Wili wet his finger and held it into the air. Even here, almost out of doors, the day was stifling. The westerly breeze barely cooled his finger. "How hot is it?" he asked unnecessarily; it was obviously hot.. enough

"Outside air temperature is almost thirty-seven. That's about as hot as it ever gets in L.A., and it's the high for today."

Wili nodded. Perfect. He rechecked the center and radius coordinates, started the generator's processor, and then crawled back to the others by the inner wall. "It takes about five minutes. Generating a large bobble from two thousand meters is almost too much for this processor."

"So," Ebenezer's man gave him a sour smile, "you are going to bobble something. Are you ready to share the secret of just what? Or are we simply to watch and learn?"

On the far side of the room, the Alcalde's man was silent, but Wili sensed his attention. Neither they nor their bosses could imagine the bobble's being used as anything but an offensive weapon. They were lacking one critical fact, a fact that would become known to all -including the Authority -very soon.

Wili glanced at his watch: two minutes to go. There was no way he could imagine Della preventing the rescue now. And he had some quick explaining to do, or else -when his allies saw what he had done -he might have deadly problems. "Okay," he said finally. "In ninety seconds, my gadget is going to throw a bobble around the top floors of the Tradetower."

"What?" The question came from four mouths, in two languages. The Alcalde's man, so mild and respectful, was suddenly at his throat. He held up his hand briefly as his men started toward the equipment on the balcony. His other hand pressed against Wili's windpipe, just short of pain, and Wili realized that he had seconds to convince him not to topple the generator into the street. "The bobble will... pop... later.... Time... stops inside," choked Wili. The pressure on his throat eased; the goons edged back from the balcony. Wili saw Jonque and sabio trade glances. There would have to be a lot more explanations later, but for now they would cooperate.

A sudden, loud click marked the discharge of the Julians. All eyes looked westward through the opening that once held a sliding glass door. Faint "ah"s escaped from several pairs of lips.

The top of the Tradetower was in shadow, surmounted and dwarfed by a four-hundred-meter sphere.

"The building, it must collapse," someone said. But it didn't. The bobble was only as massive as what it enclosed, and that was mostly empty air. There was a long moment of complete silence, broken only by the far, tiny wailing of sirens. Wili had known what to expect, but even so it took an effort to tear his attention from the sky and surreptitiously survey the others.

Lu was staring wide-eyed as any; even her schemes were momentarily submerged. But Rosas: The undersheriff looked back into Wili's gaze, a different kind of wonder on his face, the wonder of a man who suddenly discovers that some of his guilt is just a bad dream. Wili nodded faintly at him. Yes, Jeremy is still alive, or at least will someday live again. You did not murder him, Mike.

In the sky around the Tradetower, the helicopters swept in close to the silver curve of the bobble. From further up they could hear the whine of the fixed-wing patrol spreading in greater and greater circles around the Enclave. They had stepped on a hornets' nest and now those hornets were doing their best to decide what had happened and to deal with the enemy. Finally, the Jonque chief turned to the Ndelante sabio. "Can your people get us out from under all this?"

The black cocked his head, listening to his earphone, then replied, "Not till dark. We've got a tunnel head about two hundred meters from here, but the way they're patrolling, we probably couldn't make it. Right after sunset, before things cool off enough for their heat eyes to work good, that'll be the best time to sneak back. Till then we should stay away from windows and keep quiet. The last few months they've improved. Their snooper gear is almost as good as ours now."

The lot of them -blacks, Jonques, and Lu - moved carefully back into the hallway. Wili left his equipment sitting near the edge of the balcony; it was too risky to retrieve it just now. Fortunately, its camouflage bag resembled the nondescript rubble that surrounded it.

Wili sat with his back against the door. No one was going to get to the generator without his knowing it.

From in here, the sounds of the Enclave were fainter, but soon he heard something ominous and new: the rattle and growl of tracked vehicles.

After they were settled and lookouts were posted at the nearest peepholes, the sabio sat beside Wili and smiled. "And now, young friend, we have hours to sit, time for you to tell us just what you meant when you said that the bobble will burst, and that time stops inside." He spoke quietly, and considering the present situation -it was a reasonable question. But Wili recognized the tone. On the other side of the hallway, the Alcalde's man leaned forward to listen. There was just enough light in the musty hallway for Wili to see the faint smile on Lu's face.

He must mix truth and lies just right. It would be along afternoon.

TWENTY-EIGHT

The hallway was brighter now. As the sun set, its light came nearly horizontally through the rips near the ceiling and splashed bloody light down upon them. The air patrols had spread over a vast area, and the nearest tanks were several thousand meters away; Ebenezer's man had coordinated a series of clever decoy operations -the sort of thing Wili had seen done several times against the Jonques.

"iDel Nico Dio!" It was almost a shriek. The lookout at the end of the hall jumped down from his perch. "It's happen-ing. Just as he said. It's flying!"

Ebenezer's sabio made angry shushing motions, but the group moved quickly to the opening, the sabio and chief Jon-que forcing their way to the front. Wili crawled between them and looked through one of the smaller chinks in the plaster and concrete: The evening haze was red. The sun sat half-dissolved in the deeper red beyond the Enclave towers.

And hanging just above the skyline was a vast new moon, a dark sphere edged by a crescent of red: The bobble had risen off the top of the Tradetower and was slowly drifting with the evening breeze toward the west.

"Mother of God," the Alcalde's man whispered to himself. Even with understanding, this was hard to grasp. The bobble, with its cargo of afternoon air, was lighter than the evening air around it, was the largest hot air balloon in history. And sailing into the sunset with it went the Tinker hostages. The noise of aircraft came louder, as the hornets returned to their nest and buzzed around this latest development. One of the insects strayed too close to the vast smooth arc. Its rotor shattered; the helicopter fell away, turning and turning.

The sabio glanced down at Wili. "You're sure it will come inland?"

"Yes. Uh, Naismith studied the wind patterns very carefully. It's just a matter of time - weeks at most - before it grounds in the mountains. The Authority will know soon enough - along with the rest of the world - the secret of the bobbles, but they won't know just when this one will burst. If the bobble ends up far enough away, the other problems we are going to cause them will be so big they won't post a permanent force around it. Then, when it finally bursts..."

"I know, I know. When it finally bursts we're there to rescue them. But ten years is long to sleep."

It would actually be one year. That had been one of Wili's little lies. If Lu and the Peacers didn't know the potential for short-lived bobbles, then It suddenly occurred to him that Della Lu was no longer in his sight. He turned quickly from the wall and looked down the hallway. But she and Rosas were still there, sitting next to a couple of Jonque goons who had not joined the crush at the peephole. "Look, I think we should try to make it back to the tunnel now. The Peacers have plenty of new problems, and it's pretty dark down in the street."