But Ben made it plausible. Plausible not because of his exoticisms—his strange injuries or his tiny robots—but because of his manner. Archer had no trouble at all believing this guy as a twenty-second-century academic recruited into an odd and secret business. Ben was calm, intelligent, and inspired trust. This could, of course, be a clever disguise. Maybe he was a Martian fifth columnist out to sabotage the planet—given recent events, it wouldn’t be too surprising. But Archer’s instinct was to trust the man.
Questions remained, however.
“Couple of things,” Archer said. “If your marauder did such a thorough job at the Manhattan end, why did he screw up here?”
“He must have believed I was dead beyond reclamation. Probably he thought all the cybernetics were dead, too.”
“Why not come back and check on that?”
“I don’t know,” Ben said. “But he may have been afraid of the tunnel.”
“Why would he be?”
For the first time, Ben hesitated. “There are other … presences there,” he said.
Archer wasn’t sure he liked the sound of this. Presences? “I thought you said nobody could get through.”
The time traveler paused, as if trying to assemble an answer.
“Time is a vastness,” he said finally. “We tend to underestimate it. Think about the people who opened these tunnels— millennia in the future. That’s an almost inconceivable landscape of time. But history didn’t begin with them and it certainly didn’t end with them. The fact is, when they created these passages they found them already inhabited.”
“Inhabited by what?”
“Apparitions. Creatures who appear without warning, vanish without any apparent destination. Creatures not altogether material in constitution.”
“From an even farther future,” Archer said. “Is that what you mean?”
“Presumably. But no one really knows.”
“Are they human? In any sense at all?”
“Doug, I don’t know. I’ve heard speculation. They might be our ultimate heirs. Or something unrelated to us. They might exist—somehow; I find it difficult to imagine—outside our customary time and space. They seem to appear capriciously, but they may have some purpose, though no one knows what it is. Maybe they’re the world’s last anthropologists—collecting human history in some unimaginable sense. Or controlling it. Creating it.” He shrugged. “Ultimately, they’re indecipherable.”
“The marauder might have seen one of these?”
“It’s possible. They appear from time to time, without warning.”
“Would that frighten him?”
“It might have. They’re impressive creatures. And not always benign.”
“Come again?”
“They almost always ignore people. But occasionally they’ll take one.” Archer blinked. “Take one?”
“Abduct one? Eat one? The process is mysterious but quite complete. No body is left behind. In any case, it’s very rare. I’ve seen these creatures and I’ve never felt threatened by them. But the marauder may have been told about this, maybe even witnessed it—I don’t know. I’m only guessing.”
Archer said, “This is very bizarre, Ben.”
“Yes,” Ben said. “I think so too.”
Archer tried to collect his thoughts. “The last question—”
“Is about Tom.”
Archer nodded.
“He discovered the tunnel,” Ben said. “He used it. He should have known better.”
“Is he still alive?”
“I don’t know.”
“One of these ghost things might have eaten him?”
Ben frowned. “I want to emphasize how unlikely that is. ‘Ghost’ is a good analogy. We call them that: time ghosts. They’re seldom seen, even more seldom dangerous. No, the more present danger is from the marauder.”
“Tom could be dead,” Archer interpreted.
“He might be.”
“Or in danger?”
“Very likely.”
“And he doesn’t know that—doesn’t know anything about it.”
“No,” Ben said, “he doesn’t.”
This talk worried Catherine deeply.
She had accepted Ben Collier as a visitor from the future; as an explanation it worked as well as any other. But the future was supposed to be a sensible place—a simplified place, decorated in tasteful white; she had seen this on television. But the future Ben had described was vast, confusing, endless in its hierarchies of mutation. Nothing was certain and nothing lasted forever. It was scary, the idea of this chasm of impermanence yawning in front of her.
She was worried about Doug Archer, too.
He had crawled into her bed last night with the bashful eagerness of a puppy dog. Catherine accepted this as a gesture of friendship but worried about the consequences. She had not slept with very many men because she tended to care too much about them. She lacked the aptitude for casual sex. This was no doubt an advantage in the age of AIDS, but too often it forced her to choose between frustration and a commitment she didn’t want or need. For instance, Archer: who was this man, really?
She stole a glance at him as he sat beside her, Levi’s and messy hair and a strange little grin on his face, listening to Ben, the porcelain-white one-legged time traveler: Douglas Archer, somehow loving all this. Loving the weirdness of it.
She wanted to warn him. She wanted to say, Listen to all these frightening words. A renegade soldier from the twenty-first century, a tunnel populated with time ghosts who sometimes “take” people, a man named Tom Winter lost in the past …
But Doug was sitting here like a kid listening to some Rudyard Kipling story.
She looked at Ben Collier—at this man who had been dead for ten years and endured it with the equanimity of a CEO late for a meeting of his finance committee—and frowned.
He wants something from us, Catherine thought.
He won’t demand anything. (She understood this.) He won’t threaten us. He won’t beg. He’ll let us say no. He’ll let us walk away. He’ll thank us for all we’ve done, and he’ll really mean it.
But Doug won’t say no. Doug won’t walk away.
She knew him that well, at least. Cared that much about him.
Doug was saying, “Maybe we should break for lunch.” He looked at Ben speculatively. “How about you? We could fix up some of those steaks. Unless you prefer to eat ’em raw?”
“Thank you,” Ben said, “but I don’t take food in the customary fashion.” He indicated his throat, his chest. “Still undergoing repairs.”
“The steaks aren’t for you?”
“Oh, they’re for me. And thank you. But the cybernetics have to digest them first.”
“Ick,” Catherine said. “I’m sorry if this is disturbing.”
It was, but she shrugged. “They fed my aunt Lacey through a tube for two years before she died. This isn’t any worse, I guess. But I’m sorry for you.”
“Strictly temporary. And I’m not in any pain. You two have lunch if you like. I’m quite happy here.”
“Okay,” Catherine said. Meekly: “But I have a couple of questions of my own.”
“Surely,” Ben said.
“You told us you were a sort of custodian. A caretaker. You said you were recruited.’ But I don’t know what that means. Somebody knocked at your door and asked you to join up?”
“I was a professional historian, Catherine. A good one. I was approached by another caretaker, from my own near future, also a historian. Think of us as a guild. We recruit our own.”
“That puts a lot of power in your hands.” Custodian was a modest word, Catherine thought; maybe too modest.
“It has to be that way,” Ben said. “The tunnel-builders are journeying into their own distant past. Their records of this time are sketchy; that’s why they’re here. The custodians act as their buffer in a sometimes hostile environment. We provide them with contemporary documents and we help to integrate them into contemporary culture on the rare occasions when they choose to make a physical visit. Could you, for instance, walk into a Cro-Magnon encampment and expect to pass for one of the tribe?”