He said, “Is this building really a time machine?”
“There’s a tunnel in the basement,” Ann Heath said, tonelessly, except for the hiccupping. “Where does it go?” Billy asked. “The future,” she said. “Or the past.”
“Tell me about it,” Billy said.
The storm penned them in the house for two days. Ann Heath grew steadily less intelligible; but in that time, while Brother Hallowell and Brother Piper were cleaning their armor, or heating rations over the building’s thermopump, or playing card games, Billy did as he was told: he interrogated the prisoner. He explained to Piper and Hallowell that she was incoherent but he hoped she might still say something useful. Piper and Hallowell didn’t really care what she said. They had swept aside the dead machine bugs and seemed to have written them off as some Storm Zone aberration, something the research corps might be interested in—later. Neither Piper nor Hallowell enjoyed mysteries. Nor did Billy; but Billy believed what Ann Heath told him.
What Ann Heath told him was a catalogue of miracles. She told it without passion and with great clarity, as if a door had come unlocked in her head, the answers to Billy’s questions spilling out like hoarded treasure.
Late on the third night of their occupation, while the storm plucked at the edges of the house and Brother Hallowell and Brother Piper dozed in the placid heat of their armor, Billy took Ann Heath down to the basement. Ann Heath couldn’t walk by herself, the left side of her body curling out from under her as if the joints wouldn’t lock, so Billy put an arm around her and half carried her, getting his hands all bloody on the mess of her shirt. He was disappointed by the basement, because it was as plain a cell as the upstairs rooms —no miracles here that he could see. Billy had retained the edge of his skepticism throughout this interrogation and the basement seemed to confirm all his doubts. But then she showed him the control panel set into the blank wall, invisible until she spoke a word in a language Billy didn’t recognize; then he held his own hand against the panel while she spoke more words until the panel knew Billy’s touch. She taught him which words to say to operate the machine, and Billy and his armor memorized the peculiar sounds. Then her head dropped and she started to drool and Billy put a pillow of wadded rags behind her so she could sleep—if this was sleeping—while the cardiovascular unit bumped steadily against her breastbone. Billy opened the tunnel—it appeared at once, white and miraculous, his final assurance that these miracles were genuine—then he closed it again. Ann Heath had told him how she was getting ready to close this tunnel forever, and Billy wondered what it would have been like if he and Brother Piper and Brother Hallowell had passed by this place and found some other shelter: he would never have guessed, never imagined, lived out his life never knowing about tunnels between time and time. He thought about this and about Ohio and about the Infantry and how much he hated it. He thought about his armor; then he powered his armor up and moved upstairs to the place where Brother Piper and Brother Hallowell were sleeping, and he put his gloved hand down close to Brother Piper’s exposed head and beamed a smoky corridor through Brother Piper’s skull, then turned and did the same to Brother Hallowell before he was altogether awake; then he ran back downstairs, hurrying because he was afraid this peculiar, mutinous courage might evaporate and leave him weeping.
He paused to bend over Ann Heath. Ann Heath was awake again and followed him with her one bright eye. Billy said, “Are you suffering?” and she answered in her toneless, bleak voice, “Yes.” Billy said, “Would you rather be alive or dead?” And when she answered, “Dead,” he did her the way he’d done Piper and Hallowell, but looking away, so he wouldn’t see the wedge of bloody glass fused into the new wound he’d made.
The cardiovascular machine faltered as her blood volume dropped. Billy turned off the machine before he left.
He remembered that bleak room, sitting in this one with Lawrence Millstein.
Billy had remembered a lot recently. Sometimes the memories came flooding out of him, a river mysterious in its source. Maybe he was getting old. Maybe some flaw in the armor (or in himself) allowed these freshets of remembrance. He had never been a particularly good soldier; he was what the infantry doctors had called an “anomalous subject,” prone to unpredictable chemistries and odd neural interactions. Most soldiers loved their armor, and so did Billy, but he loved it the way an addict loves his addiction: profoundly, bitterly.
He extracted from Lawrence Millstein the address of the apartment where his prey—Tom Winter—lived.
He considered going there directly, but the sun had come up now and the morning streets were fiercely bright. He looked through Lawrence Millstein’s back window over a landscape of iron fire escapes, across the enclosed courtyard where a gutted TV set glittered like a bottle washed up from the sea. Billy was fully armored now and it would be hard to move in daylight without drawing attention.
But he was comfortable here … at least for a while.
Lawrence Millstein had wrapped a wad of toilet paper around the stump of his finger. He sat in a chair staring at Billy. He had not stopped staring at Billy since the moment Billy switched on the bedroom light. “It’s going to be a hot day,” Billy said, watching Millstein flinch at the sound of his voice. “A scorcher.”
Millstein didn’t venture a response.
“It gets hot where I come from,” Billy said. “We had summers that made this look like Christmas. Not so humid, though.”
In a voice that sounded uncomfortably like Ann Heath’s voice, Lawrence Millstein said, “Where do you come from?”
“Ohio,” Billy said.
“There’s nothing like you in Ohio,” Millstein said.
“You’re right.” Billy smiled. “I live in the wind. I’m not even born yet.”
Lawrence Millstein, who was a poet, seemed to accept this.
An hour passed while Billy contemplated his options. Finally he said, “Do you know his number?”
Millstein was weary and not paying attention. “What?”
“His telephone number. Tom Winter.”
Millstein hesitated.
“Don’t lie to me again,” Billy cautioned. “Yes. I can call him.”
“Then do that,” Billy said. Millstein repeated, “What?”
“Call him. Tell him to come over. He’s been here before. Tell him you need to talk to him.”
“Why?”
“So I can kill him,” Billy said irritably.
“You evil son of a bitch,” Millstein said. “I can’t invite him to his death.”
“Consider the alternative,” Billy suggested.
Millstein did so, and seemed to wither before Billy’s eyes. He cradled his wounded hand against his chest and rocked back and forth, back and forth.
“Pick up the phone,” Billy said.
Millstein picked up the receiver and braced it against his shoulder while he dialed the number. Billy calculated the number and memorized it, listening to the clatter of the dial each time it spun home. He was a little surprised Millstein was actually doing this; he’d guessed the odds were fifty-fifty that Millstein would refuse and Billy would have to kill him. Millstein held the receiver to his ear, breathing in little sobs, eyes half shut, then hung up the phone with a triumphant slam. “Nobody’s home!”
“That’s all right,” Billy said. “We’ll try again later.”
Billy’s prediction was correct: the day was long and hot.
He opened the tiny window but the trickle of air it admitted was syrupy and stank of gasoline. Billy’s armor kept him cool, but Lawrence Millstein turned pale and began to sweat. The sweat ran down his face in glossy rivulets and Billy told him to drink some water before he fainted.