Текст книги "A Bridge of Years"

Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

It didn’t work. On his seventeenth birthday, Billy was shipped east for treatment.

They gave him his armor and they posted him to the Zone.

He woke in the movie theater on Forty-second Street and shuffled outside into a miserably humid night.

Walking home, he felt a surge of energy, like needlepricks on his skin—a trickle from the gland in his elytra, Billy presumed. That was a good sign and it made him optimistic. Maybe the malfunction was temporary.

His thoughts were more coherent, at least.

Home, he attached the headgear to his armor and prayed the diagnostics were still working.

His eyepiece bled graphs and numbers into his field of vision. A complete diagnostic sequence took more than an hour, but Billy knew what all the numbers ought to be. He ran down his electrical systems, then started on the biologicals. Everything came up normal or near normal except for two items: a local blood pressure and the temps on a tiny circulatory pump. Billy finished the general diagnostic, then called back those numbers for a closer look. He asked the armor for a complete sequence on the abdominals and waited nervously for the results.

More numbers appeared, chiefly pressure readings. But Billy understood what these misplaced decimal points implied: a blood clot had lodged in the reedlike lancet.

Billy climbed out of his armor.

He hadn’t powered all the way up, though he had worn the armor a great deal in the last week, and maybe that was good—a full power-up would have placed greater demands on the gland in the elytra, perhaps thrown the clot into an artery. He might have died.

But the Need was still very great.

The armor was limp in his hand. He turned the flexible elytra inside out and deployed the lancet—a long, narrow microtube still wet with blood.

Here was where the clot had lodged.

Billy went to the kitchen and put a pot of water on the stove. As it boiled, he shook in a handful of Morton salt to approximate the salinity of human blood. This was “emergency field service,” a technique he had never tried, though he remembered it from training.

When the water was cool enough to touch, Billy dipped the lancet in.

Micropumps responded to the heat. Threads of dark blood oozed into the pot.

He couldn’t tell whether the clot had dissolved.

He cleaned the lancet and retracted it. Then he wrapped the elytra around his body, sealed them, and ran the diagnostics again.

The numbers looked better. Not perfect—but of course it was hard to tell until he plugged the lancet into his body and allowed his own blood to course through it.

Billy activated that system.

He felt the lancet slide under his skin. It stung a little– perhaps some salt still clinging to the microtube in spite of its own sterilants and anesthetics. But at least—

Ah.

–it seemed to be working.

Billy experienced a dizzy sense of triumph. He set out from the apartment at once.

He had lost a lot of time. It was late now. A street-cleaning truck had passed this way and Billy caught the reflection of a fingernail moon in the empty, wet asphalt.

Only an interruption, he told himself. How childish to have been so frightened of a minor malfunction. But understandable: all his courage came from the armor.

He thought about the secret gland hidden in the folds of the elytra.

It was dormant when the armor was folded away, tissues bathed in life-suspending chemicals. But the gland was a living thing—grown, he supposed, in a factory somewhere, a critically altered mutation of a thalamus or thyroid. When it lived, it lived on Billy’s blood—pumped in from an artery through the stylet, processed and pumped back through the lancet. The gland secreted the chemicals that made Billy the fine hunter he was tonight.

But because the gland was alive it might age, might be susceptible to disease, tumors, toxins—Billy simply didn’t know. For all the armor’s inbuilt diagnostics, such problems were necessarily the business of the infantry doctors.

No infantry doctors here.

He wondered whether his gland had been damaged by the blood clot. Whether it would clot again. Maybe it would … maybe this last episode had been a token of his own mortality.

But no, Billy thought, that’s wrong. I am Death. That’s what I am tonight. And Death can’t die.

He laughed out loud, an overflow of joy. It felt good to be hunting again.

He went to the place his prey had gone, where the hunt had been interrupted. He adjusted the bandwidth on his eyepiece and saw a dust of blue light in the doorway, very faint. And up the stairs.

Tonight, Billy thought, it would all come together.

Tonight, at last, he would kill someone.

Thirteen

Catherine backed out of the woodshed, turned and ran, stumbling over the berry-bush runners and scratching herself on the thorns. She didn’t feel any of this. She was too frightened.

The thing in the shed was– Was unnameable. Was not human.

Was a pulsating travesty of a human being.

She ran until she was breathless, then braced herself against a tree trunk, gasping and coughing. Her lungs ached and her unprotected arms were bloody from the nettles. The forest around her was silent, large, and absurdly sunny. Tree-tops moved in the breeze.

She sat down among the pine needles, hugging herself.

Be sensible, Catherine thought. Whatever it is, it can’t hurt you. It can’t move.

It had been bloody and helpless. Maybe not a monster, she thought; maybe a human being in some terrible kind of distress, skinned, mutilated …

But a mutilated human being would not have said “Help me” in that calm and earnest voice.

It was hurt. Well, of course it was hurt—it should have been dead! She had been able to see through its skin, into its insides; through its skull into its brains. What could have done that to a human being, and what human being could have survived?

Go home, Catherine instructed herself. Back to Gram Peggy’s house. Whatever she did—call the police, call an ambulance—she could do from there.

At home, she could think.

At home, she could lock the doors.

She locked the doors and scoured the kitchen shelves for something calming. What she turned up was a cut-glass decanter of peach brandy, two thirds full—“for sleepless nights,” Gram Peggy used to say. Catherine swallowed an ounce or so straight out of the bottle. She felt the liquid inside her like a small furnace, fiery and warming.

In the downstairs bathroom she sponged the blood off her arms and sprayed the lacework cuts with Bactine. Her shirt was torn; she changed it. She washed her face and hands.

Then she wandered through the downstairs checking the doors again, stopped when she passed the telephone. Probably she ought to call someone, Catherine thought.

911?

The Belltower Police Department? But what could she say?

She thought about it a few minutes, paralyzed with indecision, until a new idea occurred to her. An impulse, but sensible. She retrieved Doug Archer’s business card from a bureau drawer and dialed the number written there.

His answering service said he’d call back in about an hour. Catherine was disconcerted by this unexpected delay. She sat at the kitchen table with the peach brandy in front of her, trying to make sense of her experience in the woodshed.

Maybe she’d misinterpreted something. That was possible, wasn’t it? People see odd things, especially in a crisis. Maybe somebody had been badly hurt. Maybe she shouldn’t have run away.

But Catherine had an artist’s eye and she recalled the scene as clearly as if she had sketched it on canvas: dark blur of mold on ancient newsprint, bars of sunlight through green mossy walls, and the centerpiece, all pinks and blues and strange crimsons and yellows, a half-made thing, which pronounced the words Help me while its larynx bobbed in its glassy throat.

Sweet Jesus in a sidecar, Catherine thought. Oh, this is way out of bounds. This is crazy.

She’d finished half the contents of the brandy decanter by the time Doug Archer knocked. Catherine opened the door for him, a little light-headed but still deeply frightened. He said, “I was out in this neighborhood so I thought I’d just drop by instead of calling … Hey, are you all right?”

Then, without meaning to, she was leaning against him. He steadied her and guided her to the couch.

“I found something,” she managed. “Something terrible. Something strange.”

“Found something,” Archer repeated.

“In the woods—downhill south of here.”

“Tell me about it,” Archer said.

Catherine stammered out the story, suddenly embarrassed by what seemed like her own hysteria. How could he possibly understand? Archer sat attentively in Gram Peggy’s easy chair, but he was fundamentally a stranger. Maybe it had been dumb to call him. When he asked her to get in touch if she noticed anything strange, was this what he meant? Maybe it was a conspiracy. Belltower, Washington, occupied by hostile aliens. Maybe, under his neat Levi’s and blue Belltower Realty jacket, Archer was as transparent and strange as the thing in the woodshed.

But when she finished the story she found herself soothed by the telling of it.

Archer said he believed her, but maybe that was politeness. He said, “I want you to take me there.”

The idea revived her fear. “Now?”

“Soon. Today. And before dark.” He hesitated. “You might be mistaken about what you saw. Maybe somebody really does need help.”

“I thought about that. Maybe somebody does. But I know what I saw, Mr. Archer.”

“Doug,” he said absently. “I still think we have to go back. If there’s even a chance somebody’s hurt out there. I don’t think we have any choice.”

Catherine thought about it. “No,” she said unhappily. “I don’t guess we do.”

But it was late afternoon now and the forest was, if anything, spookier. Fortified by the brandy and a great deal of soothing talk, Catherine led Archer downhill past the creek, past the blackberry thickets and the tall Douglas firs, to the edge of the meadow where the woodshed stood.

The woodshed hadn’t changed, except in her imagination. It was mossy, ancient, small and unexceptional. She looked at it and envisioned monsters.

They stood a moment in brittle silence.

“When we met,” Catherine said, “you asked me to watch out for anything strange.” She looked at him. “Did you expect this? Do you have any idea what’s going on here?”

“I didn’t expect anything like this, no.”

He told her a story about a house he’d sold to a man named Tom Winter, its strange history, its perpetual tidiness, Tom Winter’s disappearance.

She said, “Is that near here?”

“A few hundred yards toward the road.”

“Is there some connection?”

Archer shrugged. “It’s getting late, Catherine. We’d better do this while we can.”

They approached the crude door of the woodshed.

Archer reached for the latch handle, but Catherine turned him away. “No. Let me.” You found him, Gram Peggy would have said. He’s your obligation, Catherine.

Already the thing inside was “he,” not “it.” She had shut out the image and concentrated on the voice.

Help me.

Catherine took a deep breath and opened the door.

The sun had edged down toward the treetops; the woodshed was darker than it had been this morning. A green, buzzing, loamy darkness. Catherine wrinkled her nose and waited for her eyesight to adjust. Doug Archer hovered at her shoulder; his presence was at least a little bit reassuring.

For a time she couldn’t hear anything but the quick beat of her heart; couldn’t see anything but dimness and clutter.

Then Archer forced the door to the extremity of its hinges and a new beam of light slanted in.

The monster lay on the pressed-dirt floor, precisely where she had left it this morning.

Catherine blinked. The monster blinked. Behind her, she heard Archer draw a sudden, shocked breath. “Holy Mother of God,” he said.

The monster turned its pale, moist eyes on Archer a moment. Then it looked at Catherine again.

“You came back,” it said. (He said.)

This was the terrible part, she thought dizzily, the truly unendurable, this voice from that throat. He sounded like someone you might meet at a bus stop. He sounded like a friendly grocer.

She forced her eyes to focus somewhere above him, on the pile of moldy newspapers. “You said you needed help.”

“Yes.”

“I brought help.”

It was all she could think of to say.

Archer pushed past her and knelt over the man—if it was a man. Be careful! she thought.

Catherine heard the tremor in his voice: “What happened to you?”

Now Catherine’s gaze drifted back to the man’s head, the caul of translucent tissue where the skull should have been, and the brain beneath it—she presumed this whitish, vague mass must be his brain. The creature spoke. “It would take too long to explain.”

Archer said, “What do you want us to do?”

“If you can, I want you to take me back to the house.”

Archer was silent a moment. Catherine noticed he didn’t say What house? The Tom Winter house, she thought. These things were connected after all. Mysterious events and living dead men.

She felt like Alice, hopelessly lost down some unpleasant rabbit hole.

But it was at least a thing to do, carrying this monster back to the Tom Winter house, and deciding how to do it brought her back to the level of the prosaic. There was an old camp cot Gram Peggy had kept in the cellar; she hurried and fetched it back with Doug Archer beside her, neither of them talking much. They wanted to be finished before nightfall: already the shadows were long and threatening.

We’ll have to touch that thing, Catherine thought. We’ll have to lift it up onto this old cot. She imagined the injured thing would feel cool and wet to the touch, like the jellyfish lumps that washed up on the beach along Puget Sound. She shuddered, thinking about it.

Archer propped open the door of the shed and did most of the lifting. He supported the thing (the man) with his hands under its arms and brought it out into the fading daylight, where it looked even more horrific. Some of its skin was dark and scabbed over; some was merely flesh colored. But whole chunks of it were translucent or pale, fishy gray. It blinked gray eyelids against the light. It looked like something that had been underwater a long time. One leg was missing. The stump ended in a pink, porous mass of tissue. At least there was no blood.

Catherine took a deep breath and did what she could to help, lifting the leg end onto the army cot. Here was more pale skin and a fine webbing of blood vessels underneath, like an illustration from an anatomy textbook. But the flesh wasn’t cool or slimy. It was warm and felt like normal skin.

Archer took the head end of the army cot and Catherine lifted the back. The injured man was heavy, as heavy as a normal man. His strangeness had not made him light. This was good, too. A creature with this much weight, she reasoned, could not be ghostly.

It was hard to hold the pipe legs of the army cot without spilling the man off, and she was sweating and her hands were cramped and sore by the time they passed out of the deep forest, down a trail nearly overgrown with moss and horsetail fern, into the back yard of what must be the house Archer had described. It was a very ordinary-looking house.

They put the army cot down on the overgrown lawn for a minute. Archer wiped his face with a handkerchief; Catherine kneaded her aching palms. She avoided his look. We don’t want to acknowledge what we’re doing, she thought; we want to pretend this is a regular kind of job.

The thing on the cot said, “You should be prepared for what’s inside.”

Archer looked down sharply. “What is inside?”

“Machines. A lot of very small machines. They won’t hurt you.”

“Oh,” Archer said. He looked at the house again. “Machines.” He frowned. “I don’t have a key.”

“You don’t need one,” the monster said.

The door opened at a touch.

They carried the army cot inside, through an ordinary kitchen, into the big living room, which was not ordinary because the walls were covered with the machines the monster had warned them about.

The machines—there must he thousands of them, Catherine thought—were like tiny jewels, brightly colored, segmented, insectile, eyes and attention all aimed at the man on the cot. They were motionless; but she imagined them, for some reason, quivering with excitement.

It’s like a homecoming, Catherine thought dazedly. That’s what it’s like.

None of this was possible.

She understood that she had reached an unexpected turning point in her life. She felt the way people must feel in a plane crash, or when their house goes up in flames. Now everything was different; nothing would be the same ever again. In the wake of these events, it wasn’t possible to construct an ordinary idea of the world and how it worked. There was no way to make any of this fit.

But she was calm. Outside the context of the decaying woodshed—outside of the woods—even the monster had ceased to be frightening. He wasn’t a monster after all; only a strange kind of man who had had some strange kind of accident. Maybe a curse had been placed on him.

They carried him into the bedroom, where there were more of the machine insects. She helped Archer lift him onto the bed. Archer asked in a small voice what else the man needed. The man said, “Time. Please don’t tell anyone else about this.”

“All right,” Archer said. And Catherine nodded.

“And food,” the man said. “Anything rich in protein. Meat would be good.”

“I’ll bring something,” Catherine volunteered, surprising herself. “Would tomorrow be all right?”

“That would be fine.”

And Archer added, “Who are you?”

The man smiled, but only a little. He must know how he looks, Catherine thought. When your lips are nearly transparent, you shouldn’t smile too much. It creates a different effect. “My name is Ben Collier,” he said.

“Ben,” Archer repeated. “Ben, I would like to know what kind of thing you are exactly.”

“I’m a time traveler,” Ben said.

They left Ben Collier the time traveler alone with his machine bugs. On the way out of the house Catherine saw Archer pick up two items from the kitchen table: a blue spiral-bound notebook and a copy of the New York Times.

Back at Gram Peggy’s house, Archer pored over the two documents. Catherine felt mysteriously vacant, lost: what was next? There was no etiquette for this situation. She said to Archer, “Shall I make us some dinner?” He looked up briefly, nodded.

It had never occurred to her that people who had shared experiences like this—people who were kidnapped by flying saucers or visited by ghosts—would have to deal with anything as prosaic as dinner. An encounter with the numinous, followed by, say, linguine. It was impossible. (That word again.)

Step by step, she thought. One thing at a time. She heated the frying pan, located a chicken breast she’d been thawing since morning, took a second one from the freezer and quick-defrosted it in the microwave—she would eat this one herself; Catherine didn’t believe in nuked food, especially for guests. She didn’t much believe in pan-fried chicken, either, but it was quick and available.

She set two places at the dinner table. The dining room was large and Victorian, Gram Peggy’s cuckoo clock presiding over a cabinet stocked with blue Wedgwood. Catherine started coffee perking and served dinner on the Petalware she’d picked up at a thrift shop in Belltower—because it seemed somehow wrong or impertinent to be eating from Gram Peggy’s china when Gram Peggy wasn’t home. Archer carried his two souvenirs, the notebook and the New York Times, to the table with him. But he set them aside and complimented her on the food.

Catherine picked at her chicken. It tasted irrelevant.

She said, “Well, what have we got ourselves into?”

Archer managed a smile. “Something absolutely unexpected. Something we don’t understand.”

“You sound pleased about that.”

“Do I? I guess I am, in a way. It kind of confirms this suspicion I’ve had.”

“Suspicion?”

“That the world is stranger than it looks.”

Catherine considered this. “I think I know what you mean. When I was eighteen, I took up jogging. I used to go out after dark, winter nights. I liked all the yellow lighted-up windows of the houses. It felt funny being the only person out on the street, just, you know, running and breathing steam. I used to get an idea that anything could happen, that I’d turn a corner and I’d be in Oz and nobody would be the wiser—none of those people sleepwalking behind those yellow windows would have the slightest idea. I knew what kind of world it was. They didn’t.”

“Exactly,” Archer said.

“But there was never Oz. Only one more dark street.”

“Until now.”

“Is this Oz?”

“It might as well be.”

She supposed that was true. “I guess we can’t tell anyone.”

“I don’t think we should, no.”

“And we have to go back in the morning.”

“Yes.”

“We can’t forget about it and we can’t walk away. He needs our help.”

“I think so.”

“But what is he?”

“Well, I think maybe he told us the truth, Catherine. I think he’s a time traveler.”

“Is that possible?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I’m past making odds on what’s possible and what isn’t.”

She gestured at the notebook, the newspaper. “So what did you find?”

“They belonged to Tom Winter, I believe. Look.” She pushed aside her chicken and examined the paper. Sunday, May 13, 1962. The Late City Edition.

U.S SHIPS AND 1,800 MARINES ON WAY TO INDOCHINA AREA; LAOS DECREES EMERGENCY … DOCTORS TRANSPLANT HUMAN HEART VALVE … CHURCH IN SPAIN BACKS WORKERS ON STRIKE RIGHTS

The front page had yellowed—but only a little.

“Check out the notebook,” Archer prompted.

She leafed through it. The entries were brief scrawls and occupied the first three pages; the rest of the book was blank.

Troubling Questions, it said at the top.

You could walk away from this, it said.

This is dangerous, and you could walk away.

Everybody else on the face of the earth is being dragged into the future an hour at a time, but you can walk out. You found the back door.

Thirty years ago, she read. They have the Bomb. Think about it. They have industrial pollution. They have racism, ignorance, crime, starvation—

Are you really so frightened of the future?

I’ll go back one more time. At least to look. To really be there. At least once.

She looked up at Doug Archer. “It’s a sort of diary.”

“A short one.”

“Tom Winter’s?”

“I’d bet on it.”

“What did he do?”

“Walked into a shitload of trouble, it looks like. But that remains to be seen.”

Only later did the obvious next thought occur to Catherine: Maybe we walked into a shitload of trouble, too.

Archer slept on the sofa. In the morning he phoned the Belltower Realty office and told them he was sick—“Death’s door,” he said into the phone. “That’s right. Yup. I know. I know. Yeah, I hope so too. Thanks.”

Catherine said, “Won’t you get into trouble?”

“Lose some commissions, for sure.”

“Is that all right?”

“It’s all right with me. I have other business.” He grinned —a little wildly, in Catherine’s opinion. “Hey, there are miracles happening. Aren’t you a little bit excited by that?”

She allowed a guilty smile. “I guess I am.”

Then they drove down to the Safeway and bought five frozen T-bone steaks for Ben, the time traveler.

* * *

Archer visited the house every day for a week, sometimes with Catherine and sometimes without her. He brought food, which the time traveler never ate in his presence—maybe the machine bugs absorbed it and fed it to him in some more direct fashion; he didn’t care to know the details.

Every day, he exchanged some words with Ben.

It was getting easier to think of him as “Ben,” as something human rather than monstrous. The bedclothes disguised most of his deformities; and the white, sebaceous caul where his skull should have been had acquired enough pigmentation, by the third day, to pass for human skin. Archer had been scared at first by the machine bugs all over the house, but they never approached him and never presented any kind of threat. So Archer began to ask questions.

Simple ones at first: “How long were you in the shed?”

“Ten years, more or less.”

“You were injured all that time?”

“I was dead most of that time.”

“Clinically dead?”

Ben smiled. “At least.” .

“What happened to you?”

“I was murdered.”

“What saved you?”

“They did.” The machine bugs.

Or he asked about Tom Winter: “What happened to him?”

“He went somewhere he shouldn’t have gone.” This was ominous. “He traveled in time?”

“Yes.”

“Is he still alive?”

“I don’t know.”

Brief questions, brief answers. Archer let it rest at that. He was trying to get a sense of who this person really was—how dangerous, how trustworthy. And he sensed Ben making similar judgments about him, perhaps in some more subtle or certain way.

Catherine didn’t seem surprised by this. She let Archer sleep in her living room some nights; they ate dinner and breakfast together, talked about these strange events sometimes and sometimes not. Like Archer, she stopped by the Winter house every day or so. “We’re like church deacons,” Archer said. “Visiting the sick.” And she answered, “That’s what it feels like, doesn’t it? How strange.”

It was that, Archer thought. Very strange indeed. And the strangeness of it bolstered his courage. He remembered telling Tom Winter about this, his conviction that one day the clouds would open and rain frogs and marigolds over Belltower. (Or something like that.) And now, in a small way, that had happened, and it was a secret he shared only with Catherine Simmons and perhaps Tom Winter, wherever Tom had gone: absolute proof that the ordinary world wasn’t ordinary at all … that Belltower itself was a kind of mass hallucination, a reassuring stage set erected over a wild, mutable landscape.

“But dangerous, too,” Catherine objected when he told her this. “We don’t really know. Something terrible happened to Ben. He was almost killed.”

“Probably dangerous,” Archer admitted. “You can get out of this if you want. Sell the house, move on back to Seattle. Most likely, you’ll be perfectly safe.”

She shook her head with a firmness he found charming. “I can’t do that, Doug. It feels like a kind of contract. He asked me for help. Maybe I could have walked away then. But I didn’t. I came back. It’s like saying, Okay, I’ll help.”

“You did help.”

“But not just carrying him back to the house. That’s not all the help he needs. Don’t you feel that?”

“Yes,” Archer admitted. “I do feel that.”

He let her fix him a meal of crab legs and salad. Archer hated crab legs—his mother used to buy cheap crab and lobster from a fishing boat down by the VFW outpost—but he smiled at the effort she made. He said, “You should let me cook for you sometime.”

She nodded. “That would be nice. This is kind of weird, you know. We hardly know each other, but we’re nursemaiding this—person out of a time machine.”

“We know each other all right,” Archer said. “It doesn’t take that long. I’m a semi-fucked-up real estate agent living in this little town he kind of loves and kind of hates. You’re a semisuccessful painter from Seattle who misses her grandmother because she never had much of a family. Neither of us knows what to do next and we’re both lonelier than we want to admit. Does that about sum it up?”

“Not a bad call.” She smiled a little forlornly and uncorked a bottle of wine.

The night after that she went to bed with him.

The bed was a creaky, pillared antique in what Catherine called the guest room, off the main hall upstairs. The sheets were old, thin, delicate, cool; the mattress rose around them like an ocean swell.

Catherine was shy and attentive. Archer was touched by her eagerness to please and did his best to return the favor. Archer had never much believed in one-night stands; great sex, like great anything, required a little learning. But Catherine was easy to know and they came together with what seemed like an old familiarity. It was, in any case, Archer thought, a hell of an introduction.

Now Catherine drifted to sleep beside him while Archer lay awake listening to the silence. It was quiet up here along the Post Road. Twice, he heard a car pass by outside—one of the locals, home late; or a tourist looking for the highway.

There were big questions that still needed answering, he thought. Archer thought about the word “time” and how strange and lonely it made him feel. When he was little his family used to drive down to his uncle’s ranch outside Santa Fe in New Mexico, dirt roads and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the distance, scrub pines and sage brush and ancient pueblos. The word “time” made him feel the way those desert roads used to make him feel: lost in something too big to comprehend. Time travel, Archer thought, must be like driving those roads. Strange rock formations and dust devils, and an empty blank horizon everywhere you look.

When he woke, Catherine was dressing herself self-consciously by the bed. He turned away politely while she pulled on her panties. Archer sometimes wondered whether there was something wrong with him, the doubtful way women always looked at him in the morning. But then he stood up and hugged her and he felt her relax in his arms. They were still friends after all.

But something was different today and it was not just that they had gone to bed last night. Something in this project was less miraculous now, more serious. They knew it without talking about it.

After breakfast they hiked down to the Winter house to visit Ben Collier.

The steaks from the Safeway had been doing him good. Ben was sitting up in bed this morning, the blankets pooled around his waist. He looked as cheerful as a Buddha, Archer thought. But it was obvious from the he of the bedclothes that his leg was still missing.

Archer believed the stump was a little longer, though. It occurred to him that he expected the time traveler to grow a new leg—which apparently he was doing.

“Morning,” Archer said. Catherine stood beside him, nodding, still a little frightened.

Ben turned his head. “Good morning. Thank you for coming by.”

Archer began to deliver the speech he’d been rehearsing: “We really have to talk. Neither of us minds coming down here. But, Ben, it’s confusing. Until we know what’s really going on—”

Ben accepted this immediately and waved his hand: no need to continue. “I understand,” he said. “I’ll answer all your questions. And then—if you don’t mind—I’ll ask you one.”