Vicki came awake abruptly and she nearly threw up. She was looking down on smooth water, with bright sunlight glinting off it. She was way above the surface of the water, and she thought this must be another of the flying dreams she'd been having recently.

The next time she opened her eyes, it was night. Once again, when she woke up it was sudden and unnerving. For a second she thought she was somewhere else, because all she could see was big shadowy girders and nice, even rows of huge rivets. Then she sat up and looked around, and things became more familiar, at least from photographs she'd seen. She was sitting in the middle of a bridge, a big bridge that could carry at least four lanes of traffic.

She had seen bridges like this in newspaper pictures and on television, but that hadn't prepared her for how enormous everything was. It was as if this bridge had been built by and for giants. The lanes for traffic seemed ridiculously wide, the girders enormous, but she thought it was probably just because she'd never been in a city before.

She got to her feet and walked to the edge and looked over at the water. This must have been where she'd woken up the first time, lying at the edge and looking over, without being aware that she was on the bridge. Of course, this didn't explain where she was, or why, or how, but at least it was one question answered.

She looked around a little more, walking slowly across the pavement toward the center of the bridge. At one end of the bridge she could see the lights of a city. There were hundreds, maybe even thousands of lights. Most were white, but all other colors were represented as well, some glowing steadily and many others blinking or flickering. She stared at the lights for a long time, moving slowly across the roadway to see the parts of the skyline which were blocked by the dark shapes of the big uprights of the bridge.

Then she turned, expecting an equally intoxicating view in the other direction, but she saw only blackness. The contrast was so striking that she had to glance back over her shoulder to make sure the lights were still there. She remembered a comedy routine she'd heard once, about urban planners who'd accidentally built a bridge in the wrong direction, so that it stopped in the middle of the ocean.

It slowly occurred to her that the bridge probably did go somewhere, even if it was somewhere dark, and she was probably inviting trouble by standing in the middle of a lane of traffic. She looked around, though, and didn't see any cars, in fact she saw nothing moving anywhere. Read more...