Well, yes. It was. A surprise and a shock. But he was beginning to get a handle on it.
He thought, I can’t stay here. In fact, the feeling was more urgent. You’re a long way from home and it’s a long, dark crawl back to the tunnel. What if somebody seals up one of those doors? What if the Machine doesn’t work anymore? What if— and here was a truly chilling thought—what if it’s a one-way Machine?
Anxiety veered toward panic.
Lots here to figure out, Tom thought, lots of possibilities, lots to absorb, but the wise thing would be to turn back and contemplate his options.
Before he did that, however, he took three long steps out into the frigid rain—past a miserable man with umbrella, unlit pipe, dog on a leash—to a newspaper box occupying curb space next to the shiny-wet Buick. He put three dimes into the paper box and pulled out the New York Times. Paused to inspect the date. May 13, 1962.
Raindrops spattered across the front page.
“It’s a fucking miracle,” he said out loud. “You were right all along, Doug. Miracles up along the Post Road.”
He turned and saw the dog-walker regarding him a little suspiciously, a little fearfully, while the dog, a springer spaniel, left its scent on a gray lamp standard. Tom smiled. “Nice weather!”
“For lunatics,” the man offered.
Tom retreated past him into the sad lobby of this old building, its smell of mildew and ancient plaster and the unimaginable secret in its foundation. Still my secret, he thought. He turned away from the man on the street, away from the rain and the traffic, clutching his souvenir newspaper in one hand, down and away and home; or, if not home, at least back.
Back, as they say, to the future.
One more thing caught his attention before he began the long, fatiguing hike back to the basement. As he clambered over the stacked rubble into the tunnel, his flashlight reflected from an object half buried under the masonry and turned up, no doubt, by his movement: a machine bug.
It was inert. He picked it up. The device had lost its shine; it wasn’t just dusty, but dull, somehow empty.
Dead, he thought. What it is, is dead.
So the machine bugs must have been here, too, in the building behind him, cleaning and maintaining it … but something had killed them. At least, something had killed this one. And the wall had never been repaired, unlike the wall in Tom’s basement.
He put the broken creature in his pocket—in a strange way, the gesture was respectful—and took a deep breath, bracing himself for the long walk back.
Home, he slept for twelve hours straight. He woke up to a sunny afternoon. He had missed a day at the lot; Klein would be, in Tony’s immortal phrase, shitting bricks—but he dismissed the thought as soon as it came to him; he had other things to think about. He fixed himself a huge meal, bacon and fried eggs and buttered toast and a fresh pot of coffee. And sat down at the kitchen table, where the New York Times waited for him.
He read it meticulously. He read the headline story: Laos had declared a state of emergency and eighteen hundred marines were en route to Indochina. Troops of the South Vietnamese Seventy-fifth Infantry had ambushed some guerrillas in Kien Phong Province, and President Kennedy had addressed a Democratic Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Milwaukee, mainly about the economy. The Mets had won both games of a doubleheader, defeating the Braves at the Polo Grounds. The weather? Cloudy, cool, occasional rain.
He read the fashion ads, the movie ads, the sports pages. Then he folded the paper and set it neatly aside.
He took a pad of paper and a pencil from a kitchen drawer and opened the pad to its first fresh page.
At the top he wrote, Troubling Questions. He underlined it twice.
He paused, sipped coffee, then picked up the pencil.
Something is wrong here, he wrote.
Something is wrong or I would never have found the tunnel. The previous owner vanished. The machine bugs talked about “repairing” him/it. The machine bugs are running on autopilot, I think. The lights left on but the premises empty.
Question of rubble at the end of the tunnel. “Destruction.” But why, and committed by whom or what?
Well, that was the real question, wasn’t it?
He wrote, The tunnel is an artifact. The tunnel is a time machine. It was built by someone. Someone owns it.
Which would imply someone from the future, since they weren’t assembling time tunnels down at General Dynamics these days. It was hard to come to grips with that idea, in part because of the echo of too much juvenile fantasy, too many comic books and bad movies. People from the future, very familiar: bald guys in pastel tights.
The trouble was that such thinking was dangerously useless. He would have to think about these numbingly strange events with as much sobriety and clarity as he could muster. The stakes—he remembered destruction—might be very high.
Some destructive force caused problems at this end of the tunnel, he wrote, bad enough that the owners bugged out and left the property running on automatic. The same force, presumably, did an even better job at the Manhattan end.
But there was so much he still didn’t know. Why a tunnel between Belltower and New York City? Were there more tunnels to other places? Did the tunnels always go to the same place? When they functioned normally, what were they for? Who used them?
He wrote these questions down.
Then paused, refilled his coffee cup and sat down again. He reached into his pocket and took out the dead machine bug.
It lay pallid and empty-seeming on the inky front page of the Times.
Death by misadventure. Most likely, he thought, it had been murdered.
Ten years have passed, he wrote. If the passing of time means anything at all, under the circumstances.
Chewed his pencil.
You could walk away from this.
After alclass="underline" what was he really doing here? Tempting himself? Daring himself?
This is dangerous, and you could walk away. It was undeniable.
Maybe the only question is which way to walk.
Because he had a choice now, didn’t he? He felt a tingle of excitement, the pleasure of this secret option, this new ace that had been dealt him. He hadn’t dared to consider it. He considered it now.
You could leave it all behind.
You could leave the car lot and the divorce and the polite pink slip and the greenhouse effect all behind. The sensation of writing the words made him dizzy. You could walk out on it. Everybody else on the face of the earth is being dragged into the future an hour at a time but you can walk out. You found the back door. Forcing some rationality here: Not the door to paradise. Thirty years ago. They have the Bomb. Think about it. They have industrial pollution. They have racism, ignorance, crime, starvation—
They have the Bomb, he thought, but maybe the important thing was, they didn’t use it He could live three decades, if he wanted to, knowing for a stone fact that the air-raid siren wouldn’t go off. He could laugh at the newspapers. If he was diligent, if he did his homework, he’d know the plane he stepped onto wasn’t going to fall out of the sky; he’d be out of town when the earthquake hit …