"I know. I found some."
"You want to find her before she freezes to death, try the trash-can fires first, the shelters later." She 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 though 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 thefor 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 row of drinks and said good-bye to Cyndi. Unless a mircle happened and he found the bag lady soon, he'd be spending the rest of the night on the streets.
Four A.M. The car ran over a manhole, and hot coffee spilled on Coleman Hubbard's thigh. He ignored it. He raised the big styrofoam cup from between his thighs and drank urgently. He had to stay awake.
He was looking for the bag lady, going through every shelter, driving down every dark street, casting out with his mind, hoping to find the pattern of lunacy and anger that he had seen in her disturbed brain.
He'd been doing this for the better part of twenty-four hours. The heater in his cheap rented heap had given out. His body was a mass of cramps and his skull was pounding to a slow piledriver rhythm. The fact that Black and Judas were freezing themselves on the same errand was no consolation. Hubbard jammed the coffee cup between his thighs, turned on his map light, and glanced at the paper for the list of shelters. There was a girls' school gymnasium filled with refugees nearby, and he hadn't sensed it yet.
As he approached the place, Hubbard began to feel a disturbing familiarity, something like deja vu. His headache battered at his eyes. His stomach felt queasy. It was a few seconds before he recognized the sensation.
She was here. Elation seized him. He wrenched his mind away from the twisted patterns of the bag lady's mind and reached out to where Black patrolled, the loaded dart gun on the seat next to him.
Hurry! he cried. I've found her!
Modular Man walked down the long rows, scanning left and right. Eight hundred refugees had been crammed into the prep school gym. There were cots for about half, apparently acquired from some National Guard depot, and the remaining refugees were sleeping on the floor. The big room echoed to the sound of snores, cries, the wail of children.
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 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 absorbed 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. A blackness snapped into existence around her, and the gas drowned in it, drawn into her bag like a waterspout.
Panic roared among the refugees as they awoke to the battle.
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.
The bag lady's crooked smile died. "Sonofabitch," she said. "You remind me of Shaun."
Modular Man crested his flight 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.
Hubbard gazed for a long, endless moment at the space where the bag lady had been. So that's how she did it, he thought.
He rubbed his frozen hands together and thought of the streets, the endless freezing streets, the long cold hours of his search. The bag lady might have gone to Jersey, for all he knew.
It was going to be a long night.
"Goddamn 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 carryout bag of hot croissants and coffee.
"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. And when she's cleaning that up, do the same to her apartment. "
"Yes, sir," the android said. Resigned to it.
"The Lower East Fucking Side," Travnicek said. "What's left, if this neighborhood's starting to get pretensions? I'm gonna have to move into Jokertown to get any peace." He took his coffee from the android's hand while he continued stomping the pressboard floor.
He looked over his shoulder at his creation. "Well?" he 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. Outside, the cold wind continued to batter the city, flooding between the tall buildings, blowing the people like straws in the water. The temperature had risen barely above freezing, but the wind chill was dropping the effective temperature to below zero.
More people, the android knew, were going to die.
"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?"