He stood with one hand propped against a cane. His left leg was truncated, the denim tied shut between his knee and the place where his ankle should have been. He was pale and his hair was a faint, fine stubble over his scalp.
He offered his hand. Tom shook it.
“You’re the time traveler,” he said.
Ben Collier smiled. “Let’s sit down, shall we? This leg is still awkward. Tom, would you like a beer? There’s one in the refrigerator.”
Tom wasn’t thirsty. “You lived here ten years ago.”
“That’s right. Doug must have explained all that?”
“You were hurt and you were in that shed out in the woods. I think I owe you an apology. If I hadn’t gone haring off down the tunnel—”
“Nothing you’ve done or haven’t done is anybody’s fault. If everything had been working correctly the house would never have been for sale. You walked into a major debacle; you didn’t create it.”
“Doug said you were—he used the word ‘dead.’ Buried out there for some years.”
“Doug is more or less correct.”
“It’s hard to accept that.”
“Is it? You seem to be doing all right.”
“Well … I’ve swallowed a fair number of miracles since May; I suppose one more won’t choke me.”
He gave Ben a closer look. A ray of sunlight from the big back window had fallen across the time traveler and for a moment Tom imagined he saw the outline of the skull under the skin. An optical illusion. He hoped. “Maybe I’ll have that beer after all. You want one?”
“No, thank you,” Ben said.
Tom took a beer from the refrigerator and twisted off the cap. Welcome to the future: throw away that clumsy old bottle opener.
A stove grill clanked against the floor behind him and a brigade of machine bugs began hauling it toward the basement stairs.
Life, Tom thought, is very strange.
“They’re using the metal,” Ben explained. “Making more of themselves. It’s hard on the appliances, but we’re in fairly desperate straits at the moment.”
“They can do that? Duplicate themselves?”
“With enough raw material, certainly.”
“They’re from the future,” Tom said.
“Somewhat in advance of my own time, as a matter of fact. I found them a little repellent when I was introduced to the concept. But they’re extremely useful and they’re easy to conceal.”
“They can repair the tunnel?”
“They’re doing precisely that—among many other things.”
“But you said we were in ‘dire straits.’ So nothing is repaired yet and this so-called marauder—”
“Might choose to follow you here. That’s what we’re on guard against, yes.”
“But he hasn’t tried it yet. Maybe he won’t.”
“Maybe. I hope not. We do have to take precautions.”
Tom nodded; this was sensible. “How well protected are we?”
Ben seemed to ponder the question. “There’s no doubt we can stop him. What troubles me is that it might take too long.”
“I don’t understand.”
“From what I can reconstruct, the man is an armored conscript soldier, a renegade from the territorial wars at the end of the next century. In a sense, he isn’t really our enemy— the enemy is his armor.”
“I saw him in New York,” Tom said. “He didn’t look especially well armored.”
“It’s a kind of cybernetic armor, Tom. Thin, flexible, very sophisticated, very effective. It protects him from most conventional weapons and interacts with his body to improve his reflexes and focus his aggression. When he’s wearing the armor, killing is an almost sexual imperative. He wants it and he can’t help wanting it.”
“Ugly.”
“Much worse than ugly. But in a way, his strength is his weakness. Without the armor he’s more or less helpless; he might not even be inclined to do us harm. The fact that he took advantage of the tunnel to flee the war suggests his loyalty isn’t as automatic as his surgeons might have liked. If we can attack the armor we can neutralize the threat.”
“Good,” Tom said. He pulled at the beer. “Can we?”
“Yes, we can, in a couple of ways. Primarily, we’ve been building specialized cybernetics—tiny ones, the size of a virus. They can infiltrate his bloodstream and attack the armor … dismantle and disconnect it from the inside.”
“Why didn’t they do that in the first place?”
“These aren’t the units he was exposed to. They’ve been built expressly for the purpose. He had the advantage of surprise; he doesn’t have that anymore.”
“So if he shows up here,” Tom interpreted, “if he breathes the air—”
“The devices go to work instantly. But he won’t simply fall over and die. He’ll be functional, or partly functional, for some time.”
“How much time?”
“Unfortunately, it’s impossible to calculate. Ten minutes? Half an hour? Long enough to do a great deal of damage.”
Tom thought about it. “So we should leave the machine bugs and clear out of here. If he shows up, they can deal with him.”
“Tom, you’re welcome to do so if you like. I can’t; I have an obligation to protect the premises and direct the repair work. Also, we have weapons that might slow down the marauder while the cybernetics work on him. It’s important to keep him confined to the property. The machines inside him aren’t entirely autonomous. They need direction from outside, and if he moves beyond a certain radius they’ll lose the ability to communicate, might not be able to finish disarming him. He could cause a great deal of havoc if he wandered down to the highway.”
No doubt that was true. “Doug and Catherine—”
“Have volunteered to help. They’re armed and they know what to do if an alarm sounds.”
He asked the central question: “What about Joyce?”
“Joyce is making a difficult adjustment. She’s endured a great deal. But she volunteered her help as soon as she understood the situation.”
“Might as well make it unanimous,” Tom said.
He found Joyce in the back yard, in a lawn chair, reading the Seattle paper in the shade of the tall pines.
It was a cool day for August; there was a nice breeze bearing in from the west. The air carried the smell of pine sap, of the distant ocean, a faint and bitter echo of the pulp mill. Tom stood a moment, savoring all this, not wanting to disturb her.
He wondered what the headlines were. This wasn’t precisely the present, not exactly the future; he had come here by a twisted path, a road too complex to make linear sense. Maybe some new country had been invaded, some new oil tanker breached.
She looked up from the editorial page and saw him watching her. He came the rest of the way across the lawn.
She was an anachronism in her harlequin glasses and straight hair, beautiful in the shade of these tall trees.
Before he could frame a sentence she said, “I’m sorry about the way I behaved. I was tired and I was sick about Lawrence and I didn’t know how you were involved. Ben explained all that. And thank you for bringing me here.”
“Not as far out of danger as I thought it would be.”
“Far enough. I’m not worried. How’s your shoulder?”
“Pretty much okay. Enjoying the news?”
“Convincing myself it’s real. I watched a little TV, too. That satellite news station, what’s it called? CNN.” She folded the paper and stood up. “Tom, can we walk somewhere? The woods are pretty—Doug said there were trails.”
“Is it a good idea to leave the house?”
“Ben said it would be all right.”
“I know a place,” Tom said.
He took her up the path Doug Archer had shown him some months ago, past the overgrown woodshed—its door standing open and a cloud of gnats hanging inside—up this hillside to the open, rocky space where the land sloped away to the sea.