Wild Cards 0

Bag Lady

Edited by 

George R.R. Martin

and written by

Walter Jon Williams

© 1998 by Walter Jon Williams 

Foreward

This is the first Wild Cards story ever written. Walter Jon Williams wrote it back in the early 80s, before we had sold the series... before we had even finalized the proposal, in fact. We were still working out the details of the universe when Walter took the bit in his teeth, went off, and produced "Bag Lady" in a white heat.

It's a fun story. Unfortunately, by the time we had finished working out where we wanted to go with the series, "Bag Lady" no longer fit comfortably with the tone and direction of the other stories. Walter ended up cannibalizing parts of this for his story in book two (ACES HIGH) but other parts remained unpublished until 1998, when he included this original version in his 'Boskone Book,' a small press collection from NESFA Press.

That's the only place that "Bag Lady" has ever seen print, so it’s fairly new to a majority of Wild Card readers and should be a nice treat. The note below also includes an introduction by Walter explaining the history of the story. Enjoy!

--GRRM

Introduction

          What you are about to pass beneath your eyeballs is the first Wild Cards story ever written… but it never appeared in a Wild Cards book.

          But how, you ask, can such a thing be?

          A little history is definitely in order.

          Back in the early Eighties, George R.R. Martin conceived the notion of the Wild Cards series— a shared alternate-world timeline in which the superpowers displayed by comic-book heroes and villains were real, and subject to a degree of plausibility.  George contacted his friends, who included Howard Waldrop, Ed Bryant, Melinda Snodgrass, Roger Zelazny, Pat Cadigan, Lewis Shiner, John Jos. Miller, and myself, all of whom took to the idea with a great enthusiasm.   It was Melinda Snodgrass who came up with the rationale for the various metahuman abilities displayed by the characters— an alien virus, dropped over New York City in 1946, that caused most of those infected to mutate horribly and die (“drawing the black queen”), that caused most of the survivors to turn into grotesque mutations (“jokers”), and which permitted a fortunate few to develop genuine superpowers (“aces”).  

          But somewhere along the path of developing the series, George began to suffer doubts.  He became uncertain as to whether it was really possible to convincingly depict superpowers in fiction.  So, in an act of selflessness so pure that I nowadays can scarcely credit that I actually did it, I wrote “Bag Lady” in order to prove him wrong.  (Furthermore, the thought that I had the leisure to produce a work this long, purely to prove a point, croggles my mind in these busy latter days.)    In any case, “Bag Lady” succeeded in proving what I set out to prove, which was that the form was viable, and work on the series resumed.

          Unfortunately, Wild Cards evolved in a different direction from that anticipated by this story.  By the time the series background was fully developed, “Bag Lady” was a non-starter.  My act of selflessness remained pure, unsullied by the wretched commercialism that would mark an actual sale.  (I did, however, manage to plunder some of the text for a later story, “Unto the Sixth Generation.”)  

Wild Cards fans will note a number of differences between the New York of this story and that of the series.  For “Bag Lady,” I conceived New York city as a kind of golden, wonder-filled megalopolis, aptly symbolized by the gold-plated Empire State Building and the presence of the RMS Queen Elizabeth sitting in an enlarged Central Park Lake.  The place is filled with superheroes doing whatever it is that superheroes do.  The tone is that of light adventure, admittedly with a touch of darkness here and there.  

          The actual series, as it developed, was much darker, sometimes verging on relentless.  The QE1 never made it to Central Park.  The Empire State Building didn’t get its gold sheath.  And the Knave of Diamonds, art thief extraordinaire, never made it to the pages of the series.

          At least the Central Park Ape, the occasion of Modular Man’s first public triumph, not only made it into the Wild Cards universe, but became a major character.

          So here’s the original, twenty years after it was first written. 

          Have fun with it.  I certainly did.

♦ ♥ ♣ ♠

BAG LADY

by Walter Jon Williams

         He was still smoking where the atmosphere had burned his flesh.  Heated lifeblood was running out through his spiracles. He tried to close them, to hold onto the last of the liquid, but he had lost the capacity to control his respiration.

          Lights strobed at him from the end of the alley, dazzled his eyes.  Hard sounds crackled in his ears.  His blood steamed on the cold concrete.

          The Swarm mother had unmasked his ship, had struck at him with energies that bound his flux generators and then ruptured his ship's chitin.  He had been forced to close his spiracles and leap into the dark vacuum, hoping to find a friendly landing on the planet below.  He had failed--- the atmosphere here was thicker than that for which his escape equipment was intended.

          He tried to summon his concentration and grow new flesh, but failed.  He realized that he was dying.

          It was necessary to stop the draining of his life. There was a metal container nearby, large, with a hinged lid.   His body a flaring agony, he rolled across the damp surface of the concrete and hooked his one undamaged leg across the lid of the container.  He moved his weight against the oppressive gravity, rolling his body up the length of his leg.  Outraged nerves wailed in his body.  Fluid spattered the outside of the container.

          The metal rang as he fell inside.  Substances crackled under him.  He gazed up into a night that glowed with reflected infrared.  There were bits of organic stuff here, crushed and pressed flat, with dyes pressed onto them in patterns.  He seized these with palps and cilia, tearing them into strips, pushing them against his leaking spiracles.  Stopping the flow.

          Organic smells came to him.  There had been life here, but it had died.

          He reached into his abdomen for his shifter, brought the device out, clasped it to his torn chest.  If he could stop time for a while, he could heal.

          The shifter hummed.  It was warm against his cooling flesh. Time passed.

♦ ♥ ♣ ♠

          "So last night I got a call from my neighbor Sally . . . "

          Dimly, from inside his time cocoon, he heard the sound of the voice.  It echoed faintly inside his skull.

          "And Sally, she says, Hildy, she says, I just heard from my sister Margaret in California.  You remember Margaret, she says. She went to school with you at St. Mary's."

          There was a thud against the metal near his auditory palps. A silhouette against the glowing night.  Arms reached for him.

          Agony returned.  He cried out, a hiss.  The foreign touch climbed his body.

          "Sure I remember Margaret, I says.  She was a grade behind. The sisters were always after her 'cause she was a gumchewer."

          Something was taking hold of his shifter.  He clutched it against him, tried to protest.

          "It's mine, bunky," the voice said, fast and angry. "I saw it first!”

          He saw a face.  Pale flesh smudged with dirt, bared teeth, grey cilia just hanging from beneath an inorganic extrusion.

          “Don’t,” he said. “I’m dying.”

          “Shut up there.  It’s mine.”

          Pain began a slow crawl through his body.  “You don’t understand,” he said. “There is a Swarm mother in this system.”

          The voice droned.  Things crackling and rang in the container as hands sorted through them.  “So Margaret, Sally says, she married this engineer from Boeing.  And they pull down fifty grand a year, at least.  Vacations in Hawaii, in St. Thomas for Chrissake.”

          “Please listen.”  The pain was growing.  He knew he had only a short time.  “The Swarm mother has already developed intelligence.  She perceived that my ship had penetrated her intrusion defenses, and she struck before I even knew I’d seen her.”

          “But she doesn’t have to deal with my family, Sally says.  She’s over on the other goddam coast, Sally says.”

          His body was weeping scarlet.  “The next stage will be a first-generation swarm.  They will come to your planet, directed by the Swarm mother.  Please listen.”

          “So I got my mom onto the welfare and into this nice apartment, Sally says.  But the welfare wants me and Margaret to give mom an extra five dollars a month.  And Margaret, she says, she doesn't have the money.  Things are expensive on the Coast, she says."

          "You are in terrible danger.  Please listen."

          Metal thudded again.  The voice was growing fainter, as with distance.  "So how easy are things here, Sally says.  I got five kids and two cars and a mortgage, and Bill says things are a dead-end at the agency."

          "You will die.  I can't protect you.  The Swarm.  The Swarm."

          The other was gone, and he was dying.  The stuff under him was soaking up his fluids.  To breathe was an agony.

          "It is cold here," he said.  Tears came from the sky, ringing against metal.  There was acid in the tears.

♦ ♥ ♣ ♠         

          Cold December rain tapped against the skylights.  The drizzle had finally silenced the Salvation Army Santa on the corner.  Maxim Travnicek lit a Russian cigaret and capped the bottle of schnapps.  He would drink the rest later, to celebrate when his work was done.

          He adjusted a control on his camouflage jumpsuit.  He couldn't afford to heat his entire loft and instead wore an electric suit meant to keep portly outdoorsmen warm while they crouched in duck blinds.

          The long barnlike loft was lit by a cold row of fluorescents.  Homebuilt tables were littered with molds, vats, ROM burners, tabletop micro-computers each with more computing power than was possessed by the entire world in 1950.  Blowups of Leonardo's drawings of male anatomy were stapled to the rafters.

          Strapped to a table at the far end of the table was a tall naked man.  He was hairless and the roof of his skull appeared to be transparent, but otherwise he looked like something out of one of Leonardo's better wet dreams.

          The man on the table was connected to other equipment by stout electric cables.  His eyes were closed.

          The man who Dr. Bushmill, one of his former colleagues at M.I.T., had once introduced to the public as "Czechoslovakia's answer to Victor Frankenstein" stood from his folding chair and began to walk towards the man on the table.  Bushmill had later become chairman of the department and sacked Travnicek at the earliest opportunity .

          "Fuck your mother, Bushmill," Travnicek said, in Slovak. The cigaret fluttered in his lips as he spoke. "And fuck you too, Victor Frankenstein.  If you'd known jack shit about computer programming you would never have run into trouble."

          Travnicek took his reading glasses out of a pocket and peered at the controls on the flux generators.  He was a forbiddingly tall man, hawk-nosed, coldly handsome.  The comparison with Frankenstein had irked him.  The image of the ill-fated resurrectionist had, it seemed, always followed him. He'd come to M.I.T. following his tenure at Ingolstadt — his first teaching job in the West would be at Frankenstein's alma mater — and he'd hated every minute of his time in Bavaria.

          He'd never had much use for Germans, especially as role models. Which may have explained his dismissal from Ingolstadt after five years .

          After Ingolstadt and M.I.T. had come Texas A&M.  His tenures were getting shorter, and A&M fit the pattern.  He'd taken one look at the jackbooted ROTC cadets stomping around with their cropped hair, bull voices, and sabers, and the hair on the back of his neck rose.  In the department chairman’s presence, he'd ground out a Russian cigaret on the carpet of the student lounge and muttered something about the Hitler Youth.   The chairman had protested .

          "I know a goddam fascist when I see one," Travnicek said. His voice echoed in the vast lounge.  "My whole family was all mowed down by the S.S. at Lidice.  Seventeen Travniceks, dead on the cobbles.  I only survived because I hid under their bodies. I suggest you fucking well quarantine this campus before the infection spreads."

          At A&M he'd lasted two years, the length of his contract. He'd been working on his own projects most of the time, anyway, and often didn't bother to show up for his lectures.

          Travnicek tapped cigaret ash onto the floor of the loft and glanced at the skylights.  The rain appeared to be lessening.  Good.  He didn't need Victor Frankenstein's cheap theatrics, his thunder and lightning, as background for his work.

          He straightened his tie as if for an invisible audience---he wore a tie and jacket under his jumpsuit, proper dress being important to him--- and then he pressed the button that would start the flux generators.  A low moan filled the loft.  The fluorescents on the ceiling dimmed and flickered.  Half went out.  The moan became a shriek.  St. Elmo's fire danced among the roofbeams.  There was an electric smell.

          The flux generators screamed.  The floor trembled. Travnicek's reading glasses slid down his nose as he watched the dials .

          Dimly, he heard a regular thumping.  The lady in the apartment below was banging on her ceiling with a broomstick.

          The scream reached its peak.  Ultrasonics made Travnicek's worktables dance and shattering crockery throughout the building.  In the apartment below the television set imploded.  Travnicek threw another switch.

          The android on the table twitched as the energy from the flux generators was dumped into his body.  The table glowed with St. Elmo's fire.  Travnicek bit through his cigaret.  The glowing end fell unnoticed to the floor.

          The sound from the generators began to die down.  The sound of the broomstick did not, nor the dim threats from below.

          "You'll pay for that television, motherfucker!"

          "Jam the broomstick up your ass, my darling," said Travnicek.  In German, an ideal language for dealing with the excremental .

          The stunned flourescent lights began to flicker on again.

          Leonardo's stern drawings gazed down at the android as it opened its dark eyes.  The flickering fluorescents provided a strobe effect that made the eyewhites seem unreal.  The head turned; the eyes saw Travnicek, then focused.  Under the transparent dome that topped the skull, a silver dish spun.  The sound of the broomstick ceased.

          Travnicek stepped up to the table.  “How are you?” he asked.

          “All monitored systems are functioning.”  The android’s voice was deep and spoke American English.

          Travnicek smiled and spat the stub of his cigaret to the floor.  The cardboard mouthpiece made a dithering sound as it fell.  "Who are you?" he asked.

          The android's eyes searched the loft deliberately.  His voice was matter-of-fact.  "I am Modular Man," he said. "I am a multipurpose multifunctional sixth-generation machine intelligence, a flexible-response defensive attack system capable of independent action while equipped with the latest in weaponry."

          Travnicek grinned.  "The Pentagon will love it," he said. Then, "What are your orders?"

          "To obey my creator, Dr. Maxim Travnicek.  To guard his identity and well-being.  To test myself and my equipment under combat conditions, by fighting enemies of society.  To gain maximum publicity for the future Modular Men Enterprises in so doing.  To preserve my existence and well-being."

          "Take that, Asimov," Travnicek said.  "What the hell do know about structuring robot priorities?" He beamed down at creation.  "Your clothes and modules are kept in the cabinet. Take them, take your guns, and go out and find some enemies of society.  Be back before dawn."

          The android lowered himself from the table and stepped to a metal cabinet.  He swung open the door.  "Flux-field insubstantiality," he said, taking a plug-in unit off the shelf. With it he could control his flux generators so as to rotate him slightly out of the plane of existence, allowing him to move through solid matter.   "Flight, eight hundred miles per hour maximum." Another unit came down, one that would allow the flux generators to manipulate gravity and inertia so as to produce flight .

          The android moved a finger down his chest.  An invisible seam opened.  He peeled back the synthetic flesh and his alloy chestplate and revealed his interior.  A miniature flux generator gave off a slight aura of St. Elmo's fire.  The android plugged the two modules into his alloy skeleton, then sealed his chest. He drew on a flexible navy blue jump suit.

          "X-ray laser cannon.  Grenade launcher with sleep gas grenades." The android unzipped two seams on the jump suit, revealing the two slots on his shoulders, opened of their own accord.  He drew two long tubes out of the cabinet.  Each weapon had projections attached to their undersides. The android slotted the projections into his shoulders, then took his hands away.  The gun barrels spun, traversing in all possible directions .

          "All modular equipment functional," the android said.

          "Get your dome out of here," said Travnicek.

          There was a crackle and a taste of ozone.  The android rose, at gradually increasing speed, right through the ceiling, his insubstantiality field providing a blurring effect. Travnicek gazed at the place on the ceiling where the android had risen and smiled in satisfaction.  He turned and walked the length of the silent loft.  He uncorked the bottle of vodka and raised the bottle on high in a toast.

          "New Prometheus," he said, "my ass."

♦ ♥ ♣ ♠

          Raindrops passed through the android's insubstantial body as he spiraled into the sky.  Below, the damp streets reflected red and green Christmas lights.  The Empire State Building fired a tall column of colored spotlights into the low clouds.  Beyond, in Central Park, the Queen Elizabeth lay in a blaze of light. Manhattan was aglow.

          The android flew toward the darkest part of the island.   In the trees, beyond where the Queen Elizabeth gleamed like a river of diamonds.  Central Park.

          The flux-field dimmed and he was solid again.  He lowered his speed, hovering, rain batting on his radar dome.  Infra-red receptors in his eyes clicked on.  The park glowed dimly.  A brighter glow lurked below, under a tree, near one of the walkways that stretched toward Fifth Avenue from where the Queen Elizabeth lay moored in its concrete cradle.

          Two streetlights that arced above this part of the path seemed to have been shattered.

          Calculations flickered through his cybernetic mind.  "Enemy of society," the android thought.  "High probability."

          He settled into a tree to watch.  A cold wind blew into his face a mist of raindrops torn from the leaves.  Late-night Christmas shoppers, heading from the boutiques in the liner, might be walking down the path.  If the character under the tree turned out to be a mugger, as seemed likely, the android would swoop down and make his collar.

          Something caught his attention.  It was not so much an infra-red glow, but rather the absence of a glow.  He looked to his right, behind the man under the tree.

          A moving darkness was drifting through the park.

          Like an intent and deadly wave the blackness accelerated toward the man under the tree.  The android could see nothing inside the cloud, either through his normal vision or infra-red.

          The android's radar reached out, saw a human figure inside the blackness.  He consulted his memory, computed probabilities, decided to watch.

          The darkness reached the man under the tree, flowed over him.  There was a cry of surprise, then of fear.  The android heard the sound of a pair of blows, then hurried movement.  The radar image was confused and the android could not be certain what was happening.

          The sea of darkness seemed to fall inward on itself.  When it was gone, the man who had lurked beneath the tree was swinging upside-down from a limb, a rope tied to one ankle.  The other leg flailed in the air.  The wind whipped at his jacket, which was hanging down around his eyes.

          Standing on the sparse turf beneath was a black man in a wide black cloak.  There was a strip of orange tied over his eyes, a mask.  The android floated silently down from the tree and landed near him.

          "You're the one they call Black Shadow, yes?" he said.

          The man in the cloak jumped.  Then recovered.

          "Yeah.  I'm Black Shadow.  Who the hell are you?"  The voice was low, growling.  Faintly amused, faintly menacing.

          "I'm Modular Man.  I'm a sixth-generation machine intelligence."

          The man in the cloak looked at him for a long moment.  "Do tell," he said.

          "I'm programmed to fight the enemies of society."

          Black Shadow smiled wickedly.  "You’re a little late with this one," he said.  "Better luck next time."

          "Jesus!" said the man.  He was a well-built white man with a pockmarked face.  "Get me out of here.  That guy's crazy!"

          "I was watching him for some time," said the android, "and he didn't do anything."

          "Yeah!" the man said. "I didn't do nothing!”

          "He had a slapper in his jacket pocket," said the man in the cloak, "and a knife up his sleeve.  He had a grownup slingshot in his back pocket for putting out street lights and maybe hurting people.  He had over two hundred dollars in miscellaneous bills jammed in his pockets and credit cards in the names of eight people, none of them his own." He paused for a moment.  "I think," he added, "the circumstantial evidence in this case is kind of strong."

          "Let me down, man," the man said. "I think you broke a couple ribs."

          "Crime," said Black Shadow, "is a calling fraught with hazard." He took the credit cards in his hands, stacked them, and tore them neatly across.  He threw the fragments under the tree, along with the slapper, the knife, the slingshot.  He contemplated the swinging man.

          "And in Central Park, too," he said. "What a goddam cliché. This asshole has no imagination at all." He looked at the android, and his look changed to one of curiosity.  "What's that thing on your head?"

          "A radar dome."

          "No shit.  I've never seen anything like it."

          The android smiled.  "No one has."

          The wind gusted madly through the trees.  Black Shadow's cloak blew out behind him.  The man on the end of the rope swung. He flailed as he began to spin.

          Black Shadow looked at the chronometer on his wrist.  "Want to test Galileo's theorem? Our mugger here should take the same amount of time to complete an oscillation regardless of the range of the swing."

          "Jesus Christ!  Ain't nobody gonna help me?"

          "Pendulums," said Black Shadow, "either say 'tick tock,' or they say nothing at all." He frowned.  "Your thrashing around is raising havoc with Galileo.  As I scientist, I can't permit this."

          He stepped closer to the mugger, obscuring him from the android's sight.  Modular Man heard the sound of a blow.  When Black Shadow stepped away, the man hung limply.  Blood began to drip on the sward.

          "There.  Just like Galileo's lamp."

          "You didn't kill him, did you?"

          "Hell, no.  I just treated him to a little of what he's been giving to the tourists, that's all.  Call it my innate sense of fair play."  He shook rain off his cloak.  “Hey," he said. "Do you want to go up to Aces High? There aren't any criminals around on a night like this anyhow.  I've been patrolling the park since dusk and this asshole's the only person I've seen.”  He flourished a wad of bills.  "Our friend here is buying."

          The android contemplated him.  "According to my memory, you're wanted for murder in Oklahoma."

          Black Shadow took a step back.  "Are you a deputy sheriff in Tulsa County or what?" he asked. "What do you care what a redneck grand jury decided?"

          "No.  I was just wondering if you're worried about someone going after you.  Just, say, for the publicity."

          "Headlines in Tulsa do not translate to eternal fame in the Big Apple."

          The android thought about this for a moment.  "I think you’re right," he said. "Aces High sounds good to me.

          "I'll meet you there," Black Shadow said. "Tell Hiram you' re there to meet the Wall Walker." He looked amused.  "Hiram would fuss if he knew a wanted man was eating at his place, so I just wear this mask and street clothes and call myself by another name.  It drives Hiram crazy.  He can't figure out if I really have powers or just real good grip boots." He pulled his cloak about himself.  The cloak seemed to expand, covering him in a shroud of darkness.  The blackness expanded, covering the android, and then flowed away, toward the golden pillar of the Empire State Building.

          Wind gusted hard across the park, bringing the sound of Christmas bells tired to the tail of one of the handsome cab's horses.  The mugger twisted on the end of his line.

          The android rose silently into the sky.

♦ ♥ ♣ ♠

          "Eight million people in this shithole of a town," Travnicek said, his breath rising frozen in front of his lips, "and you couldn't find one single enemy of society?"

          "Does Black Shadow count?"

          "He fucking well does!" Travnicek's lips turned white.  "He's a wanted man, yes? Why the hell didn't you turn him into charcoal and fly the ashes to Tulsa for a few headlines and a reward?"

          "I reasoned," said the android, "that headlines in Tulsa do not translate to eternal fame in the Big Apple."

          Travnicek looked petulant.

          "Black Shadow also introduced me to Fatman at the Aces High," the android continued, "And Fatman introduced me to two city councilmen, an ex-governor, Dr. Tachyon, and an illustrator for King Features Syndicate.  I'm trying to improve my contacts "

          Travnicek adjusted the warmth control of his jumpsuit. "Yeah, okay," he said. "But if you can't find anyone better in a few days, I want you to incinerate the little creep.  You won't get the key to the city, but maybe you can get a headline in the Post."

          The sound of the Salvation Army Santa jingled up from the corner.  Travnicek scowled at it.  "There are enough enemies of society within three blocks of here to choke The Tombs for the next year," he said. "I can't even walk to the store without half a dozen junkies asking me for a quarter." He looked up at the android.  "Clean up the neighborhood.  Starting this afternoon."

          "My paying so much attention to a small part of town might seem odd, Dr. Travnicek.  If you'll forgive the suggestion."

          Travnicek thought for a moment.  "Yeah, okay.  It might give things away."  He grinned.  "In that case, you'll have to do my shopping for me."

          The android was expressionless. “You’ll have to tell me what you want," he said.

          Travnicek looked thoughtful.  Stroked his chin.   "In a minute,” he said.  “First, hand me a screwdriver and open your dome.  I want to make a few adjustments."

♦ ♥ ♣ ♠

          "Hey buddy.  What's wrong with your head?"  The android heard the comment at least a half-dozen times as he walked through the Minute Mart buying groceries.  He was growing tired of explaining about his radar dome.  He paid for the groceries with the money Travnicek gave him, spun into the air, and flew them with great speed through the roof of Travnicek's loft.  While Travnicek drank Urquell and cooked up garlic sausage and cabbage, his creation began a flying patrol over the city.  Even with his radar he could find little in the way of society's enemies beside three-card monte players hustling Christmas shoppers up and down Fifth Avenue .

          Heading downtown, he observed a crash between a moving van tearing along West Broadway and a UPS truck just wandered up from the Holland Tunnel.  No one was hurt, but the android spent a few moments picking up the UPS truck and disentangling it from the van.  The van's horn was jammed on from the collision and the blast was so loud that until he was airborne, he failed to hear the city's air-raid sirens that were rising to a high banshee chorus.

          He increased his speed till the wind turned to a roar in his ears.  Infra-red receptors snapped on.  The guns on his shoulders spun and fired test bursts at the sky.  His radar quested out, touching rooftops, streets, air traffic, his machine mind comparing the radar images with those generated earlier, searching for discrepancies.

          There seemed to be something wrong with the radar image of the Empire State Building.  A large object was climbing up its side, and there seemed to be several small objects, about the size of people, orbiting the golden spire.  The android altered course toward midtown and accelerated.

          A forty-five-foot ape was climbing the building.  Broken shackles hung from its wrists.  A blonde woman screamed for help from one of the ape’s fists.  Flying people rocketed around the creature, and by the time the android arrived the cloud of orbiting heroes had grown dense, spinning like electrons around a hairy, snarling nucleus.  The air resounded with the sound of rockets, wings, force fields, propellers, eructations.  Guns, wands, ray projectors, and less identifiable weapons were brandished in the direction of the ape.  None were fired.

          The ape, with a cretinous determination, continued to climb the building.  Windows crackled as he drove his toes through them.  Faint shrieks of alarm were heard with each crash.

          The android matched speeds with a woman with talons, feathers, and a thirty-foot wingspan.

          "The second goddam ape escape this year," she said. "Always he grabs a blonde and always he climbs the Empire State Building. Why a fucking blonde, I want to know?"

          The android observed that the winged woman had lustrous brown hair.  "Why isn't anyone doing anything?" he asked.

          "If we shoot the ape, he might crush the girl, or drop her.  Usually the godalmighty Great and Powerful fucking Turtle just pries the chimp's fingers apart and wafts the girl to the ground, and then we all cut loose.  The ape regenerates, so we can't hurt him permanently.  But the Turtle isn't here.  He's probably shacked up with some bimbo in that shell of his."

          "I think I see the problem now."

          "Hey.  By the way.  What's wrong with your head?"

          The android didn't answer.  Instead, with a crackle, he turned on his insubstantiality flux-field.  He altered course and swooped toward the ape.  It growled at him, baring its teeth. The android smelled rank breath.  He sailed into the middle of the hand that held the blonde girl, receiving an impressionist image of wild pale hair, tears, pleading blue eyes.

          "Holy fuck," said the girl.

          Modular Man rotated his insubstantial X-ray laser within the ape's hand and fired a full-strength burst down the length of its arm.  The ape reacted as if stung, opening his hand.  The blonde tumbled out.  The ape's eyes widened in horror.

          The android turned off his flux-field, seized the girl in his now-substantial arms, and flew away.

          The ape's eyes grew even more terrified.  It had escaped nine times in the last thirty years and by now it knew what to expect.

          Behind him, as he flew, the android heard a barrage of explosions, crackles, shots, rockets, hissing rays, screams, thuds, and futile roars.  There was a final quivering moan, and then the android’s radar detected the shadow of a long-armed giant tumbling down the façade of the skyscraper.  There was a sizzle, and a net of cold blue flame appeared over Fifth Avenue; the ape fell into it, bounced once, and then was borne, unconscious and smoldering, toward its home at Central Park Zoo.

          The android looked at the streets below for video cameras.  He began to descend.

          “Would you mind hovering for a little while?" the blonde said.  "If you're going to land in front of the media, I'd like to fix my makeup first, okay?"

          "Okay." He began to orbit above the cameras.  They pointed up at him.  He could see his reflection in their distant lenses.

          "My name is Cyndi," the blonde said. "I'm an actress.  I just got here from Minnesota a couple days ago.  This might be my big break."

          "Mine, too," said the android.  She smiled at him. “By the way " he added, "I think the ape showed excellent taste."

          "You're pretty good looking, yourself," she said.  "But if you're gonna go on the stage, you'd better do something about that dome of yours."

♦ ♥ ♣ ♠

          "Not bad, not bad," Travnicek mused, watching on his television at a tape of the android, after a brief interview with the press, rising into the heavens with Cyndi in his arms.   He was particularly pleased with the android's deadpan announcement that his creator "had equipped me for this and other eventualities.”

          He turned to his creation.  "Why the fucking hell did you have your hands over your head the whole time?"

          "My radar dome.  I'm getting self-conscious. Everyone asks me what's wrong with my head."

          "A blushingly self-conscious multi-purpose defensive attack system," Travnicek said.  "Jesus Christ.  Just what the world needs.”

          The cute couple in blazers who read the news were giving a bulletin from the Mayor's office that offered praise of the city's new heroic sixth-generation machine intelligence.

          "Can I make myself a skullcap or something?” the android asked. “I'm not going to get on many magazine covers the way I look now."

          "Yeah, go ahead.  Wait a minute.  Here's something." Travnicek turned his attention back to the television.  The older, more masculine half of the cute couple was reporting that the ape had been set free rather than escaped on its own, that its alloy shackles had been twisted and broken like licorice, and that the only clue was a playing card, the jack of diamonds, that had been left on the scene.

          Another jack of diamonds, just moments later, was found at the Museum of Modern Art, where Picasso's Guernica, on loan from the government of Spain, had been stolen in front of several dozen onlookers.  The painting had, the report went, simply folded in on itself and disappeared.  Then the wall behind it was smashed in, as if by an invisible wrecking ball.  The Spanish Embassy refused to confirm or deny the existence of a ransom demand .

          "Get moving over to the Spanish Embassy," Travnicek snapped. "And offer to deliver that ransom.  If they won't cooperate, wait till later tonight and turn insubstantial, sneak in, and get a look at the ransom demand."

          "Yes, sir," said Modular Man.  He turned on his flux-field and flew up through the ceiling.

          "And bring me some croissants in the morning!" Travnicek called after him.

♦ ♥ ♣ ♠

          Leaning against the padded lounge bar with one metal boot on the brass rail, a man dressed in some kind of complicated battle armor was addressing a woman in red tights who, in odd inattentive moments, kept turning transparent.  "Pardon me," he said. "But didn't I see you at the ape escape?"

          "Your table's almost ready, Modular Man," said Hiram. “Sorry, but I didn't realize that Fortunato would invite all friends."

          "No hurry, Hiram.  My date hasn't arrived yet, anyway. Thank you."

          "There are a couple photographers waiting, too."

          "Let them get some pictures after we're seated, then chase them out.  Okay?"

          "Sure."  Hiram, owner of the Aces High restaurant, had a perpetual offer of a free multi-course meal to anyone who succeeded in rescuing the inevitable blonde during the periodic ape escapes.

          "Say," he added, "that was a good stunt this afternoon  I was ready to use my gas gun on the ape if it ever climbed this high.  I thought if I got it laughing hard it might put the girl down.”

          "Good idea, Fatman.  I bet that would have worked."

          The semi-heroic restauranteur gave a pleased smile and bustled out, giving an odd look to the amused black man in the orange mask as he left.

          Black Shadow, known here as Wall Walker, ordered another round of drinks.  Behind him freezing rain drummed on the glass patio doors.  The observation deck was two inches deep in hail.

          "No luck at the Spanish Embassy," the android said. "I looked through all the papers in their offices.  Maybe the insurance company's handling it." He finished his malt whisky and lowered the glass.

          "Hey, Mod Man," Black Shadow said. "I was wondering.  Does that whisky actually effect you? Make you high?"

          "Not really, no.  I just put it in a holding tank with the food and then let my flux generators break it down to energy. But somehow . . ."  He accepted the new glass of whisky with a smile. "It just feels good to stand here at the bar and drink it."

          "Yeah.  I know what you mean."

          "And I can taste, of course.  I don't know what's supposed to taste good or bad, though, so I just try everything.  I'm working it out." He held the single-malt under his nose, sniffed, then tasted.  Taste receptors crackled.  He felt what seemed to be a minor explosion in his nasal cavity.

          "Are you going to get involved in this jack of diamonds thing?" he asked.

          "Depends," Black Shadow said. "The sorts of clues available are best exploited by the authorities.  They can look into their computers and so on, see whether this sort of thing has turned up before.  I can ask around on the streets, of course, but the F.B.I. or somebody might come up with the same information a lot quicker.  But if the bad guy gets identified, or if he gets caught and then set free . . ."  He frowned.  "I might take an interest.  How about you?"

          "I have nothing else to work on."

          "Yeah.  But with those guns and no hair and that skullcap, you're not exactly cut out for undercover work."

          "That can change," Modular Man said.  “Maybe I could wear a toupee.”  He saw Cyndi step into the lounge and stand blinking in the dim lighting.  She was wearing an azure something that left most of her sternum exposed. The android waved at her.  She grinned hello and began working her way around the bar.

          "Well," said Black Shadow, "I can see you two have a lot to talk about.  I guess I'll just sidle off into the shadows.  As I do so well."

          "Want to go patrolling later?"

          "In this weather? Pneumonia'll get the bad guys before we do."

          "I'm not susceptible to cold.  But you have a point." Modular Man noticed that Cyndi's graceful spine seemed even more on view than was her front.  He smiled.

          Cyndi smiled back.  "I like the cap."

          "Thanks," said the android.  "I made it myself."

          Hiram arrived to show them to their table.  Flashbulbs began popping.

          Back in the lounge, the man in combat armor tried to put his arm around the woman in red tights.  His arm passed through her.

          She looked up at him with smiling brown eyes.

          "I was waiting for that," she said. "I'm in an astral body, schmuck."

♦ ♥ ♣ ♠

          The authorities reconstructed the incident later.  They concluded that at approximately ten A.M. on a cold, drizzly December morning, a Con Ed employee named Frank Constantine, thankful to be dry and underground as he inspected a tunnel on the fringes of Jokertown, inhaled a wild-card spore that had been waiting in the tunnel for thirty-six years.  Constantine immediately grew ill, and his partner, a sixty-year-old near-retiree named Rathbone, called for help.  Before aid arrived Constantine was transformed into something resembling a mucous-green gelatinous mass that promptly engulfed the unfortunate Rathbone and then erupted from the nearest manhole into the streets.  Constantine headed into Jokertown and succeeded in devouring two Christmas shoppers and one hot pretzel vendor before the emergency was called in and the sirens began to wail.

          Frank Constantine had drawn a royal flush.

          Modular Man was early on the scene.  As he dived into the canyon street, Constantine looked like a bowl of gelatine thirty feet wide that had been in the refrigerator far too long.  The gelatine was stuffed with black currants that were Constantine's victims, which he was slowly digesting.

          The android hovered over the creature and began firing his X-ray laser, trying to avoid the currants.  The gelatine began to boil where the silent, invisible beam struck.  Constantine made a futile effort to reach his flying tormentor with a pseudopod, but failed.  The creature began to roll in the direction of an alley, looking for escape.  It was not bright enough, apparently, to seek shelter in the sewers.

          The creature squeezed into the alley and rushed down it. The android continued to fire.  Bits were sizzling away and Constantine seemed to be losing energy rapidly.  Modular Man looked ahead and saw a bent figure ahead in the alley.

          She was dressed in several layers of clothing, all worn, all dirty.  There was a floppy felt hat pulled down over a Navy watch cap, and a pair of shopping bags hanging from her arms. Tangled grey hair hung from under the cap.  She was rummaging in a dumpster, tossing crumpled newspapers over her shoulder into the alley.  Modular Man increased his speed, firing radar-directed shots over his shoulder as he barreled through the cold drizzly air.  He dropped to the pavement in front of the dumpster, his knees cushioning the impact.

          "So I says to Maxine, I says . . . " the lady was saying.

          "Excuse me," said the android.  He seized the lady and sped upwards.  Behind him, writhing under the barrage of coherent X-rays, Constantine was evaporating.

          "Maxine says, my mother broke her hip this morning, and you won' t believe . . . " The old lady flailed at him while she continued her monologue.  He silently absorbed an elbow to his jaw and floated to a landing on the nearest roof.  He let go his passenger.  She turned to him flushed with anger.

          "Okay, bunky," she said. "Time to see what Hildy's got in her bag."

          "I'll fly you down later," Modular Man said.  He was already turning to pursue the creature when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the lady opening her bag.

          There was something black in there.  The black thing was getting bigger.

          The android tried to move, to fly away.  Something had hold of him and wouldn't let him go.

          Whatever was in the shopping bag was getting larger.  It was getting larger very quickly.  Whatever had hold of the android was dragging him toward the shopping bag.

          "Stop," he said simply.  The thing wouldn't stop.  The android tried to fight it, but his laser discharges had cost him a lot of power and he didn't seem to have the strength left.

          The blackness grew until it enveloped him.  He felt as if he were falling.  Then he felt nothing at all.

♦ ♥ ♣ ♠

          New York's aces, responding to the emergency, finally conquered Frank Constantine.  What was left of him, blobs of dark green in the streets, melted in the steady drizzle.  His victims, partially eaten, were identified by the non-edible credit cards and laminated I.D. they carried.  Some of their Christmas presents were still intact.

          By nightfall, the hardened inhabitants of Jokertown were referring to Frank Constantine as the Amazing Colossal Snot Monster.  They considered him lucky.  He hadn't had to live with what he had become.

          The android awoke in a dumpster in an alley behind 52nd Street.  He fought his way up from among the paper sacks and plastic garbage bags, and flung back the lid with a bang. Carefully he looked up and down the alley.

          There was no one in sight.

♦ ♥ ♣ ♠

          "So," Travnicek said.  His breath was frosting in front of his face and condensing on his reading glasses.  He took the spectacles off.  "You were displaced about fifty city blocks spatially and moved one hour forward timewise, yes?"

          "Apparently.  When I came out of the dumpster I found that the fight in Jokertown had been over for almost an hour. Comparison with my internal clock showed a discrepancy of seventy-two minutes, fifteen point three three three seconds."

          "Interesting.  You say the bag lady seemed not to be working with the blob thing?"

          "It seems most likely it was a coincidence they were in the same street.  Her monologue did not seem to be strictly rational. I do not think she is mentally sound."

          Travnicek turned up the heater control on his jumpsuit.  The morning drizzle had been blown out to sea by a cold front that seemed to have come straight from Siberia.  The temperature had dropped twelve degrees in two hours and frost was forming on the skylights of the loft in mid-afternoon.  Travnicek lit a Russian cigaret, turned on a hot plate to boil some water for coffee, and then put his hands in his warm jumpsuit pockets.

          "I want to look in your memory," he said. "Open up your chest."

          Modular Man obeyed.  Travnicek took a pair of cables from a minicomputer stacked under an array of video equipment and jacked them into sockets in the android's chest, near his shielded machine brain.  "Back up your memory onto the computer," he said. As the android followed instructions, flickering effects from the flux generator were reflected in Travnicek's intent eyes.  The computer signaled the task complete.  "Button up,” Travnicek said.  As the android removed the jacks and closed his chest, Travnicek turned on the video, then touched controls.  A video picture began racing backwards.

          He reached the place where the bag lady appeared and ran and re-ran the image several times.  He moved to a computer terminal and tapped some instructions.  The image of the bag lady's face filled the screen.  The android looked at the woman's lined, grimy face, the straggling hair, the worn and tattered clothing. He noticed for the first time that she was missing some teeth. Travnicek stood and went back to his one-room living quarters in the back of the loft and came back with a battered Polaroid camera.  He used what was left of the roll, three pictures, snapping frozen the image of the bag lady.  He gave one to his creation .

          "There.  You can show it to people.  Ask if they've seen her."

          "Yes, sir.

          Travnicek took thumbtacks and stuck the other two pictures to the low beams of the ceiling, next to newsprint photographs from USA Today and the Times society section, each of which showed the android dining with Cyndi at Aces High.

          “I want you to find out where the bag lady is," Travnicek said. "I want you to get what's in her bag.  And I want you to find out where she got it." He shook his head, dripping cigaret ash on the floor, and muttered,  "I don't think she looks like a crackpot inventor.  I think she's just found this thing somewhere."

          "Do you want me to concentrate exclusively on the bag lady? Or should I work on the Jack of Diamonds case also?"

          Travnicek blew warm breath on his freezing fingertips.  "If you can think of anything else to do other than wait for this critter to strike again.  But the bag lady's your priority, yes?" He pulled a chair up to his video console.  "I'm going to run through your memory of the trip to the embassy.  I might notice something you hadn't." He began to speed backwards through the android's digital memory.

          The android winced deep in his computer mind.  He began talking quickly, hoping to distract his inventor from the pictures .

          "I could go through the insurance company just as I went through the embassy.  Or perhaps police headquarters--- I'm sure they'd have everything on file.  Yes--- that course certainly seems likely to stand the best chance of success.  Which police precinct should I try--- the one that handled the first call, or headquarters somewhere?"

          “Piss in a chalice!" exclaimed Travnicek, in German.  The android felt another wince coming on.  Travnicek turned to Modular Man in surprise.

          "You're screwing that actress lady!" he said.  "That Cyndi what's-her-name!" The android resigned himself to what was about to come.

          "That's correct," he said.

          "You're just a goddam toaster," Travnicek said. "What the hell made you think you could fuck?"

          "You gave me the equipment," the android said.  "And you implanted emotions in me.  And on top of that, you made me good-looking."

          "Holy shit." Travnicek turned his eyes from Modular Man to the video and back again.  "I gave you the equipment so you could pass as a human if you had to.  And I just gave you the emotions so you could understand the enemies of society.  I didn't think you’d do anything.”  He tossed his cigaret butt to the floor.  “Was it fun?” he asked.

          “It was pleasant, yes.”

          “Your blonde chippie seems to be having a good time.”  Travnicek cackled and reached for the controls.  “I want to start this party at the beginning.”

          “Didn’t you want to look at the bag lady again?”

          “First things first.  Get me an Urquell.”  He looked up as another thought occurred to him.  "Do we have any popcorn?"

          "No!" The android's abrupt answer was tossed over his shoulder.

          Modular Man brought the beer and watched while Travnicek had his first sip.  The Czech looked up in annoyance.

          "I don't like the way you're looking at me," he said.

          The android considered this.  "Would you prefer me to look at you some other way?" he asked.

          "Go stand in the corner, microwave-oven-that-fucks!" Travnicek bellowed. "Turn your goddam head away, video-unit-that-fucks!"

          For the rest of the afternoon, while his creation stood in a corner of the loft, Travnicek watched the video and enjoyed himself enormously.  He watched the best parts several times, cackling at what he saw.  Then, slowly, his laughter dimmed.  A cold, uncertain feeling was creeping up the back of his neck.  He began casting glances at the stolid figure of the android.  He had never anticipated anything like this.  He turned off the vid unit, dropped his cigaret butt in the Urquell bottle, then lit another.

          The android was showing a surprising degree of independence. Travnicek reviewed elements of his programming, the expert-systems logic by which the android was allowed, in imitation of human thought patterns, to reprogram itself, within limits, in order to solve various problems without recourse to the programmer.  Travnicek's chief innovation in expert-systems programming had been to add to his programming a simulation, not only of human problem-solving methods, but an abstract of human emotion, gleaned from a variety of expert sources ranging from Freud to Dr. Spock.  It had been an intellectual challenge for Travnicek to do the programming — transforming the illogicalities of human behavior into the cold rhetoric of a program.  He'd performed the task during his second year at Texas A&M, when he'd barely gone out of his quarters the whole year and felt he had to set himself a large task in order to keep from being driven crazy by the lunatic environment of a university that seemed an embodiment of the collective unconscious fantasies of Stonewall Jackson and Albert Speer.  Travnicek had never been particularly interested in human psychology as such--- passion, he had long ago decided, was not only foolish but genuinely boring, a waste of time.  But putting passion into a program, yes, that was interesting.

          He wondered how his expert-systems logic had interacted with human passion.  The android was capable of teaching himself, of learning from experience.  Had the machine-part of him not only made use of the emotion program, but somehow implanted it within his own programming? And was the emotion, now implanted, evolving as the expert-systems logic evolved?

          From the evidence of the video memory, Modular Man had a considerable, perhaps (if Travnicek's own experience was anything to go by) abnormally large libido.  What the hell else did he have inside that perpetually-evolving machine consciousness of his?

          For a moment a tremor of fear went through Travnicek.  The ghost of Victor Frankenstein's creation loomed for a moment in his mind.  Was a rebellion on the part of the android possible? Could he evolve hostile passions against his creator? But no---there were overriding imperatives that Travnicek had hardwired into the system.  Modular Man could not evolve away his prime directives as long as his computer consciousness was physically intact, any more than a human could, unassisted, evolve away his genetic makeup in a single lifetime.

          Travnicek began to feel a growing comfort.  He looked at the android with a kind of admiration.  He felt pride that he'd programmed such a fast learner.

          "You're not bad, toaster," he said finally, turning off the video.  "Reminds me of myself in the old days." He raised an admonishing finger.  "But no screwing tonight.  Go find me the bag lady."

          Modular Man's voice was muffled as he stood with his face to a juncture of the wall.  "Yes, sir," he said.

♦ ♥ ♣ ♠

          "I am beginning to realize," said the android, raising a hot buttered rum to his lips, "that my creator is a hopeless sociopath."

          Black Shadow considered this.  "I suspect, if you don't mind a touch of theology, this just puts you in the same boat with the rest of us," he said.

          "He's beginning to run my memories for his amusement.  I'm going to have to erase this before he sees it."

          "I suppose you could run away.  Last I heard, slavery was illegal.  He's not even paying you minimum wage, I suppose."

          "I'm not a person.  I'm not human.  Machines do not have rights.”

          Black Shadow smiled.  "My record demonstrates that I have little respect for these sorts of legal technicalities.  My advice is to run for it and worry afterward if he can bring you back."

          The android shook his head.  "It won't work.  I have hardwired inhibitions against disobeying him, disobeying his instructions, or revealing his identity in any way."

          "He's thorough, I'll hand that to him."  Black Shadow looked at Modular Man carefully.  "Why'd he build you, anyway?"

          "He was going to mass-market me and sell me to the military. But I think he's having so much fun playing with me that he may never get around to selling my rights to the Pentagon."

          The vigilante smiled.  "Personally, I'd be thankful for that."

          "I wouldn't know."  The android signaled for another drink, then reached into one of his inner pockets.  He showed Black Shadow the Polaroid of the bag lady.

          "Where would I find this person?" he asked.

          "She looks like a shopping bag lady."

          "She is a shopping bag lady."

          The masked man laughed.  "Haven't you been listening to the broadcasts?  You know how many thousands of those women there are in this town?  There's a recession going on out there.  Winos, runaways, people out of a job or out of luck, people who got kicked out of mental institutions because of state cutbacks on funding . . .  Jesus--- and on a night like this, too.  You know it's already the coldest night for this date in recorded history? They've had to open up churches, police stations--- all sorts of places so the vagrants won't freeze to death.  And a lot of the vagrants won't go to any kind of shelter, because they're too scared of the authorities or because they're just too crazy to realize they're gonna need help.  I don't envy you, Mod Man, not at all.  The dumpsters'll be full of dead people tomorrow. "

          "I'll start with the shelters, I guess. "

          "You want to find her before she freezes to death, try the trashcan fires first, the shelters later."  He frowned at the picture again.  "Why are you trying to find her, anyway?"

          "I think . . . she may be a witness to something."

          "Right.  Well.  Good luck, then."

          The android glanced over his shoulder at the patio observation deck with its glistening skin of ice.  Beyond the rail Manhattan gleamed at him coldly, with a clarity that he hadn't before seen, as if the buildings, the people, the lights had all been frozen inside a vast crystal.  It was as if the city were no closer than the stars, and as incapable as they of giving warmth .

          Inside his mind, the android performed a purely mental shudder.  He wanted to stay here in the warmth of the Aces High, going through the, for him, perfectly abstract motions of raising a warm drink to his lips.  There was something comforting in it, in spite of the logical pointlessness of the act.  He did not entirely understand the impulse, only knew it for a fact.  The human part of his programming, presumably.

          But there were restrictions placed on his desires, and one of those was obedience.  He could stay at the Aces High only so long as it could help him in his mission of finding the bag lady.

          He finished the hot buttered rum and said goodbye to the Black Shadow.  After a phone call to Cyndi telling her he would be working tonight, he'd be spending the rest of the night on the streets.

          The legions of the night were endless.  The android's abstract knowledge of the New York underclass, the fact that there were thousands of people, perhaps tens of thousands, who drifted among the glass towers and solid brownstones in an existence almost as remote from that of the buildings' inhabitants as denizens of Mars . .   the abstract digitalize facts were not, somehow, adequate to describe the reality, the clusters of men who passed bottles around ashcan fires, the dispossessed who lived behind walls of cardboard, the insane who hugged themselves in alleyways or subway entrances, chanting the litany of the mad.  It was as if a spell of evil had fallen on the city, that part of the population had been subjected to war or devastation, made homeless refugees, while the others had been enchanted so as not to see them.

          The android found two dead, the last of their warmth gone from them.  He left these in their newspaper coffins and went on. He found others that were dying or ill and took them to hospitals.  Others ran from him.  Some pretended to gaze at the bag lady's picture, cocking the Polaroid up to look at the picture in the light of a trashcan fire, and then asked for money in return for a sighting that was obviously false.

          At four in the morning the android found her.  He was walking through the gymnasium of a private prep school that had been opened to maybe eight hundred vagrants.  There were cots for about half, apparently acquired from some National Guard Depot, and the others were sleeping on the floor.  The big room echoed to the sound of snores, cries, the wail of children.  Modular Man walked down the long rows, scanning left and right.

          And there she was.  Walking among the rows of cots, mumbling to herself, dragging her heavy bags.  She looked up at the same moment that the android saw her, and there was a mutual shock of recognition, a snaggletoothed, malevolent grin.

          The android was airborne in a picosecond of his lightspeed thought.  He wanted to be clear of any innocent bystanders if she was going to unleash whatever it was she had in her bag.  He had barely left the floor before his flux-force field snapped on, crackling around his body.  The bag-thing was not going to be able to seize anything solid.

          Radar quested out, the gas-grenade launcher on his left shoulder whirred as it aimed.  His shoulder took the recoil.  The grenade became substantial as soon as it left the flux-field but kept its momentum.  Opaque gas billowed up around the bag lady.

          She smiled to herself.  The android could see a dim glow surrounding her.  A force-field of her own, keeping the sleep gas away.

          The bag lady opened her shopping bag.  The android could see the blackness lying there.  He felt something cold pass through him, something that tried to tug at his insubstantial frame.  The steel girders supporting the ceiling rang like chimes above his head.

          "Sonofabitch," she said.

          The bag lady's crooked smile died.

          "You remind me of Shaun."

          Modular Man’s flight crested near the ceiling.  He was going to dive at her, turn substantial at the last second, make a grab for the shopping bag, and hope it didn't eat him.

          The bag lady began grinning again.  As the android reached his pushover point just above her, she pulled the shopping bag over her head.

          It swallowed her.  Her head disappeared into it, followed by the rest of her body.  Her hands, clutching the end of the bag, pulled the bag after her into the void.  The bag folded into itself and vanished.

          "That's impossible," somebody said.

          The android searched the room carefully.  The bag lady was not to be found.

          Ignoring the growing disturbance below, he drifted upward, through the ceiling.  The cold lights of Manhattan appeared around him.  He rose alone into the night.

          ♦ ♥ ♣ ♠

          "Goddam the woman!" Travnicek said.  His hand, which was holding a letter, trembled with rage.  "I've been evicted!"  He brandished the letter. "Disturbances!" he muttered. "Unsafe equipment!  Sixty fucking days!"  He began to stomp on the floor with his heavy boots, trying deliberately to rattle the apartment below.  Breath frosted from his every word.  "The bitch!" he bellowed. "I know her game!  She just wanted me to fix the place up at my own expense so she could evict me and then charge higher rent.  I didn't spend a fortune in improvements, so now she wants to find another chump.  Some member of the fucking gentrifying class.”   He looked up at the android, patiently waiting with a carry-out bag of hot croissants and heavily-sugared coffee in a foam cup.

          “I want you to get into her office tonight and trash the place," Travnicek said. "Leave nothing intact, not a piece of paper, not a chair.  I want only mangled furniture and confetti."

          "Yes, sir," the android said.  Resigned to it.

          "The Lower East fucking Side," Travnicek said.  "This neighborhood's starting to get pretensions."  He took his coffee from the android's hand while he continued stomping the particle board floor .

          He looked over his shoulder at his creation. barked. "Are you looking for the bag lady or what?"

          "Yes, sir.  But since the gas launcher didn't work, I thought I'd change to the dazzler."

          Travnicek jumped up and down several times.  The sound echoed through the loft.  "Whatever you want."  He stopped his jumping up and down and smiled.  "Okay," he said. "I know what to do.  I'll turn on the big generators!"

          The android put the paper bag down on a workbench, swapped weapons, and flew soundlessly up through the ceiling.  He was relieved that he had got off so lightly.  Travnicek had been so upset about his eviction that he'd forgot to lecture his creation about his failure to capture the bag lady, and Modular Man had been sensible enough not to mention the headline he'd seen in the paper while buying Travnicek his breakfast, that Guernica had been returned to the government of Spain in return for a fabulous ransom.

          Outside, the cold wind continued to batter the city, funneling like a flood between the tall buildings, blowing people like straws in the water.  The temperature had risen barely above freezing, but the wind chill was dropping the effective temperature to the teens.

          More people, the android knew, were going to die.

          One landlady had her office destroyed by a mysterious intruder and a hundred people died of cold and exposure before the android found the bag lady again, two nights later.  He was floating high over Fifth Avenue, searching the street, the alleys, and Central Park for infra-red signatures.  The bag lady stood in plain sight on the well-lit front porch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  In front, Fifth Avenue was littered with bright flags, blown down from lampposts, that announced the arrival of the Maritime Artist Exhibit.  The bag lady was wrapped in one of the flags, sheltering herself in the recess of the porch.

          Certain that he hadn't been seen, the android spiraled down, turning on the flux-field that made him insubstantial.  His dark suit blended in with the night.  The dazzle gun moved on his shoulders to its firing position.  The android dropped from the sky to land directly in front of the bag lady.  The dazzler exploded right in her face.

          "Motherfucking aliens!" she muttered, and took a step back. "Always playing yer goddam tricks!"  Her eyes searched blindly for the android as he floated right through her, then turned off his field and spun around to approach the bag lady from the rear. She was clawing at her bag, shouting into the night.

          "Got you," the android thought, and reached for the bag.

          "Not so fast," said a voice from behind.

          The android felt a tearing deep inside him.  The guns on his shoulders were crushed and twisted like an aluminum can in the hands of a giant.  He could feel components inside his chest torquing under some incredible force, feel sparks and flames.

          He turned, astonished.  There was something strange standing behind him.

          It looked like a Holbein portrait turned somewhat edge-on, about forty-five degrees, with all the background cut away except for the main subject.  The figure seemed entirely two-dimensional, a man in a kind of elaborate red velvet Henry VIII costume, complete with hat and plume.  He was carrying something longer than he was, a rectangular object on which the android saw flags, smoke, water.

          The portrait smiled.  The smile was not nice.  The portrait rotated until it was edge-on and vanished.

          There was the sound of a shopping bag rattling. “You’ll get yours, bunky," the voice said.

          The android felt his feet leaving the ground as he was pulled backwards.  Not again, he thought, and then thought ceased.

♦ ♥ ♣ ♠

          It was still night when he came to, still cold.  He was in the middle of something that smelled bad even in the winter air. On top it was crusted hard and covered with frost, beneath it was almost liquid.  He realized it was human waste.

          He stood and moved away from the pile.  Night soil dripped down his legs.  A broken ceramic pot rolled away, disturbed by his foot. Carefully he monitored his internal systems.  Flux-field monitor destroyed, weapons systems damaged, dazzler damaged, x-ray laser destroyed.  Other components appeared to be functioning, though they had suffered stress.

          Below him he could see a series of shallow flooded terraces, stepping downward into a shadowed valley.  Above, clustered close to the edges of a twisting road, were several hundred houses. Lights glowed in several windows.  It occurred to him that this landscape was not typically Occidental.

          He looked up at the stars and made a brief calculation.  He was at about thirty-three degrees North latitude, but longitude was harder to figure.  His internal clock may have been disturbed as it had the last time he'd been sucked into the shopping bag, and without accurate time the determination of longitude was impossible.

          Carefully he tested his flight capability, then rose from the ground.  He decided to head East.

          He found a vast river, and he moved downstream.  He flew through low-lying clouds and they and his speed cleaned the night soil from him.  Below he could see silent junks coasting downstream under their gleaming lugsails.  Others were moored to the bank.  As the android climbed into a rosy dawn, he followed the river to an ocean.  Just south was a huge port city, with hundreds of ships tied to the wharves.  By that time he'd concluded this was Shanghai, and a brief flying inspection of the ships and wharves showed his deduction was correct.  There weren't very many people awake yet, and he didn't think anyone saw him.

          Deciding to take the polar route, he corrected his internal clocks and rose high into the sky, heading north along the coast. Somehow he had jumped fourteen hours in time and thousands of miles.  It would take him hours to return.

          The android's reappearance was aided by the Siberian jet stream that was punishing North America.  He caught it high over the brilliant blue-and-white world that was the Arctic and let its great velocities add to his own, his internal heaters turned high to keep ice from forming on his body as he soared high across Canada and the U.S.   Here the misery below was abstracted, nothing but distant crosshatched fields dusted with white and brown, writhing rivers choked with ice, the straight, black lines of expressways.

          In New York, it was night again.  Through one of the skylights Modular Man could see Travnicek sitting at a workbench amid a cloud of tobacco smoke.  The android tapped on the skylight, and Travnicek jumped, cursed in Slovak, and looked up with red, angry eyes.  Travnicek pulled a stool under the skylight, stood on it, and hammered at the ancient, rusted opening mechanism, breaking the skin on his hand.  As soon as the thing opened he was bellowing.

          "Where the fuck was breakfast?  I thought you'd been lost, like the others."

          "What others?" The android pulled open the skylight and squeezed through it.  

          Travnicek sucked at his bleeding hand.  “Never mind," he said.  "Why the hell didn't you fly in, like before?  And where have you been?"

          "In China."  Travnicek was sufficiently surprised by the answer to keep silent while Modular Man explained his journey. Wordlessly, he turned to one of the benches and gave the android a copy of one of the afternoon papers, detailing the disappearance of An Action with Barbary Corsairs, by William van de Velte the Younger, from the Nautical Art Exhibit.  A museum guard was also missing.  People were speculating about an inside job, but the jack of diamonds, left at the scene, pointed elsewhere.

          "The goddam Jack of Diamonds has gone from Guernica to genre art," Travnicek said. "No fucking taste."  He grinned with his cigaret-stained teeth.  "Or maybe he just knows what he likes."

          "Perhaps," said the android, "he's just taking pictures on loan from foreign governments.  That way the lines of bureaucracy are more tangled and it's more likely they'll just ransom the stuff instead of looking for him."

          "Could be.  Open up.  I want to see what needs replacing."

          Travnicek first examined the damaged weaponry, then lowered his head and peered into the android's chest.  Modular Man hoped he wasn't dropping too much cigaret ash in there.

          "Interesting," Travnicek said.  He removed some of the damaged components.  They looked as if they'd been twisted by a giant hand.

          "Our Jack of Diamonds can't be turning himself two-dimensional," Travnicek said. "That would kill him--- he'd just be crushed that way.  So what he's doing is somehow warping the space around him.  He's doing it enough to make the space, with himself in it, two-dimensional.  When he's edge-on he's invisible.  He can probably walk through walls that way."

          "Maybe that's why he's stealing art.  He's attracted to two-dimensional representations.”

          Travnicek ignored him.  "He uses his space-warping ability as a weapon," he said. "It's like being able to pass a strong gravity wave through the target, crushing it.  That's how he knocked down that wall at MOMA."  He tossed one of the components in the trash.  "Works pretty good, yes?"

          "How can he be defeated?"

          Travnicek shrugged.  "How the fuck do I know?"  He lit a new cigaret from the stub of the old.  "Let me think for a minute."  He paced the room.  From one of the apartments below came the sound of a television commercial, then a murmured, indistinct conversation. Then sex, louder even than the TV.

          Travnicek ignored the sound.  One cigaret followed the other.  "Okay," Travnicek said.  "The guy can't be entirely confined to two dimensions, because otherwise he couldn't tell where he is.  He has to be able to see out of the field he’s generating, to reach out and grab works of art, to exchange air with the outside so he doesn't asphyxiate.  So whatever's keeping him in there isn't perfect.   Light gets in, material objects get in, air gets in. If they get in, we can get in."

          "But how?"

          Travnicek gave him an annoyed look.  "Get your ass out of here and let me think about it, that's how."

          "Shall I look for the bag lady some more?"

          "You don't seem to be doing so good where she's concerned, yes?  Forget about her for now.  Just be back before the sun comes up."

          "With your breakfast."

          "Yeah.  Sausage and eggs, okay?  Lots of garlic in the sausage, if you can find it."

          "Yes, sir.

          The android climbed up on the stool and squeezed through the skylight again.  A dry, blustery wind tugged at his clothing and rattled the panes of the skylight.  He flew into the sky.

          First thing, he thought, find a phone booth and see what Cyndi's doing.

♦ ♥ ♣ ♠

          "It doesn't sound like a coincidence to me," Black Shadow said.  "Both those characters on the porch of the museum at the same time."

          "You're probably right," the android said.

          The wind rattled the patio doors of the Aces High.  He was waiting here for Cyndi.  Drinks here, then dinner at the Russian Tea Room.  The rest of the evening would be improvised.

          Modular Man looked at the drinks lined up on the bar before him.  Irish coffee, martini, margarita, beer-and-a-shot, Napoleon brandy.  He seriously wanted to try new tastes right now, and wondered if getting crushed by the two-dee man's gravity wave had wakened in him a sense of mortality.  The bartender had looked at him oddly when he'd ordered the long line of drinks, but he was used to odd orders in this place.

          The android swallowed some more Irish coffee.  He wanted to finish it before it got cold.  He put the cup down and wiped heavy cream from his upper lip.

          "I wonder how he recruited her?" he asked.

          "Probably just gave her a few hot meals.  That's what you should have done, instead of going in with gas grenades and stuff."

          "I may need help."  Thoughtfully. "There being two of them now."

          "Yeah.  Well, I said I'd take an interest if things moved that way."

          "The problem is, I'm supposed to win publicity for myself, and that doesn't necessarily include sharing credit for captures."

          The vigilante chuckled, a low, ominous sound. “Publicity is one thing I don't need."

          "That's what I figured."

          Black Shadow reached into a pocket and came up with a small radio transmitter.  "This'll reach my, ah, answering service," he said.  "You just tell me where you want me to meet you."

          "Thanks.  I owe you one."

          Another chuckle.  "Yes, you do.  Just so we don't forget."

          The android considered the line of drinks, picked up the martini.  "I can't forget," he said. “Couldn’t if I wanted to.”

♦ ♥ ♣ ♠

          "Hey," Cyndi said. "How about we take a break?"

          "If you like."  Cyndi raised her hands, cupped the android's head between them.

          "All that exertion," she said. "Don't you even sweat a little bit?"

          "No.  I just turn on my cooling units."

          "Amazing."  The android slid off her.  "Doing it with a machine," she said thoughtfully. "You know, I would have thought it would be at least a little kinky.  But it's not."

          "Nice of you to say so.  I think."

          Modular Man was planning to move the evening's memory from its sequential place to somewhere else, and fill the empty space with a boring re-run of the previous night's patrol for the bag lady.  With any luck, Travnicek would just speed through the patrol and wouldn't go looking for memory porn.

          She sat up in the bed, reaching for the night table.  "Want some coke?"

          "It's wasted on me.  Go ahead."  She set the mirror carefully in front of her and began chopping white powder.  The android watched as she snorted a pair of lines and leaned back against the pillows with a smile.  She looked at him and took his hand.

          "You really don't have to be so hung up on performance, you know," she said. "I mean, you knew when I was having a good time. You could have finished if you'd wanted."

          "I don't finish."

          Her look was a little glassy.  "What?" she said.

          "I don't finish.  Orgasm is a complex random firing of neurons.  I don't have neurons, and nothing I do is truly random. It wouldn't work."

          "Holy fuck."  Cyndi blinked at him.

          "So what does it feel like?"

          "Pleasant.  In a very complicated way."

          She cocked her head and thought about this for a moment. "That's about right," she concluded.  She snorted another pair of lines and looked at him brightly.

          "I got a job," she said. "That's how I was able to afford the coke."  He smiled.

          "Congratulations."

          "It's in California.  A commercial.  I'm in the hand of this giant ape, see, and I'm rescued by Bud Man.  You know, the guy in the beer ads.  And then at the end--- "  She rolled her eyes. "---at the end we're all happily drunk, Bud Man, the ape, and me, and I ask the ape how he's doing, and the ape belches."  She frowned.  "It's kind of gross."

          "I was about to say."

          "But then there's a chance for a guest shot on Twenty-Dollar Hotel.  I get to have an affair with a mobster or something.  My agent wasn't too clear about it."  She giggled.  "At least there aren't any giant apes in that one.  I mean, one was enough."

          "I'll miss you," the android said.  He wasn't at all sure how he felt about this.  Or, for that matter, if what he felt could in any way be described as feeling.  Cyndi patted his hand.

          "You'll get to rescue other nice ladies."

          "I suppose.  None nicer than you, though."

          She laughed some more.  "You have a way with a compliment," she said.

          "Thank you," he said.  The android was considering his yearning for experience, the strange fashion his four-day-old career had of providing it, the way it seemed to him that the experience provided was not enough, would never prove enough.  If the next encounter with the jack of diamonds proved fatal, he wondered if there was anything that would survive the destruction, something in the way of existence savored, lessons learned, mistakes cherished and avoided.

          He was hungry, he realized, for life.  His appetite growing, and death meant never being able to appease it. that something he'd learned, or simply a fact of nature?

          He doubted, somehow, that any enlargement of his experience would serve to answer that question.

♦ ♥ ♣ ♠

          He returned to Travnicek's loft before dawn, slipping in through the skylight.  Travnicek's eyes looked like highway maps executed in red.  He held up a piece of plastic-encased circuitry.  "Gravity-wave detector," he said. "Put it in slot six.  You'll be able to track the Jack of Diamonds."

          "Thank you, sir.  Here's your breakfast."

          Travnicek ignored the paper bag.  "I'm working on some attachments to one of the portable flux generators," he said. "Put it near the two-dimensional spatial distortion and turn it on.  What it does is feed the energy from the generator into the field and make it more powerful.  The field will expand until it swallows you.  Once in there, you'll meet the guy face to face, and then you just punch out the sonofabitch."

          "Yes, sir.

          "It'll take me a few hours to finish this.  Go warm the coffee."

          "Yes, sir.”

          Modular Man made his rendezvous with Black Shadow on a dark corner in Jokertown.  The gravity-wave detector had been pulsing for several hours now.  The flux-generator, with its attachments, was being carried in a small athletic bag and looked like a black-painted cantaloupe with a pistol grip.

          Black Shadow's cape snapped in the wind.  His eyes reflected red and green as Christmas street decorations waved over his head.  "Evening, Mod Man," he said. "Heard anything from our two-dimensional friend?"

          "I know where he is, more or less.  West of here, not far."

          Something that the android preferred not to look at was making gurgling, sucking noises in an alley behind the vigilante. Black Shadow was apparently not much disturbed.  Modular Man quickly explained the function of the flux-generator.  "Let's get the hell out of here, then," Black Shadow said. "I'm freezing to death."

          "I'll fly you.  It'll be quicker."

          "Just not warmer."

          The vigilante wrapped himself thoroughly in his cloak, and Modular Man put his arms around the man's chest and rose into the air.  Black Shadow winced as the wind buffeted him.

          The Hudson was a grey chop a short distance away from their landing point on top of a warehouse.  Below, in a pool of streetlamp halogen light, they could see some men huddled into overcoats and knit hats conferring with what appeared to be a red velvet painting of Henry VIII.  Objects changed hands.  A long paper-wrapped parcel, about what would hold a painting seven feet long, seemed to materialize into three-dimensional space. Two of the men grabbed it, fighting with it as the wind tried to carry it, and them, away.

          Infra-red detectors snapped on in the android's plastic eyes.  He searched the street scene carefully and found the bag lady on the opposite street corner, huddled beside someone's stoop.  She was still wearing the exhibition flag from two nights before, wrapped around her body like a sheath.

          "He's moving," the android said as he felt the readings on the gravity-wave detector altering.

          "Where is he?  I can't see the fucker."

          "Right there.  Moving across the streets, toward the bag lady."

          The vigilante's teeth were chattering in the cold. 

          "He's right near her."

          "Okay.  Now I see her.  Let's go."

          Black Shadow tore the flux generator out of the athletic bag and leaped the three storeys to the ground, absorbing the impact without damage.  His next bound took him over the heads of the three men wrestling with the painting, but the wind caught his cloak and pushed him off his target.  He required another, smaller leap to bring him into striking distance of the bag lady and the two-dee man.  The generator began to whine as he pointed it at them.

          Modular Man was high overhead, having become airborne as soon as he saw the vigilante spring off the warehouse.  The android reached his pushover point and began his dive.  He saw three men wrestling with the canvas, the bag lady whirling at Black Shadow's approach, flashes of oddly-distorted Tudor clothing.  The flux-generator was shrieking, nearby windows rattling in accompaniment.

          There was something black in the bag lady's shopping bag. 

          It was growing.

          The android dove straight for it.  His arms were thrown out wide.

          He realized that if the lady moved her bag at the last minute, things would get very messy.

          The blackness grew.  The wind was tugging at him, trying to spin him off course, but the android corrected.

          When he struck the blackness of the portal, he felt again the obliterating nullity overcome him.  But before he lost track of himself, he felt his hands closing on the edges~of the shopping bag, clamping on them, not letting go.

          For a small fraction of a second he felt satisfaction. Then, as expected, he felt nothing at all.

♦ ♥ ♣ ♠

          Black Shadow saw the android disappear into the shopping bag, saw his hands clutching at the edges, dragging the bag in after him.  Saw the bag swallow the android and then itself, leaving the bag lady standing bewildered, staring at her empty hand.

          That's impossible, Black Shadow thought.

          He kept seeing fragments of the jack of diamonds, like someone seen in a funhouse mirror.  The generator in his hand was vibrating like a crazy thing.  He jumped for the bits of two-dee image, the generator stuck out in front of him.

          Work, you bastard, he thought.

          There was a scream as the generator tried to leap from his hand, then the scream climbed into the ultrasonic.  

          There was a snap, as of two universes banging together.

♦ ♥ ♣ ♠

          A monologue ran continually in the bag lady's head. Sometimes things outside the monologue caught her interest for a while, but she always returned to the monologue in the end.  The monologue was usually about her life before her bastard of a husband took the kids away and committed her.  Or at least it featured characters she had known then, and the thing she found most interesting about the monologue was that sometimes it climbed out of her head and began to be spoken by other people. Sometimes some wino she'd met in an alley would look at her and say something that she had said to herself only a few moments before, and sometimes inanimate objects talked to her---buildings, clouds, passing automobiles.

          At the moment, to her surprise, the monologue had gone. There were only two figures in front of her, one in a black cape, the other in red velvet.  She watched them suspiciously, wondering if they'd taken the voice away.  They were two-dimensional, flat just like the funny papers, and like the characters in the funny papers they were engaged in combat.  Jumping, punching, their mouths working as they shouted at each other.  There was something missing, though, and the bag lady realized that there were no dialogue balloons.

          "Whass the matter, here?" she demanded. "I want talk in my funnies, yah?"

          The two figures came together.  There was a blossoming darkness, like a bright flash in negative, a sudden explosion of blackness.  Then a bright flash that dazzled her eyes.  Every piece of glass for two blocks around shattered.

          The bag lady blinked.  There were still two people in front of her, but they weren't flat funny-paper people any more, they were just ordinary people in odd clothes.  The one in red velvet was sitting down.  His skin was blue with cold.  His teeth chattered.

          "Jesus Christ," he said. "What was that?"

          "I stole your body heat, man.  Sucked your photons.”  The black man smiled.  “Try surviving without the electromagetic force.”

          "Jesus Christ," said the red velvet man again.  "I’m gonna die of hypothermia.”

          "Probably not.  But you can look forward to a warm-water enema in the emergency room.”

          The bag lady could hear the monologue rising in her head again, and the conversation between the two oddly-dressed people wasn't very interesting.  She didn't think it was likely that the red-velvet man would give her any more food or show her any more interesting times.

          She looked down at her right hand, where she'd been carrying one of her two shopping bags.  The bag was gone.  Some bastard had stolen it.  She felt a pang of loss, sharper than the bite of the wind.  Half her life had just been torn away, one of the things that helped her to realize that she knew something the others didn't.

          The monologue in her head began to take on complaining tones.  There just weren't enough honest people in the world.

          "Gotta find a new bag, bunky," she said.  She turned and faced into the cold wind blowing off the Hudson.  She began to move off into the night.

          The nice thing about this kind of a life, the monologue told her, was that there was always something new in the next dumpster.

♦ ♥ ♣ ♠

          The three men were wrestling the painting into a large van when Black Shadow walked toward them, holding the red velvet man by the collar.  The prisoner’s teeth chattered.  "Would you mind taking this guy to the police?" Black Shadow asked. "Just sit on him.  I don't think he'll make any trouble."  He held up an object spattered with drops of once-molten metal. "This is the thing he used to make himself two-dimensional.  Got slagged in the fight.  Think I’ll keep it, though."  The device vanished into his cloak.

          The men looked embarrassed.  "Well," one said, "the thing is, we sort of promised him we wouldn't prosecute him if he gave the painting back."

          "That's okay, man.  You didn't make the collar.  Modular Man will be along later to file charges.  Right now he's chasing the accomplice."

          The man looked surprised.  "I didn't know the Jack of Diamonds had an accomplice," he said.

          "Knave of Diamonds!" the man said. "Knave of fucking Diamonds!  You guys are so stupid!"

          Black Shadow punched him once in the head.  The Knave of Diamonds hung unconscious from his arm.

          "There," he said. "I knocked him out for you. Just take him, will you?"

♦ ♥ ♣ ♠

          The android awoke in an airless place.  There was some kind of formless glop all around him.  He stretched out, found himself confined, and exerted some pressure.  The metal tank in which he was confined burst apart.

          Chitinous webs lay in milky lattices.  He could see stars and the bright blue-and-white orb of earth.  The contents of the shopping bag, clothing and half-eaten food, plastic cups and glass bottles, a child's broken push-toy, tumbled weightlessly in the space around him.

          There was also something spherical and black.  The android reached for it   It was warm, and he felt a faint vibration.

          The space ship was tumbling, with vast holes torn in it.  As sunlight shifted, shining through the holes, the android saw he was not alone.

          There were three other people here.  They huddled together near the center of the ship, their arms and legs thrown wide. Two looked like derelicts; one white, one black.  The other was a museum guard.  They all looked surprised to have found themselves in orbit, without air, and in each other's company.

          The android realized where the bag lady had got her device. He began to search the ship.

          ♦ ♥ ♣ ♠

          Travnicek hung another newspaper clipping from the loft roofbeam.  There were pictures of the Knave of Diamonds on his way to the arraignment, and other pictures of Modular Man in his skullcap, looking pleased by all the attention.

          "Nice," Travnicek said.  "You did good, toaster.  I pat myself on the back for a great job of programming."

          The android brought him a cup of coffee.  He grinned and took it.

          Travnicek turned to contemplate the alien orb sitting on his workbench.  He'd been trying to manipulate it with various kind of remotes, but was unable to achieve anything, other than sometimes making the remotes disappear, presumably into some waste disposal heap somewhere between the Lower East Side and Alpha Centauri.  The android hadn't been able to work it, either. Travnicek moved toward the workbench and studied the thing from a respectful distance.

          "Perhaps it requires contact from a life-form to work it," the android suggested.  "Maybe you should touch it."

          "Maybe you should mind your own fucking business.  I'm not getting near that goddam thing."

          "Yes, sir."  The android was silent for a moment.  Travnicek sipped his coffee.  Then he shook his head and turned away from the workbench.

          "Sir?" the android said.  Travnicek looked at him.

          "You got a question, blender?"

          "That space ship looked as if it had been attacked by something.  Whatever attacked it probably didn't come from Earth, and might still be up there.  Do you suppose we should look into what they're doing?"

          "In your spare time, maybe.  Which you don't have any of, since you're going to go to the store and get me a bottle of cold duck and some jelly doughnuts.  I feel like celebrating."

          "Yes, sir."  The android, his face expressionless, turned insubstantial and rocketed up through the ceiling.

          Travnicek went into the small heated room he slept in, turned on the television, and sat in a worn-out easy chair.  The television was full of pictures of crazed shoppers stampeding over each other to get toys for their children. Computers seemed to be popular this year.  Travnicek cackled, then turned the channel.  It was an old movie, A Christmas Carol with Reginald Owen.  He settled back to watch.

          When the android returned, he found Travnicek asleep.  He put the bag down quietly and withdrew.

♦ ♥ ♣ ♠

          "So I says to Maxine, I says, When are you gonna do something about that condition of yours?  I says, it's time to let a doctor see it.”

          The bag lady, one shopping bag hanging from her arm while she clutched a second bag to her chest, walked slowly down the alley, fighting the Siberian wind.  The cheerful flag she had found by the museum flapped out behind her, reflecting Broadway’s Christmas lights ahead.

          Black Shadow had his feet planted on the brick wall of an old brownstone and squatted on his calves, huddled in his cloak.  He watched Modular Man and the bag lady.  The android was trying to talk to her, to give her a takeout bag filled with Chinese food, but she continued mumbling to herself and plodding up the alley.  Finally the android stuffed the takeout bag into her shopping bag and returned to where the vigilante waited.

          "Surrender, Mod Man."  The drawling voice had an unaccustomed kindness in it.  "There isn't anything you can do for her."

          "I keep thinking there's something."

          "Wild-card powers aren't an answer to everything, Mod Man. You have to learn to come to terms with your limitations."

          The android said nothing, just turned to look at the bag lady walking down the alley.

          "Now, by way of example, I have this thing about finding evildoers and giving them what's coming to them," Black Shadow said.  "I'm not likely to do much about that, because the whole thing suits me, me being crazy and all.  You, on the other hand, have to live with some kind of nutty professor who's using you to work out his power fantasies, and from what you tell me you can't do anything about that at all.  We all have a cross to bear."

          "I understand," the android said.  Without interest.

          "The thing you need to accept, if this business isn't going to drive you crazy, is that no one's invented a wild-card power that can do a goddam thing for middle-aged ladies who are out of their heads and who carry their whole world with them in shopping bags and who live in garbage cans."  He paused.  "You listening, Mod Man?"

          "Yes.  I hear you."

          The vigilante reached into his cloak and came out with a small package wrapped in red ribbon.  "I got you something," he said. "Merry Christmas."

          The android seemed embarrassed. “I hadn’t thought to get you anything," he said.

          "That's all right.  You've had things on your mind."

          Modular Man opened the package.  The wind caught the bright ribbon and spiraled it down the alley.  Inside a box was a piece of paper.  The android held it up to the light and peered at it.

          "One of Fortunato's gift certificates," Black Shadow said. "I figured you could use cheering up."

          "Thank you.  It's a nice thought."

          "You're welcome."  He straightened from his crouch and walked down the wall to the alley surface.  "I think I'll go beat on some villains for warmth and exercise.  Care to join me?"

          "No.  I think I'll use the certificate before my boss finds it."

          "See you later, Mod Man."  The vigilante raised a hand.

          "Merry Christmas."

          Down the alley, something bright caught the eye of the bag lady.  She bent and picked up a strand of red ribbon.

          She stuffed it into a bag and walked on.

♦ ♥ ♣ ♠