A Bridge of Years by Robert Charles Wilson Page A

between the rubble on the floor
and the wall Tom had torn up last night. They moved around the ragged
opening in a slow circle, maybe as many as a hundred of them, somehow knitting
it up — restoring
the wall to its original condition.
    They
were the insect machines he had seen moving from the foundation to
the forest across the moonlit back yard. Tom recognized them and was,
strangely, unsurprised by their presence here. Of course they were
here. They simply weren't hiding anymore.
    The
work they were performing on the wall wasn't a patch; it was a
full-scale reconstruction, clean and seamless. He understood
intuitively that if he scratched away the paint he'd find the
original brand names stamped in blue ink on the gypsum panels, the
drywall nails restored in every atom to their original place in the
two-by-fours, the studs themselves patched where he'd gouged them
with the butt of his prybar —wood fiber and knot and dry sap all
restored.
    He
took a step closer. The machine bugs paused. He sensed their
attention briefly focused on him.
    Silent
moving clockwork jewels.
    "You
were here all along," Tom whispered. "You did the goddamn
dishes."
    Then
they resumed their patient work. The hole grew smaller as he watched.
    He
said—his voice trembling only a little—“I'll open it up again.
You know that?"
    They
ignored him.

    But
he didn't open it up—not until a week had passed.
    He
felt poised between two worlds, unsure of himself and unsure of his
options. The immensity of what he had discovered was staggering.
But it was composed of relatively small, incremental events—the
insects cleaning his kitchen, his dreams, the tunnel behind the wall.
He tried to imagine scenarios in which he explained all this to
the proper authorities —whoever they were.
(The realty board? The local police? The CIA, NASA, the National
Geographic Society?) Fundamentally, none of this was even
remotely possible. Stories like his made the back pages of the Enquirer at
best.
    And—perhaps
even more fundamentally—he wasn't ready to share these discoveries.
They were his; they belonged to him. He didn't have Barbara, he
didn't have a meaningful job, he had abandoned even the rough comfort
of alcohol. But
he had this secret .
. . this dangerous, compulsive, utterly strange, and sometimes very
frightening secret.
    This
still unfolding, incomplete secret.
    He
stayed out of the basement for a few days and contemplated his
next step.

    His
dream about the machine bugs hadn't been a dream, or not entirely.
Breaching the wall, he had stepped inside their magic circle. They
stopped hiding from him.
    For
two nights he watched them with rapt attention. The smallest of them
were the most numerous. They moved singly or in pairs, usually
along the wallboards, sometimes venturing across the carpet or
into the kitchen cabinets, moving in straight lines or elegant,
precise curves. They were tiny, colorful, and remorseless in their
clean-up duty; they stood absolutely still when he touched them.
    Friday
night, after he came home from the car lot, he discovered a line of
them disappearing into the back panel of his TV set. With his ear
next to the screen he could hear them working inside: a faint
metallic clatter and hiss.
    He
left them alone.
    Larger
and less numerous was a variation Tom thought of as "machine
mice." These were rodent sized and roughly rodent shaped: bodies
scarab blue and shiny metallic, heads the color of dull ink. They
moved with startling speed, though they seemed to lack legs or feet.
Tom supposed they hovered an eighth of an inch or so over the floor,
but that was only a guess; they scooted away when he tried to touch
or hold them. He saw them sometimes herding the smaller variety
across the floor; or alone, pursuing duties more mysterious.
    Saturday—another
moonlit night—he dosed himself with hot black coffee and sat up
watching a late movie. He switched off the lights at one a.m .
and stepped cautiously into the damp grass of the