“Yes.”
“Is that possible? Can you fix it?”
“The cybernetics are repairing as much of the physical damage as they can. Then we can close the connection to Manhattan, isolate it until it can be repaired as well. But that will take some time. Weeks, at least.”
“And until then,” Catherine interpreted, “the problem is Tom Winter.”
“He may be perfectly safe. He may not. The cybernetics tried to warn him, but they were working across a tremendous information barrier—I’m afraid they weren’t very specific. He may have alerted the marauder, which puts us at risk; or he may do so if he hasn’t yet.”
Catherine bit her lip. Here was the crux of it. “You want us to bring him back.”
Ben looked very solemn. “That may not be possible at this stage. The cybernetics can help, and they might provide some defense against the marauder, but the danger is obvious. I won’t ask you to go—either of you.”
You don’t have to ask, Catherine thought sadly. She looked at Doug Archer and knew.
Archer grinned.
“Tom is a likable sonofabitch,” he said. “I expect I can drag his ass back here.”
Doug went to the kitchen, leaving Catherine alone with Ben.
She hesitated in the doorway, unnerved by Ben’s expressionless patience. Finally she said, “Is this necessary? If you don’t get Tom Winter back … would the world end?” She added, “Doug is risking his life, I think.”
“I’ll do everything I can to minimize the risk. Some risk remains. The world won’t end if Tom Winter stays in Manhattan … but there might be other consequences I can’t calculate.” He paused. “Catherine, Doug knows the doorway is open. Do you think he’d stay away from it if I told him to?”
“No … I don’t suppose he would.” Catherine resented this but understood that it was true. “This way, at least he’s serving a purpose. Is that it?”
“This way,” Ben said, “he’ll come back.”
Fourteen
Tom slept for three hours and woke with Joyce beside him, already feeling as if he’d lost her.
He phoned Max to say he wouldn’t be in. “Maybe I can come in Saturday to make up for it.”
“Are you sick,” Max inquired, “or are you jerking me around?”
“It’s important, Max.”
“At least you’re not lying to me. Very important?”
“Very important.”
“I hope so. This is bothersome.”
“I’m sorry, Max.”
“Take care of your trouble soon, please. You do nice work. I don’t want to break in a new person.”
The trouble wasn’t Joyce. The trouble was in the space between them: that fragile connection, possibly broken.
She was asleep in bed, stretched out on her side with one hand cupping the pillow. The cotton sheet was tangled between her legs. Her glasses were on the orange crate next to the bed; she looked naked without them, defenseless, too young. Tom watched from the doorway, sipping coffee, until she uttered a small, unhappy moan and rolled over.
He couldn’t begin to imagine what all this might mean to her. First the interesting news item that the man she’d been living with was a visitor from the future … followed by an encounter with something strange and monstrous in a tunnel under the earth. These were experiences nobody was supposed to have. Maybe she would hate him for it. Maybe she ought to.
He was turning over these thoughts when she staggered out of the bedroom and pulled up a chair at the three-legged kitchen table. Tom tilled her coffee cup and was relieved that the look she gave was nothing like hateful. She yawned and tucked her hair away from her shoulders. He said, “Are you hungry?” and she shook her head: “Oh, God. Food? Please, no.
Nothing hateful in the way she looked at him, Tom thought, but something new and disquieting: a bruised, wounded awe.
She sipped her coffee. She said she had a gig tonight at a coffeehouse called Mario’s, “but I don’t know if I can face it.”
“Hell of a night,” Tom observed.
She frowned into her cup. “It was all real, wasn’t it? I keep thinking it was some kind of dream or hallucination. But it wasn’t. We could go back to that place and it would still be there.”
Tom said, “It would be. We shouldn’t.” She said, “We have to talk.” He said, “I know.”
They went out for breakfast in the late-morning sunlight and the hot July smell of road tar and sizzling concrete.
The city had changed, too, Tom thought, since last night.
It was a city lost in a well of time, magical and strange beyond knowing, subterranean, more legend than reality. He had come here from a world of disappointment and miscalculation; in its place he had discovered a pocket universe of optimists and cynical romantics—people like Joyce, like Soderman, like Larry Millstein. They said they hated the world they lived in, but Tom knew better. They loved it with their outrage and their poetry. They loved it with the conviction of their own newness. They believed in a future they couldn’t define, only sense—used words like “justice” and “beauty,” words that betrayed their own fundamental optimism. They believed without shame in the possibility of love and in the power of truth. Even Lawrence Millstein believed in these things: Tom had found a carbon copy of one of his poems, abandoned by Joyce in a kitchen drawer; the word “tomorrow” had been printed with fierce pressure—“Tomorrow like a father loves his weary children and gathers them up” —and yes, Tom thought, you’re one of them, Larry, brooding and bad tempered but singing the same song. And of all these people Joyce was the purest incarnation, her eyes focused plainly on the wickedness of the world but seeing beyond it into some kind of salvation, undiscovered, a submerged millennium rising like a sea creature into the light.
All in this hot, dirty, often dangerous and completely miraculous city, in this nautilus shell of lost events.
But I’ve changed that, Tom thought.
I’ve poisoned it.
He had poisoned the city with dailiness, poisoned it with boredom. The conclusion was inescapable: if he stayed here this would become merely the place where he lived, the morning paper and the evening news not miraculous but predictable, as ordinary as the moving of his bowels. His only consolation would be a panoramic, private window on the future, thirty years wide. And Joyce.
Consolation enough, Tom thought … unless he’d poisoned her, too.
He tried to remember what he’d said last night, a drunken recital of some basic history. Too much, maybe. He understood now what he should have understood then: that he wasn’t giving her the future, he was stealing it. Stealing the wine of her optimism and leaving in its place the sour vinegar of his own disenchantment.
He ordered breakfast at a little egg and hamburger restaurant where the waitress, a tiny black woman named Mirabelle, knew their names. “You look tired,” Mirabelle said. “Both of you.”
“Coffee,” Tom said. “And a couple of those Danishes.”
“You don’t need Danishes. You need something to build you up. You need aigs.”
“Bring me an egg,” Joyce said, “and I’ll vomit.”
“Just Danishes, then?”
“That’ll be fine,” Tom said. “Thank you.”
Joyce said, “I want to be alone a little bit today.”
“I can understand that.”
“You’re considerate,” Joyce said. “You’re a very considerate man, Tom. Is that a common thing where you come from?”
“Probably not common enough.”
“Half the men around here are doing a Dylan Thomas thing—very horny and very drunk. They recite the most awful poetry, then get insulted if you don’t go all weak-kneed and peel off your clothes.”