Down And Dirty

VI

The big corrugated metal garage door rattled overhead as it slid back in its tracks. The opener was old and noisy, but it still did its job. Dust and daylight filtered into the underground bunker. Tom turned off the flashlight and hung it on a hook in the wooden beam supporting the hard- packed dirt wall. His palms were sweaty. He wiped them on his jeans and stood regarding the metal hulks before him.

The hatch gaped open on his oldest shell, the armored Beetle. He'd spent the last week replacing vacuum tubes, oiling the camera tracks, and checking the wiring. It was as ready as it would ever be.

"Me and my big fucking mouth," Tom said to himself. His words echoed through the bunker.

He could have rented a truck, a big semi maybe. Joey would have helped. Back it up to the edge of the bunker, load the shells, get them over to Jokertown the easy way. But no, he had to go and tell Dutton he'd fly them over. No way the joker would ever believe him now if the damn things got delivered by UPS.

He looked at the open hatch, tried to imagine crawling into that blackness and sealing the door behind him, locking himself into that metal coffin, and he could feel the bile rise in the back of his throat. He couldn't.

Only he had no choice, did he? The junkyard wasn't his anymore. A crew would be arriving in less than three weeks to start clearing away all the shit that had accumulated here in the last forty years. If the shells were still lying around when they showed up with their bulldozers, the jig was seriously up.

Tom forced himself to walk forward. No big deal, he told himself. The shell was okay, he could get it across the bay, he'd done it a thousand times. So he had to do it one more time, that's all. One more time and he was free.

All the kings horses and all the king's men…

Tom bent at the knees, grasped the top edge of the hatch, and took a long, slow breath. The metal was cold between his fingers. He ducked his head and pulled himself inside, swinging the hatch closed behind him. The clang rang in his ears. It was pitch-dark inside the shell, and chilly. His mouth had gone dry, and he could feel his heart shuddering away in his chest.

He fumbled in the darkness for the seat, felt torn vinyl upholstery, squirmed toward it. He might as well be in a cave at the center of the earth, or dead and buried, it was so black. Faint lines of light leaked in around the outside of the hatch, but not enough to see by. Where the fuck was the power switch? The newer shells all had fingertip controls built into the armrests of the seat, but not this old bucket, oh, no. Tom groped in the darkness over his head and jammed his fingers painfully on something metal. Panic stirred inside him like a frightened animal. It was so fucking black, where were the lights?

Then, suddenly, he was falling.

The vertigo crashed over him like a wave. Tom grabbed the armrests hard, tried to tell himself it wasn't happening, but he could feel it. The darkness tumbled end over end. His stomach roiled, and he bent forward, cracking his forehead sharply against the curving wall of the shell. "I'm not falling!" he screamed loudly. The words rang in his ears as he fell, helpless, locked in his armored casket. His hands thrashed madly, fumbling against the wall, sliding over glass and vinyl, throwing switches everywhere as he gasped for breath.

All around him the TV screens woke to dim life.

The world steadied. Tom's breathing slowed. He wasn't falling, no, look out there, that was the bunker, he was sitting in the shell, safe on the ground at the bottom of a hole, that was all, he wasn't falling.

Fuzzy black-and-white images crowded the screens. The sets were a mismatch of sizes and brand names, there were obvious blind spots, one picture was locked into a slow vertical roll. Tom didn't care. He could see. He wasn't falling.

He found the tracking controls and set his external cameras to moving. The images on the screen shifted slowly as he scanned all around him. The other two shells, the empty husks, squatted a few feet away. He turned on the ventilation system, heard a fan begin to whir, felt fresh air wash over his face. Blood was dripping into his eyes. He'd cut himself in his panic. He wiped it away with the back of his hand, sagged back in the seat.

"Okay," he announced loudly. He'd gotten this far. The rest was candy. Up, up, and away. Out of the bunker, across New York Bay, one last flight, nothing simpler. He pushed up.

The shell rocked slowly from side to side, lifted maybe an inch off the ground, then settled back with a thump.

Tom grunted. All the king's horses and all the king's men, he thought. He summoned all his concentration, tried again to lift off. Nothing happened.

He sat there, grim-faced, staring unseeing at the washedout black-and-white shapes on his television screens, and finally he admitted the truth. The truth he'd hidden from Joey DiAngelis, Xavier Desmond, and even from himself.

His shell wasn't the only thing that was broken.

For twenty-odd years he'd thought himself invulnerable once behind his armor. Tom Tudbury might have his doubts, his fears, his insecurities, but not the Turtle. His teke, nurtured by that sense of invincibility, had grown steadily greater, year after year after year, so long as he was inside his shell.

Until Wild Card Day.

They'd taken him out before he even knew what was happening.

He'd been high over the Hudson, answering a distress call, when some ace power had reached through his armor as if it didn't exist. Suddenly he'd felt sick, weak. He had to fight to keep from blacking out, and he could feel the massive shell stagger in midflight as his concentration wavered. A moment before his vision blurred, he'd glimpsed the boy in the hang glider slicing down from above. Then there'd been a tremendous loud pop that hurt his eardrums, and the shell had died.

Everything went. Cameras, computers, tape deck, ventilation system, all of it burned out or seized up in the same split second. An electromagnetic pulse, he'd read later in the papers, but all he'd known then was that he'd gone blind and helpless. For a moment he was too shocked to be afraid, punching wildly at his fingertip controls in the darkness, frantic to get the power back on.

He'd never even realized that they'd napalmed him. But with the napalm the weakness came again. He lost it then; the shell began to tumble, plunging toward the river below. This time he did black out.

Tom pushed the memories away and ran his fingers through his hair. His breathing had gone ragged again, and he was covered with a fine sheen of sweat that made his shirt cling to his chest. Face it, he told himself, you're terrified.

It was no use. The Turtle was dead, and Tom Tudbury, he could juggle bars of soap and robot heads with the best of them, but no way was he going to lift a couple of tons of armor plate into the air. Give it up. Call Joey, dump the old shells into the bay, write it off. Forget the money, what's eighty thousand dollars? Not worth his life, that's for sure, Steve Bruder was going to make him rich anyway. The waters of New York Bay were wide and dark and cold, and it was a long way to Manhattan. He'd lucked out once, the goddamned shell had exploded as it fell to the bottom of the river, must have been the napalm or the water pressure or something, a freak accident, and the shock of the cold water had somehow revived him, and he'd struggled to the surface and let the current take him, and somehow, somehow, he'd made it to the shore in Jersey City. He should have died.

His breakfast moved in the pit of his stomach, and for a moment Tom thought he would gag. Beaten, he unbuckled his seat belt. His hand was shaking. He turned off the fans, the tracking motors, the cameras. The darkness closed in around him.

The shell was supposed to make him invulnerable, but they'd turned it into a death trap. He couldn't take it up again. Not even for one last trip. He couldn't.

The blackness trembled around him. He felt as though he were going to fall again. He had to get out of here, now, he was suffocating. He could have died.

Only he hadn't.

The thought came out of nowhere, defiant. He could have died, but he hadn't died. He couldn't take the shell up again, but he had, that very night.

This very shell. When he'd finally made his way back to the junkyard, he'd been half-drowned and exhausted and drunk with shock, but also strangely alive, exhilarated, high on the mere fact of his survival. He'd taken the shell out and crossed the bay and done loops over Jokertown, climbed right back on the horse that had thrown him, he'd showed them all, the Turtle was still alive, the Turtle had taken everything they could throw at him, they'd knocked him out and napalmed him and dropped him like a rock to the bottom of the fucking Hudson River, and he was still alive.

They'd cheered him in the streets.

Tom's hands reached out, flicked a switch, a second. The screens lit up again. The fans began to whir.

Don't do it, his fear whispered within him. You can't. You'd be dead now if the shell hadn't blown-

"It did blow," Tom said. The napalm, the water pressure, something…

The walls of his bedroom. Broken glass everywhere, his pillows ripped and torn, feathers floating in the air.

The water made a sullen gurgling sound somewhere in the close, hot blackness. The world twisted and turned, sinking. He was too weak and dizzy to move. He felt icy fingers on his legs, creeping up higher and higher, and then sudden shock as the water reached his crotch, jolting him awake. He tore away his seat harness with numb fingers, but too late, the cold caressed his chest, he lurched up and the floor tumbled and he lost his footing, and then the water was over his head and he couldn't breathe and everything was black, utterly black, as black as the grave, and he had to get out, he had to get out…

Cracks on the wall of his bedroom, more every time the nightmare came. And pictures in a magazine, fragments of armor plate torn and twisted, welds shattered, bolts torn loose, the whole shell shattered like an egg. The armor bent outward. Fuck it all, he thought. It was me. I did it.

He looked into the nearest screen, gripped the armrests, and pushed down with his mind.

The shell rose smoothly. up, through the bunker, through the garage door overhead, into the morning sky. Sunlight kissed the flaking green paint of its armor.

He came out of the eastern sky, out of Brooklyn, with the sun behind him. The trip was longer that way, when he circled over Staten Island and the Narrows, but it disguised the angle of his approach, and twenty years of turtling had taught him all the tricks. He came in over the great stone ramparts of the Brooklyn Bridge, low and fast, and on his screens he saw the morning strollers below look up in astonishment as his shadows washed across them. It was a sight the city had never seen before and would never see again: three Turtles sweeping across the East River, three iron specters from yesterday's headlines and the land of the dead, moving in tight formation, banking and turning as one, and sliding into a flamboyant double loop over the rooftops of Jokertown.

For Tom, in the center shell, the reactions down in the streets made it all worthwhile. At least he was going out in style; he'd like to see the magazines blame this one on Venus.

It'd been hell getting the other shells out of the bunker; gutted or not, their armor still lent them plenty of weight, and for a moment, hovering above the junkyard in Bayonne, he didn't think he'd be able to juggle all three. Then he had a better idea. Instead of trying to take them individually, he pictured them welded to the points of a giant invisible triangle, and he lifted the triangle into the air. After that it was candy.

Dutton had one camera crew on the Brooklyn Bridge, a second on the roof of the Famous Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum. With all the film they shot, there would be precious little question of authenticating the shells.

"All right," Tom announced through his loudspeakers after he had set the shells down on the wide, flat roof. "Show's over. Cut." Filming his approach and landing was one thing, but he wasn't going to have any footage of him climbing out of the hatch. Mask or no mask, that was a risk he didn't care to take.

Dutton, tall and dark with his cowl drawn up over his features, made a peremptory gesture with a gloved hand, and the camera crew-all jokers-loaded up their equipment and left the roof. When the last of them vanished down the stairs, Tom took a deep breath, slipped on his rubber frogface, killed the power, and crawled out into the morning sun.

After he'd emerged, he turned for one last look at what he was leaving behind. Out here, in daylight, they looked different than they had in the dimness of his bunker. Smaller, somehow. Shabbier. "Hard to walk away, isn't it?" Dutton asked him.

Tom turned. "Yes," he said. Beneath the cowl Dutton was wearing a leather lion mask with long golden hair. "You bought that mask at Holbrook's," Tom said.

"I own Holbrook's," Dutton replied. He studied the shells. " I wonder how we're going to get these inside." Tom shrugged. "They got a fucking whale into the Museum of Natural History; a few turtles ought to be easy." He was not feeling nearly as nonchalant as he tried to sound. The Turtle had pissed off quite a few people over the years, everyone from street punks to Richard Millions Nixon. If Dutton hadn't been discreet, any or all of them could be out there waiting for him, and even if they weren't, there was still the small matter of getting home with eighty thousand dollars in cash. "Let's do it," he said. "You got the money?"

"In my office," Dutton replied.

They went downstairs, Dutton leading, Tom following, looking around cautiously at every landing. It was cool and dim inside the building. "Closed again?" Tom asked.

"Business is off badly," Dutton admitted. "The city is afraid. This new wild card outbreak has driven the tourists away, and even the jokers are beginning to avoid crowds and public places."

When they reached the basement and entered the gloomy, stone-walled workshop, Tom saw that the museum was not entirely deserted. "We're preparing a number of new exhibits," Dutton explained as Tom paused to admire a slender, boyish young woman who was dressing a wax replica of Senator Hartmann. She had just finished knotting his tie with long, deft fingers. "This is for our Syrian diorama," Dutton said as the woman adjusted the senator's gray-checked sports coat. There was a ragged tear at one shoulder where a bullet had ripped through, and the surrounding fabric was carefully stained with fake blood.

"It looks very real," Tom said.

"Thank you," the young woman replied. She turned, smiling and extending her hand. Something was wrong with her eyes. They were all iris, a deep shiny red-black, half again the size of normal eyes. Yet she did not move like a blind person. "I'm Cathy, and I'd love to do you in wax," she said as Tom shook her hand. "Seated in one of your shells, maybe?" She tilted her head and pushed a strand of hair out of her strange dark eyes.

"Uh," said Tom, "I'd rather not."

"That's wise of you," Dutton said. "If Leo Barnett becomes president, some of your fellow aces may wish they'd kept a lower profile too. It doesn't pay to be too flamboyant these days."

"Barnett won't be elected," Tom said with some heat. He nodded at the wax figure. "Hartmann will stop him." 'Another vote for Senator Gregg," Cathy said, smiling. "If you ever change your mind about the statue, let me know,

"You'll be the first," Dutton told her. He took Tom by the arm. "Come," he urged. They passed other elements of the Syrian diorama in various states of assembly: Dr. Tachyon in full Arabian regalia, curled slippers on his feet; the giant Sayyid done in wax ten feet high; Carnifex in his blindingwhite fighting togs. In another part of the room a technician labored over the mechanical ears on a huge elephant head that sat on a wooden table. Dutton passed him with a curt nod.

Then Tom saw something that stopped him dead. "Jesus fucking Christ," he said loudly. "That's…"

"Tom Miller," Dutton said. "But I believe he preferred to be called Gimli. Bound for our Hall of Infamy, I'm afraid." The dwarf snarled up at them, one fist raised above his head as he harangued some crowd. His glass eyes, boiling with hate, seemed to follow them wherever they went. He wasn't wax.

"A brilliant piece of taxidermy," Dutton said. "We had to move quickly before decay set in. The skin was cracked in a dozen places, and everything inside had just dissolved-bones, muscles, internal organs, everything. This new wild card can be as merciless as the old."

"His skin," Tom said with revulsion.

"They have John Dillinger's penis in the Smithsonian," Dutton said calmly. "This way, please."

This time, when they reached Dutton's office, Tom accepted the offer of a drink.

Dutton had the money carefully banded and packed in a nondescript, rather shabby, green suitcase. "Tens, twenties, and fifties, a few hundreds," he said. "Would you like to count it?"

Tom just stared at all the crisp green bills, his drink forgotten in his hand. "No," he said softly after a long pause. "If it's not all there, I know where you live."

Dutton chuckled politely, went behind his desk, and produced a brown paper shopping bag with the museum logo on the side.

"What's that?" Tom asked.

"Why, the head. I was sure you'd want a bag."

Actually Tom had almost forgotten about Modular Man's head. "Oh, yeah," he said, taking the bag. "Sure." He looked inside. Modular Man stared back up at him. Quickly he closed the bag. "This will be fine," he said.

It was almost noon when he emerged from the museum, the green suitcase in his right hand and the shopping bag in his left. He stood blinking in the sunlight, then set off up the Bowery at a brisk pace, keeping a careful eye out to make certain he wasn't being followed. The streets were almost deserted, so he didn't think it would be too difficult to spot a tail.

By the third block Tom was pretty sure he was alone. What few people he'd seen were jokers wearing surgical masks or more elaborate face coverings, and they gave him, and each other, as wide a berth as possible. Still, he kept walking, just to be sure. The money was heavier than he had figured, and Modular Man surprisingly light, so he stopped twice to change hands.

When he reached the Funhouse, he set the suitcase and bag down, looked around carefully, saw no one. He peeled off his frog mask and jammed it in the pocket of his windbreaker.

The Funhouse was dark and padlocked. CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE said the sign on the door. They'd shut their doors shortly after Xavier Desmond had been hospitalized, Tom knew. He'd read about it in the papers. It had saddened him immensely and made him feel even older than he felt already.

Bare-faced and nervous, shifting from foot to foot, Tom waited for a cab.

Traffic was very light, and the longer he waited, the more uneasy he grew. He gave fifty cents to a wino who stumbled up just to get rid of the man. Three punks in Demon Prince colors gave Tom and his suitcase a long, hard, speculative look. But his clothes were as shabby as the suitcase, and they must have decided that he wasn't worth the sweat.

Finally he got his cab.

He slid into the backseat of the big yellow Checker with a sigh of relief, the shopping bag on the seat beside him, the suitcase across his lap. "I'm going to journal Square," he said. From there he could get another cab to take him back to Bayonne.

"Oh no, oh no," the cabbie said. He was dark-eyed, swarthy. Tom glanced at his hack's license. Pakistani. "No Jersey," the man said. "Oh no, do not go to Jersey."

Tom took a crumpled hundred from the pocket of his jeans. "Here," he said. "Keep the change."

The cabbie looked at the bill and broke into a broad smile. "Very good," he said. "Very good, New Jersey, oh yes, I am most pleasant." He put the cab in gear.

Tom was home free. He cranked down a window and settled back into his seat, enjoying the wind on his face and the pleasant heft of the suitcase on his lap.

A distant wail floated across the rooftops outside; high, thin, urgent.

"Oh, what is that?" the cabbie said, sounding puzzled. "An air raid siren," Tom said. He leaned forward, alarmed. A second siren began to sound, nearer, loud and piercing. Cars were pulling over to the sidewalk. People in the streets stopped and looked up into bright, empty skies. Far off, Tom could hear other sirens joining the first two. The noise built and built. "Fuck," Tom said. He was remembering history. They'd sounded the air raid sirens the day that Jetboy had died, when the wild card had been played on an unsuspecting city. "Turn on the radio," he said.

"Oh, pardon, sir, does not work, oh no."

"Damn it," Tom swore. "Okay. Faster then. Get me to the Holland Tunnel."

The driver gunned it and ran a red light.

They were on Canal Street, four blocks from the Holland Tunnel, when the traffic came to a standstill.

The cab stopped behind a silver-gray Jaguar with its temporary license taped to the rear window. Nothing was moving. The cabbie hit his horn. Other horns sounded far up the street, mingling with the sound of the air raid sirens. Behind them a rust-eaten Chevy van screeched to a halt and began to honk impatiently, over and over. The cabbie stuck his head out the window and screamed something in a language Tom did not know, but his meaning was clear. More traffic was piling up behind the van.

The cabdriver hit his horn again, then turned around long enough to tell Tom that it warn t his fault. Tom had already figured out that much for himself. "Wait here," he said unnecessarily, since the traffic was locked bumper-to-bumper, none of it moving, and there wasn't room for the cabbie to pull out even if he'd wanted to.

Tom left the door open and stood on the center line, looking down Canal Street. Traffic was tied up as far as he could see, and the jam was growing rapidly behind them. Tom walked to the corner for a better look. The intersection was gridlocked, traffic lights cycling from red to green to yellow and back to red without anyone's moving an inch. Music blared from open car windows, a cacophony of stations and songs, all of it counterpointed by the horns and air raid sirens, but none of the radios were getting any news.

The driver of the Chevy van came up behind Tom. "Where the fuck are the cops?" he demanded. He was grossly fat with a jowly, pockmarked face. He looked as if he wanted to hit something, but he had a point. The police were nowhere to be seen. Somewhere up ahead a child began to cry, her voice as high and shrill as the sirens, wordless. It gave Tom a shiver of fear. This wasn't just a traffic jam, he thought. Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong.

He went back to his cab. The driver was slamming his fist into the steering wheel, but he was the only one this side of Broadway who wasn't honking. "Horn broke," he explained.

"I'm getting out here," Tom said. "No refund."

"Fuck you." Tom had been going to let the man keep the hundred anyway, but his tone pissed him off. He pulled the suitcase and shopping bag out of the backseat and gave the cabbie a finger as he headed up Canal on foot.

A well-dressed fiftyish woman sat behind the wheel of the silver Jaguar. "Do you know what's going on?" she asked.

Tom shrugged.

A lot of people were out of their cars now. A man in a Mercedes 450 SL stood with one foot in his car and one on the street, his cellular phone in his hand. "Nine-one-one's still busy," he told the people gathered around him.

"Fuckin' cops," someone complained.

Tom had reached the intersection when he saw the helicopter sweeping down Canal just above rooftop level. Dust whirled and old newspapers shivered in the gutters. The rotors were so loud, even at a distance. I never made so much fucking noise, Tom thought; something about the helicopter reminded him weirdly of the Turtle. He heard the crackle of a loudspeaker, the words lost in the street noise.

A pimpled teenager leaned out of a white Ford pickup with Jersey plates. "The Guard," he shouted. "That's a Guard chopper!" He waved at the helicopter.

The whap-whap-whap of the rotors mingled with the horns and sirens and shouting to drown out the loudspeakers. Horns began to fall silent. "… your homes…"

Someone began shouting obscenities.

The chopper dipped lower, came on. Even Tom saw the military markings now, the National Guard insignia. The loudspeakers boomed. ". .. closed… repeat: Holland Tunnel is closed. Return to your homes peacefully."

Huge gusts of wind kicked up all around him as the helicopter passed directly overhead. Tom dropped to one knee and covered his face against the dust and dirt.

"The tunnel is closed," he heard as the chopper receded. "Do not attempt to leave Manhattan. Holland Tunnel is closed. Return to your homes peacefully:"

When the copter reached the end of stalled traffic, two blocks farther back, it peeled off and rose high in the air, a small black shape in the sky, then circled back for another loop. The people in the streets looked at each other.

"They can't mean me, I'm from Iowa," a fat woman announced, as if it made a difference. Tom knew how she felt.

The cops had finally arrived. Two patrol cars edged down the sidewalk carefully, bypassing the worst of the congestion. A black policeman got out and started snapping orders. One or two people got back into their cars obediently. The rest surrounded the cop, all of them talking at once. Others, lots of them, had abandoned their vehicles. A stream of people headed up Canal Street, toward the entrance to the Holland Tunnel.

Tom went with them, moving along slower than most, struggling with the weight of his bags. He was sweating. A woman passed him at a dead run, looking ragged and near hysteria. The helicopter flew over again, loudspeakers blaring, warning the crowd to turn back.

"Martial law!" a truck driver shouted down from the cab of his semi. A wall of people formed around the truck, trapping Tom in their midst. He was shoved up against the tractor's rear wheel as the crowd pressed closer for news. "It just came over the CB," the trucker said. "The motherfuckers have declared martial law. Not just the Holland Tunnel. They shut down everything, all the bridges, the tunnels, even the Staten Island ferry. No one's getting off the island."

"Oh, god," someone said behind Tom, a man's voice, husky but raw with fear. "Oh, god, it's the wild card."

"We're all going to die," an old woman said. " I seen it in '46. They're just gonna keep us here."

"It's those jokers," suggested a man in a three-piece suit. "Barnett is right, they shouldn't be living with normal people, they spread disease."

"No," Tom said. "The wild card isn't contagious."

"Sez you. Oh, god, we probably all got it already."

"There's a carrier," the trucker shouted down. Tom could hear the crackle of his CB radio. "Some fucking joker. He's spreading it wherever he goes."

"That's not possible," Tom said.

"Goddamn joker-lover," someone shouted at him.

"I got to get home to my babies," a young woman wailed. "Take it easy," Tom started to say, but it was too late, way too late. He heard crying, screaming, shouted obscenities. The crowd seemed to explode as people ran off in a dozen directions. Somebody slammed into him hard. Tom staggered back, then fell as he was buffeted from the side. He almost lost his grip on the suitcase, but he hung on grimly, even when a boot stomped painfully on his calf. He rolled under the truck. Feet rushed past him. He crawled between the wheels of the semi, dragging his bags behind him, and got to his feet on the sidewalk, half-dazed. This is fucking crazy, he thought.

Way down Canal, the helicopter began another pass. Tom watched it come, the crowd surging hysterically around him. The chopper will calm them down, he thought, it has to.

When the first tear gas canisters began to rain down into the street, trailing yellow smoke, he turned and dodged into the nearest alley and began to run.

The noise dwindled behind as Tom fled through alleys and side streets. He'd gone three blocks and was breathing hard when he noticed a cellar door ajar under a bookstore. He hesitated a moment, but when he heard the sound of running feet on the cross street, his mind was made up for him.

It was cool and quiet inside. Tom gratefully dropped the suitcase and sat cross-legged on the cement floor. He leaned back against the wall and listened. The air raid sirens had finally quieted, but he heard horns and an ambulance and the distant, angry rumble of shouts.

Off to his right he heard the scrape of a footstep. Tom's head snapped around. "Who's there?"

There was only silence. The cellar was dark and gloomy. Tom got to his feet. He could swear he'd heard something. He took a step forward, froze, cocked his head. Then he was sure. Someone was back there, behind those boxes. He could hear the short, ragged sound of their breathing.

Tom wasn't going any closer. He backed toward the door and gave the boxes a hard telekinetic shove. The whole stack went over,. cardboard ripping, and dozens of glossy paperback copies of More Disgusting joker jokes cascaded from a torn carton. There was a grunt of surprise and pain from behind the boxes.

Tom edged forward and pushed the top boxes in the feebly moving pile off to the side, using his hands this time. "Don't hurt me!" a voice pleaded from under the books. "No one's going to hurt you," Tom said. He shifted a torn box, spilling more paperbacks onto the floor. Half-buried underneath, a man curled in a fetal ball, arms locked protectively around his head. "Come on out of there."

"I wasn't doing nothing," the man on the floor said in a thin, whispery voice. " I just come in to hide."

"I was hiding, too," Tom said. "It's okay. Come on out." The man stirred, unfolded, got warily to his feet. There was something dreadfully wrong with the way he moved. "I ain't so good to look at," he warned in that thin, rustling voice.

"I don't care," said Tom.

Walking in a painful crabbed sideways motion, the man edged forward into the light, and Tom got a good look at him. An instant of revulsion gave way to sudden, overwhelming pity. Even in the dim light in the back of the cellar, Tom could see how cruelly the joker's body had been twisted. One of his legs was much longer than the other, triple-jointed, and attached backward, so the knee bent in the wrong direction. The other leg, the 'normal' one, ended in a clubfoot. A cluster of tiny vestigial hands grew from the swollen flesh of his right forearm. His skin was glossy black, bone-white, chocolate-brown, and copper-red in patches all over his body; there was no way to tell what race he'd belonged to originally. Only his face was normal. It was a beautiful face; blue-eyed, blond, strong. A movie star's face.

"I'm Mishmash," the joker whispered timidly.

But the movie star lips hadn't moved, and there was no life in those deep, clear blue eyes. Then Tom saw the second head, the hideous little monkey-face peeping cautiously out of the unbuttoned shirt. It sprouted crookedly from the joker's ample gut, as purple as an old bruise.

Tom felt nauseated. It must have showed on his face because Mishmash turned away. "Sorry," he muttered, "sorry."

"What happened?" Tom forced himself to ask. "Why are you hiding here?"

"I saw them," the joker told him, his back to Tom. "These guys. Nats. They had this joker; they were beating the hell out of him. They would of done me, too, only I snuck away. They said it was all our fault. I got to get home."

"Where do you live?" Tom asked.

Mishmash made a wet, muffled sound that might have been a laugh and half-turned. The little head twisted up to look at Tom. "Jokertown," he said.

"Yeah," Tom said, feeling very stupid. Of course he lived in Jokertown, where the fuck else could he live? "That's only a few blocks away. I'll take you there."

"You got a car?"

"No," Tom said. "We'll have to walk."

"I don't walk so good."

"We'll go slow," Tom said.

They went slow.

Dusk was falling when Tom finally emerged, cautiously, from the cellar refuge. The street had been quiet for hours, but Mishmash was too frightened to venture out until dark. "They'll hurt me," he kept saying.

Even when twilight began to gather, the joker was still reluctant to move. Tom went first to scout the block. There were lights in a few apartments, and he heard the sound of a television blaring from a third-story window, and more police sirens, far off in the distance. Otherwise the city seemed deathly quiet. He walked around the block slowly, moving from doorway to doorway like a GI in a war movie. There were no cars, no pedestrians, nothing. All the storefronts were dark, secured by accordion grills and steel shutters. Even the neighborhood bars were closed. Tom saw a few broken windows, and just around the corner the overturned, burned-out hulk of a police car sat square in the middle of the intersection. A huge Marlboro billboard had been defaced with red paint; KILL ALL JOKERS, it said. He decided not to take Mishmash down that street.

When he returned, the joker was waiting. He'd moved the suitcase and shopping bag to the doorway. " I told you not to touch those," Tom snapped in annoyance, and felt immediately guilty when he saw how Mishmash quailed under his voice.

He picked up the bags. "C'mon," he said, stepping back outside. Mishmash followed, his every step a hideous twisting dance. They went slowly. They went very slowly.

They stayed mostly to alleys and side streets south of Canal, resting frequently. The damned suitcase seemed to get heavier with each passing block.

They were catching their breath by a Dumpster just off Church Street when a tank rolled past the mouth of the alley, followed by a half dozen National Guardsmen on foot. One of them glanced to his left, saw Mishmash, and began to raise his rifle. Tom stood up, stepped in front of the joker. For an instant his eyes met the Guardsman's. He was only a kid, Tom saw, no more than nineteen or twenty. The boy looked at Tom for a long moment, then lowered his gun, nodded, and walked on.

Broadway was eerily deserted. A lone police paddy wagon wove its way through an obstacle course of abandoned cars. Tom watched it pass while Mishmash cringed back behind some garbage cans. "Let's go," Tom said.

"They'll see us," Mishmash said. "They'll hurt me."

"No they won't," Tom promised. "Look at how dark it is." They were halfway across Broadway, moving from car to car, when the streetlights came on, sudden and silent. The shadows were gone. Mishmash gave a single sharp bark of fear. "Move it," Tom told him urgently. They scrambled for the far side of the street.

"Hold it right there!"

The shout stopped them at the edge of the sidewalk. Almost, Tom thought, but almost only counts in horseshoes and grenades. He turned slowly.

The cop wore a white gauze surgical mask that muffled his voice, but his tone was still all business. His holster was unbuttoned, his gun already in hand.

"You don't have to-" Tom started nervously.

"Shut the fuck up," the cop said. "You're in violation of the curfew."

"Curfew?" Tom said.

"You heard me. Don't you listen to the radio?" He didn't wait for the answer. "Lemme see some ID."

Tom carefully lowered his bags to the ground. "I'm from Jersey," he said. " I was trying to get home, but they closed the tunnels." He fished out his wallet and handed it to the cop.

"Jersey," the cop said, studying the driver's license. He handed it back. "Why aren't you at Port Authority?"

"Port Authority?" Tom said, confused.

"The clearance center." The cop's tone was still gruff and impatient, but he'd evidently decided they weren't a threat. He holstered his gun. "Out-of-towners are supposed to report to Port Authority. You pass the medical, they'll give you a blue card and send you home. If I was you, I'd head up there."

Port Authority Bus Terminal was a zoo under the best of circumstances. Tom tried to imagine what it would be like now. Every tourist, commuter, and visitor in the city would be there, alongwith a lot offrightened Manhattanites pretending to be from out of town, all of them waiting their turn for a medical or fighting for a seat on one of the buses leaving the city, with the police and National Guard trying to keep order. You didn't need a lot of imagination to picture the kind of nightmare going on up at Forty-second Street. "I didn't know. I'll get right up there," Tom lied, "as soon as I get my friend home."

The cop gave Mishmash a hard look. "You're taking a big risk, buddy. The carrier's supposed to be some kind of albino, and nobody said anything about any extra heads, but all jokers look alike in the dark, right? Those Guard boys are real jumpy, too. They see a pair like you, they might decide to shoot first and check your IDs later."

"What the fuck is going on?" Tom said. It sounded worse than he could have imagined. "What is all this?"

"Do you good to turn on a radio once in a while," the cop said. "Might stop you getting your head shot off."

"Who are you looking for?"

"Some joker fuck, been spreading a new kind of wild card all over the city. He's freaky strong, and crazy. Dangerous. And he's got a friend with him, some new ace, looks normal but bullets bounce right off him. If I was you, I'd dump the geek and haul ass for Port Authority."

"I didn't do nothing," Mishmash whispered.

His voice was low, barely audible, but it was the first time he'd dared to speak, and the cop heard him well enough. "Shut the fuck up. I'm not in the mood for any joker lip. I want to hear you talk, I'll ask you a question."

Mishmash quailed. Tom was shocked by the loathing in the policeman's voice. "You got no call to talk to him that way."

It was a mistake, a big mistake. Above the surgical mask the policeman's eyes narrowed. "That so? What are you, one of those queers who likes to hump jokers?"

No, you asshole, Tom thought furiously, I'm the Great and Powerful Turtle, and if I were in my shell right now, I'd pick you up and drop you in the garbage where you belong. But what he said was, "Sorry, Officer. I didn't mean anything by it. It's been a rough day for everyone, right? Maybe we should just get going?" He tried to smile as he picked up the suitcase and shopping bag. "C'mon, Mishmash," he said.

"What's in those bags?" the cop said suddenly.

Modular Man's head and eighty thousand dollars in cash, Tom thought, but he didn't say it. He didn't think he'd broken any laws, but the truth would raise questions he wasn't prepared to answer. "Nothing," he told the cop. "Some clothes." But he'd hesitated too long.

"Why don't we have a look," the policeman replied.

"No," Tom blurted. "You can't. I mean, don't you need a search warrant or probable cause or something?"

"I got your fucking probable cause right here," the cop said, drawing his gun. "This is martial law, and we got authority to shoot looters on sight. Now lower the bags to the ground slowly and back off, asshole."

The moment seemed to last a long, long time. Then Tom did as he was told.

"Further back," the cop said. Tom retreated to the sidewalk. "You too, geek." Mishmash moved back next to Tom. The policeman edged forward, bent over, and pulled one of the handles of the shopping bag to peer inside.

Modular Man's head flew up and smashed him in the face. Blood squirted from the cop's nose with a sickening crunch to stain the white gauze of his mask. He gave a muffled screech and staggered back. The head bowled squarely into his gut, tumbling like a cannonball. The cop grunted as his feet went out from under him. He landed on his ass in the street.

The head swooped around him. The cop brought up his pistol with both hands and squeezed off a round. Glass shattered in a second-story window as the head came crashing into his temple. The cop swatted at it with the barrel of his pistol; then something jerked the gun right out his hand and sent it skittering off down a sewer.

"Son-of-a-bitch," the cop managed. He tried to struggle back to his feet, his eyes as glassy as Mod Man's. His nose was still bleeding; the surgical mask had turned a vivid red.

The head came at him again. This time he managed to grab it and hold it at bay, just inches from his face. The long cable dangling from the jagged neck took on a life of its own and snaked up into a bloody nostril. The cop screamed and grabbed for the cable. The head jumped forward; two foreheads cracked together hard. The cop went down. The head circled over him. The cop groaned and rolled over. He made no attempt to rise.

Tom started breathing again.

"Is he dead?" Mishmash asked in an eager whisper.

Tom's heart was still on adrenaline overdrive; it took a moment for the words to register. "Fuck," he said. What the hell had he done? It had all gone down so quickly.

Mod Man's head fell out of the air, hit the gutter, and rolled. Tom knelt over the fallen cop and felt for a pulse. "He's alive," Tom said. "Breathing is shallow, though. He might have a concussion, maybe even a cracked skull."

Mishmash crowded close. "Kill him."

Tom's head snapped back around and he stared at the joker in horror. "Are you crazy?"

The hideous little purple monkey-face was straining forward through his shirtfront. Moisture glistened on the hard, thin lips. "He was going to kill us. You heard him, you heard what he called us. He had no right. Kill him."

"No way," Tom said. He stood up, wiping his hands on his jeans compulsively. His high was gone now; he felt more than a little sick.

"He knows who you are," Mishmash whispered.

Tom had somehow managed to forget that. "Fuck fuck fuck," he swore. The cop had seen his driver's license. "They'll come for you," Mishmash suggested. "They'll know you did it, and they'll come. Kill him. Go on, I won't tell."

Tom backed away, shaking his head. "No."

"Then I'll do it," Mishmash said. His lips peeled back over a mouthful of yellowed incisors, and the wrinkled face shot out and down, into the cop's throat. Mishmash's shirt sagged where his gut had been. The head worked at the soft flesh under the cop's chin, bobbing at the end of three feet of glistening transparent tube connecting it to the joker's torso. Tom heard wet, greedy sucking sounds. The cops feet began to thrash feebly. Blood spurted, Mishmash swallowed and sucked, and a thick red wash began to travel up through the thick glassy flesh of his neck.

"No!" Tom screamed. "Stop it!"

The monkey-face continued to feed, but on top of the joker's body his second head, the movie-star head, turned to stare at Tom from clear blue eyes and smiled beatifically.

Tom reached out for Mishmash with his teke, or tried to, but there was nothing there. The fury that had filled him when the cop threatened them was gone; now there was only horror and fear, and his power had always deserted him when he was afraid. He stood helplessly, hands clenching and unclenching as Mishmash gnawed away with teeth as cruel and sharp as needles.

Then he leapt forward and grabbed the joker from behind, wrapping his arms around that twisted torso, pulling him back. For a moment they grappled. Tom was overweight and out of shape and had never been especially strong, but the joker's body was as weak as it was misshapen. They stumbled backward, Mishmash thrashing feebly in Tom's arms, until the head pulled free of the cop's torn throat with a soft pop. The joker hissed in fury. His long glistening neck coiled around, snakelike, over his left shoulder, as pale eyes glared down, insane with frustration. Blood was smeared all over the shrunken purplish face. Wet red teeth snapped wildly, but his neck wasn't long enough.

Tom spun him around and shoved him away. The joker's mismatched legs tangled under him, and he tripped and fell heavily into the gutter. "Get out of here!" Tom screamed. "Get out of here now or I'll give you the same thing I gave him."

Mishmash hissed, his head weaving back and forth. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the bloodlust was gone, and once more the joker cringed in fear. "Don't," he whispered, "please don't. I only wanted to help. Don't hurt me, mister." His neck shrunk slowly back into his shirt, a long, thick glass eel returning to its lair, until there was only the small scared face shivering between his buttons. By then Mishmash was back on his feet. He gave Tom one last pleading look, and then whirled and began to run, arms and legs working grotesquely.

Tom stopped the policeman's bleeding with a handkerchief. There was still a pulse, but it felt weak to him, and the man had obviously lost a lot of blood. He hoped it wasn't too late.

He looked around at the abandoned cars and headed toward a likely one. Joey had once shown him how to hot-wire an ignition; he sure as hell hoped he still remembered.

It was standing room only in the waiting room of the Jokertown Clinic. Tom pushed his suitcase up against a wall and sat on top of it. The shopping bag, with Modular Man's bloodied head stuck inside it, he shoved between his legs. The room was hot and noisy. He ignored the frightened people all around him, the screams of pain from the next room, and stared dully at the tiles on the floor, trying not to think. Perspiration covered his face under the clinging frog mask.

He'd been waiting a half hour when a fat, tusked newsboy in a porkpie hat and Hawaiian shirt entered the waiting room with an armful of papers. Tom bought a copy of tomorrow's Jokertown Cry, sat back on his suitcase, and began to read. He read every word in every story on every page, and then started all over again.

The headlines were full of martial law and the citywide manhunt for Croyd Crenson. Typhoid Croyd, the Cry called him; anyone coming in contact with the carrier risked drawing the wild card. No wonder everyone was so scared. Dr. Tachyon had told the authorities it was a mutant form, capable of reinfecting even stable aces and jokers.

The Turtle could bring him in, Tom thought. Anyone else, police or Guardsman or ace, risked infection and death if they tried to apprehend him, but the Turtle could take him in perfect safety, easy as candy. He didn't have to get real close to teke someone, and his shell gave him plenty of protection. Only there was no shell, and the Turtle was dead.

Sixty-three people had required medical treatment after the rioting around the Holland Tunnel, and property damage was estimated at more than a million dollars, he read.

The Turtle could have dissipated that crowd without anyone's getting hurt. Just talk to them, dammit, take the time to quell their fears, and if things got out of hand, pry them apart with teke. You didn't need guns or tear gas.

Sporadic outbreaks of anti joker violence had been reported throughout the city. Two jokers were dead, a dozen more had been hospitalized after beatings or stonings.

There was widespread looting in Harlem.

Arson had destroyed the storefront headquarters of jokers for Jesus, and firemen responding to the alarm had been pelted with bricks and dogshit.

Leo Barnett was praying for the souls of the afflicted and calling for quarantine in the name of public health.

A twenty-year-old coed from Columbia had been gangraped on a pool table in Squisher's Basement. More than a dozen jokers had watched from their barstools, and half of those had lined up to take their turns after the original rapists were done. Someone had told them they'd be cured of their deformities if they had sex with this woman.

The Turtle was dead, and Tom Tudbury sat on a battered old suitcase stuffed with eighty thousand dollars in cash as the world grew more and more insane.

All the king's horses and all the king's men, he thought. He'd just finished his third pass through the newspaper when a shadow fell across him. Tom looked up and saw the hefty black nurse who had helped him carry the policeman in from the car. "Dr. Tachyon will see you now," she said.

Tom followed her back to a small cubicle off the emergency room, where Tachyon sat wearily behind a steel desk. "Well?" Tom asked after the nurse had left.

"He'll live," Tach said. Lilac eyes lingered on the green, rubbery features of Tom's mask. "We are required by law to file a report on this sort of thing. The police will want to question you once the emergency has passed. We need a name."

"Thomas Tudbury," he said. He pulled off the mask and let it drop to the floor.

"Turtle," Tach blurted, surprised. He stood up.

The Turtle is dead, Tom thought, but he didn't say it. Dr. Tachyon frowned. "Tom, what happened out there?"

"It's a long, ugly story. You want it, go into my fucking brain and take it. I don't want to talk about it."

Tach looked at him thoughtfully. Then the alien winced and sat down again.

"At least with the fucking Astronomer I could tell the good guys from the bad guys," Tom said.

"He has your name," Tach said.

"One of my names," Tom said. "Fuck it. I need your help."

Tach was still linked with his mind; the alien looked up sharply. "I will not do that."

Tom leaned forward across the desk, looming over the smaller man. "You will," he said. "You owe me, Tachyon. And there's no way I can kill myself without your help."

Mortality by Walter Jon Williams

Run.

Consciousness stitched a lightning path across his mind. It seemed to come in bursts, like lines of text from a very fast laserprinter

… but no, it was more complex than that. A master weaver was forming the largest and most intricate tapestry in the universe, all in a matter of seconds, and doing it all in his brain.

He opened his eyes. St. Elmo's fire shimmered before him like a polar aurora. A screaming noise assaulted his ears. Subsonics moved through his body like tidal waves.

The noise faded. Internals ran lightspeed checks. Radar painted an image in his brain, superimposed it on the visuals. "All monitored systems are functioning," he found himself saying.

The St. Elmo's fluorescence faded, revealing sagging bare roofbeams, an half-open skylight with the glass painted black from the inside, diagrams tacked up helter-skelter, drooping electric cables. Electric fans made a busy stir in the air. Something in the room moved, imaged first by radar, then by visuals. He recognized the figure, the tall, white-haired man with the hawk nose and disdainful eyes. Maxim Travnicek. A frigid smile curled Travnicek's lips. He spoke with a middleEuropean accent.

"Welcome back, toaster. The land of the living awaits."

"I blew up." Modular Man examined this possibility with cold impartiality as he pulled on a jumpsuit. A fly buzzed in the distance.

"You blew up," said Travnicek. "Modular Man the invincible android blew himself to bits. In a big fight at Aces High with the Astronomer and the Egyptian Masons. Lucky I had a backup of your memory."

Memories poured over the android's macroatomic switches. Modular Man recognized Travnicek's new Jokertown loft, the one he'd moved into after being evicted from the bigger place on the Lower East Side. The place was stiflingly hot, and electric fans plugged into overworked extension cords did little to make the place seem like home. Equipment, the big flux generators and computers, were jammed together on home-built platforms and raw plywood shelving. The ultrasonics had burst the picture tubes in two of the monitors.

"The Astronomer?" he said. "He hadn't been seen in months. I have no recollection of his return."

Travnicek made a dismissive gesture. "The fight happened after I last backed up your memory."

"I blew up?" The android didn't want to think about this. "How could I blow up?"

"Right. A surprise to both of us. Half-intelligent microwave ovens aren't supposed to explode."

Travnicek sat on a thirdhand plastic chair, a cigarette in his hand. He was thinner than before, his reddened eyes sunk deep in hollows. He looked years older. His straight hair, usually combed back from his forehead, stuck out in tufts. He seemed to have been doing his own barbering.

Travnicek wore baggy, army-green surplus trousers and a cream-colored formal shirt with food stains and frills on the front. He wasn't wearing a tie.

The android had never seen Travnicek without a tie. Something must have happened to the man, he realized. And then a frightening thought came to him.

"How long have I been…?"

"Dead?"

"Yes."

"You blew up last Wild Card Day. Now it's June fifteenth."

"Nine months." The android was horrified.

Travnicek seemed irritated. He threw away his cigarette and ground the stub into the bare plywood floor. "How long do you think it takes to build a blender of your capabilities? Jesus Christ, it took weeks just to decipher the notes I wrote last time." He gave an expansive wave of his hand. "Look at this place. I've been working day and night."

Fast food containers were everywhere, a bewildering variety that strongly represented Chinese places, pizza joints, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Flies buzzed among the cartons. In and among the containers were bits of scrap, yellow legal paper, pieces of paper bags, torn cigarette cartons, and the insides of matchbooks. All with notes that Travnicek had made to himself during his fever of construction, half of them ground into the naked floor and covered with footprints. The electric fans Travnicek used to move the sluggish air in the place had done a good job of scattering them.

Travnicek stood up and turned away, lighting another cigarette. "The place needs a good cleaning," he said. "You know where the broom is."

"Yes, sir." Resigned to it.

"I've got about fifty bucks left after paying the rent on this fucking heap. Enough for a little celebration." He jingled change in his pockets. "Gotta make a little phone call." Travnicek leered. "You're not the only one with girlfriends."

Modular Man ran his internal checks again, looked down at his body in the half-zipped jumpsuit.

Nothing seemed out of place.

Still, he thought, something was wrong. He went after the broom.

Half an hour later, carrying two plastic trash bags full of fast food cartons, the android opened the skylight, floated through it, crossed the roof, then dropped down the air shaft that led to the alley behind. His intention was to toss the trash in a Dumpster that he knew waited in the alley.

His feet touched broken concrete. Sounds echoed down the alley. Heavy breathing, a guttural moan. A strange, lyric, birdlike sound.

In Jokertown the sounds could mean anything. The victim of an assault bleeding against the brownstone wall; the sad and horrible joker Snotman struggling for breath; a derelict passed out and having a nightmare; a customer from Freakers who'd had too much liquor or too many grotesque sights and had stumbled away to upchuck his guts…

The android was cautious. He lowered the trash bags silently to the pavement and floated silently a few feet above the surface. Rotating his body to the horizontal, he peered out into the alleyway.

The heavy breathing was coming from Travnicek. He had a woman up against the wall, lunging into her with his trousers down around his ankles.

The woman wore an elaborate custom mask over her lower face: a joker. The upper half of her face was not disfigured, but it wasn't pretty, either. She was not young. She wore a tube top and a glittery silver jacket and a red miniskirt. Her plastic boots were white. The trilling sound came from behind the mask. Short-time in an alley was probably costing Travnicek about fifteen dollars.

Travnicek muttered something in Czech. The woman's face was impassive. She regarded the alley wall with dreamy eyes. The musical sound she was making was something she probably did all the time, a sound unconnected with what she was doing. The android decided he didn't want to watch this anymore.

He left the garbage in the airshaft. The trilling sound pursued him like a flight of birds.

Someone had stuck a red, white, and blue poster on the plastic hood over the pay phone: BARNETT FOR PRESIDENT. The android didn't know who Barnett was. His plastic fingertips jabbed the coin slot on the pay phone. There was a click, then a ringing signal. The android had long ago discovered an affinity with communications equipment.

"Hello."

"Alice? This is Modular Man." A slight pause. "Not funny."

"This really is Modular Man. I'm back."

"Modular Man blew up!"

"My creator built me over again. I've got almost all the memories of the original." The android's eyes scanned the street, looking up and down. There were very few people on the street for a warm June afternoon. "You feature in a lot of those memories, Alice."

"Oh, god."

There was another long pause. The android noticed that the pedestrians on the street seemed to be giving one another a lot of space. One of them wore a gauze mask over his mouth and nose. Cars were few.

"Can I see you?" he asked.

"You were important for me, you know."

"I'm glad, Alice." The android sensed impending disappointment in his demotion to the past tense.

"I mean, every man I'd ever been involved with was so demanding. Wanting this, wanting that. I never had any time to find out what Alice wanted. And then I meet this guy who's willing to give me all the space I need, who didn't want anything from me because he can't want anything, because he's a machine, you know, and because he can get me seated at the good tables at Aces High and because we can fly and dance with the moon…" There was a brief silence. "You were really important to me, Mod Man. But I can't see you. I'm married now."

A palpable sense of loss drifted like scuttering snow across the android's macroatomic switches. "I'm happy for you, Alice." A National Guard jeep cruised past, with four Guardsmen in combat gear. Modular Man, who had established good relations with the Guard during the Swarm attack, gave them a wave. The jeep slowed, its passengers looking at him without changing expression. Then they speeded up and moved on.

"I thought you were dead. You know?"

"I understand." He sensed an irresolution in her. "Can I call you later?"

"Only at work." Her voice was fast. "If you call me at home, Ralph might start asking questions. He knows about a lot of my past, but he might find an affair with a machine a little weird. I mean, I know it was okay, and you know, but I imagine it's a little strange explaining it to people."

"I understand."

"He's toierant of alternate lifestyles, but I'm not sure how tolerant he'd be of me having one. Particularly one he'd never heard of or thought about."

"I'll call you, Alice."

"Good-bye."

She thought I didn't want anything for myself, the android thought as he hung up the phone. Somehow that made him sadder than anything.

His finger jabbed the coin slot again and dialed a California number. The phone rang twice before a recording announced the number had been disconnected. Cyndi had moved somewhere. Maybe, he thought, he'd call her agent later.

He dialed a New Haven number. "Hi, Kate," he said. "Oh." He heard someone inhaling a cigarette. When the voice came back, it was cheerful. " I always thought someone would put you back together."

Relief poured into him. "Someone did. For good this time, I hope."

A low chuckle. "It's hard to keep a good man down." The android thought about that for a moment. "Maybe I can see you," he said.

"I'm not coming to Manhattan. The bridges are closed anyway."

"Bridges closed?"

"Bridges closed. Martial law. Panic in the streets. You have been out of touch, haven't you?"

Modular Man looked up and down the street again. "I guess so."

"There's a wild card outbreak, mostly in lower Manhattan. Hundreds of people have drawn the Black Queen. It's a mutant form. Supposedly it's spread by a carrier named Croyd Crenson."

"The Sleeper? I've heard the name."

Kate sucked on the cigarette again. "They've closed the bridges and tunnels to keep him from getting out. There's martial law."

Which explained the Guard on the streets again. "Things had seemed a little slow," Modular Man said. "But nobody told me."

"Amazing."

"I guess if you're dead,-hollowly-"you don't get to watch the news." He thought about this for a moment, then tried to cheer himself up. "I could visit you. I can fly. Roadblocks can't stop me.

"You might-" She cleared her throat. "You might be a carrier, Mod Man." She tried to laugh. "Becoming a joker would really wreck my burgeoning academic career."

"I can't be a carrier. I'm a machine."

"Oh." A surprised pause. "Sometimes I forget."

"Shall I come?"

"Um…" That cigarette sound again. "I'd better not. Not till after comps."

"Comps?"

"Three days locked in a very small and cramped hell with the dullest of the Roman poets, which come to think of it is really saying something. I'm studying like mad. I really can't afford a social life till after I get my degree."

"Oh. I'll call you then, okay?"

"I'll be looking forward.".`Bye.

Modular Man hung up the phone. Other phone numbers rolled through his mind; but the first three had been sufficiently discouraging that he didn't really want to try again.

He looked up the near-vacant street. He could go to Aces High and maybe meet somebody, he thought.

Aces High. Where he'd died.

A coldness touched his mind at the thought. Quite suddenly he didn't want to go to Aces High at all.

Then he decided he needed to know.

Radar dish spinning, he rose silently into the air.

The android landed on the observation deck and stepped into the bar. Hiram Worchester, standing alone in the middle of the room, swung around suddenly, holding up a fist… His eyes were dark holes in his doughy face. He looked at Modular Man for a long moment as if he didn't recognize him, then swallowed hard, lowered his hand, and almost visibly drew a smile onto his face.

"I thought you'd be rebuilt," he said.

The android smiled. "Takes a licking," he said. "Keeps on ticking."

"That's very good to hear." Hiram gave a grating chuckle that sounded as if it were coming from the tin horn of a gramophone. "Still, it's not every day a regular customer comes back from the dead. Your drinks and your next meal, Modular Man, are on Aces High."

Aside from Hiram the place was nearly deserted: only Wall Walker and two others were present.

"Thank you, Hiram." The android stepped to the bar and put his foot on the rail. The gesture felt familiar, warmly pleasant and homelike. He smiled at the bartender, whom he hadn't seen before, and said, "Zombie." Behind him, Hiram made a choking sound. He turned back to the fat man.

"A problem, Hiram?"

Hiram gave a nervous smile. "Not at all." He adjusted his bow tie, wiped imaginary sweat from his forehead. His pleasant tone was forced. It sounded as if it took great effort to talk. "I kept parts of you here for months," he said. "Your head came through more or less intact, though it wouldn't talk. I kept hoping your creator would appear and know how to reassemble them."

"He's secretive and wouldn't appear in public. But I'm sure he'd like the parts back."

Hiram looked at him with his deep, dead eyes. "Sorry. Someone stole them. A souvenir freak, I imagine."

"Oh. My creator will be disappointed."

"Your zombie, sir," said the bartender.

"Thank you." The android noticed that an autographed picture of Senator Hartmann had been moved from a corner of the bar to a prominent place above the bar.

"You must pardon me, Modular Man," Hiram said, "but I really ought to get back to the kitchens. Time and rognons sautes au champagne wait for no man."

"Sounds delectable," said the android. "Perhaps I'll have your rognons for dinner. Whatever they are." He watched as Hiram maneuvered his bulk toward the kitchen. There was something wrong with Hiram, he thought, something off-key in the way he reacted to things. The word zombie, the weird comment about the head. He seemed hollow, somehow. As if something was consuming his vast body from the inside. He was completely different from the way Modular Man remembered him.

So was Travnicek. So was everyone.

A chill eddied through his mind. Perhaps his earlier perceptions had been faulty in some way, his recorded memories subject to some unintended cybernetic bias. But it was just as likely that it was his current perceptions that were at fault. Maybe Travnicek's work was faulty.

Maybe he'd blow up again.

He left the bar and walked toward Wall Walker. Wall Walker was a fixture at Aces High, a thirtyish black man of no apparent occupation whose wild card enabled him to walk on the walls and ceiling. He wore a cloth domino mask that didn't go very far toward concealing his appearance, seemed to have plenty of money, and was, the android gathered, pleasant company. No one knew his real name. He looked up and smiled.

"Hi, Mod Man. You're looking good."

"May I join you?"

"I'm waiting for someone." His voice had what Modular Man thought to be a light West Indian accent. "But I don't mind company in the meantime."

Modular Man sat. Wall Walker regarded him from over the rim of a Sierra Porter. "I haven't seen you since you… exploded." He shook his head. "What a mess, mon."

Modular Man sipped his zombie. Taste receptors made a cataclysmic null sound in his mind. "I was wondering if you might be able to tell me about what happened that night."

The android's radar painted him the unmistakable image of Hiram stepping into the bar, glancing left and right in what seemed to be an anxious way, then stepping away.

"Oh. Yes. I daresay you would not remember, would you?" He frowned. "It was an accident, I think. You were trying to rescue Jane from the Astronomer, and you got in Croyd's way."

"Croyd? The same Croyd that's…"

"Spreading the virus? Yes. Same gentleman. He had the power to… make metal go limp, or some other such nonsense. He was trying to use it on the Astronomer and he couldn't control it and he hit you. You melted like the India-rubber man, and you started firing off tear gas and smoke, mon, and a few seconds later you exploded."

Modular Man was still for a few seconds while his circuits explored this possibility. "The Astronomer was made of metal?" he asked.

"No. Just an old fella, kinda frail."

"So Croyd's power wouldn't have worked anyway. Not on the Astronomer."

Wall Walker raised his hands. "People were shootin' off everything they had, mon. We had a full-grown elephant in here. The lights were out, the place was full of tear gas…"

"And Croyd fired off a wild card talent that could only work against me."

Wall Walker shrugged. The two other customers rose and left the bar. Modular Man thought for a moment.

"Who's Jane? The woman I was trying to rescue."

Wall Walker looked at him. "You don't remember her, either?"

"I don't think so."

"You were supposed to be guarding her. They call her Water Lily, mon."

"Oh." A qualified relief entered the android's mind. Here, at least, was something he could remember. "I met her briefly. During the Great Cloisters Raid. I thought her name was actually Lily, though." Didn't I see you at the ape-escape? he'd asked. Never saw her again. Maybe she'd have some answers.

"Seems to prefer that people call her Jane, mon. Was the name she used when she worked here."

I don't have a name, the android thought suddenly. I've got this label, Modular Man, but it's a trademark, not a real name, not Bob or Simon or Michael. Sometimes people call me Mod Man, but that's just to make it easy on themselves. I don't really have a name.

Sadness wafted through his mind.

"Do you know how to get ahold of this Jane person?" he asked. "I'd like to ask her some questions."

Wall Walker chuckled. "You and half the city, man. She has disappeared and is probably running for her life. Word is she can heal Croyd's victims."

"Yes?"

"By fucking them."

"Oh."

Facts whirled hopelessly in the eddies of the android's mind. None of this made any sense at all. Croyd had blown him up and was now spreading death thoughout the city; the woman who could heal the harm Croyd was doing had fled from sight; Hiram and Travnicek were behaving oddly; and Alice had got married.

The android looked at Wall Walker carefully. "If this is all part of some strange joke," he said, "tell me now. Otherwise,"-quite seriously-"I'll hurt you badly."

Wall Walker's eyes dilated. The android had the feeling he was not terribly intimidated. " I am not making it up, mon." His voice was emphatic, matter-of-fact. "This is not a fantasy, Mod Man. Croyd is spreading the Black Queen, Water Lily is on the run, there's martial law."

Suddenly there was shouting from the kitchen.

"I don't know where he went, damn it!" Hiram's voice. "He just walked out!"

"He was looking for you!" There was a sudden crash, as if a stack of pans had just toppled.

"I don't know! I don't know! He just walked out, goddammit!"

"He wouldn't walk out on me!" "He walked out on both of us!" "Jane wouldn't walk out!"

"They both left us!"

"I don't believe you!" More pans crashed.

"Out! Out! Get out of my place!" Hiram's voice was a scream. Suddenly he appeared, rushing out of the kitchen with another man in his arms. The man was Asian and wore a chefs uniform. He seemed light as a feather.

Hiram flung the man into the outside door. He didn't have enough weight to swing it open and began to drift to the floor. Hiram flushed. He rushed forward and pushed the man through the door.

There was a silence in the restaurant, filled only by the sound of Hiram's winded breaths. The restauranteur gave the bar a defiant glare, then stalked into his office. One of the customers rose hastily to pay for his drink and leave.

"Goddamn," the other customer said. He was a lanky, brown-haired man who looked uncomfortable in his welltailored clothes. "I spent twenty years trying to get into this place, and look what happens when I finally get here."

Modular Man looked at Wall Walker. The black man gave him a rueful smile and said, "Standards fallin' all over." The android took an odd comfort from the scene. Hiram was different. It wasn't just some programming glitch.

He turned his mind back to Wild Card Day. Circuits sifted possibilities. "Could Croyd have been working for the Astronomer?"

"Back on Wild Card Day?" Wall Walker seemed to find this thought interesting. "He is a mercenary of sorts-it's possible. But the Astronomer killed just about all of his own henchmen-a real bloodbath, mon-and Croyd is still with us."

"How do you know so much about Croyd?"

A smile. "I keep my ear to the ground, mon."

"What's he look like?" Modular Man intended to avoid him.

"I cannot give a description of what he looks like right now. Fella keeps changing appearance and abilities, understand, mon-his wild car. And last time he surfaced he had someone with him, a bodyguard or something, and no one knows which is which. Or who. One of them, Croyd or the other guy, he's an albino, mon. Probably got his hair dyed and shades over his eyes by now. The other is young, good-looking. But neither have been seen for a few days-no new cases of wild card-so whichever one is Croyd, he may be someone else now. He may not be carrying the plague anymore."

"In that case the emergency's over, right?"

"Guess so. There is still the gang war going on, though."

"I don't want to hear about it."

"And the elections. Even I don't believe who's running." Seen on radar, Hiram appeared from his office, cast another anxious glance over the barroom, left again. Wall Walker's eyes tracked him over Modular Man's right shoulder. He looked concerned.

"Hiram's not doing well."

"I thought he seemed different."

"Business is way off, mon. Aces are not as fashionable as once we were. The Wild Card Day massacres were a real black eye for all wild talents. And then there was violence all over the bloody place on the WHO tour, a real cock-up, and Hiram took part… beg pardon, mon, that's something else you probably don't know about."

"Never mind," said the android.

"Okay. And now, the Croyd buggering up and dealing jokers and Black Queens all over town, a big reaction is going on. Soon it may not be… politically astute… to be seen in aces' company."

"I'm not an ace. I'm a machine."

"You fly, mon! You are abnormally strong, and you shoot energy bolts. Try and tell someone the difference."

"I suppose."

Someone walked into the bar. The radar image was strange enough that Modular Man turned his head to pick up on him visually.

The man's brown hair and beard hung almost to his ankles. He had a crucifix on a chain around his neck, outside the hair, and otherwise wore a dirty T-shirt, blue jean cutoffs, and was barefoot.

None of this was sufficiently abnormal to do more than suggest a wild card, but as the man ambled closer, Modular Man saw the different-colored irises, orange-yellow-green, set one within the other like target symbols. His hands were deformed, the fingers thin and hairy. He held a six-ounce bottle of Coke in one hand.

"This is the man I need to see," Wall Walker said. "If you'll pardon me."

"See you later maybe." Modular Man stood up.

The hairy stranger walked up to the table and looked at Wall Walker and said, " I know you."

"You know me, Flattop."

Modular Man made his way to the bar and ordered another zombie. Hiram appeared and ejected Flattop for lacking proper footwear. When he left with Wall Walker, the android noticed that he had plugged the Coke bottle into the inside of his elbow joint, as if the bottle were a hypodermic needle, and left it there.

The bar was empty. Hiram seemed fretful and depressed, and the bartender echoed his boss's mood. The android made excuses and left.

He wouldn't drink zombies ever again. The associations were just too depressing.

"Yah. Gotta get us some money, right, food processor?" Maxim Travnicek was rooting through a pile of notes he'd written to himself during Modular Man's assemblage. "I want you to get to the patent office tomorrow. Get some forms. Shit, my foot itches." He rubbed the toe of his left shoe against his right calf.

"I could try to get on Peregrine's Perch tomorrow. Let everyone know I'm back. She only pays scale, but…"

"The bitch is pregnant, you know. Gonna pop any day now, from what I can see."

Something else I hadn't heard about, the android thought. Wonderful. Next he would discover that France had changed its name to Fredonia and moved to Asia.

"But you should see her tits! If you thought they were good before, you should see them now! Fantastic!"

"I'll fly over and visit her producer."

"Bosonic strings," Travnicek said. He had one of his notes in his hand but didn't seem to be looking at it. "Minus one to the Nth is minus one for the massless vector, so epsilon equals one." His eyes had glazed over. His body swayed back and forth. He seemed to have fallen into some kind of trance. "For superstrings," he went on, "minus one to the Nth is plus one for the massless vector, so epsilon equals minus one… All of the n times n antihermitian matrices taken together represent U(n) in the complex case… Potential clash with unitarity…"

Cold terror washed over the android. He had never seen his creator do this before.

Travnicek went on in this mode for several minutes. Then he seemed to jerk awake. He turned to Modular Man. "Did I say something?" he asked.

The android repeated it word for word. Travnicek listened with a frown. "That's open strings, okay," he said. "It's the ghost string operator that's the bitch. Did I say anything about Sigma sub plus one over two?"

"Sorry," said the android.

"Damn it." Travnicek shook his head. "I'm a physicist, not a mathematician. I've been working too hard. And my fucking foot keeps itching." He hopped to his camp bed, sat down, took off his shoe and sock. He began scratching between his toes.

"If I could get a handle on the fucking fermion-emission vertex I could solve that power-drain problem you have when you rotate out of the normal spectrum. Massless particles are easy, it's the…"

He stopped talking and stared at his foot.

Two of his toes had come off in his hand. Bluish ooze dripped deliberately from the wounds.

The android stared in disbelief. Travnicek began to scream.

"The operators in question," said Travnicek, "are fermionic only in a two-dimensional world-sheet sense and not in the space-time D-dimensional sense." Lying on a gurney in the Rensselaer Clinic E-room, Travnicek had lapsed into a trance again. Modular Man wondered if this had anything to do with the 'ghost operator' his creator had mentioned earlier.

"Truncating the spectrum to an even G parity sector… eliminates the tachyon from the spectrum…"

"It's wild card," Dr. Finn said to Modular Man. There had scarcely been any doubt. "But it's strange. I don't understand the spectra." He glanced at a series of computer printouts. His hooves clicked nervously on the floor. "There seem to be two strains of wild card."

"Ghost-free light-cone gauge… Lorentz invariance is valid…"

"I've informed Tachyon," said Finn. He was a pony-size centaur, his human half wearing a white lab coat and stethoscope. He looked at Travnicek, then at the android. "Can you assume responsibility for this man, should we decide to give him the serum? Are you family?"

"I can't sign legal documents. I'm not a person, I'm a sixth-generation machine intelligence."

Finn absorbed this. "We'll wait for Tachyon," he decided. The plastic curtains parted. The alien's violet eyes widened in surprise. "You're back," he said. Modular Man realized this was the first time he'd ever heard Tachyon use a contraction. Tachyon was dressed in a white lab coat over which he wore a hussar jacket with enough gold lace to outfit the Ruritanian Royal Guard. Over it was strapped a Colt Python on a black gunbelt with silver-and-turquoise conchos. "You're carrying a six-gun," Modular Man said.

Tachyon recovered quickly from his surprise. He waved his hand carelessly. "There has been… harassment. We are coping, however, I am pleased to see you have been reassembled."

"Thank you. I've brought in a patient."

Tachyon took the printouts from the centaur and began glancing through them. "This is the first appearance of the wild card in three days," he remarked. "If we can discover where the patient was infected, we might be able to trace Croyd."

"Reparametrization invariance of the bosonic string!" Travnicek shouted. Sweat beaded on his forehead. "Preserve the covariant gauge!"

Tachyon's eyes narrowed as he glanced at the printouts. "There are two strains of wild card," Tachyon said. "One old infection, one new."

Modular Man looked at Travnicek in surprise. Probabilities poured through his mind. Travnicek had been a wild card all along. His ability to build Modular Man had been a function of his talent, not native genius.

Tachyon looked at Travnicek. "Can he be awakened from this state?"

"I don't know."

Tachyon leaned over the gurney, looked at Travnicek intently. Mental powers, Modular Man thought.

Travnicek gave a shout and batted the alien's arms away. He sat up and stared.

"It's that fucking Lorelei!" he said. "She's doing this to me, the bitch. Just because I wouldn't tip."

Tachyon looked at him. "Mister, ah…"

Travnicek brandished a finger. "Stop singing when we do it, I said, and maybe I'll tip! Who needs that kind of distraction?"

"Sir," Tachyon said. "We need a list of your contacts over the last few days."

Sweat poured down Travnicek's face. " I haven't seen anyone. I've been in the loft the last three days. Only ate a few slices of pizza from the fridge." His voice rose to a shriek. "It's that Lorelei, I tell you! She's doing it!"

"Are you sure this Lorelei is your only contact?"

"Jesus, yes!" Travnicek held out his hand. His two toes were still in his palm. "Look what the bitch is doing to me!"

"Do you know how to reach her? Where she might be hiding?"

"Shangri-la Outcalls. They're in the book. Just have them send her." Rage entered his eyes. "Five bucks for the taxi!" Finn looked at Tachyon. "Could Croyd have become a female in the last three days?"

"Unlikely, but this remains the only lead we possess. If nothing else, this Lorelei might provide us with a lead to Croyd. Call the Squad. And the police."

"Sir." Finn's hooves rapped daintily on the tile floor as he left the curtained area. Tachyon's attention returned to Travnicek. "Have you a wild card history?" he asked. "Any manifestations?"

"Of course not." Travnicek reached for his bare foot, then jerked his hand back. " I have no feeling in my toes. Goddamn it!"

"The reason I asked, sir-this is your second dose of wild card. You have a previous infection."

Travnicek's head snapped up. Sweat sprayed over Tachyon's coat. "What the hell do you mean, previous infection? I've had nothing of the sort."

"It would appear that you have. Your gene structure has been thoroughly infiltrated by the virus."

"I've never been sick in my life, you fucking quack."

"Sir," the android interrupted. "You have unusual abilities. Involving… reparametrization invariance of the bosonic string?"

Travnicek looked at him for a long moment. Then comprehension dawned, followed by horror.

"My God," he said.

"Sir," said Tachyon. "There is a serum. It has a twenty percent chance of success."

Travnicek continued to stare at the android. "Success," he said. "That means both infections go, right?"

"Yes. If it works at all. But there is a risk…"

Hooves tapped on the floor. Finn appeared through the curtains. "All set, Doc." He carried a case, which he opened. Bottles and hypodermics were revealed. "I've brought the serum. Also the release forms."

Travnicek appeared to notice the centaur for the first time. He shrank away. "Get away from me, you freak!" Finn seemed embarrassed. Tachyon's face hardened, and he drew himself up. Angry hauteur burned in his face. "Dr. Finn is in charge here. He is a licensed physician-"

"I don't care if he's licensed to pull carriages in Central Park! A joker is doing this to me, and I'm not having a joker treat me!" Travnicek hesitated and looked at the toes in his hand. Decision entered his eyes. He flung the toes to the ground. "In fact, I'm not taking the fucking serum at all." He looked at the android. "Get me out of here. Now."

"Yes, sir." Dismay wafted through the android. He was not constructed so as to be able to refuse a direct command from his creator. He picked up Travnicek in his arms and rose into the air. Tachyon watched, arms folded in frozen, implacable hostility.

"Wait!" Finn's tone was desperate. "We need you to sign a release that you refused treatment!"

"Piss off!" barked Travnicek. Modular Man floated above the screens separating the E-room beds and began moving toward the entrance. A gray-faced joker child, waiting to have a splinter removed from his knee, stared upward with blank silver eyeballs. Finn followed, waving his forms and a pencil. "Sir! I at least need your name!"

Modular Man butted through the swinging doors leading to the E-room and then past a surprised, green, seven-foot joker to the street door. Once outside he accelerated.

"After we get home," Travnicek said, "I want you to find Lorelei. Bring her to the loft and we'll make her turn off her wild card."

People on the night streets stared up as the android and his burden flew overhead. Half of them were wearing gauze masks. Modular Man's feeling of dismay intensified. "This is a viral infection, sir," he said. " I don't believe anyone is doing this to you."

"Jesus fucking Christ!" Travnicek slapped his forehead. "The two sons of bitches in the hallway! I forgot about them!" He grinned. "It's not the chippie after all. When I went downstairs to call Lorelei on the pay phone in the downstairs hall, I ran into these two guys coming up the stairs. I bumped into one of them in the hall. They went into the apartment right under us. One of them must be this Croyd guy."

"Was one an albino?"

"I didn't pay attention to them. They were wearing those surgical mask things anyway." He grew excited. "One of them was wearing dark glasses! And in a dark corridor! He must have been hiding his pink eyes!"

They had arrived at Travnicek's building. The android flew down the alley, circled into the airshaft, and rose to the building's flat roof. He opened the skylight and lowered Travnicek carefully through it. As he set Travnicek on his feet, he observed that two of the man's remaining toes were set at an odd angle.

Travnicek, oblivious to this fact, cackled as he paced back and forth. "I thought there was a joker in that apartment," he said. " I ran into one once on the stairs. All I cared about was that he didn't complain to the landlord about noise from the flux generators." One of his toes, cast adrift, rolled under a table. "He's right below," he said. "He's been doing this to me, and now the bastard is going to pay."

"He may not be able to control it," the android said. He was looking at the place where the toe had vanished, wondering if he should retrieve it. "He may not be able to reverse things."

Travnicek swung around. Sweat was pouring down his face. His eyes were fevered. "He's going to stop what he's doing," he shouted, "or he's going to die!" His voice rose to a shriek. "I am not going to be a joker! I am a genius, and I intend to stay one! Find the bastard and bring him here!"

"Yes, sir." Resigned, the android stepped to the metal locker where his spare parts were kept. He twirled the combination knob, opened the door, and saw that the two grenade launchers were missing. Apparently he'd loaded one with sleep gas and the other with smoke grenades, and they'd been destroyed at Aces High. That left the dazzler, the 20mm cannon, and the microwave laser.

Croyd, he thought, had already destroyed him once.

He opened the zips on the shoulders of his jumpsuit and willed open the slots on his shoulders. He took the cannon and the laser and fixed them in place. The cannon was almost as tall as he was and heavy; he wove software patterns that compensated his balance accordingly. A drum of 20mm rounds was attached to the cannon. The bolt slammed back and forward and the first round was chambered.

He wondered if he was going to die again.

He turned on his flux fields. Ozone crackled around him. A faint St. Elmo's aura danced before his eyes. Insubstantial, he melted through the floor.

The first thing the android saw was a television set. Its tube had imploded. An unstrung coat hanger was wired in place of one of the broken rabbit ears.

There was a camp bed in the middle of the floor. The mattress was wrapped in plastic. There were no sheets. Cheap furniture choked the rest of the room.

The android became substantial and hung suspended in the middle of the room. He heard voices in the back room. His weaponry swung toward the sound and locked into position.

"Something broke all the glass." The voice was fast, fervid, weirdly intense. "Something strange is going on."

"Maybe a sonic boom." Another voice, deeper. Certainly calmer.

"The cups on the shelves?" The voice was very insistent, talking so fast the words crowded on one another. "Something broke the cups on the shelves. Sonic booms don't do that. Not in New York. Something else must've done that." The man wouldn't let the subject alone.

Modular Man hovered to the doorway. Two men stood in the apartment's tiny kitchen, bent to peer into a small refrigerator. Milk and orange juice dripped from its sill.

The nearest man was young, dark-haired, movie-star handsome. He was dressed in blue jeans and a Levi's jacket. He had a piece of a broken juice container in his hand.

The other was a thin, pale, nervous man with pink eyes. "Which one of you is Croyd Crenson?" asked the android. The pink-eyed man turned and gave a shriek. "You blew up!" he shouted, and in a blur of speed he reached for a gun under his Levi's jacket.

Modular Man concluded this sure enough sounded like a guilty conscience. The ceiling was too low for him to maneuver over the first man, so he pushed out with an arm as he moved forward, intending to knock him into the refrigerator and get next to the albino.

The second man didn't move when the android shoved him. He didn't even shift his stance, partly stooped by the refrigerator. Modular Man stopped dead. He pushed harder. The man straightened and smiled and didn't move.

The presumed Croyd fired his automatic. The sound thundered in the small room. The first wild round missed, the second gouged plastic skin from the android's shoulder, the third and fourth shots hit Croyd's companion.

The man still didn't react, not even after being shot. The bullets didn't ricochet or flatten on impact, just dropped to the scarred linoleum.

Bullets don't work, the android thought. Scratch the cannon.

Modular Man backed up, dropped to the floor, fired a straight punch to the young man's chest. The man still didn't move, didn't even flinch. Croyd's bullets cracked as they cut the air. A couple of them hit his friend, none hit the android. The android punched again, full force. Same result.

The young man struck out, the return punch unnaturally fast. His fist caught Modular Man and knocked him back, out of the kitchen. The android drove through the old tin paneling of the far wall and partway through the slats on the other side. Paint flecks a dozen layers thick dropped like gray snow from the ancient walls. Red damage lights came alive in the android's mind.

Modular Man levered himself out of the wall-the long tube of the cannon got caught and required a wrench of the android's shoulders to free it. He saw the albino charging with superhuman speed, the refrigerator raised high. The android tried to get out of the way, but the wall hampered him and Croyd was moving very fast. The refrigerator drove Modular Man back through the wall again, widening the hole. Orange juice sloshed in the refrigerator's interior.

Modular Man cut in his flight generators and flew straight forward, seizing the refrigerator and using it as a battering ram. Croyd was caught off center and spun into the front room, arms flailing, before the camp bed caught the back of his knees and he crashed to the floor. The android kept going, driving the refrigerator full force into Croyd's companion.

The man still didn't move. St. Elmo's fire filled the hallway as the android's generators went to full power. The man still didn't move.

The hell with it. Go for Croyd.

The android let go of the refrigerator and altered his flight pattern to head for the albino, Very quickly, before he could move more than a few inches, the young man struck out with the other arm, a forearm slam against the top of the refrigerator.

Modular Man went through the wall again, across someone's apartment, into a fifteen-gallon fish tank, then into the exterior wall. Bits of the android's consciousness fragmented with shock. A green flood poured across the carpet. Tropical fish began to die.

A moment of time throbbed endlessly in his mind. He could not remember his purpose, could not recognize the scatter of bright scales that flapped helplessly before his gaze. Automatic systems slowly rerouted his memory.

The day and its long advent of despair returned. He pried himself from the wall. His energies needed replenishment. He couldn't go insubstantial for a while, and he shouldn't fly. The 20mm cannon hung bent over one shoulder. The laser seemed intact.

The apartment was decorated with care, featuring abstract prints, an Oriental carpet, more fish tanks. A mobile jangled near the ceiling. Its tenant seemed not to be home. Distantly he heard the sound of arriving police. The android stepped through the hole into Croyd's apartment, saw that the albino and his companion had left, and walked up the stairs to Travnicek's. On the way his consciousness disappeared twice, for half-second intervals. When he regained it, he moved faster.

He heard the heavy footsteps of police below.

Travnicek opened the door to his knock. Both his feet were bare, and all the toes had gone. Something blue and hairy was beginning to grow from each wound.

"Fucking coffee maker," said Travnicek.

The android knew it wasn't going to get any better.

"Croyd wasn't so much a problem as this other person." The android had his jumpsuit off, was repairing the gouge in his synthetic flesh. The cannon lay on a table. He would have to get a replacement from the army munitions depot where he'd found the first one.

Travnicek was laboring over broken components. He'd told the police that he'd heard shots but had been afraid to go downstairs to phone for help. They'd accepted his explanation without comment and never came into the apartment where the android had been hiding in a locker.

"Nothing's really badly damaged, toaster," Travnicek said. "Field monitor jarred loose. That's why you kept losing consciousness. I'll strap the bastard down this time. Otherwise, just a few dings here and there."

He straightened. His eyes glazed over. "Renormalization function switch damaged," he said. "Replace at once." He shook his head, frowned a moment, then turned to the android. "Open your chest again. I just remembered something." Travnicek was scratching one of his hands near the finger joints. He looked down, realized what he was doing, and stopped. He seemed a little pale.

"After I get you fixed up," he said, "get on the goddamn streets. That Croyd guy is gonna be using his power to transform more people. That'll give you a fix on his location. I want you to be looking for him."

"Yes, sir." The android's chest opened. He noticed that his creator's neck was beginning to swell, and that his flesh now had a distinct blue cast.

He decided not to mention it.

The android patrolled all that night, searching the streets for familiar figures. His internal radio receiver was tuned to any alert, on both police and National Guard bands. From a early edition of the Times stolen from a pile near a closed newsstand, he found out that there had been a half dozen cases of wild card in the two hours following his battle with Croyd. Three of the cases had been in Jokertown, and the other three were people traveling together on a northbound number 4 Lexington Avenue express. Croyd and his companion had taken the subway at least as far as the Forty-second Street stop.

He also discovered from a copy of Newsweek he found in a trash basket that Croyd and his unknown protector had fought a group of jokers led by Tachyon to a standstill a few days before.

He wished he'd known that. Even though the article didn't give many details, maybe knowing the pair was dangerous would have made a difference.

As he hovered over the streets, eyes and radar casting for familiar images, he replayed the fight in the apartment. He'd tried to knock the unknown man away, and the man hadn't moved. Punches had struck him and then stopped. When the android had tried to bulldoze him with the refrigerator, motion had just stopped. Bullets hadn't bounced off the man, just lost their energy and fallen to the floor.

Lost their energy, the android thought. Lost their energy and died.

The unknown man, therefore, absorbed kinetic energy. Then he transformed it in an attack of his own. He had to get hit first, the android realized, because he seemed to need to absorb the android's attack before he could strike back.

Satisfaction moved through the android's mind. All he had to do to get around the other guy was not hit him. If he didn't have any energy to absorb, he couldn't do anything.

And if things went wrong, the android could use the microwave laser as a last resort. The unknown man absorbed kinetic energy, not radiation.

The android smiled. He had the next encounter aced. All he had to do was find them.

At two thirty-one in the afternoon two people drew the Black Queen on Forty-seventh Street near Hammarskjold Plaza. The radio crackled with NYPD and National Guard commands to reinforce the guards on the United Nations building in case Croyd was intending to make some move on the UN.

Modular Man was overhead seconds after the alarm. Two victims were stretched on the street half a block apart, one lying still, his body turned into something monstrous, the other writhing in pain as his bones dissolved and he was crushed by the weight of his own body. Olive-green M.A.S.H. ambulances were responding, followed in the distance by a whooping city ambulance. There was nothing Modular Man could do for the victims. He flew a swift search pattern over the block, then began flying in widening circles. Another wild card victim to the west of the others on Third Avenue gave his search another focal point.

Then he saw one of his targets, Croyd's brown-haired companion. The man was dressed as the android had last seen him, in a Levi's jacket and jeans. He was walking east on Forty-eighth Street, having doubled back, and he was moving quickly, hands in his pockets and eyes fixed on the pedestrians ahead of him.

Modular Man flew behind the parapet of a building across the street, paralleling him, moving his head from cover every so often to keep tabs on his target. There was very little foot traffic and the android found him easy to follow. The young man did not look up. Ambulance sirens wailed in the distance.

The young man began moving north on Second Avenue. He walked for three blocks, then pushed through the revolving door of a large white-stone bank.

The android hovered over the building across the street while he decided what to do, then flew swiftly across Second Avenue and dropped to the pavement, careful not to make his movements visible from the bank's front door. People in white gauze masks gave him plenty of room on the sidewalk.

The android turned insubstantial and walked into the thick wall of the bank, then pushed his face through the far side. Croyd's guardian had walked across the bank lobby, past the teller cages, and was speaking to a pudgy, white-haired bank guard who sat on a stool near one of the back doors. He showed the guard a card and a key. The guard nodded, pressed a button, and a sliding door opened. The young man entered an elevator and the door shut behind him.

Modular Man stepped back from the building. Apparently Croyd's companion was heading for a safety deposit box. The android, to the audible gasps of a pair of pedestrians, dropped through the pavement.

Though his vision was dark, his internal navigation systems kept him aligned perfectly. He moved down, then forward. His upper head, containing eyes and radar, moved tentatively through a wall: the android perceived an enormous vault with a clerk behind a desk, her back to him. Stacks of fresh bills, each with a neat paper wrapper, stood on the desk.

Wrong vault. The android moved back, then to the side, then forward again, then pushed through a row of safety deposit boxes.

Right vault. Remaining insubstantial was draining his power reserves: he couldn't do this much longer.

Croyd's companion was marching with another guard to one large box. He and the guard inserted their keys, and the young man withdrew the box. The android memorized its location, then made note of the position of all the cameras and other security monitors.

His energy was running low. He moved back, rose up through the sidewalk, turned substantial, flew to the roof across the street, and lighted. It probably didn't matter what was in the deposit box, although if it proved relevant, he could always return.

Croyd's companion was in the bank for another ten minutes, allowing the android's energy to return fully. When the man emerged, he began retracing his steps south, turning west on Fiftieth Street to avoid the ambulances and military police setting up checkpoints on Forty-seventh, then hastened to Lexington Avenue, where he turned south again. The android followed, flitting from roof to roof. His quarry walked south to Forty-fourth, then headed west to enter one of the side entrances to Grand Central Station.

The android turned insubstantial and flew through the wall onto the second level of the station. He lighted on the polished marble balcony and watched his quarry move across the floor below.

The station was almost deserted. The entrances to the platforms were guarded by regular army Rangers in black berets. They were in full biological warfare rig, hoods and gas masks off but ready. Croyd's companion walked to a stairway leading down to the arcade level and descended.

The android followed, moving carefully, turning insubstantial when necessary in order to peer around corners. The young man moved lower, through a utility door with a smashed lock, then down into the train tunnels that stretched north from the station. Rusting iron supports held up what seemed to be half of Manhattan. Occasional bulbs provided dim light. The place smelled of damp and metal. The android, keeping his target in sight with radar, followed without difficulty.

He found a corpse, a man in several layers of shabby clothing whose body seemed to have calcified, leaving the derelict a huddled figure with his face permanently carved in a look of horror and pain. Croyd had been here all right. There was another body a hundred yards farther on, an elderly woman with her bags clutched around her. The android looked closer.

It wasn't the bag lady he had once known. The android was relieved.

"D'ja get it? D ja get it?" The albino's eager voice rapped out of the darkness.

"Yeah."

"Lemme see."

"Bunch of keys. Envelope of cash."

"Gimme the deposit key."

The android crept nearer. An approaching train was rumbling closer, coming from the north.

"Here you go. You shouldn't have risked going out." The albino's rapid-fire voice crackled with suspicion. "Didn't know if I could trust you. And your signature wasn't on the card."

"The guard barely looked at it. I think he was drunk."

"Gimme the gun."

"This thing's heavy. What is it?"

"Forty-four Automag. The most powerful handgun ever made." Croyd strapped a giant shoulder holster under his arm. "If the robot comes after us again,"he said, "I wanna be able to dent him. This thing fires cut-down NATO rifle rounds."

"Jesus."

The albino said something then, but Modular Man couldn't hear it. The train was getting closer. Its headlight outlined iron stanchions. Croyd and his companion began moving toward Modular Man. The android silently flew upward to the dirty ceiling, hovering in the shadow of a girder.

Yellow light burned steadily on the iron pillars as the train ground steadily southward. The noise echoed in the cavernous room. Croyd and his bodyguard passed beneath the android.

Croyd looked up, warned somehow-maybe he'd seen the hovering android in his peripheral vision. The albino yelled something obscured by the sound of the train and clawed for his pistol with incredible speed. His companion began to turn.

Modular Man dropped from the ceiling, his arms going around the albino from behind. The train bathed the scene in garish cinema light. Croyd shouted, tried to throw himself from side to side. His strength was considerably more than that of a normal human, but not equal to that of the android. Modular Man rose into the air, his legs wrapping around Croyd's, and he began to fly south. Wind from the train pushed him on.

"Hey…!" The companion was running after, waving an arm. "Bring him back!" The huge gun, still jammed in Croyd's armpit, fired out and down through Croyd's coat. A ricochet struck bright sparks from an iron stanchion.

Croyd's guardian swerved. He leaped directly into the path of the train.

There was a burst of light, a crackling sound. The train stopped dead. The young man was hurled fifty feet farther down the track. When he hit the ground, a smaller burst of electricity jumped between him and the nearest rail.

The man jumped to his feet. In the bright light of the train's headlight the android could see his grin.

Modular Man made a brief calculation of the amount of kinetic energy possessed by a fully loaded train moving at fifteen or so miles per hour. Although Croyd's guardian hadn't absorbed all of it, and the excess had bled off in a burst of lightning-there were some limits on his power, fortunatelythe total of what he had absorbed was appalling. The android's laser whined as it tracked toward the man standing on the tracks.

The man crouched, bracing his feet against the track, then jumped. His leap was aimed ahead of the android, to cut him off. The man tumbled in air-evidently he wasn't used to traveling this way-then hit a stanchion and fell to the ground. No electricity this time. He picked himself up and looked at the approaching android with clenched teeth. His clothing smoldered.

Swift calculations passed through macroatomic circuits, followed by lightspeed regret. Modular Man hadn't ever shot a real person before. He didn't want to now. But Croyd was killing people even in hiding, even in the tunnels deep under Grand Central. And if Croyd's guardian got his hands on the android, he could tear his alloy skeleton to bits.

The android fired. Then suddenly he was falling, his arms limp. Croyd tumbled to the ground. The android crashed to the ground at the young mans feet. The young man reached, seized him by the shoulders. The android tried to move, failed.

Modular Man realized that Croyd's protector didn't just absorb kinetic energy. He absorbed any kind of energy and could return it instantly.

Bad mistake, he thought.

Suddenly he was flying again. He crashed through the side of the commuter train, sprawled across several seats in a spill of glass and torn aluminum. Someone's briefcase tumbled to the aisle, papers flying. The android heard a scream. His sensors registered the smell of burning.

The few people on board-executives whose work forced them into the quarantined city-rushed to his aid. Lifting him from his ungainly sprawl across the seats, they laid him carefully in the aisle. "What's that on his head?" asked a white-haired man with a mustache.

Radar imaging was gone. Its control unit had been fried when Croyd's bodyguard returned the coherent microwave pulse. The monitor that controlled his ability to turn insubstantial was gone. His alloy underskin had a neat hole in it. The excess energy had blown a lot of circuit breakers. The android reset as many as possible and felt control return to his limbs. Some breakers wouldn't reset.

"Pardon me," he said, and stood up. People faded back. The train gave a jerk as it started moving again, and the android tumbled backward, arms windmilling, and sat down in the aisle. People rushed toward him again. He felt the helping hands on his right side but not on his left. Balance and coordination were still affected. He rerouted internal circuits, but still something was wrong.

"Excuse me." He unzipped and pulled off the upper half of his jumpsuit. Train passengers gasped. Plastic flesh was blackened around the wound. Modular Man opened his chest and reached inside with one hand. Someone turned away and began to be sick, but the other passengers seemed interested, one woman standing on a seat and craning her neck to peer into the android's interior through horn-rimmed spectacles.

The android removed one of his internal guidance units, saw melted connections, and sighed mentally. He returned the unit. The trip home was going to be pretty shaky. He certainly couldn't fly.

He looked up at the people on the train.

"Do any of you have five dollars for a taxi?" he asked.

The trip to Jokertown was humiliating and dangerous. Some of the passengers supported him out of the station, but even so he fell a few times. With some money given him by the man with the mustache, he took a taxi to the other side of the block from Travnicek's brownstone. He pushed the money through the slot in the taxi's bulletproof shield, then staggered out onto the sidewalk. He half-walked, half-crawled down the alley to Travnicek's building, then dragged himself up the fire escape to the roof. From there he crawled to the skylight and lowered himself down.

Travnicek lay on his camp bed, naked to the waist. His skin was light blue. Writhing cilia, covered with long hairs, grew from where his fingers and toes had been. A fly hummed over his head.

The swollen skin around his neck had split open, revealing a flower lei of organs. Some were recognizable-trumpetshaped ears, yellowish eyes, some normal in size and some not-but others of the organs were not.

"The only left-moving ghosts," he muttered, "are the reparametrization ghosts." His voice was thick, indistinct. The android had the intuition that his lips might be growing together. And the words seemed half-unfamiliar, as if he no longer entirely comprehended their meaning.

"Sir," said Modular Man. "Sir. I've been injured again." Travnicek sat up with a start. The eyes clustered around his neck swiveled to focus on the android. "Ah. Toaster. You look… very interesting… this way." The eyes in his skull were closed. Perhaps, the android thought, forever.

"I need repairs. Croyd's companion reflected my laser back at me."

"Why the fuck did you shoot him, blender? All forms of energy are the same. Same as matter, as far as that goes."

"I didn't know."

"Fucking moron. You'd think you'd pick up a little intelligence from me."

Travnicek jumped up from his cot, moving very fast, faster than a normal human. He caught hold of a roof beam with one hand, swung around it to stand on his head. He planted his feet on the ceiling, the hairy cilia splaying, and then removed his hand from the beam and hung inverted. Yellow eyes looked steadily at the android.

"Not bad, hey? Haven't felt this good in years." He moved carefully along the ceiling toward the android.

"Sir. Radar control is burned out. I've lost a stabilizer. My flux control is damaged."

"I hear you." His voice was serene, drifting. "In fact I don't just hear you, I perceive you in all sorts of ways. I'm not sure what some of them are just yet." Travnicek grabbed another roof beam, swung to the floor, dropped. The fly buzzed airily in the distance. Sadness swelled in the android's analog mind. A mounting hush of fear, like white noise, sizzled steadily in the background of his thoughts.

"Open your chest," Travnicek said. "Give me the monitor. There's a spare guidance unit in the cabinet."

"There's a hole in my chest."

The yellow eyes looked at him. The android waited for an outburst.

"Better patch it yourself," Travnicek said mildly. "When you have the time." He took the flux monitor and stepped to a workbench. "It's getting hard to think about all this," he said.

"Preserve your genius, sir." Modular Man tried not to let his desperation show. "Fight the infection. I'll get Croyd here."

A touch of vinegar entered Travnicek's voice. "Yah. You do that. Now let me worry about the fermionic coordinates, okay?"

"Yes, sir." Mildly reassured.

He staggered to the locker and began looking for a new gyroscope.

The BARNETT FOR PRESIDENT poster had been defaced. Someone had drawn a knife or fingernail file through the candidate's picture several times, then written JOKER DEATH over it in thick red letters. Next to it was a freehand drawing of an animal head-a black dog?-executed in thick felt tip. "Hi. I need to talk."

Kate blew cigarette smoke. "Okay. For a little while."

"How are the Roman poets coming along?"

"If Latin weren't already a dead language, Statius would have killed it."

Modular Man was hunched over the public phone again. His gyroscope had been replaced and he could walk and fly. Except for the heavy presence of the National Guard and Army, the streets were nearly deserted. Half the restaurants and cabarets in jokertown were shut down.

"Kate," the android said, " I think I'm going to die." There was a moment of startled silence. Then, "Tell me."

"My creator got infected by the wild card. He's turning into a joker and forgetting how to repair me. And he's sending me after the plague carrier, hoping the man can make it stop."

"Okay. Cautiously. "I'm following.

"He seems to think the man's deliberately doing this to him. But must people think the guy is just a carrier, and if that's true, and I bring him to my creator, the chances are nine to one that if my creator's reinfected, he'll draw the Black Queen and die."

"Yes."

"And the man I'm after-his name is Croyd-is the man who killed me the first time. And this time Croyd has a protector who is more powerful than he is. We're already fought twice, and they've beaten me both times. The last time I could easily have died. And my creator can't put me together again. He's losing his abilities. He may not be able to repair the damage from the last attack."

Kate drew on her cigarette, exhaled. "Mod Man," she said, "you need help."

"Yes. That's why I'm calling you."

"I mean other wild cards. You can't face these two alone."

"If I went to SCARE or someone, and we captured Croyd together, then I'd have to fight the SCARE aces to get him away. I'd be an outlaw."

"Maybe you could make some kind of deal with them."

"I'll think about it. I'll try." Despair wailed through him. "I'm going to die," he said.

"I'm sorry. Can't you just leave?"

"I'm programmed to obey him. I can't refuse a direct order. And I'm programmed to battle the enemies of society. I don't have a choice in any of that. People like the Turtle, or Cyclone-it's their decision to do what they do. It was never mine. I'm not human that way."

"I see. "

"Sooner or later I'm going to lose a fight. I don't heal like people, someone has to repair me. Any parts that get broken wont get fixed. If I don't die, I'll be a cripple, pieces falling off." Like Travnicek, he thought, and a cold shudder ran through his mind. "And even if I'm crippled," he went on, "I'll still have to fight. I still won't have any choice."

There was a long silence. " I don't know what to tell you." Her voice was choked.

"I was sort of immortal before," Modular Man said. "My creator was going to mass-produce me and sell me to the military. If any single unit was destroyed, the others would go on. They'd have identical programming; they'd still be me, at least mostly me. Now that's not going to happen."

"I'm sorry."

"What happens to machines when they die? I've been wondering that."