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 all: 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 …

And even if someone died, it would be a death already entered into the history books. No graves would be filled that weren’t already full. The tragedy of the world would march on, but at least he would have its measure.

He heard an echo of Barbara from that chamber in his head where memories lived and sometimes spoke: Are you really so frightened of the future?

After Chernobyl, after Tiananmen Square, after his divorce? In a world where tritium regularly disappeared from scheduled shipments, where the national debt was coming due, where the stock market resembled an Olympic high-dive competition? Scared of the future, here in the world of teen suicide and the cost-effective assault rifle? Scared?—while the Brazilian rain forests clouded the atmosphere with their burning and the skin cancer rate had become an artifact of the evening news? What, frightened? Who, me?

I’ll go back one more time, he wrote. At least to look. To be there. At least once. Any other questions?

Yes, he thought. Many. But he chose not to write them down.

When Tom glanced up from the paper he saw that several of the larger machine bugs had climbed the table leg and were carrying their dead compatriot away.

Maybe to replace it, Tom thought. Maybe to repair it: they were big on repairing things. Or maybe to bury it, to inter it in some metallic grave while they gathered around and sang electromagnetic hymns.

They made a bright, glassy line against the kitchen tiles as they marched away. He didn’t interfere.

One more time, he promised himself, at least to see—all decisions postponed until then. He decided he’d provision himself for a weekend trip and in the meantime lead a normal life, as impossible as that sounded.

Astonishingly, the charade was a success. He put in good hours at work. Tony invited him for a family dinner and that worked out well, too, with Tony and Loreen making casual but pointed inquiries about his health and his “attitude,” Tom fending them off with carefully fuzzy answers. Time passed easily except at night, when his doubts came sneaking back like guilty prodigals. He installed a hardware store deadbolt on the door leading into the back basement—not that this would stop any serious traffic coming up the tunnel, but it was a useful psychological prop, a sleeping aid, like the small white pills he bought at the Valu-Save Pharmacy. He found some popular histories of the 1960s in the library and invested some study in the first third of that decade, everything up to the Kennedy assassination. It struck him as an oddly quiescent time, large events jostling in the wings but not quite ready to put in an appearance on stage. Call it a nervous appendage of the fifties. He began to recognize names: Gagarin, Khrushchev, John Glenn, Billie Sol Estes— but history paled in the face of this enormity, his secret shortcut through the maze of years and death. The week wheeled on.

He woke up before dawn Saturday morning, marked the space between the wall studs and carved an opening with a keyhole saw—he was getting good at this.

At the opposite end of the tunnel he noted with relief that the rubble had not been disturbed—only his own footprints in the dust—and that the broken lock on the adjoining door had not been replaced.

No one knows yet.

He was safe here still.

He left the tunnel and ventured into the street on a cool and cloudy spring morning. Time passed at the same rate, he noted, here and at home, though the seasons were out of synchronization by a couple of months. He wrote down the street number of the tenement building he emerged from and then the street as he passed the sign at an intersection. Then simply walked. He was a tourist. That was what he’d say if anyone asked. I’m from out of town. Basic and quite true.

Of course, he got lost.

He had been to New York on business trips for Aerotech but his grasp of the city’s geography was vague at best. He walked across Fourteenth Street to Fifth Avenue with the notion that he might find some familiar landmarks … but he didn’t want to stray that far from the tunnel.