PART TWO - Ghosts

Seven

For a long, lost span of years, the time traveler was dead.

Ben Corner's death was not absolute, but it was nothing less than death. The marauder's weapon had opened his skull and scattered much of his brain matter in a bloody rain across the lawn. His heart had given one final, convulsive pump, fibrillated for thirty seconds as wild impulses radiated from his traumatized brainstem, then fallen silent, a lump of static tissue in the cooling cavern of his chest.

Throughout his body emergency repair systems stuttered and shut down. Auxiliary circulatory pumps responded to his failing heart, then failed in turn as blood pressure dropped below maintainable levels. He continued to take huge, ratcheting breaths—like yawns—for nearly a minute. The lungs were the last major system to give up their independent life, and they did so with a final sigh of resignation. By then the body had begun to cool.

Nanomechanisms were trapped in his arteries by clotting blood. Oxygen-starved, they radiated emergency signals and shut themselves off one by one.

Billy Gargullo dragged the body into the woods and left it in an abandoned woodshed under a scatter of mildewed newspaper. Decay organisms—thick in the rainy forest—began to attack the corpse at once.

Billy hurried back to the house. When he arrived here he had disoriented the cybernetics with a pulse of electromagnetic radiation; now he triggered a second burst to keep them out of his way. He paused a moment in the kitchen and consulted his auxiliary memories for a rough estimate of his whereabouts. America, the Pacific Northwest—distinguished by the fiercely dense biomass of the forest, which appalled and frightened him—sometime after 1970: too close to the nightmare he'd left behind. He wanted a more effective buffer, even if it meant greater risk. He moved back to the basement and operated the tunnel's hidden controls the way the dying woman had taught him. Destination was relatively unimportant: he wanted a place to hide. He would run, he would hide, he would never be found and he would never go back.

That was all of his plan. His only plan. The only plan he needed.

Billy's EM pulses interrupted TV and radio reception throughout the town of Belltower and two neighboring counties. Along the Post Road the effect was most violent and startling. Peggy Simmons, the widow who lived a quarter mile from the house Tom Winter would eventually inhabit, was astonished to see her Zenith color television emit a vivid blue spark while the picture tube turned an ominous, fractured gray. Repairs, that summer of 1979, cost her almost three hundred dollars—the set was just out of warranty. She paid the repair bill but reminded the man at Belltower Audio-Video that the Crosley set she'd bought in 1960 lasted her fifteen years with only a tube to replace now and then, and perhaps standards of manufacture had fallen while the price of repairs had zoomed up, which was precisely the sort of thing you'd expect to happen, wouldn't you—the world being what it was. The repairman nodded and shrugged. Maybe she was right: he'd been out on a lot of calls just recently.

The rash of electrical failures became a brief sensation in Belltower, reported in the local paper, discussed to no conclusion, and finally forgotten.

Many of the cybernetics died or were rendered hopelessly dysfunctional by the EM burst; but many survived. They were disoriented for days afterward. Severed paths of information needed to be patched and restored; a comprehensible memory of the day's events had to be assembled.

Most damaging was the loss of Ben Collier. For the cybernetics, he had combined the functions of clearinghouse, lawmaker, and God. Without him they were forced to fall back on primitive subroutines. This was unavoidable but limiting. Without Ben, and with their numbers greatly reduced, they possessed only a rudimentary intelligence. They were able to perform routine tasks; all else was groping in the dark.

Many of the nanomechanisms intimately associated with the time traveler's body had been destroyed by the impact of Billy's weapon or the physical shutdown that followed. Some had been scattered to the winds; damaged or swept out of the range of collective mentation, they died. A few—following subroutines of their own—managed an orderly escape; in time, they made their way back to the house. They transferred their significant memory to the larger cybernetics in the manner of bees feeding pollen to the hive. The community of machines, sharing this new wisdom, understood that there were measures to be taken.

Armies of insect-sized cybernetics, following vectors the nanomechanisms described, delved into the forest behind the house. This was risky and had been the subject of debate; territory beyond the perimeter of the house had been forbidden to them—until this emergency. But their first priority (they reasoned) was the restoration of Ben Collier; other issues could be deferred until he was in a position to clarify his wishes.

Restoration was no simple task, however. Cybernetic emissaries found the body in a state of decomposition. Great numbers of microorganisms, mainly bacteria and fungi, had established themselves on the wounds, in the extremities, throughout the body. The putrefaction was extensive and would be impossible to reverse if allowed to continue much longer. Work began at once. Old nanomechanisms were enlisted and new ones created to enter the body as sterilants. The heart was isolated and meticulously restored to a potentially functional state. Open veins and arteries were sealed. Old, infected skin was sloughed off and replaced with extruded synthetics.

What they preserved in this fashion was not the time traveler's body, precisely, but the rough core of it—the skeletal system (minus a leg and most of the skull); crude reductions of the major organs; some sterile meat. An observer walking into the woodshed would have seen what looked like a freshly flayed, naked, and brutally incomplete corpse. It was not in any sense functional.

It never would have been, except that the cybernetics maintained among themselves a blueprint of the time traveler's body and had shared a map of his brain and its contents. This information was shared among them holographically; some detail had been lost in the EM pulse, but it was nothing they couldn't infer from genetic data still preserved in the body. They had salvaged what parts they could and they were ready to begin rebuilding the rest.

The problem was raw material: raw material for the reconstruction and raw material for their own maintenance. Much needed to be done. For now, they simply sterilized the corpse and sealed its perimeters. They maintained a watch over the body of Ben Collier to guarantee the continued viability of his meat; but the main phalanx of the cybernetics retreated to the house to consider their resources and rebuild their material base.

Many new nanomechanisms would be needed. These could be assembled—albeit slowly—from material in the house and surrounding soil. The nanomechanisms were intricate but very nearly massless; this was their advantage. With this new army, work could proceed on the restoration of the body ... a task unfortunately much more massive.

Their sole ally was the body itself. Once primitive cardiovascular function had been restored, the time traveler's own digestive functions could begin to work. In effect, he could be nourished, and the nourishment directed into building and healing. The problem was that he would require a vast amount of protein for maintenance alone.

The cybernetics had established a broad path between the house and the woodshed, and within this space they taught themselves to scavenge food. Much acceptable protein was available in this temperate rain forest. Much that was not acceptable could be rendered so, with modification. They learned how to harvest the forest without denuding it. They took deer fern and horsetail, red huckleberries, bracket fungus from a tall, mossy hemlock. They competed with the frogs and the thrushes for insects. On one occasion they discovered the fresh body of a raccoon. This was a banquet, skinned and liquefied with enzymes. They could have killed a deer and speeded their task immensely; but the cybernetics were deeply inhibited against the taking of vertebrate life. They acquired most of their meat by theft—a mouse or frog stolen from the beak of an owl on moonlit summer nights.

If their numbers had been greater this might have sufficed. Restrained by their material base, they were able to preserve the time traveler but only occasionally to upgrade a major function. In July 1983 he regained an operational kidney. In October 1986 he took his first real breath in seven years.

Consciousness was the last great hurdle—so much brain tissue had been destroyed. The reconstruction was more delicate and required more raw material. Consequently it was slow.

The work was painstaking but the cybernetics were infinitely patient. Nothing intruded on their labor until the arrival of Tom Winter—a complication that was not merely distracting but possibly dangerous. Since they couldn't evict him they attempted to use him to their advantage . . . but there was so much they didn't know, so much wisdom that had been lost, and working with Tom Winter culled away too many of their essential nanomechanisms. For a time, the work was slowed . . . but it hastened once again when Tom Winter donated several packages of proteins from his freezer; hastened again when a cougar killed a deer within range of the woodshed. The cougar was easily frightened away and the deer was a vast, warm repository of useful food.

The work hurried toward completion.

Ben Collier experienced odd moments of wakefulness.

His awareness, at first, was tenuous and small, like the flickering of a candleflame in a vast, dark room.

The first experience strong enough to linger in his memory was of pain—a scalding pain that seemed to radiate inward from all the peripheries of his body. He tried to open his eyes and couldn't. The eyes weren't functional and the lids felt sutured shut. He tried to scream and lacked this function also.

The nanomechanisms inside him sensed his distress and alleviated it at once. They closed his sensorium, blocking nerve signals from his raw and mending skin. They triggered a flood of soothing endorphins. Almost immediately, Ben went back to sleep.

The next time he was allowed to wake, the fundamental mechanisms of self and thought were more nearly healed. He knew who he was and what had happened to him. He was paralyzed and blind; but the nanomechanisms reassured him and monitored his neurochemicals for panic.

Ben was mindful of his custodial duties, doubtless neglected during the period of his death. He had one overriding thought: Tell me what's happened at the house.

In time, the nanomechanisms responded. He had made great progress but he wasn't ready to assume his former status. For that, he would need to be entirely healed.

Sleep now, they said. He was grateful, and slept.

The next time he woke he woke instantly, alert and buzzing with concern.

Someone is here, the nanomechanisms told him.

Ben knew where he was. He was in the ancient woodshed in the forest behind the house. The cybernetics had restored his memory, including the memory of his own murder and beyond: really, their memories were his memories. The cybernetics had been designed for Ben as his personal adjuncts —appendages—and he was pleased at how well they had functioned without him. For a moment much briefer than a second he savored the details of his own reconstruction.

Which was miraculous but unfortunately not complete. His mind was almost fully functional, but his body needed work. His skull was still partial, large chunks of it replaced with a gluey, transparent caul; his left leg was a venous flipper; muscle tissue stood exposed over large parts of his body where the skin and decay had been stripped and sterilized.

At least his eyes were functional. He opened them.

He was supine in the rotted mass of newsprint. Sunlight glimmered through gaps in the southern wall of the shed. Everything was green here, the color of moss and lichen. The air was full of dust motes, pollen and spores.

He looked at the door of the shed, a crudely hinged raft of barnboards held together with rusty iron nails.

His ears worked. He was able to hear the rasp of his own breathing . . . the faint scuttle of cybermechanisms in the detritus around him.

The sound of footsteps in the high meadow weeds beyond the door.

Now, the sound of a hand on the primitive latch that held the door closed. The sound of the latch as it opened. The door as it squealed inward.

Ben couldn't move. He drew a deep breath into his raw lungs and hoped he would be able at least to speak.

Eight

Greenwich Village, Manhattan, in the gathering heat and tidal migrations of the summer of 1962: by the end of June Tom Winter had learned a few things about his adopted homeland.

He learned some of its history. "The Village," named Sapokanican by the Indians and Greenwich by the British, had been a fashionable section of Manhattan until its prestige migrated north along Broadway at the end of the nineteenth century. Then an immigrant population had moved in, and then radical bohemians drawn by low rents in the years before the First World War. If his time machine had dropped him off in the 1920s he could have walked into Romany Marie's in one of its several incarnations—on Sheridan Square or later on Christopher Street—and found Eugene O'Neill making notes for a play or Edgard Varese dining on a ciorba aromatic with leeks and dill. Or he might have arrived in 1950 and encountered Dylan Thomas drunk in the White Horse or Kerouac at the Remo considering California—these public lives only an eddy of the deeper current, a counterpoint to American life as it was understood in the movies.

Rents had climbed since then; a slow gentrification had been proceeding ever since the subway linked the Village to the rest of the city in the 1930s. Genuinely poor artists were already being shouldered into the Lower East Side. Nevertheless, it was 1962 and the scent of rebellion was strong and poignant.

He learned that he liked it here.

Maybe that was odd. Tom had never considered himself a "bohemian." The word had never meant much to him. He had gone to college in the seventies, smoked marijuana on rare occasions, worn denim and long hair in the last years that was fashionable. None of this had seemed even vaguely rebellious—merely routine. He moved into a white-collar job without anxiety and worried about his income like everybody else. Like everybody else, he ran up his credit debt and had to cut back a little. He was troubled—like everybody else— when the stock market tottered; he and Barbara had never set aside enough for an investment portfolio, but he worried about the economy and what it might mean for their budget. Barbara was deeply committed to ecological activism but she was hardly bohemian about it, despite what Tony thought— her approach, he sometimes thought, was brutal enough to put a hard-nosed corporate lawyer to shame. She told him once that if she had to wear a Perry Ellis skirt to be credible, she'd fucking wear it: it wasn't an issue.

And when the structure of life and job collapsed around him, it didn't occur to Tom that the system had failed; only that he had failed it.

He was surprised and delighted to discover another attitude here, not only in Joyce but generally, in the Village: a consensus that the world outside was a sterile laboratory and that its only interesting products were its failures, its rejects, and its refugees.

He was as poor, certainly, as any refugee. Joyce put him up for a few days when he arrived—until Lawrence objected— and persuaded him not to sell his guitar. She had found a part-time job waitressing and lent him enough cash for a room at the Y. She told her friends he was looking for a day job and one of them—an unpublished novelist named Soderman—told Tom there was a radio and hi-fi shop on Eighth with a Help Wanted sign in the window. The store was called Lindner's Radio Supply, and the owner, Max Lindner, explained that he needed a technician, "somebody to work in the back," and did Tom know anything about electronics? Tom said yeah, he did—he'd done a couple of EE courses in college and he knew his way around a soldering iron. Most of what Max's customers brought in for repair would be vacuum tube merchandise, but Tom didn't anticipate any trouble adapting. "The back" was a room the size of a two-car garage; the walls were lined with tube caddies and testers and there was a well-thumbed RCA manual attached to the workbench on a string. The smell of hot solder flux saturated the air.

"My last guy was a Puerto Rican kid," Max said. "He was only eighteen, but there was nothing he couldn't strip and put back together twice as nice as the day we sold it. You know what they did? They fucking drafted him. Six months from now he'll be building radar stations in Congo Bongo. I did my bit on Guadalcanal and this is how the army repays me." He looked Tom up and down. "You can really do this work?"

"I can really do this work."

"You start tomorrow."

After work, his first priority was a place to live.

Joyce agreed. "You can't stay at the French Embassy. It's not safe."

"The what?"

"The Y, Tom. It's nothing but faggots. Maybe you noticed."

She grinned a little slyly, expecting him to be shocked by this information. He wondered what to say. My ex-wife was politically correct—we attended all the AIDS fundraisers. "I think my virtue is intact."

She raised her eyebrows. "Virtue?"

To celebrate his job they had come to Stanley's, a new bar on the Lower East Side. Tom had begun to sort out the geography of the city; he understood that the East Village was even more subterranean than the West, a crosstown bus away from the subways, the Bearded Artist a recent immigrant, which was why Stanley's sometimes offered free beer in an effort to build a clientele. Lawrence's apartment was nearby and Joyce's not too far from it and anyway nothing was happening tonight in the gaudier precincts of Bleecker and MacDougal.

Tom was pleased about the job, a little nervous about the evening.

Joyce offered him a cigarette. He said, "I don't."

"You're very light on vices, Tom." She lit one of her own. The office where he worked at Aerotech had been designated smoke-free; none of Barbara's friends smoked and the salesmen at the car lot had been encouraged not to. He'd forgotten what a fascinating little ritual it could be. Joyce performed it with unconscious grace, waving the match and dropping it in an ashtray. In an hour, when the bar filled up, the air would be blue with smoke. The stern disapproval of C. Everett Koop was a quarter century away.

"At least you drink."

"In moderation." He was nursing a beer. "I used to drink more. Actually, I wasn't a very successful alcoholic. My doctor told me it was too hard for me to drink seriously and too easy to stop. He said I must not have the gene for alcoholism —it just isn't in my DNA."

"Your which?"

"I'm not cut out that way."

"Hopelessly Presbyterian." She drew on the cigarette. "Something's bothering you, yes?"

"I don't want to fend off a lot of questions tonight."

"From me, or—?"

He waved his hand—no, not her.

"Well, people are curious. The thing is, Tom, you're not a label. People come here and talk about nonconformity and the Lonely Crowd and all that jazz, but they're wearing labels all the same. You could hang signs on them. Angry young poet. Left-wing folksinger. Ad executive reclaiming his youth. So on. The real, true ciphers are very rare."

He said, "I'm a cipher?"

"Oh, definitely."

"Isn't that a label too?"

She smiled. "But no one likes it. If you don't want to hang around, Tom, you have some options." "Like?"

"Like, you could go somewhere else. Or you could tell everybody to fuck off. Or we could go somewhere else. Now or later."

She sat across the table from him, one hand cocked at an angle and the smoke from her cigarette drifting toward the ceiling. The light was dim but she was beautiful in it. She had tied her long hair back; her eyes were pursed, quizzical, blue under the magnification of her glasses. He could tell she was nervous about making the offer.

Nor was there any mistaking what the offer meant. Tom felt as if the chair had dropped out from under him. Felt weightless.

He said, "What about Lawrence?"

"Lawrence has some problems. Or, I don't know, maybe they're my problems. He says he doesn't want to own me. He doesn't want anybody else to, either. He says he's ambivalent. I'm what he's ambivalent about."

Tom was considering this when the door opened and a crowd rushed in from the hot evening on Avenue B. Her friends. "Joyce!" one of them sang out.

She looked at Tom, shrugged and smiled and mouthed a word: it might have been "Later."

Like any immigrant—any refugee—he was adjusting to his new environment. It was impossible to live in a state of perpetual awe. But the knowledge of where he was and how he had come here was seldom far from his mind.

Nineteen sixty-two. The Berlin Wall was less than a year old. John F. Kennedy was in the White House. The Soviets were preparing to send missiles to Cuba, precipitating a crisis which would not, finally, result in nuclear war. In Europe, women were bearing babies deformed by thalidomide. Martin Luther King was leading the civil rights movement; this fall, there would be some trouble down at Oxford, Mississippi. And the Yanks would take the World Series from the Giants.

Privileged information.

He knew all this; but he still felt edged out of the conversation that began to flow around him. For a while they talked about books, about plays. Soderman, the novelist who tipped Tom off to the radio-repair job, had strong opinions about Ionesco. Soderman was a nice guy; he had a young, round chipmunk face with a brush cut on top and a fringe of beard under his chin. Likable—but he might have been speaking Greek. Ionesco was a name Tom had heard but couldn't place, lost in a vague memory of some undergraduate English class. Likewise Beckett, likewise Jean Genet. He smiled enigmatically at what seemed like appropriate moments.

Then Lawrence Millstein performed a verbal editorial on folk music versus jazz and Tom felt a little bit more at home. Millstein was of the old school and outnumbered at this table; he hated the cafe-folk scene and harbored nostalgia for the fierce gods of the tenor sax.

He looked the part. If Tom had been casting a movie version of On the Road he might have picked Millstein as an "atmosphere" character. He was tall, dark-haired, lean, and there was something studied about his intensity. Joyce had described him as "a Raskolnikov type—at least, he tries to come on that way."

Millstein performed a twenty-minute monologue on Char-he Parker and the "anguish of the Negro soul." Tom listened with mounting irritation, but kept silent—and drank. He knew the music Lawrence was talking about. Through his breakup with Barbara and after the divorce, he had sometimes felt that Parker—and Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis of the Sketches of Spain era, and Sonny Rollins, and Oliver Nelson—were the only thing holding him together. He had traded in his scoured LPs for the CD versions of some of these records. It was an anomaly, he sometimes thought, these old monophonic recordings deciphered by laser-beam technology. But the music just rolled on out of the speakers. He liked it because it wasn't crying-in-your-beer music. It was never pathetic. It took your hurt, it acknowledged your hurt, but sometimes—on the good nights—it let you soar out somewhere beyond that hurt. Tom had appreciated this strange way the music translated losses into gains and it bothered him to hear Millstein doing a self-righteous tap dance on the subject.

Joyce ventured, "Nobody's putting down Parker. Folk music is doing something else. It's just different. There's no antagonism."

Tom sensed that they had had this argument before and that Millstein had his own reasons for bringing it up. "It's white people's music," Millstein said.

"There's more social commentary in the folk cafes than in the jazz bars," Soderman said.

"But that's the point. Folk music is like a high school essay. All these earnest little sermons. Jazz is the subject It's what the sermon is about The whole Negro experience is wrapped up in it."

"What are you saying?" Tom asked. "White people shouldn't make music?"

Eyes focused on him. Soderman ventured, "The repairman speaks!"

Millstein was full of beery scorn. "What the fuck do you know about the Negro experience?"

"Not a damn thing," Tom said amiably. "Hell, Larry, I'm as white as you are."

Lawrence Millstein opened his mouth, then closed it. A moment of silence . . . then the table erupted in laughter. Millstein managed to say something—it might have been fuck you—but it was lost in the roar and Tom was able to ignore him.

Joyce laughed, too, then steered the conversation down a less volatile alleyway: she'd had a letter from somebody named Susan who was doing political organization in rural Georgia. Apparently Susan, a Vassar graduate, had been pretty wild during her Village days. Everybody trotted out Susan stories. Joyce relaxed.

She leaned over and whispered in Tom's ear, "Try not to make him mad!"

He whispered back, "I think it's too late," and ordered another beer.

He had reached that subtle turning point at which he was not quite drunk but definitely a little past sober. He decided these were good people. He liked them. When they left Stanley's, he followed them. Joyce took his hand.

The night air was warm and stagnant. They moved past tenement stoops full of people, bleak streetlights, noise, a barber shop reeking of Barbasol, to an old building and inside and up to a long room cluttered with bookshelves and bad, amateurish paintings. "Lawrence's apartment," Joyce confided. He asked, "Should I be here?" and she said, "It's a party!"

The books were poetry, Evergreen Review, contemporary novels. The record collection was large and impressive— there were Bix Beiderbecke 78s in among the LPs—and the hi-fi looked expensive: a Rek-O-Kut turntable, an amplifier bristling with tubes. "Music!" somebody shouted, and Tom stood aside while Millstein eased a John Coltrane record out of its sleeve and placed it on the turntable—the gesture was faintly religious. Suddenly the room was full of wild melody.

Tom watched Soderman pull down the blinds, cutting off a view of the Con Ed stacks on Fourteenth Street, while someone else produced a wooden box containing a quarter ounce of seeded brown marijuana and a package of Zig-Zag rolling papers. Tom was amused by the solemnity of this ritual, including a few doubtful glances in his direction—was this new guy trustworthy? He bustled over and said, "Let me roll it."

Smiles. Joyce asked, "Do you know how?"

He pasted together two papers to make a double-wide. His technique was rusty—it had been a long time—but he produced a creditable joint. Soderman nodded his approval. "Where did you learn that?"

He answered absently, "In college."

"So where'd you go to college?"

"In the agricultural heartland of the Pacific Northwest." He smiled. "A match?"

He meant only to establish his camaraderie, but the dope went instantly to his head. Coltrane's sax, radiating from a single speaker, became a great golden bell-like instrument. He decided he liked Lawrence Millstein for liking this music, then remembered the diatribe in the bar and Joyce's warning —Don't make him mad—implying something about his temper and what she might have seen of it. He looked at Joyce where she stood silhouetted in the door to Lawrence's ugly kitchen. He recalled the half promise she had made him and thought about the possibility of holding her in his arms, of taking her to bed. She was very young and not as sophisticated as she liked to believe. She deserved better than Lawrence Millstein.

The Coltrane ended. Millstein put on something Tom didn't recognize, fierce bop, an angry music recorded with the microphone too close to the trumpet—it sounded like a piano at war with a giant wasp. The party was getting noisier. Disoriented, he moved to a vacant chair in one corner of the room and let the sound wash over him. There was a knock at the door; the dope was carefully hidden; the door eased open —it was some friend of Soderman's, a woman in a black turtleneck carrying a guitar case. Shouts of welcome. Joyce went to the turntable and lifted the tonearm. Millstein shouted, "Careful with that!" from the opposite end of the room.

Joyce borrowed the guitar, tuned it, and began picking out chords and bass runs. Pretty soon there were five or six people gathered around her. She was flushed—from the drinking or the dope or the attention—and her eyes were a little glassy. But when she sang, she sang wonderfully. She sang traditional folk ballads, "Fannerio," "Lonesome Traveler." When she spoke she was tentative, or shy, or sardonic, but the voice that issued out of her now was utterly different, a voice that made Tom sit up and stare. He had liked her without guessing she had this voice bottled up inside. The look on his face must have been comical; she smiled at him. "Come play!" she said.

He was startled. "Christ, no."

"I heard you diddling that guitar you carried into town. You're not too bad."

Soderman said, "The repairman plays guitar?"

If he'd been a little more sober he would never have accepted. But what the hell—if he was lousy it would only make Joyce look good. Making Joyce look good seemed like a fairly noble ambition.

For years he'd taken his guitar out of its box maybe once a month, so he wouldn't lose what little skill he had. He'd been serious about it in college—serious enough to take lessons with a semialcoholic free-lance teacher named Pegler, who claimed to have led a folk-rock outfit in the Haight in 1965. (Pegler, where are you now?) He took the guitar from Joyce and wondered what he could possibly play. "Guantanamera"? Some old Weavers ballad? But he recalled a song he'd taught himself, years ago, from an old Fred Neil album—counted on inspiration and luck to bring back the chord changes.

His singing voice was basically charmless and the dope had roughened it, but he managed the lyrics without groping. He looked up from his fingering halfway through the song and realized Joyce was beaming her approval. Which made him fumble over a chord change. But he picked it up and finished without too much embarrassment. Joyce applauded happily. Soderman said, "Impressive!"

Lawrence Millstein had drifted over from a dark corner of the room. He offered, "Not bad for amateur night."

"Thank you," Tom said warily.

"Sentimental shit, of course."

Joyce was more rankled by the remark than Tom was. "Must be a full moon," she said. "Lawrence is turning into an asshole."

"Reckless," Soderman observed quietly. Tom sat up.

"No, that's all right," Millstein said. He made an expansive gesture and spilled a little Jack Daniel's from the glass in his hand. "I don't want to interrupt your lovefest."

Tom handed away the guitar. It was dawning on him that he was in the presence of an angry drunk.

Don't make him mad. But Joyce seemed to have forgotten her own advice. "Don't do this," she said. "We don't need this shit."

"We don't need it? Who—you and Tom here? Joyce and the repairman?"

Soderman said, "You spilled your drink, Lawrence. Let's get another one. You and me."

Millstein ignored him. He turned to Tom. "You like her? Are you fond of Joyce?"

"Yes, Larry," he said. "I like Joyce a lot."

"Don't you fucking call me Larry!"

Instantly, the party was quiet. Millstein picked up the attention focused on him; he forced a smile. "You know what she is, of course," he went on. "But you must know. It's an old story. They come in from Bryn Mawr wearing these ridiculous clothes—ballet flats and toreador pants. They have bohemian inclinations but they all shop at Bonwit Teller. They come here for intellectual inspiration. They'll tell you that. Of course, they really come to get laid. Isn't that right, Joyce? They see themselves in the arms of some nineteen-year-old Negro musician. You can get laid in Westchester just as easily, of course, but not by anyone nearly as interesting." He peered at Tom with a fixed, counterfeit smile. "So just how interesting are you?"

"Right now," Tom said, "I guess I'm a little bit more interesting than you are."

Millstein threw down his glass and balled his fists. Joyce said, "Stop him!" Soderman stood up in front of Millstein and put a conciliatory hand on his shoulder. "Hey," he said. "Hey, calm down. It's nothing. Hey, Larry—I mean, Lawrence—"

Joyce grabbed Tom's hand and pulled him toward the door.

"The party is fucking over!" Millstein screamed.

They ducked into the hall.

"Come home with me," Joyce said.

Tom said that sounded like a good idea.

She undressed with the unselfconsciousness of a cat.

Pale streetlight came glowing through the dusty window. He was startled by her small breasts and pink, pleasant aureoles; by the neat angle of her pubic hair. She smiled at him in the dark, and he decided he was leading a charmed life.

The touch of her was like a long, deep drink of water. She arched against him as he entered her; he felt rusty springs unwind inside him. She had put her glasses on the orange crate by the bed and her eyes were fiercely wide.

Later, as they were drifting into sleep, she told him he made love like a lonely man.

"Do I?"

"You did tonight. Are you lonely?" "Was lonely." "Very lonely?" "Very lonely."

She curved against him, breasts and hips. "I want you to stay here. I want you to move in."

He experienced another moment of pure free-fall. "Is the apartment big enough?"

"The bed is big enough."

He kissed her in the dark. Charmed life, he thought.

Nineteen sixty-two, a hot summer night.

It was night all over the continent now, skies clear from the Rockies east to the coast of Maine, stars shining down from the uncrowded sky of a slightly younger universe. The nation slept, and its sleep was troubled—if at all—by faint and distant dreams. A dream of Mississippi. The dream of a war that hadn't quite started, somewhere east of the ocean. The dream of dark empires moving on its borders.

JFK slept. Lee Harvey Oswald slept. Martin Luther King slept.

Tom Winter slept and dreamed of Chernobyl.

He carried this nugget of discontent from the night into the morning.

I am a cold wind from the land of your children, he had thought. But he looked at Joyce—eating a late breakfast at a cheap restaurant at the end of a dirty, narrow, sunlit street— and didn't want to be that anymore. This was history and history was good because it was immutable; but he worried that he might have brought an infection from the future— not a literal disease but some turbulence in the timestream. Some dark, stalking irregularity that would unravel the fabric of her life. Maybe his certainties were absolutely false. Maybe they would all die in the Soviet attack that followed the missile crisis.

But that was absurd—wasn't it?

"Sometime soon," she said, "you're going to have to tell me who you are and where you came from."

He was startled by the suggestion. He looked at her across the table.

"I will," he said. "Sometime."

"Sometime soon."

"Soon," he said helplessly. Maybe it was a promise. Maybe it was a he.

Nine

His name was Billy Gargullo, and he was a farmboy.

He had lived in New York City for ten years now, but hot nights like this still reminded him of Ohio.

Hot nights like this, he couldn't sleep. Hot summer nights, he left his tiny apartment and moved like a shadow into the streets. He liked to ride the subway; when the subway was crowded, he liked to walk.

Tonight he rode a little, walked a little.

He had left his shiny golden armor safe at home.

Billy seldom wore the armor, but he often thought about it. The golden armor was at home, in the tenement apartment where he had lived for the last decade. He kept the armor in his closet, behind a false wall, in a box no one else could open.

He wore the golden armor seldom; but the golden armor was a part of him, profoundly his own—and that was troublesome. He had left a great many things behind when he came to New York. Many ugly, many shameful things. But some ugly and shameful things had come with him. The armor itself was not ugly or shameful—in its own way it was beautiful, and when Billy wore it he wore it with pride. But he had come to suspect that his need for it was shameful . . . that the things he did when he wore it were ugly.

This wasn't entirely Billy's fault, or so he told himself. The Infantry had performed certain surgeries on him. His need for the armor was real, physical; he wasn't whole without it. In a sense, Billy was the armor. But the armor wasn't entirely Billy: the armor had its own motives, and it knew Billy better than any other creature in the world.

It sang to him sometimes.

Most often, it sang about death.

Billy emerged from the roaring machine caves of the subway into the night wilderness of Forty-second Street and Broadway. Midnight had come and gone.

Now as ever, he was startled by the wild exuberance of the twentieth century. All these lights! Colored neon and glaring filaments, powered, he had learned, by mechanical dams spanning rivers hundreds of miles away. And most of this— astonishingly—in the name of advertising.

He paced through Times Square, where the lights were so bright he could hear them sizzle and spit.

Where Billy came from—back on the farm—this frivolous use of electricity would have been called promiscuous. A very bad word. But the word meant something else here ... a dissipation of some other energy entirely.

Words had troubled him from the day he arrived in New York.

He had arrived in a fury of blood and noise, disgorged into the sub-basement of an old building through a fracture in the firmament of time—frightened of what he had seen there; frightened of what might be waiting for him. He detonated EM pulses, brought a wall tumbling down, and killed the man (a time traveler) who tried to stop him.

When the dust settled, he crouched in a corner and considered his options.

He thought about the monster he'd encountered in the tunnel.

The monster was called a "time ghost"—Ann Heath had warned him about it before she died.

The fiery apparition had terrified Billy even through the haze of chemical courage pumped into him by his armor. The time ghost was like nothing he had ever seen and Billy sensed—he couldn't say how—that its interest in him was particular, personal. Maybe it knew what he'd done. Maybe it knew he had no place in this maze of time; that he was a deserter, a criminal, a refugee.

The monster had appeared as he reached the end of the tunnel, and Billy felt the heat of it and the subtler weight of its hostility; and he had run from it, a terrified sprint through the terminal doorway to this place, a safe place where the monster couldn't follow—or so Ann Heath had told him.

Nevertheless, Billy was still frightened.

He had a rough idea where he was. Mid-twentieth century. Some urban locus. He had killed the custodian of this place and a few more pulse detonations would sweep it clean of cybernetics. But Billy crouched in the corner of the dimly fit sub-basement—in the stench of fused plaster and cinder-block and a fine gray dust from the damaged tunnel—and understood that his exile was permanent.

He powered down his armor and performed a private inventory.

Things he had run away from:

The Infantry.

The Storm Zone.

Murder.

The woman Ann Heath with a wedge of glass in her skull and a hemotropic tube embedded in her chest. Things he had left behind:

Ohio.

His father, Nathan. A town called Oasis.

Miles of kale and green wheat and a sky empty of everything but heat and dust.

Things he couldn't leave behind: His armor.

And, Billy realized, this place. This building, whatever it was. This tunnel entrance, which he had sealed but which he could not trust: because it contained monsters, because it contained the future.

What had seemed at the time like inspiration, this feverish escape into the past, troubled him now. He had tampered with mechanisms he didn't understand, mechanisms more powerful than he could imagine. His encounter with the time ghost had been disturbing enough; who else might he have angered? There was so much Billy didn't understand. He believed he was safe here . . . but the belief was tempered with fresh new doubts.

But here you are. That was the plain fact of it. Here he was and here he would stay. At least no Infantry; at least no Storm Zone. A place away from all that. Not Ohio with its deserts and canals and the miracle of the harvest, but at least a safe place.

A city in the middle years of the twentieth century.

That night, his first night in the city of New York, Billy undressed the body of the time traveler and used a fan beam to turn the corpse into a dune of feathery white ash.

The clothes were bloodstained and a poor fit, but they allowed Billy to move without attracting attention. He explored the corridors of the tenement building above the sub-basement chamber which contained the tunnel; he explored the nearby streets of the night city. He deduced from the contents of the dead man's wallet that the time traveler had occupied an "apartment" in this building. Billy located the entrance, one numbered door among many, and fumbled keys into the primitive lock until the door sprang inward.

He slept in the dead man's bed. He appropriated a fresh suit of clothes. He marveled at the dead man's calendar: 1953.

He found cash in the dead man's wallet, more cash in a drawer of his desk. Billy understood cash: it was an archaic form of credit, universal and interchangeable. The denominations were confusing but simple in principle: a ten-dollar bill was "worth" two fives, for instance.

He stayed in the apartment a week. Twice, someone knocked at the door; but Billy was quiet and didn't answer. He watched television at night. He ate regular meals until there was nothing left in the refrigerator. He sat at the window and studied the people passing in the street.

He kept his armor hidden under the bed. As vulnerable as Billy felt without the armor, he would have been grotesquely conspicuous in it. He supposed he could have worn the body pieces under his clothing and looked only a little peculiar, but that wasn't the point; he hadn't come here to wear the armor. He planned not to wear the armor at all ... at least, only to wear it when he had to, when the peculiar needs of his altered body demanded it. In a month, say. Two months. Six months. Not now.

When there was nothing left to eat Billy gathered up his cash and left the building. He walked three blocks to a "grocery" and found himself in a paradise of fresh fruit and vegetables, more of these things than he had ever seen in one place. Dazzled, he chose three oranges, a head of lettuce, and a bunch of bright yellow speckled bananas. He handed the checkout clerk a flimsy cash certificate and was nonplussed when the man said, "I can't change that! Christ's sake!" Change it to what? But Billy rooted in his pocket for a smaller denomination, which proved acceptable, and he understood the problem when the cashier handed him a fresh selection of bills and coins: his "change."

Words, Billy thought. What they spoke here was English, but only just.

He acquired his new life by theft.

The custodian, a time traveler, had owned the block of tenement flats above the sub-basement which concealed the tunnel. The deeds were stored in a filing cabinet in the bedroom. For years the time traveler had operated the building strictly as, a formality and most of the apartments were empty. Billy passed himself off as "new management" and accepted the monthly rent checks. The charade was almost ridiculously easy. There was no family to mourn the dead man, no business partners to inquire about his health. By reviewing the documents he learned that the time traveler had registered his business under the name Hourglass Rentals, and Billy was able to discern enough of the local financial customs to manipulate bank deposits and withdrawals and pay the tax bills on time. Hourglass Rentals didn't generate enough revenue to cover its debts, but the amount of money banked in the company name was staggering—enough to keep Billy in food and shelter for the rest of his life. Not only that, but the management of these fiscal arcana had been streamlined for a single individual to operate without help— an hour of paperwork an evening, once Billy mastered the essentials of bookkeeping and learned which lies to tell the IRS, the city, and the utility companies. By the end of 1952, Billy was Hourglass Rentals.

It suited him to commandeer the life of a loner. Billy was a loner, too.

He guessed the armor had made him that way. He knew the Infantry surgeons had made him dependent on the armor —that without it he was less than a normal human being. Sexually, Billy was a blank slate. He remembered a time when he had wanted the touch of a woman—back in his brief adolescence, before he was prepped, when the physical need had burned like a flame—but that was long ago. Nothing burned in him now but his need for the armor. Now he saw women all the time: women on television, women on city streets, bank tellers, secretaries, women available for money. Occasionally they looked at him. Their looks seldom lingered. Billy guessed there was something about him they could sense—a blankness, a deferral, an inertia of the soul.

It didn't matter. By the snowy January of 1953 Billy had established a life he was content to lead.

He was far from the Infantry, the Storm Zone, and the prospect of imminent death or court martial. He wasn't hungry and he wasn't in physical danger. When he stopped to think about it, it felt a little bit like paradise.

Was he happy here? Billy couldn't say. Most days passed in blissful oblivion, and he was grateful for that. But there were times when he felt the pangs of a brittle, piercing loneliness. He woke up nights in a city more than a century away from home, and that impossible distance was like a hook in his heart. He thought about his father, Nathan. He tried to remember his mother, who had died when he was little. He thought about his life in exile here, stranded on this island, Manhattan, among people who had been dead a hundred years when he was born. Thought about his life among these ghosts. He thought about time, about clocks: clocks, like words, worked differently here. Billy was accustomed to clocks that numbered time and marked it with cursors, linear slices of a linear phenomenon. Here, clocks were round and symbolic. Time was a territory mapped with circles.

Time and words. Seasons. That January, Billy was caught in a snowstorm that slowed the buses to a crawl. Tired and cold, he decided to check into a hotel rather than walk the distance home. He found an inexpensive boarding hotel and asked the desk clerk for a room with a slut; the clerk showed him a strange smile and said he would have to arrange that himself—he recommended a bar a few blocks away. Billy disguised his confusion and checked in anyway, then realized that in 1953 the word "slut" must have some other meaning —he didn't need a heated bed; the entire room, the entire hotel was heated. Probably every room in the city was heated, even the vast public spaces of banks and the cavernous lobbies of skyscrapers, all through the bitter winter. He had a hard time grasping this simple fact; when he did, the sheer arrogant monstrosity of it left him dazed and blinking.

Asleep in the snowbound hotel, Billy dreamed of all that heat ... a hundred summers' worth, bubbling up from this city and a dozen cities like it, hovering for decades in invisible cloudbanks and then descending all at once in a final obliteration of the seasons.

He dreamed about Ohio, about a farm in the desert there.

His need for the armor was quiet at first, a barely discernible tickle of desire, something he could ignore—for a time.

The armor, with its power off and its tensor fields collapsed, lay in the box Billy had found for it like yardcloth from some fairy-tale haberdashery. It looked like spun gold, though of course it wasn't really gold; it was woven of complex polymolecules grown in the big East Coast armaments collectives. Parts of it were electronic and parts of it were vaguely alive.

The Infantry doctors had told Billy he'd die without his armor—that he would go mad without the essential neurochemicals generated in the elytra. Billy was frankly aware that without the armor he was slow, languorous, sleepy, and sexless. But he endured that—in a way, the condition was even sedating. For six months he moved through the city with his eyelids heavy and his mouth turned up in an empty narcotic smile.

Then came the Need.

At first it was only a tingling dissatisfaction, pins and needles in his fingers and toes. Billy ignored it and went about his business.

Then the tingling became an itch, the itch a fiery burning. The skin of his face felt drawn tight, as if it had been clamped and sutured to his hairline. He woke up in the bitter late winter of that year with the disquieting sensation that he could feel the gaps and contours of his own skull under the skin, the grinding of bones and ligaments like dry chalk inside him. He was thirsty all the time, but tap water tasted sour in his mouth and burned his throat when he swallowed. He felt sudden blooms of panic, irrational fears: of heights, open spaces, disease.

He knew what this was all about.

The armor, Billy thought.

The sleek and deadly armor.

He wanted it, or it wanted him . . . Billy was inclined to the latter belief.

This discomfort, this pain, this vertigo: it was the sound of the armor calling to him from its box under the bed.

Billy resisted it.

He was afraid of what the armor might want.

Well, he knew what it wanted. It wanted motion, light, heat. It wanted to be brought alive. It wanted to be the creature that Billy was when he wore it, a powerful nightmare-Billy to be summoned and let loose.

He dreamed he was a dog chasing rabbits through a field of wheat by the bone-white light of a harvest moon. He dreamed of cracking the rabbit's spine with his sharp teeth and of the gush of warm rabbit blood on his muzzle.

He dreamed of the armor. The armor was a presence in all his dreams now, the flash of it like something dazzling at the periphery of his vision. He couldn't bear to look directly at it;

like the sun, it might blind him—but, like the sun, it was always there.

Some nights, sweating and shivering, he dreamed of Ohio.

In the main, Billy's childhood memories were sunny. He had grown up in a farm town called Oasis, one of the soil reclamation collectives that had sprung up along the diversion canals drawing water south from the Great Lakes. Founded in a mood of optimism during the Dry Fifties, operated by a consortium of food distributors out of Detroit, the town had lost some of its civic spirit in the hard decades after. But if you grew up there, you didn't notice. For Billy, it was only a place.

He carried a few vivid memories of that time. He remembered the sky, a hazy blue vastness that had seemed as big as time itself. He remembered the miracle of water, water gushing up from sprinkler heads embedded in the dust-dikes that ran in lazy whorls through the fields—water raining down over a thousand acres of new green leaves. The town grew wheat and cabbage and kale and alfalfa and a patchwork of minor crops. Twice, Billy had been allowed to ride out on the big tending machines; and it made him proud and giddy to sit beside his father in the crow's-nest seat, emperor of all this fragrant green foliage and dusty blue sky. He remembered one scorching summer when a work battalion from AgService came to install what they called "UV screens"—huge banners of some nearly invisible film, tethered on poles and anchored with fat steel cables. For a few days it was cooler in the fields, and the clinic reported exposure trauma down a percentile. But then—pretty much as Billy's father had predicted—a hot wind came blowing from the west and the UV film broke free of its tethers. It balled up and tangled in the crops like so much cellophane discarded by a thoughtless giant. Acres of winter wheat were bent and broken. Nathan, surveying the battered fields, had startled Billy by falling on his knees.

Billy remembered Nathan as a large man—large, bearded, generous, often quiet, and deeply unhappy. His father always followed the news on the big screen in the civic center; and Billy gleaned that it was Nathan who received the other news, microwave databursts not sanctioned by the federal information services—news, especially, on the movement of conscription battalions across the Midwest.

Every two or three years the recruiters swept into Oasis. Nathan said they were like the locusts in the Bible, a plague. They would bunk in the labor barracks, stay a few days, maybe leave some of the more impressionable young girls with a new baby inside them; and when they rode away in their huge hovertrucks they would take a few draftees—boys barely old enough to shave, mainly.

Nathan and the town council usually had some warning when the battalions were coming, time enough to tamper with the town's birth records—to delete or alter certain documents. The likeliest young recruits would be hidden away in a supply cellar under the machine shed and the women would sneak them food. The battalions complained about the slim pickings, and sometimes they ran crude tamper-check routines on the civic computers . . . but if you got them drunk enough, Nathan said, they'd leave happy.

But if they came without warning—if they had destroyed the pirate relay towers on their way west—then they took what they wanted.

Billy remembered a summer when the news from the Storm Zone was very bad, tremendous loss of life all through the Caribbean and the occupation forces scattered. That summer, the Infantry came without warning. They arrived in a phalanx of black hovercraft, raising a cloud of dust that must have reddened sunsets all the way to Sandusky. Billy remembered his father's face when he climbed an embankment and saw that gray-black line approaching from the west —dismay as substantial as a weight on his shoulders.

He turned to Billy and said, "Go to the machine shed. Hurry."

It was the first time Billy had been old enough to hide with the other boys. It might have been exciting . . . but this time things were different. This time, he had seen his father's fear.

The cellar was hot and smelled of ancient cottonseed and burlap. He crouched there with a dozen other boys. "I'll come get you," Nathan had said, "when the Infantry are gone," and the words had reassured him a little. But it wasn't Nathan who came.

He never saw Nathan again.

It was a soldier who came.

An Infantryman. Billy woke blinking and bewildered in the clockless depths of cellar night, startled awake by the sound of footsteps. The Infantryman smiled down from the doorway. His name, he said, was Krakow. He was wearing his armor—a command breastplate, radiantly golden. Billy gazed up with no little awe as Krakow touched his chest. "This is my armor," he said. "This is the part of it you can see. Some of it is inside me. My armor knows who I am, and I know my armor. My armor is a machine, and right now it isn't fully powered. But if I switched it on I could kill you all before there was time enough to blink. And I would enjoy it."

Billy didn't doubt the truth of this. Krakow ran his fingers over the mirror-bright surface of the breastplate and Billy wondered exactly how you turned the armor on—he hoped Krakow wouldn't do it by mistake.

"My armor is my best friend." Krakow's voice was gentle, confiding. "An Infantryman's armor is always his best friend. Your armor will be your best friend."

Billy knew what that meant. It meant he was leaving home.

Curled in the womb of his apartment, Billy ate canned tuna and watched television and sat up nights shivering, listening to the snow rattle on the window. His temperature crept upward; his joints ached; his body felt as if the skin had been flayed from it. Billy endured this until it was unbearable. He was surprised at how distinct that moment was: the tick of a second hand on the wheel of a clock, a single thought. No more.

He took the box from under the bed and opened it. The golden armor was inside—all the large and small pieces of it.

Billy recalled the catechism of his training. Sir, this is my armor, sir.

Sir, these are the body pieces, which are called the elytra. (Like cloth, quite golden, rigid only when impacted at high velocity. Bulging here and there with instrumentation, power packs, processing units.)

These are the arm pieces, sir, which are called the halteres. (Molding to the contour of his skin. They feel warm.)

Sir, these are the leg pieces, which are called the setae. (Snug against his thighs.)

Sir, this touchplate controls the stylet and the lancet, which connect the armor to my body. (To the liver, to the spine, to the lumen of the aorta.)

Hollow micropipettes burrowing in, wet with contact anesthetic.

Motion under his skin.

It felt funny.

Sir, this touchpiece activates the lancet.

Ah.

He moved in the snowbound night streets like a ghost.

He wore loose clothes over his armor, a long gray coat and a broad-brimmed hat to shadow his face.

He moved among the snowy lamp standards and the blinking traffic fights. Past midnight, before dawn, 1953.

He was supple and powerful and quite invincible.

He was intoxicated with his own hidden strength and dizzy with the need to kill a human being.

He did not resist the urge but he tantalized himself with it. The streets were empty and the snow came down in dry, icy granules. Wind flapped at the hem of his chalk-gray overcoat and erased his footprints behind him. The few pedestrians he saw were bent against the wind, scurrying like beetles for shelter. He followed one, maintaining a discreet distance, until the man vanished into a tenement building. Billy reached the stoop . . . paused a long moment in the winter darkness . . . then walked on.

He chose another potential victim, a small man spotlit by the beam of an automobile headlight; Billy followed him two blocks east but allowed this one, too, to vanish behind a door.

No hurry. He was warm in his armor. He was content. His heart beat inside him with the happy regularity of a finely tuned machine.

He smiled at a man who stepped out of an all-night delicatessen with a paper bag tucked under his arm. This one? Tall man, sleepless, red-eyed, suspicious, a cheap cloth coat: not a rich man; bulk of arms and chest: maybe a strong man.

"Hell of a night," Billy said.

The man shrugged, smiled vaguely, and turned to face the wind.

Yes, this one, Billy thought.

Billy took him with his wrist beam in an alley half a block away.

The killing took all of twenty seconds, but it was the nearest thing to an orgasm Billy had experienced since he came through the tunnel from the future. A brief and blissful release.

He mutilated the body with a knife, to disguise the cauterization of the wounds; then he took the man's wallet, to make the death seem like a robbery.

He dropped the wallet in a trash bin on Eighth Street. The money—five dollars in ones—he took home and flushed down the toilet.

Soothed and sweetly alive in the dark of his apartment, Billy relaxed his armor and folded it into its box. By dawn, the clouds had rolled away. A winter sun rose over the snowbound city. Billy showered and raided the refrigerator. He had lost a lot of weight in the last few months, but now his appetite had returned with a vengeance. Now he was very hungry indeed.

He went to bed at noon and woke in the dark. Waking, he discovered something new in himself. He discovered remorse.

He found his thoughts circling back to the man he'd killed. Who had he been? Had he lived alone? Were the police investigating the murder?

Billy had watched police investigations on TV. On TV, the police always found the killer. Billy knew this was a social fiction; in real life the opposite was probably nearer to the truth. Still, fiction or not, the possibility nagged at him.

He developed new phobias. The tunnel in the sub-basement was suddenly on his mind. He had sealed that tunnel at both ends: according to Ann Heath, the dead woman with the wedge of glass in her skull, that act would guarantee his safety. No one would come hunting him from the future; no time ghost would carry him off. The tunnel, after all, was only a machine. A strange and nearly incomprehensible machine, Billy admitted privately, but a powerless machine, too —inaccessible.

Nevertheless, it made him nervous.

He patrolled the sub-basement daily. He thought of this as "checking the exits." The city of New York and the meridian of the twentieth century had become in Billy's mind a private place, a welcoming shelter. The natives might be a nuisance, but they weren't gravely dangerous; the real dangers lay elsewhere, beyond the rubble where the tunnel had been. Billy piled the rubble higher and installed a door at the foot of the stairs; on the door he installed an expensive padlock. If—by some magic—the tunnel repaired itself, any intruder would have to disturb these barricades. If Billy found the lock broken or the door splintered it would mean his sanctuary had been invaded ... it would mean the twentieth century wasn't his own anymore.

The effort reassured him. Still, his proximity to the gateway made him nervous. It was hard to sleep some nights with the thought of that temporal fracture buried in the bedrock some few yards under the floor. By the summer of 1953 Billy decided that this building didn't need his nightly presence— that he could move a few streets away without harming anything.

He rented an apartment on the other side of Tompkins Square, three streets uptown. It was not much different from his first apartment. The floor was a crumbling, ancient parquet; Billy covered it with a cheap rug. The windows were concealed by yellow roll blinds and dust. Cockroaches lived in the gaps in the wallboard and they came out at night. And there was a deep closet, where Billy kept his armor in its box.

His life fell into a series of simple routines. Every week, sometimes more often, Billy walked the short distance between the two buildings—or, when he was restless, took a long night walk uptown and back—to collect his rent money and check the exits.

The rent was often late and sometimes his few tenants failed to pay at all. But that didn't matter. What mattered was that the padlock in the basement was never disturbed—a fact more reassuring as the years began to stack up behind him.

Time, Billy often thought, tasting the word in his mind. Time: small circles of days and the great wheel of the seasons. Seasons passed. Engrossed in television news—watching his small Westinghouse TV set the way Nathan had monitored the immensely larger screen in the civic center— he learned a parade of names: Eisenhower, Oppenheimer, Nixon; and places: Suez, Formosa, Little Rock. He numbered the years although the numbers still seemed implausible, one-nine-five-four, one-nine-five-five, one thousand nine hundred and fifty-six years in the wake of a crucifixion which seemed to Billy just as ludicrously unreal as the fall of Rome, the treaty of Ghent, or the Army-McCarthy hearings.

His armor continued to call to him from its hiding place, a small voice which sometimes grew shrill and unbearable. The need seemed to follow the seasons, an irony Billy failed to appreciate: if time was a wheel then in some sense he had been broken on it. Two killings per annum, winter and summer, dark nights or moonlit, as irresistible as the tides. And each killing was followed by a grinding remorse, then numbness, then weeks of dull torpor . . . and the Need again.

Nineteen fifty-eight, 'fifty-nine, 'sixty.

Nixon in Moscow, sit-ins in Greensboro, Kennedy in the White House by a fraction of the vote.

Billy grew older. So did the armor—but he tried not to think about that.

Tried not to think about a lot of things, especially tonight, as he was checking the exits: early summer of Anno Domini 1962, a hot night that reminded him of Ohio.

Billy entered the groaning front door of the old building near Tompkins Square where the time traveler had once lived and where nobody lived now except a few aging relics.

He had developed a perverse fondness for these people, human detritus too fragile or tenacious to abandon a building he had allowed to crumble around them. Two of them had been there long before Billy arrived—an arthritic old man named Shank on the fourth floor and a diabetic pensioner on the second. Mrs. Korzybski, the pensioner, sometimes forgot her medication and would stumble out to the street in insulin-shock delirium. This had happened once when he was checking the exits, and Billy had helped the woman inside, using his passkey to open the apartment door she had somehow locked behind her. He didn't like the police or an ambulance coming to the building, so he rummaged in the kitchen drawers among her cat-food cans and cutlery and fading photographs until he found her diabetic kit. He used the syringe to inject a measured dose of insulin solution into the crook of her flabby arm. When she came to, she thanked him. "You're nice," she said. "You're nicer than you look. How come you know how to use that needle?"

"I was in the army," Billy said.

"Korea?"

"That's right. Korea."

He had seen Korea on television.

She said she was glad now that she paid her rent on time, and how come nobody had moved in for such a long while? "Since that Mr. Allen was the manager. It gets kind of lonely these days."

"Nobody wants to rent, I guess."

"That's funny. That's not what I hear. Maybe if you painted?"

"One day," Billy explained solemnly, "all this will be under water."

Nowadays, when he came, he came at night, when Mrs. Korzybski was asleep. Her apartment was dark tonight. All the apartments were dark except for 403: Amos Shank, who lived on his retirement fund from the H. J. Heinz Company in Pittsburgh. Mr. Shank had come to New York to find a publisher for his epic poem Ulysses at the Elbe. The publishing industry had disappointed him, but Mr. Shank still liked to talk about the work—three massive volumes of vellum paper bound with rubber bands, still not entirely finished.

Mr. Shank left the light on in case inspiration struck in the depths of the night . . . but Mr. Shank was probably asleep by now too. Everyone in Billy's building was lonely and asleep. Everyone but Billy.

He whistled a formless tune between his teeth and stepped into the entranceway. The paint on the walls had faded to gray a long time ago. The mirrored wall by the stairs was fogged and chipped and some of the floor tiles had turned up at the corners, like leaves.

Billy went directly to the basement.

The stairway leading down smelled hot and stale. These old wooden steps had grown leathery in the humid air. Silent in the dim light, Billy passed the bizarre and inefficient oil furnace with its many arms, the groaning water heater; through an unmarked access door and deeper, past the storage cellar with its lime-green calcinated walls and its crusted cans of paint, to the door he had sealed with a sturdy Yale padlock. The light was dim—the light here was always dim. Billy took a chrome Zippo lighter out of his hip pocket.

He felt strange down here so close to the tunnel. He had been deeply frightened when he first understood how vast this warren of temporal fractures really was—what it implied and what that might mean to him. He couldn't think about the tunnel without considering the creatures who had made it . . . beings, Billy understood, so nearly omnipotent that they might as well be called gods. And he remembered what he'd seen in this tunnel the day he arrived here, something even stranger than the godlike time travelers, a creature as bright and hot as a living flame.

He flicked the igniter on the Zippo. Time for a new flint, Billy told himself.

He brought the light down closer to the padlock—then drew a sharp breath and stepped back.

Dear God! After all these years—! The lock had been broken open.

Billy's first thought was of Krakow gazing down at him through another door, the night he was recruited. He had the same feeling now: discovered in hiding.

He was defenseless, weaponless, and the walls were much too close.

He touched his throat, instinctively reaching for the touch-plate that would trigger his armor—but the armor was at home.

He backed away from the door.

Someone had been here! Someone had come for him!

He considered going upstairs, dragging Mrs. Korzybski out of her sleep, Amos Shank from his senile slumber, beating them until they told him who had come and who had gone. But they might not know. Probably didn't. Maybe no one had seen.

I need help, Billy told himself. The sense of imminent danger had closed around him like a noose. (Not alone anymore!) He pocketed his lighter, climbed the stairs, and left the building.

He stood alone in the sweaty darkness of the street, his eyes patrolling the sawtooth shadows between the tenement stoops.

He hurried away, avoiding streetlights. The armor, Billy thought. The armor would know what to do.

Ten

Catherine Simmons drove into Belltower after the cremation of her grandmother, Peggy Simmons, who had lived out along the Post Road for many years and who had died a week ago in her sleep.

Summer made Belltower a pretty little town, at least when the wind wasn't blowing from the mill. Catherine knew the town from her many visits; she didn't have any trouble finding the Carstairs Funeral Home on a side street off Brierley, between an antique shop and a marine electronics store. She parked and sat in her Honda a few minutes—she was early for her appointment.

Gram Peggy's fatal stroke had been unexpected and the news of her death still seemed fresh and unreasonable. Of all Catherine's family, Gram Peggy had seemed most like a fixture—the solidest and most fun of the sorry lot. But Gram Peggy was dead and Catherine supposed she would have to adjust to that fact.

She sighed and climbed out of the car. The afternoon was sunny and the air carried a whiff of ocean. Pretty little dumb little smelly little town, Catherine thought.

There was no ceremony planned and no other Simmonses at the funeral home. Catherine's father—Gram Peggy's only son—had died in 1983, of liver cancer, and the rest of the family was hopelessly scattered. Only Catherine had ever come to visit these last several years. Apparently Gram Peggy had appreciated those visits. Her lawyer, Dick Parsons, had phoned to say that the entire estate, including the house, had been left to Catherine: another stunning piece of news, still somewhat indigestible.

The funeral director at Carstairs turned out not to be the unctuous vulture Catherine was expecting; he was a big-shouldered man who looked a little like a football coach. He handed Catherine the bronze urn containing Gram Peggy's ashes in a gesture that was almost apologetic. "This is the way your grandmother wanted it, Miss Simmons. No ceremony, nothing solemn. She arranged all this in advance."

"Gram Peggy was very practical," Catherine said.

"That she was." He managed a sympathetic smile. "Everything's been paid for through her lawyer. I hope we've been of some small help?"

"You did fine," Catherine said. "Thank you."

There was a woman in the lobby as Catherine left, a gray-haired woman roughly Gram Peggy's age; she stepped forward and said, "I'm Nancy Horton—a friend of your grandmother's. I just want to say how sorry I am."

"Thank you," Catherine said. Apparently death involved thanking people a lot.

"I knew Peggy from the shopping trips we took. She still drove, you see. I don't drive if I can help it. She used to drive me down to the mall on the highway, Wednesday mornings usually. We'd talk. Though she was never a big talker. I liked her a lot, though. You must be Catherine."

"Yes."

"Are you going to be staying in the house?" "Gram's house? For a little while. Maybe for the summer." "Well, I'm not far away if you need anything." She glanced at the urn in Catherine's hand. "I don't know about cremation. It seems—oh, I'm sorry! I shouldn't be saying this, should I? But it seems like so little to leave behind."

"That's okay," Catherine said. "This isn't Gram Peggy. We talked about that before she died. These are just some ashes."

"Of course," Nancy Horton said. "Will you keep them? Oh, my curiosity! I'm sorry—"

"Gram loved the forest out in back of her property," Catherine said. "She once asked me to scatter her ashes there." She took the urn protectively into the crook of her left arm. "That's what I'll do."

Of course, she couldn't keep the house. It was a big old house up along the Post Road and a long way from anywhere Catherine wanted to live, as much as she sometimes liked Belltower. Once the will was probated, she would probably try to sell the property. She had said as much to Dick Parsons, who had given her the number of the local realty company. One of their agents was supposed to meet her outside the funeral home.

The agent turned out to be the man lounging against a mailbox by the front steps—he straightened up and announced himself as Doug Archer. Catherine smiled and shook his hand. "Everybody's running against type," she said. I m sorry?

"The funeral director doesn't look like a funeral director. You don't look much like a real estate agent."

"I'll take that as flattery," Archer said.

But it was true, Catherine thought. He was a little too young, a little too careless about his clothes. He wore floppy high-top Reeboks tied too low, and he grinned like an eight-year-old. He said, "Are you still thinking about putting the house on the market?"

"It's a firm decision," Catherine said. "I'm just not sure about when. I'm thinking of spending the rest of the summer here."

"It may not be a quick sale in any case. The market's a little slow, and those houses out on the Post Road are kind of lonely. But I'm sure we can find a buyer for it."

"I'm in no hurry. Dick Parsons said you'd probably want to look at the house?"

"It'll help when we're thinking about setting a price. If you want to make an appointment? Or I can drive out today—"

"Today is fine. I have to stop by Mr. Parsons' office and pick up the keys, but you can come by later if you like."

"If that's all right." He looked at his watch. "Around three?" Sure.

"I'm sorry about your grandmother, Miss Simmons. I handle a lot of those houses up the Post Road, so I had the occasion to meet her once or twice. She was a unique woman."

Catherine smiled. "I don't imagine she had much patience with real estate agents." "Not too damn much patience at all," Doug Archer said.

Catherine picked up the keys, signed papers, said another round of thanks, then braced herself for the drive to Gram Peggy's house.

The word "holiday," in Catherine's memory, was associated with this road. When she was little they would drive down from Bellingham in her father's station wagon, circle through Belltower to the bottom of the Post Road hill, then up a long corridor of fragrant pines to the door of Gram Peggy's house. Gram Peggy who cooked wonderful meals, who said wonderful and irreverent things, and whose presence imposed a magical truce between Catherine's mother and father. At Gram Peggy's house, nobody was allowed to smoke and nobody was allowed to fight. "Everything else is permitted. But I will not have the house stinking of tobacco smoke and I will not allow bickering—both of which poison the air. Isn't that right, Catherine?"

The Post Road hadn't changed much. It was still this green, dark, faintly magical corridor—the highway and the malls might have been a thousand miles away. Houses on the Post Road were barely more than outposts in the wilderness, Catherine thought, set in their little plots of landscape, some grand and many humble, but always overshadowed by the lush Douglas firs.

Gram Peggy's house, at the crest of the hill, was the only one of these homes with a view. The house was an old and grandly Victorian wood frame structure, two stories high with a gabled attic above that. Gram Peggy had always been meticulous about having it painted and touched up; otherwise, she said, the weeds would think they had an open invitation. The house had been built by Gram Peggy's father, a piano maker, whom Catherine had never met. The idea of selling the property—of never coming back here—felt like the worst kind of sacrilege. But of course she'd be lost in it herself.

She parked and unlocked the big front door. For now, she left her paints and supplies in the trunk of the Civic. If she stayed for the summer—the idea was steadily more attractive —she could set up a studio in the sunny room facing the woods out back. Or in the guest room, where the bay window allowed glimpses of the distant ocean.

But for now it was still Gram Peggy's house, left untidied at the end of what must have been a tiring day. Crumbs on the kitchen counter, the ficus wilting in a dry pot. Catherine wandered aimlessly through some of these rooms, then dropped into the overstuffed sofa in front of the TV set. Gram Peggy's TV Guide was splayed open on the side table —a week out of date.

Of course I'll be here all summer, Catherine thought; it would take that long to sort out Gram Peggy's possessions and arrange to have them sold. None of this had occurred to her. She had assumed, by some wordless logic, that Gram Peggy's things would have vanished like Gram Peggy herself, into the urn now resting by the front door. But maybe this was where the real mourning started: the disposition of these letters, clocks, clothes, dentures—a last, brutal intimacy.

Catherine slipped off her shoes, reclined on the sofa, and napped until Doug Archer knocked at the door.

Before he left, Doug Archer said a strange thing.

His visit went well, otherwise. He was friendly and his interest seemed genuine, more than just businesslike. He asked about her work. Catherine was shy about her painting even though she had begun to earn some money through a couple of small Seattle galleries. She'd taken fine arts courses at college, but the work she produced was mainly intuitive, personal, meticulous. She worked with acrylics and sometimes with montage. Her subjects were usually small—a leaf, a water drop, a ladybug—but her canvases were large, impressionistic, and layered with bright acrylic washes. After her last show a Seattle newspaper critic said she "seemed to coax light out of paint," which had pleased her. But she didn't tell Archer that; only that she painted and that she was thinking of doing some work here during the summer. He said he'd love to see some of her work sometime. Catherine said she was flattered but there was nothing to show right now.

He was thorough about the house. He inspected the basement, the water heater and the furnace, the fuseboard and the window casements. Upstairs, he made a note about the oak floors and moldings. Lastly, he went outside and gazed up at the eaves. Catherine told him Gram Peggy had had the roof inspected every year.

She walked him to his car. "I suppose we'll have to put it on the market pretty soon. I don't even know what that involves. I guess people come to see it?"

"We don't have to hurry. You must be upset by all this."

"Dazed. I think I'm dazed."

"Take as long as you need. Call me when you're ready to talk about it."

"I appreciate that," Catherine said.

Archer put his hand on the door of the car, then seemed to hesitate. "Do you mind if I ask you something?"

"Shoot."

"Did your grandmother ever talk much about her neighbors?"

"Not that I remember. I did meet Mrs. Horton from around the corner. Apparently they used to drive to the mall together."

"How about the house down the other direction—the man who lived there? She ever mention him? This would have been ten or more years ago."

"I don't remember anything like that. Why?"

"No real reason." Something personal, she guessed. He was obviously embarrassed to have asked. "Will you do me one favor, Catherine? If you notice anything strange happening, will you give me a call? My number's on the card. You can reach me pretty much anytime."

"What do you mean, anything strange?"

"Odd occurrences," Archer said unhappily.

"Like what? Ghosts, flying saucers, that kind of thing? Is there a lot of that around here?" She couldn't help smiling.

"Nothing like that. No, look, forget I asked, okay? It's nothing important. Just kind of a hobby with me."

He thanked her, she thanked him, he drove away. How odd, Catherine thought as his car vanished into the tree shadows along the Post Road. What an unusual man. What a strange thing to ask.

She didn't think more about it. A bank of clouds moved in and a steady, sullen rain fell without interruption for most of a week. Catherine stayed in the house and began to itemize some of Gram Peggy's possessions, room by room. It was depressing weather and depressing work. She felt lost in this big old house, but the rhythms of it—the ticking of the mantel clock and the morning and evening light through the high dusty windows—were familiar and in their own way reassuring.

Still, she was glad when the sun came out. After a couple of warm days the ground had dried and she was able to move around the big back lawn and some distance down a trail into the woods. She remembered taking some of these walks with Gram Peggy and how intimidating the forest had seemed— still seemed, in fact. There was enough red cedar behind the house to make her feel very small, as if she'd shrunk, Alice-style, to the size of a caterpillar. The trail was narrow, probably a deer trail; the forest was cool and silent.

She took these walks almost every day and before long she began to feel a little braver. She ranged farther than Gram Peggy had ever taken her. Some of this woodland was municipal property, and farther east it had been staked out by the timber interests, but nobody up along the Post Road cared too much about property lines and Catherine was able to wander fairly freely. Most days she hiked south down the slope of the hill, keeping east of the road and the houses.

She bought a guidebook and taught herself to identify some of the wildlife. She had seen a salamander, a thrush, and something she believed was a "pileated woodpecker." There was the tantalizing possibility of encountering a black bear, though that hadn't happened yet. Sometimes she brought her lunch with her; sometimes she carried a sketchbook.

She had already found favorite places in the woods. There was a meadow where she could sit on a fallen log and gaze across a thicket of salal and huckleberry, where the forest sloped away toward Belltower. There was a sandy spot by a creek where she thought she might scatter Gram Peggy's ashes. And another meadow, farther south, riddled with deer trails, where an abandoned woodshed sagged under a growth of moss.

The woodshed fascinated her. There was something inviting about the cockeyed slant of the door. Surely there was nothing inside, Catherine told herself; or only a cord of moldy firewood. But then again there might be an old plough or spinning wheel, something she could clean up and peddle to the antique shops in Belltower. Unless this was somebody's property, in which case she would be stealing. But she could at least peek.

She had this thought vaguely in mind Wednesday morning, her second week in Belltower, when she packed a bag lunch and went wandering. It was a warm day and she was sweating by the time she passed the creek. She pressed on south, paused to tie her hair up off her neck, hiked past the huckleberry thicket and on down to the woodshed in its sunny meadow.

She approached the door of the ancient structure, high-stepping through berry-bush runners to avoid a stand of fireweed . . . then she hesitated.

It seemed to her she could hear faint motion inside.

Curiosity killed the cat, Gram Peggy used to say. But she always added the less salutary rider—Satisfaction brought it back. Gram Peggy had been a big believer in satisfied curiosity.

So Catherine opened the creaking woodshed door and peered inside, where a stack of newspapers had moldered for decades, and where something hideous moved and spoke in the darkness.