Still, he shouldn’t count on that. Prepare for hard battle, hope for a vulnerable target.
He cast a final glance down the empty tunnel, then switched on his forensic programs.
He was able to learn a great deal.
His armor detected and memorized fingerprints from the cellar walls, skin samples where the intruder had cut himself on a shard of glass projecting from the rubble. The intruder was quite human, a male, type 0+ blood. Back home, a competent laboratory might have been able to put together a portrait of the man from a simple genome projection, assuming the samples were more or less intact. But Billy didn’t have that capacity; he needed another means of tracking his prey.
The enormity of the task was daunting. It might be impossible—a civilian joyriding from the future might be anywhere. Might have jumped a plane to some familiar place. Invested money in the stock market and set off on a tour of his own recent history.
But the man had arrived here less than a month ago and Billy guessed he would need more time than that to adjust. After alclass="underline" his money was no good, his knowledge was valuable but difficult to cash in on. He might still be close by.
But how to identify him?
Billy ran a finger through the dust on the floor. Dust from his concussion grenade, dust from the foundation of the building. He opened a pouch in one of the elytra of his armor and withdrew the armor’s headset, a leathery black mask that covered his face entirely. He clipped an optical cable between the headset and the armor’s processors while his forensics sampled the dust and announced its constituents to Billy in a flickering eyepiece readout: limestone, sand, bedrock … and microscopic fragments of the tunnel itself: strange long-chain molecules that fluoresced in dim light, absorbing background radiation and leaking photons.
Billy narrowed the bandwidth of his eyepiece to the frequency of strongest emission, then clambered back into the dark chamber of the basement.
With his opticals adjusted, the dust was plainly luminescent.
He stood in a starry blue limbo, very strange. The tip of his forefinger radiated light like a small constellation.
How much of this dust had the intruder carried out of the building? How much would cling to him? To his shoes? To his clothes? For how long?
Interesting questions.
He stood in the tunnel a moment before he left.
He took a step forward, his heart pounding. This was not a place, he reminded himself. It was a time machine. Each step carried him a measured distance forward: a week? a month? And what am I doing out there? Take a step: February? March? Is it snowing? Am I out in the snow? Am I hunting? Is the armor alive? Am I?
Suppose he ran a hundred yards forward. 1963? 1964? Had the elytra failed? The gland dried up? Have I convulsed and died somewhere? Suppose he went even farther. Suppose he stood in some sheltered part of this tunnel where 1970 raged overhead, 1975, 1980: was Billy in his coffin in some potter’s field, buried a century before his own birth?
He felt a sudden weightlessness, a kind of vertigo.
It was better not to think about these things.
Home, he showered away all the dust still clinging to him; then he washed and shined the armor. He disliked taking the armor off. He hadn’t powered up entirely and the physical need was still urgent and unsatisfied. The lancet had left a painful sore on the right side of his abdomen; without the hormone drip he felt small, vulnerable, and nervous. But he needed to sleep. And it would be wasteful to sleep in his armor.
Tomorrow, he promised himself. In the night.
He dreamed of the Storm Zone, of armored combat, in the future, where he had once lived; and then of Ohio, the fierce summers and cold, snowless winters there. He dreamed of the bed he had slept in as a child, with a heater he was allowed to switch on in January and February; of bitter nights walking from the common store to the housing plex, frost on the ground and a horned moon overhead.
He dreamed these things with a clarity so absolute and a sadness so piercing they could be sustained only in a dream. And then, finally, he dreamed the face of Nathan, his father.
He woke wanting the armor.
Even in New York City—even in 1962, in a city that was the axis around which much of the world revolved—the night was quieter than the day.
Billy chose the stillest hours of the night, between three a.m. and dawn, to begin his search.
He wore the armor snug to his body. He pulled on loose, filthy pants over the leggings. Over the elytra and the halteres he wore a torn athletic sweatshirt marked NYU, which he had found in a bin at a secondhand shop. He pulled up the hood to help disguise the headset; the headset was conspicuous but he needed its eyepiece. Over the sweatshirt Billy wore a slate-gray, threadbare coat that reached to his knees, the high collar turned up at his throat.
Before he left the apartment he looked at himself in the chipped bathroom mirror.
The black headset with its calibrated goggles projected from the hood of his sweatshirt like the muzzle of an animal.
A rat, Billy thought. He looked like some kind of leathery, robotic sewer rat attempting to pass for human. I look like someone’s nightmare.
The thought was disquieting. It troubled him until he activated the armor’s lancet; then everything was simple, everything was clear.
He kept to the shadows.
He tuned his eyepiece to the radiant frequency of the tunnel dust. He was able to follow his own footprints—a faintly blue, faintly luminous path—back to the building near Tompkins Square.
The lobby of the building was alive, starry with ghostlight.
But the intruder had come through here long ago and there was no clear trail to follow. Well, Billy had expected that. There had been rain since then; there had been wind, air pollution, foot traffic, a thousand scatterings and adulterations.
He stood in the street outside the building. Faint blue light glimmered here and there. A brush of it adhered to a lamppost. A scatter of it stood like snow crystals along the filthy curb.
No trail, only clues: dim, ambiguous.
He looked up at the building, dark except for Mr. Shank’s apartment. Amos Shank chose that moment to pull back his blinds—awake in some delirium of creativity—and Billy gazed up calmly at him. Mr. Shank returned his look for one long breathless moment … then pulled away from the window; and the blinds slashed down again.
Billy smiled.
What did you see, Mr. Shank? What do you think I am, out here in the lonely dark?
Billy imagined himself old and senile in 1962, lost in a dream of antiquity and Napoleonic Europe, peering from his slum apartment into a nighttime world inhabited by monstrosities.
Why, Billy thought, I must look like Death.
Good guess, Mr. Shank.
Billy laughed quietly and turned away.
He moved in a crude spiral away from the tunnel, avoiding Fifth Avenue and the late-night crowds in the Village, hoping for some substantial clue, an arrow of blue light, that would lead him to the intruder.
He found none. He found traces of the dust here and there almost at random—a big deposit clinging to an oil slick at Ninth and University Place, a smaller one smudged into the yellow grass at the foot of a bench in Washington Square Park. Billy lingered at the bench a moment, but there was nothing coherent, only a suggestion that his prey had passed this way. He frowned and decided to move south, avoiding the west side of the park where a few hustlers and homosexuals still lingered in the darkness. That part of the park was a familiar hunting ground when his armor needed a killing— like Times Square and Union Square at night, places where disposable nonpersons gathered. Billy’s armor wanted a killing now; but there wasn’t time and he suppressed the urge.