THAT WOULD BE FINE, TOM.

“Maybe I can leave them on the counter.”

THANK YOU.

“How come you can talk so much better now?”

WE’RE ALMOST REPAIRED. THINGS ARE MUCH CLEARER.

THE END OF THE WORK IS VERY CLOSE.

Something ominous about that, Tom thought. When the sleeping giant woke, this might not be a safe place to be. The implication? Get out now.

He tried to pull the plug on the TV set but it wouldn’t come out of the wall—they must have welded it there. But the screen remained blank. He hurried to the kitchen, left a stack of frozen steaks and ground beef on the countertop—a little queasy at the thought of them wanting it—then gathered up his baggage.

The phone rang once more. He debated letting it ring, then relented and picked up the handset. He expected Tony with some last-minute badgering, but it was Doug Archer’s voice he heard.

“I heard you got fired.”

“News travels fast,” Tom said.

“It’s a small town. I’ve done business with a lot of these people. Yeah, everybody talks.”

“Keeping tabs on me?”

“Hell, no. If I had been, I would have noticed you aren’t looking for another job. So are you taking a vacation, Tom, or just bugging out?”

“The property’s not for sale.”

“I’m not calling as your fucking realtor. Are things okay up there?”

“Things are okay.”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

He sighed. He liked Doug, he didn’t want to hurt Doug’s feelings—but he didn’t want Doug involved, not at this stage. “I’ll be out of town for a while.”

“Son of a bitch,” Archer said. “You found something, didn’t you? You don’t want to talk about it, but you found something.”

Or something found me. “You’re right … I don’t want to talk about it.”

“How long are you gone for?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

“The guy who lived there before—you’re going where he went, right?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“When you come back,” Archer said, “will you talk to me about this?”

Tom relented a little. “Maybe I will.”

“Maybe I should drive by while you’re gone—make sure the place is in reasonable shape.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary.” A thought occurred. “Doug, promise me you won’t try to get in.” He lied, “I had the locks changed.”

“I promise I won’t try to get in if you promise you’ll explain this one day.”

“Deal,” Tom said. “When I get back.” If I get hack.

“I mean to hold you to that,” Archer said. There was a pause. He added, “Well, good luck. If you need luck.”

“I might need a little,” Tom admitted.

He hung up the phone, pulled the shades, turned off the lights, and left the world behind.

PART TWO — Ghosts

Seven

For a long, lost span of years, the time traveler was dead.

Ben Corner’s death was not absolute, but it was nothing less than death. The marauder’s weapon had opened his skull and scattered much of his brain matter in a bloody rain across the lawn. His heart had given one final, convulsive pump, fibrillated for thirty seconds as wild impulses radiated from his traumatized brainstem, then fallen silent, a lump of static tissue in the cooling cavern of his chest.

Throughout his body emergency repair systems stuttered and shut down. Auxiliary circulatory pumps responded to his failing heart, then failed in turn as blood pressure dropped below maintainable levels. He continued to take huge, ratcheting breaths—like yawns—for nearly a minute. The lungs were the last major system to give up their independent life, and they did so with a final sigh of resignation. By then the body had begun to cool.

Nanomechanisms were trapped in his arteries by clotting blood. Oxygen-starved, they radiated emergency signals and shut themselves off one by one.

Billy Gargullo dragged the body into the woods and left it in an abandoned woodshed under a scatter of mildewed newspaper. Decay organisms—thick in the rainy forest—began to attack the corpse at once.

Billy hurried back to the house. When he arrived here he had disoriented the cybernetics with a pulse of electromagnetic radiation; now he triggered a second burst to keep them out of his way. He paused a moment in the kitchen and consulted his auxiliary memories for a rough estimate of his whereabouts. America, the Pacific Northwest—distinguished by the fiercely dense biomass of the forest, which appalled and frightened him—sometime after 1970: too close to the nightmare he’d left behind. He wanted a more effective buffer, even if it meant greater risk. He moved back to the basement and operated the tunnel’s hidden controls the way the dying woman had taught him. Destination was relatively unimportant: he wanted a place to hide. He would run, he would hide, he would never be found and he would never go back.

That was all of his plan. His only plan. The only plan he needed.

Billy’s EM pulses interrupted TV and radio reception throughout the town of Belltower and two neighboring counties. Along the Post Road the effect was most violent and startling. Peggy Simmons, the widow who lived a quarter mile from the house Tom Winter would eventually inhabit, was astonished to see her Zenith color television emit a vivid blue spark while the picture tube turned an ominous, fractured gray. Repairs, that summer of 1979, cost her almost three hundred dollars—the set was just out of warranty. She paid the repair bill but reminded the man at Belltower Audio-Video that the Crosley set she’d bought in 1960 lasted her fifteen years with only a tube to replace now and then, and perhaps standards of manufacture had fallen while the price of repairs had zoomed up, which was precisely the sort of thing you’d expect to happen, wouldn’t you—the world being what it was. The repairman nodded and shrugged. Maybe she was right: he’d been out on a lot of calls just recently.

The rash of electrical failures became a brief sensation in Belltower, reported in the local paper, discussed to no conclusion, and finally forgotten.

Many of the cybernetics died or were rendered hopelessly dysfunctional by the EM burst; but many survived. They were disoriented for days afterward. Severed paths of information needed to be patched and restored; a comprehensible memory of the day’s events had to be assembled.

Most damaging was the loss of Ben Collier. For the cybernetics, he had combined the functions of clearinghouse, lawmaker, and God. Without him they were forced to fall back on primitive subroutines. This was unavoidable but limiting. Without Ben, and with their numbers greatly reduced, they possessed only a rudimentary intelligence. They were able to perform routine tasks; all else was groping in the dark.

Many of the nanomechanisms intimately associated with the time traveler’s body had been destroyed by the impact of Billy’s weapon or the physical shutdown that followed. Some had been scattered to the winds; damaged or swept out of the range of collective mentation, they died. A few—following subroutines of their own—managed an orderly escape; in time, they made their way back to the house. They transferred their significant memory to the larger cybernetics in the manner of bees feeding pollen to the hive. The community of machines, sharing this new wisdom, understood that there were measures to be taken.

Armies of insect-sized cybernetics, following vectors the nanomechanisms described, delved into the forest behind the house. This was risky and had been the subject of debate; territory beyond the perimeter of the house had been forbidden to them—until this emergency. But their first priority (they reasoned) was the restoration of Ben Collier; other issues could be deferred until he was in a position to clarify his wishes.