“How did you get in here?”

She grinned. “If you come with me, Kate, I’ll show you.”

Kate said slowly, “Come with you? Where?”

“And why?” Bobby asked.

“’Why’ is obvious, Bobby,” Mary said, an echo of her adolescent prickle returning. “Because, as Kate keeps saying, if she doesn’t get out of here the man is going to stir her brains with a spoon.”

Bobby said reasonably, “Wherever she goes she can be traced.”

“Right,” Mary said heavily. “The WormCam. But you haven’t been able to trace me since I left home three months ago. You didn’t see me coming. You didn’t know I was in the apartment until I revealed myself. Look, the WormCam is a terrific tool. But it isn’t a magic wand. People are paralysed by it. They’ve stopped thinking. Even if Santa Claus can see you, what is he going to do? By the time he arrives you can be long gone.”

Bobby frowned. “Santa Claus?”

Kate said slowly, “Santa can see you all the time. On Christmas Eve, he can look back over the whole year and see if you’ve been naughty or nice.”

Mary grinned. “Santa must have had the first WormCam of all. Right? Merry Christmas.”

“I always thought that was a sinister myth,” Kate said. “But you can only keep away from Santa if you can see him coming.”

Mary smiled. “That’s easy.” She raised her arm, pulled back her SmartShroud sleeve and revealed what looked like a fat wristwatch. It was compact, scuffed, and had the look of something out of a home workshop. The instrument’s face was a miniature SoftScreen; it showed views of the corridor outside, the street, the elevators, what must be neighbouring apartments. “All empty,” murmured Mary. “Maybe some goon somewhere is listening to everything we say. Who cares? By the time he gets here, we’ll be gone.”

“That’s a WormCam,” Kate said. “On her wrist. Some kind of pirate design.”

“I can’t believe it,” said Bobby. “Compared to the giant accelerators in the Wormworks.”

“And,” said Mary, “Alexander Graham Bell probably never thought a telephone could be made without a cable, and so small it could be implanted in your wrist.”

Kate’s eyes narrowed. “A Casimir injector could never be miniaturized that far. This has to be squeezed vacuum technology. The stuff David was working on, Bobby.”

“If it is,” Bobby said heavily, “how did the technology development leak out of the Wormworks?” He eyed Mary. “Does your mother know where you are?”

“Typical,” Mary snapped. “A couple of minutes ago Kate was about to kill herself, and now you’re accusing me of industrial espionage and worrying about my relationship with my mother.”

“My God.” Kate said. “What kind of world is it going to be where every damn kid wears a WormCam on her wrist?”

“I’ll tell you a secret,” Mary said. “We already do. The details are on the Internet. There are home workshops churning them out, all over the planet.” She grinned. “The djinn is out of the bottle. Look, I’m here to help you. There are no guarantees. Santa Claus isn’t all powerful, but he has made it harder to hide. All I’m offering you is a chance.” She stared at Kate. “That’s better than what you’re facing now, isn’t it?”

Kate said, “Why do you want to help me?”

Mary looked embarrassed. “Because you’re family. More or less.”

Bobby said, “Your mother is family too.”

Mary glared at him. “I’ll cut you a deal, if it’ll make you feel better. Let me get you out of here. Let me save Kate’s head from being sliced open. In return I’ll call my mother. Deal?”

Kate and Bobby exchanged a glance. “Deal.”

Mary dug into her tunic and produced a swatch of cloth, which she shook out. “SmartShroud.”

Bobby said, “Is there room for two in there?”

Mary was grinning. “I was hoping you’d say that. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

Hiram’s security guards, alerted by a routine WormCam monitor, arrived ten minutes later. The apartment, brightly lit, was empty. The guards began to squabble over who would have to tell Hiram and take the blame — and then fell silent, as they realized he was, or would be, watching anyhow.

Rome, A.D. 2041: Holding Heather’s hand, David was walking through the dense, swarming heart of the city; the night sky above, layered with smog, looked as orange as the clouds of Titan.

Even this late Rome was crowded with sightseers. Many, like Heather, were walking around with Mind’sEye headbands or Glasses-and-Gloves.

Four years after the first mass-market release of the WormCam, it had become a fashionable and alluring pastime to become a time tourist at many of the world’s ancient sites, wandering through deep layers of past: David had determined he must try the Scuba tour of sunken Venice before he left Italy… Alluring, yes: and David understood why. The past had become a comfortable and familiar place, its exploration a safe, synthetic adventure, the perfect place to avert the eyes from the blank meteoric wall that terminated the future. How ironic, thought David, that a world denied its future was suddenly granted its past.

And escape was tempting, from a world where even the transformed present was a strange and disturbing place.

Almost everybody now wore a WormCam of some kind, generally the wristwatch-sized miniaturized version powered by squeezed-vacuum technology. The personal WormCam was a link to the rest of mankind, to the glories and horrors of the past — and, not least, a useful gadget for looking around the next corner.

And everybody was reshaped by the WormCam’s relentless glare.

People didn’t even dress the way they used to. Some of the older people, here in Rente’s crowded streets, still wore clothing that would have been recognizable, even fashionable, a few years before. Some tourist types, in fact, walked around defiantly dressed in loud T-shirts and shorts, just as they had for decades. One woman was wearing a shirt with a gaudy, flashing message:

But many more people had covered up, wearing seamless one-piece coveralls that buttoned high on the neck, and with long sleeves and trouser legs that terminated in sewn-on gloves and boots. There were even some examples of all-over-cover styles imported from the Islamic world; shapeless smocks and tunics that trailed along the ground, headpieces hiding all but the eyes, which were uniformly staring and wary.

Others had reacted quite differently. Here was a nudist couple, two men hand in hand wearing slack middle-aged bellies over shrunken genitalia with defiant pride.

But, cautious or defiant, the older folk — among whom David reluctantly counted himself — displayed a continual uncomfortable awareness of the WormCam’s unblinking gaze.

The young, growing up with the WormCam, were different.

Many of the young went simply naked, save for practical items like purses and sandals. But they seemed to David to have none of the shyness or self-consciousness of their elders, as if they were making a choice about what to wear based simply on practicality or a desire to display personality, rather than any modesty or taboo.

One group of youngsters wore masks that showed projections of the broad face of a young man. Girls and boys alike wore the face, and it displayed a range of conditions and emotions — rain-lashed, sun-drenched, bearded and clean-shaven, laughing and crying, even sleeping — that seemed to have nothing to do with the activities of the wearers. It was disconcerting to watch, like seeing a group of clones wandering through the Rome night.