Across Realtime

THIRTEEN

Still five meters up, the twin rotor chopper sent a shower of grit across the Tradetower helipad. From her place in the main cabin, Delia Lu watched the bystanders grab their hats and squint into the wash. Old Hamilton Avery was the only fellow who kept his aplomb.

As the chopper touched down, one of her crew slid open the front hatch and waved at the standing VIPs. Through her silvered window, she saw Director Avery nod and turn to shake hands with Smythe, the L.A. franchise owner. Then Avery walked alone toward the crewman, who had not stepped down from the doorway.

Smythe was probably the most powerful Peacer in Southern California. She wondered what he thought when his boss submitted to such a cavalier pickup. She smiled lopsidedly. Hell, she was in charge of the operation, and she didn't know what was coming off either.

The rotors spun up even has she heard the hatch slam. Her crew had their orders: The helipad dropped away as the chopper rose like some magic elevator from the top of the Tradetower. They slid out from the roof and she looked down eighty storeys at the street.

As the helicopter turned toward LAX and Santa Monica, Delia came to her feet. An instant later Avery entered her cabin. He looked completely relaxed yet completely formal, his dress both casual and expensive. In theory, the Board of Directors of the Peace Authority was a committee of equals. In fact, Hamilton Avery had been the driving force behind it for as long as Della Lu had been following inner politics. Though not a famous man, he was the most powerful one in the world.

"My dear! So good to see you." Avery walked quickly to her, shook her hand as if she were an equal and not an officer three levels below him. She let the silver-haired Director take her elbow and lead her to a seat. One might think she was his guest.

They sat down, and the Director looked quickly about the cabin. It was a solid, mobile command room. There was no bar, no carpets. With her priority; she could have had such, but Della had not gotten to her present job by sucking up to her bosses.

The aircraft hummed steadily westward, the chop of the blades muted by the office's heavy insulation. Below, Della could see Peace Authority housing. The Enclave was really a corridor that extended from Santa Monica and LAX on the coast, inland to what had once been the center of Los Angeles. It was the largest Enclave in the world. More than fifty thousand people lived down there, mostly near the News Service studios. And they lived well. She saw swimming pools and tennis courts on the three-acre suburban lots that passed below.

In the north glowered the castles and fortified roads of the Aztlÿn aristocrats. They had governmental responsibility for the region, but without Banned technology their "palaces" were medieval dumps. Like the Republic of New Mexico, Aztlÿn watched the Authority with impotent jealousy and dreamed of the good old days.

Avery looked up from the view. "I noticed you had the Beijing insignia painted over."

"Yes, sir. It was clear from your message that you didn't want people to guess you were using people from off North

America." That was one of the few things that was crystal clear. Three days before she had been at the Beijing Enclave, just returned from her final survey of the Central Asian situation. Then a megabyte of instructions and background came over the satellite from Livermore - and not to the Beijing franchise owner, but to one Della Lu, third-level counter-guerrilla cop and general hatchetman. She was assigned a cargo jet- its freight being this chopper -and told to fly across the Pacific to LAX. No one was to emerge at any intermediate stop. At LAX, the freighter crew was to disgorge the chopper with her people, and return immediately.

Avery nodded approvingly. "Good. I need someone who doesn't need everything spelled out. Have you had a chance to read the New Mexico report?"

"Yes, sir." She had spent the flight studying the report and boning up on North American politics. She had been gone three years; there'd have been a lot of catching up to do even without the Tucson crisis.

"Do you think the Republic bought our story?"

She thought back on the meeting tape and the dossiers. "Yes. Ironically, the most suspicious of them were also the most ignorant. Schelling bought it hook, line, and sinker. He knows enough theory to see that it's reasonable."

Avery nodded.

"But they'll continue to believe only if no more bobbles burst. And I understand it's happened at least twice more during the last few weeks. I don't believe the quantum decay explanation. The old USA missile fields are littered with thousands of bobbles. If decays continue to happen, they won't be missed."

Avery nodded again, didn't seem especially upset by her analysis.

The chopper did a gentle bank over Santa Monica, giving her a close-up view of the largest mansions in the Enclave. She had a glimpse of the Authority beach and the ruined Aztlÿn shoreline further south, and then they were over the ocean. They flew south several kilometers before turning inland. They would fly in vast circles until the meeting was over. Even the Tucson event could not explain this mission. Della almost frowned.

Avery raised a well-manicured hand. "What you say is cor-- rect, but may be irrelevant. It depends on what the true explanation turns out to be. Have you considered the possibility that someone has discovered how to destroy bobbles, that we are seeing their experiments?"

"The choice of `experiment sites' is very strange, sir: the Ross Iceshelf, Tucson, Ulan Ude. And I don't see how such an organization could escape direct detection."

Fifty-five years ago, before the War, what had become the Peace Authority had been a contract laboratory, a corporation run under federal grants to do certain esoteric - and militarily productive -research. That research had produced the bobbles, force fields whose generation took a minimum of thirty minutes of power from the largest nuclear plant in the lab. The old US government had not been told of the discovery; Avery's father had seen to that. Instead, the lab directors played their own version of geopolitics. Even at the rarefied bureaucratic heights Della inhabited, there was no solid evidence that the Avery lab had started the War, but she had her suspicions.

In the years following the great collapse, the Authority had stripped the rest of the world of high energy technology. The most dangerous governments - such as that of the United States - were destroyed, and their territories left in a state that ranged from the village anarchy of Middle California, to the medievalism of Aztlÿn, to the fascism of New Mexico. Where governments did exist, they were just strong enough to collect the Authority Impost. These little countries were in some ways sovereign. They even fought their little wars-but without the capital industry and high energy weapons that made war a threat to the race.

Della doubted that, outside the Enclaves, there existed the technical expertise to reproduce the old inventions, much less improve on them. And if someone did discover the secret of the bobble, Authority satellites would detect the construction of the power plants and factories needed to implement the invention.

"I know, I may sound paranoid. But one thing you youngsters don't understand is how technologically stultified the Authority is." He glanced at her, as though expecting debate. "We have all the universities and all the big labs. We control most degreed persons on Earth. Nevertheless, we do very little research. I should know, since I can remember my father's lab right before the War - and even more, because I've made sure no really imaginative projects got funded since.

"Our factories can produce most any product that existed before the War," he slapped his hand against the bulkhead. "This is a good, reliable craft, probably built in the last five years. But the design is almost sixty years old."

He paused and his tone became less casual. "During the last six months, I've concluded we've made a serious mistake in this. There are people operating under our very noses who have technology substantially in advance of pre-War levels."

"I hope you're not thinking of the Mongolian nationalists, sir. I tried to make it clear in my reports that their nuclear weapons were from old Soviet stockpiles. Most weren't usable. And without those bombs they were just pony sol-

"No, my dear Della, that's not what I am thinking of." He slid a plastic box across the table. "Look inside."

Five small objects sat in the velvet lining. Lu held one in the sunlight. "A bullet?" It looked like an 8-mm. She couldn't tell if it had been fired; there was some damage, but no rifling marks. Something dark and glossy stained the nose.

"That's right. But a bullet with a brain. Let me tell you how we came across that little gem.

"Since I became suspicious of these backyard scientists, these Tinkers, I've been trying to infiltrate. It hasn't been easy. In most of North America, we have tolerated no governments. Even though it's cost us on the impost, the risk of nationalism seemed too high. Now I see that was a mistake. Somehow they've gone further than any of the governed areas - and we have no easy way to watch them, except from orbit.

"Anyway, I sent teams into the ungoverned lands, using whatever cover was appropriate. In Middle California, for instance, it was easiest to pretend they were descendents of the old Soviet invasion force. Their instructions were to hang around in the mountains and ambush likely-looking travelers. I figured we would gradually accumulate information without any official raids. Last week, one crew ambushed three locals in the forests east of Vandenberg. The quarry had only one gun, a New Mexico 8-mm. It was nearly dark, but from a distance of forty meters the enemy hit every one of the ten-man crew - with one burst from the 8-mm.

"The New Mexico 8-mm only has a ten-round clip. That's - "

"A perfect target score, my dear. And my men swear the weapon was fired on full automatic. If they hadn't been wearing body armor, or if the rounds had had normal velocity, not one of them would have lived to tell the story. 'Ten armed men killed by one man and a handmade gun. Magic. And you're holding a piece of that magic. Others have been through every test and dissection the Livermore labs could come up with. You've heard of smart bombs? Sure, your air units in Mongolia used them. Well, Miss Lu, these are smart bullets.

"The round has a video eye up front, connected to a processor as powerful as anything we can pack in a suitcase - and our suitcase version would cost a hundred thousand monets. Evidently the gun barrel isn't rifled; the round can change attitude in flight to close with its target."

Della rolled the metal marble in her palm. "So it's under the control of the gunman?"

"Only indirectly, and only at `launch' time. There must be a processor on the gun that queues the targets, and chooses the firing instant. The processor on the bullet is more than powerful enough to latch the assigned target. Rather interesting, eh?"

Della nodded. She remembered how delicate the attack gear on the A51 1's had been - and how expensive. They'd needed a steady supply of replacement boards from Beijing. If these things could be made cheaply enough to throw away...?

Hamilton Avery gave a small smile, apparently satisfied with her reaction. "That's not all. Take a look at the other things in the box."

Della dropped the bullet onto the velvet padding and picked up a brownish ball. It was slightly sticky on her fingers. There were no markings, no variations in its surface. She raised her eyebrows.

"That is a bug, Della. Not one of your ordinary, audio bugs, but full video - we expect in all directions, at that. Something to do with Fourier optics, my experts tell me. It can record, or transmit a very short distance. We've guessed all this from x-ray micrographs of the interior. We don't even have equipment that can interface with it!"

"You're sure it's not recording right now?"

"Oh yes. They fried its guts before I took it. The microscopists claim there's not a working junction in there.

"Now I think you see the reason for all the precautions."

Della nodded slowly. The bobble bursts were not the reason; he expected their true enemies already knew all about those. Yes, Avery was being clever - and he was as frightened as his cool personality would ever allow.

They sat silently for about thirty seconds. The chopper made another turn, and the sunlight swept across Della's face. They were flying east over Long Beach toward Anaheim - those were the names in the history books anyway. The street pattern stretched off into gray-orange haze. It gave a false sense of order. The reality was kilometer on kilometer of abandoned, burned-out wilderness. It was hard to believe that this threat could grow in North America. But, after the fact, it made sense. If you deny big industry and big research to people, they will look for other ways of getting what they need.

...And if they could make these things, maybe they were clever enough to go beyond all the beautiful quantum-mechanical theories and figure a way to burst bobbles.

"You think they've infiltrated the Authority?"

"I'm sure of it. We swept our labs and conference rooms. We found seventeen bugs on the West Coast, two in China, and a few more in Europe. There were no repeaters near the overseas finds, so we think they were unintentional exports. The plague appears to spread from California."

"So they know we're on to them."

"Yes, but little more. They've made some big mistakes and we've had a bit of good luck: We have an informer in the California group. He came to us less than two weeks ago, out of the blue. I think he's legitimate. What he's told us matches our discoveries but goes a good deal further. We're going to run these people to ground. And do it officially. We haven't made an example of anyone in a long time, not since the Yakima incident.

"Your role in this will be crucial, Della. You are a woman, and outside the Authority the frailer sex is disregarded nowadays."

Not only outside the Authority, thought Della.

"You'll be invisible to the enemy, until it's too late."

"You mean a field job?"

"Why, yes, my dear. You've certainly had rougher assignments."

"Yes, but-" but I was a field director in Mongolia.

Avery put his hand on Della's. "This is no demotion. You'll be responsible only to me. As communications permit, you'll control the California operation. But we need our very best out there on the ground, someone who knows the land and can be given a credible cover." Della had been born and raised in San Francisco. For three generations, her family had been 'furbishers - and Authority plants.

"And there is a very special thing I want done. This may be more important than all the rest of the operation." Avery laid a color picture on the table. The photo was grainy, blown up to near the resolution limit. She saw a group of men standing in front of a barn: northern farmers - except for the black child talking to a tall boy who carried an NM 8-mm. She could guess who these were.

"See the guy in the middle - by the one with the soldier frizz."

His face was scarcely more than a blotch, but he looked perfectly ordinary, seventy or eighty years old. Della could walk through a crowd in any North American enclave and see a dozen such.

"We think that's Paul Hoehler." He glanced at his agent. "The name doesn't mean anything to you, does it? Well, you won't find it in the history books, but I remember him. Back in Livermore, right before the War. I was just a kid. He was in my father's lab and... he's the man who invented the bobble."

Delta's attention snapped back to the photo. She knew she had just been let in on one of those secrets which was kept from everyone, which would otherwise die with the last of the old Directors. She tried to see something remarkable in the fuzzy features.

"Oh, Schmidt, Kashihara, Bhadra, they got the thing into projectable form. But it was one of Hoehler's bright ideas. The hell of it is, the man wasn't - isn't- even a physicist.

'Anyway, he disappeared right after the War started. Very clever. He didn't wait to do any moral posturing, to give us a chance to put him away. Next to eliminating the national armies, catching him was one of our highest priorities. We never got him. After ten or fifteen years, when we had control of all the remaining labs and reactors, the search for Dr. Hoehler died. But now, after all these years, when we see bobbles being burst, we have rediscovered him.... You can see why I'm convinced the `bobble decay' is not natural."

Avery tapped the picture. "This is the man, Della. In the next weeks, we'll take Peace action against hundreds of people. But it will all be for nothing if you can't nail this one man."