On the other side of the shell, in the shadow of Detroit Steel, Mike Tsakos and Danny Shepherd were laying out cartons of Chinese food while two other women spread a picnic blanket on the outfield grass. Startled, Tom looked from Danny in red leather to Danny with the ponytail and the baseball cap, and back again. Twins, he thought, for at least a moment… until it dawned on him that the two other women were also Danny Shepherd.
One was in uniform, with her black hair cropped short and a corporal’s stripes on her sleeve. The other one looked like a yuppie: business suit, big round glasses, carefully styled hair, gold Rolex. But the faces were the same.
“Danny,” Tom said. All four looked toward the shell. “What the fuck is going on here? Are these your sisters, or what?”
“Sisters,” said punk Danny. “That’s good. I like that.”
Ponytail Danny stood up. “I should have introduced you,” she said. “This is my sister Danny, and my other sister Danny, and my other sister Danny. My sister Danny would have been here too, but she had to pick up my sister Danny at the airport.” She grinned.
“They’re all the same girl,” Mike Tsakos added.
“Von Herzenhagen told you I was an ace,” punk Danny said.
“Wait a minute,” Tom objected. “You weren’t even there.” "We were all there,” Corporal Danny said.
“Her name is Legion,” Mike Tsakos put in.
Ponytail Danny stuck out her tongue at him. “Her name is Danny,” she said. “Is anyone going to eat this Chinese food before it gets cold?”
Tsakos started filling a paper plate with chicken chow mein. The other Dannys all moved in too. When they were close together like that, you could see they were more than twins. Something about their movements, their conversation, the way each one seemed to know exactly what the others were doing. And yet they were less than twins too, Tom thought as he watched them. Maybe it was just their clothes, but Corporal Danny looked at least two inches taller than the others, and yuppie Danny definitely had larger breasts.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come out?” ponytail Danny asked him. Her plate was heavily laden with shredded beef, moo shu pork, and General Tso’s chicken. “It’s going to be a long night. You must be hungry.”
“I’m fine,” Tom said. “I’ve got food in here.” There was half a bag of nacho-flavored Doritos around somewhere, he knew. His stomach growled at him. Fortunately, the microphones didn’t pick it up.
“Okay,” two Dannys said in chorus.
Tom sat inside his shell, watching Mike Tsakos and the four girls put away a ton of Chinese food. They seemed to be having a great time. He got hungrier and hungrier.
After a while, the rest of the team began to drift in. The Reflector came up out of the dugout from command HQ, and looked at the picnic in confusion. Punk Danny rolled him a moo shu pork burrito. He accepted the plate, stared at it suspiciously for a moment, then ate it with his fingers. Tom had to make a conscious effort not to think of him as Snotman.
Two more Dannys joined them a little later. One was a young starlet with a cascade of honey-blond hair that fell past her waist, long slender legs in tight jeans, a low-cut lace blouse that hinted at breasts most Playmates would kill for. The other one was pregnant. She wore a blue maternity dress and a gold wedding band, and looked like she was ready to give birth any moment now. Both of them talked like Danny, moved like Danny, smiled like Danny.
The food was pretty well gone by the time Zappa, Hartmann, and von Herzenhagen emerged from command HQ to start the briefing. With them came a gaggle of brass in assorted uniforms, Cyclone and his daughter Mistral in matching blue-and-white flying suits and a slight, green-eyed, Irish-Indian woman named Radha Valeria O’Reilly. Radha had a strange beauty: deep auburn hair, dark lashes, skin like burnished gold. She wore a green, spangled acrobat’s costume and a caste mark in the center of her forehead.
“All of you know Elephant Girl, I believe,” Hartmann began. “Once Pulse arrives, our team will be in place.” He glanced at his watch and frowned. “He should have been here by now. It’s not like Cyril to be late.”
“I saw him at Aces High an hour ago,” Mistral said. She had her helmet cradled under one arm. A light wind riffled through her hair. She’d dyed a bright blue streak down one side, to match her costume. “He was having pictures taken with some tourists.”
“Just mark him tardy and get on with it,” Cyclone said irritably. He didn’t look nearly as good in his cape and Kevlar as his daughter did in hers.
Zappa agreed. “Major Vidkunssen, perhaps you’d care to go over the layout of the Rox with the team?”
“WHAT ABOUT MODULAR MAN?” Tom wanted to know.
Von Herzenhagen took a puff. “What about him?”
“HE’S CHANGED SIDES,” Tom pointed out.
“Unfortunate,” von Herzenhagen said, “but hardly a fatal blow. If he gets in our way, we’ll simply have to destroy him. It’s not as if it hasn’t been done before.”
“Leave him to Detroit Steel,” Mike Tsakos put in cheerfully. “I got no use for turncoats.”
“Get in line, tin man,” Snotman snapped. “I trashed him before. I can trash him again.”
Tom was aghast. “A COUPLE OF HOURS AGO, HE WAS ONE OF US.”
“He made his choice,” von Herzenhagen said. “Now I’m afraid he’ll have to live — or die — with the consequences.” He waved his pipe at Tsakos and Snotman. “Gentlemen, we appreciate your eagerness to get in there and grapple with the enemy, but we don’t want to distract ourselves with personal vendettas. Let’s just leave Modular Man to Pulse, shall we? He should be able to burn through that cheap plastic skin just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “You can’t dance with a laser. The robot won’t even see it coming.”
“Poor Mod Man,” the pregnant Danny said.
Time had stopped.
The bodysnatcher rose through a silent sunlit sky. He had no body now. He was fire, he was light. He was a burning arrow, ascending. It seemed as though he were moving in slow motion. But around him, nothing else moved at all.
The towers of Manhattan dwindled beneath him. Everything was strangely distorted. Objects seemed to stretch away, receding into infinity when he looked at them. Ahead of him, everything was tinted blue; behind, the world was awash with sunset, as if seen through a red filter. His passage etched a burning line through the sky, like a tracer frozen in flight.
The endless music of the streets was gone now. There was no wind, no words, no sound at all. The silence was endless. There was no sense of movement. No sensation at all.
Below, stretched and reddened, were the shoreline of the Battery, the waters of the bay, the twisted towers of the Rox, small as a child’s toys. Indigo clouds appeared above him. He knifed through them. For an instant he felt a vague heat. Around him, the cloud stuff turned red and orange. It was over so fast it was almost subliminal. Then the bodysnatcher was above the clouds.
He saw a jet high against the blue, its fuselage as long as a freight train, stretching back to infinity. Slowly, ever so slowly, he drifted up toward it. The jet hung dead still in the sky, frozen in space and time, a big 747 with KLM markings. Pale round faces peered out of the windows, little Norman Rockwell faces looking down on the city. The bodysnatcher wondered what they’d think when they saw him, realized that he’d never know. He’d be a hundred thousand miles into space before their vapid little mouths began to open in surprise. He’d be past the moon before the pilot could turn to the copilot to say, “What the fuck was that?”
This was what it was like to move at the speed of light.