Charles Wilson - A Bridge of Years

It was the first time Billy had been old enough to hide with the other boys. It might have been exciting … but this time things were different. This time, he had seen his father’s fear.

The cellar was hot and smelled of ancient cottonseed and burlap. He crouched there with a dozen other boys. “I’ll come get you,” Nathan had said, “when the Infantry are gone,” and the words had reassured him a little. But it wasn’t Nathan who came.

He never saw Nathan again.

It was a soldier who came.

An Infantryman. Billy woke blinking and bewildered in the clockless depths of cellar night, startled awake by the sound of footsteps. The Infantryman smiled down from the doorway. His name, he said, was Krakow. He was wearing his armor—a command breastplate, radiantly golden. Billy gazed up with no little awe as Krakow touched his chest. “This is my armor,” he said. “This is the part of it you can see. Some of it is inside me. My armor knows who I am, and I know my armor. My armor is a machine, and right now it isn’t fully powered. But if I switched it on I could kill you all before there was time enough to blink. And I would enjoy it.”

Billy didn’t doubt the truth of this. Krakow ran his fingers over the mirror-bright surface of the breastplate and Billy wondered exactly how you turned the armor on—he hoped Krakow wouldn’t do it by mistake.

“My armor is my best friend.” Krakow’s voice was gentle, confiding. “An Infantryman’s armor is always his best friend. Your armor will be your best friend.”

Billy knew what that meant. It meant he was leaving home.

Curled in the womb of his apartment, Billy ate canned tuna and watched television and sat up nights shivering, listening to the snow rattle on the window. His temperature crept upward; his joints ached; his body felt as if the skin had been flayed from it. Billy endured this until it was unbearable. He was surprised at how distinct that moment was: the tick of a second hand on the wheel of a clock, a single thought. No more.

He took the box from under the bed and opened it. The golden armor was inside—all the large and small pieces of it.

Billy recalled the catechism of his training. Sir, this is my armor, sir.

Sir, these are the body pieces, which are called the elytra. (Like cloth, quite golden, rigid only when impacted at high velocity. Bulging here and there with instrumentation, power packs, processing units.)

These are the arm pieces, sir, which are called the halteres. (Molding to the contour of his skin. They feel warm.)

Sir, these are the leg pieces, which are called the setae. (Snug against his thighs.)

Sir, this touchplate controls the stylet and the lancet, which connect the armor to my body. (To the liver, to the spine, to the lumen of the aorta.)

Hollow micropipettes burrowing in, wet with contact anesthetic.

Motion under his skin.

It felt funny.

Sir, this touchpiece activates the lancet.

Ah.

He moved in the snowbound night streets like a ghost.

He wore loose clothes over his armor, a long gray coat and a broad-brimmed hat to shadow his face.

He moved among the snowy lamp standards and the blinking traffic fights. Past midnight, before dawn, 1953.

He was supple and powerful and quite invincible.

He was intoxicated with his own hidden strength and dizzy with the need to kill a human being.

He did not resist the urge but he tantalized himself with it. The streets were empty and the snow came down in dry, icy granules. Wind flapped at the hem of his chalk-gray overcoat and erased his footprints behind him. The few pedestrians he saw were bent against the wind, scurrying like beetles for shelter. He followed one, maintaining a discreet distance, until the man vanished into a tenement building. Billy reached the stoop … paused a long moment in the winter darkness … then walked on.

He chose another potential victim, a small man spotlit by the beam of an automobile headlight; Billy followed him two blocks east but allowed this one, too, to vanish behind a door.

No hurry. He was warm in his armor. He was content. His heart beat inside him with the happy regularity of a finely tuned machine.

He smiled at a man who stepped out of an all-night delicatessen with a paper bag tucked under his arm. This one? Tall man, sleepless, red-eyed, suspicious, a cheap cloth coat: not a rich man; bulk of arms and chest: maybe a strong man.

“Hell of a night,” Billy said.

The man shrugged, smiled vaguely, and turned to face the wind.

Yes, this one, Billy thought.

Billy took him with his wrist beam in an alley half a block away.

The killing took all of twenty seconds, but it was the nearest thing to an orgasm Billy had experienced since he came through the tunnel from the future. A brief and blissful release.

He mutilated the body with a knife, to disguise the cauterization of the wounds; then he took the man’s wallet, to make the death seem like a robbery.

He dropped the wallet in a trash bin on Eighth Street. The money—five dollars in ones—he took home and flushed down the toilet.

Soothed and sweetly alive in the dark of his apartment, Billy relaxed his armor and folded it into its box. By dawn, the clouds had rolled away. A winter sun rose over the snowbound city. Billy showered and raided the refrigerator. He had lost a lot of weight in the last few months, but now his appetite had returned with a vengeance. Now he was very hungry indeed.

He went to bed at noon and woke in the dark. Waking, he discovered something new in himself. He discovered remorse.

He found his thoughts circling back to the man he’d killed. Who had he been? Had he lived alone? Were the police investigating the murder?

Billy had watched police investigations on TV. On TV, the police always found the killer. Billy knew this was a social fiction; in real life the opposite was probably nearer to the truth. Still, fiction or not, the possibility nagged at him.

He developed new phobias. The tunnel in the sub-basement was suddenly on his mind. He had sealed that tunnel at both ends: according to Ann Heath, the dead woman with the wedge of glass in her skull, that act would guarantee his safety. No one would come hunting him from the future; no time ghost would carry him off. The tunnel, after all, was only a machine. A strange and nearly incomprehensible machine, Billy admitted privately, but a powerless machine, too —inaccessible.

Nevertheless, it made him nervous.

He patrolled the sub-basement daily. He thought of this as “checking the exits.” The city of New York and the meridian of the twentieth century had become in Billy’s mind a private place, a welcoming shelter. The natives might be a nuisance, but they weren’t gravely dangerous; the real dangers lay elsewhere, beyond the rubble where the tunnel had been. Billy piled the rubble higher and installed a door at the foot of the stairs; on the door he installed an expensive padlock. If—by some magic—the tunnel repaired itself, any intruder would have to disturb these barricades. If Billy found the lock broken or the door splintered it would mean his sanctuary had been invaded … it would mean the twentieth century wasn’t his own anymore.

The effort reassured him. Still, his proximity to the gateway made him nervous. It was hard to sleep some nights with the thought of that temporal fracture buried in the bedrock some few yards under the floor. By the summer of 1953 Billy decided that this building didn’t need his nightly presence— that he could move a few streets away without harming anything.

He rented an apartment on the other side of Tompkins Square, three streets uptown. It was not much different from his first apartment. The floor was a crumbling, ancient parquet; Billy covered it with a cheap rug. The windows were concealed by yellow roll blinds and dust. Cockroaches lived in the gaps in the wallboard and they came out at night. And there was a deep closet, where Billy kept his armor in its box.