She nodded, but didn't seem to be listening to the chitchat. "There's one other thing, sir. One other thing I wanted to bring up. We have the power to crush the Tinkers in North America; the situation is not like Europe. But craft has won against power before. If I were on the other side..."

"Yes?"

"If I were making their strategy, I would attack Livermore and try to bobble our generator."

"Without high-energy sources they can't attack us from a distance."

She shrugged. "That's our scientists' solemn word. And six months ago they would have argued volumes that bobbles can't be generated without nuclear power.... But let's assume that they're right. Even then I would try to come up with some attack plan, some way of getting in close enough to bobble the Authority generator."

Avery looked out his window, seeing the beautiful land with Lu's vision: as a possible battlefield, to be analyzed for fields of fire and interdiction zones. At first glance it was impossible to imagine any group getting in undetected, but from camping trips long ago he remembered all the ravines out there. Thank God the recon satellites were back in operation.

That would protect against only part of the danger. There was still the possibility that the enemy might use traitors to smuggle a Tinker bobble generator into the area. Avery's attention turned inward, calculating. He smiled to himself. Either way it wouldn't do them any good. It was common knowledge that one of the Authority's bobble generators was at Livermore (the other being at Beijing). And there were thousands of Authority personnel who routinely entered the Livermore Enclave. But that was a big area, almost fifty kilometers in its longest dimension. Somewhere in there was the generator and its power supply, but out of all the millions on Earth, only five knew exactly where that generator was housed, and scarcely fifty had access. The bobbler had been built under the cover of projects Jackson Avery contracted for the old LEL. Those projects had been the usual combination of military and energy research. The LEL and the US military had been only too happy to have them proceed in secret and had made it possible for the elder Avery to build his gadgets underground and well away from his official headquarters. Avery had seen to it that not even the military liaison had really known where everything was. After the War, that secrecy had been maintained: In the early days, the remnants of the US government still had had enough power to destroy the bobbler if they had known its location.

And now that secrecy was paying off: The only way Hoehler could accomplish what Lu predicted was if he found some way of making Vandenberg-sized bobbles.... The old fear welled up: That was just the sort of thing the monster was capable of.

He looked at Lu with a feeling that surpassed respect and bordered on awe: She was not merely competent- she could actually think like Hoehler. He took her by the arm and led her to the door. "You've helped more than you can know, Miss Lu."

THIRTY-TWO

Allison had been in the new world more than ten weeks.

Sometimes it was the small things that were the hardest to get used to. You could forget for hours at a time that nearly everyone you ever knew was dead, and that those deaths had been mostly murder. But when night came, and indoors became nearly as dark as outside - that was strangeness she could not ignore. Paul had plenty of electronic equipment, most of it more sophisticated than anything in the twentieth century, yet his power supply was measured in watts, not kilowatts. So they sat in darkness illuminated by the flatscreen displays and tiny holos that were their eyes on the outer world. Here they were, conspirators plotting the overthrow of a world dictatorship - a dictatorship which possessed missiles and nukes - and they sat timidly in the dark.

Their quixotic conspiracy wasn't winning, but, by God, the enemy knew it was in a fight. Take the TV: The first couple of weeks it seemed that there were hardly any stations, and those were mostly run by families. The Moraleses spent most of their viewing time with old recordings. Then, after the L.A. rescue, the Authority had begun around-the-clock saturation broadcasting similar to twentieth century Soviet feeds, and as little watched: It was all news, all stories about the heinous Tinkers and the courageous measures being taken by "your Peace Authority" to make the world safe from the Tinker threat.

Paul called those "measures" the Silvery Pogrom. Every day there were more pictures of convicted Tinkers and fellow-travelers disappearing into the bobble farm the Authority had established at Chico. Ten years, the announcers said; and those bobbles would burst and the felons would have their cases reviewed. Meantime, their property would also be held in stasis. Never in history, the audience was assured, had criminals and monsters been treated with more firmness or more fairness. Allison knew bullshit when she heard it; if she hadn't been bobbled herself, she would have assumed that it was a cover for extermination.

It was a strange feeling to have been present at the founding of the present order, and to be alive now, fifty years later. This great Authority, ruling the entire world - except now Europe and Africa -had grown from nothing more than that third-rate company Paul worked for in Livermore. What would have happened if she and Angus and Fred had made their flight a couple of days earlier, in time to return safely with the evidence?

Allison looked out the mansion's wide windows, into the twilight. Tears didn't come to her eyes anymore when she thought about it, but the pain was still there. If they had gotten back in time, her CO might have listened to Hoehler. They just might have been able to raid the Livermore labs before the brazen takeover that was called the "War" nowadays. And apparently the "War" had been just the beginning of decades of war and plague, now blamed on the losers. Just a couple of days' difference, and the world would not be a near-lifeless tomb, the United States a fading memory. To think that some lousy contractors could have brought down the greatest nation in history!

She turned back into the room, trying to see the three other conspirators in the dimness. An old man, a skinny kid, and Miguel Rosas. This was the heart of the conspiracy? Tonight, at least, Rosas sounded as pessimistic as she felt.

"Sure, Paul, your invention will bring them down eventually, but I'm telling you the Tinkers are all going to be dead or bobbled before that happens. The Peacers are moving fast."

The old man shrugged. "Mike, I think you just need something to panic over. A few weeks back it was the Peacers' recon operation. Wili fixed that - more than fixed it - so now you have to worry about something else." Allison agreed with Mike, but there was truth in Paul's complaint. Mike seemed both haunted and trapped: haunted by what he had done in the past, trapped by his inability to do something to make up for that past. "The Tinkers have simply got to hide out long enough to make more bobblers and im- prove on 'em. Then we can fight back." Paul voice was almost petulant, as though he thought that he had done all the hard work and now the Tinkers were incompetent to carry through with what remained. Sometimes Paul seemed exactly as she remembered him. But other times - like tonight he just seemed old, and faintly befuddled.

"I'm sorry, Paul, but I think that Mike he is right." The black kid spoke up, his Spanish accent incongruous yet pleasant. The boy had a sharp tongue and a temper to go with it, but when he spoke to Paul-even in contradiction he sounded respectful and diffident. "The Authority will not give us the time to succeed. They have bobbled the Alcalde del Norte himself. Red Arrow Farm is gone; if Colonel Kaladze was hiding there, then he is gone, too." On a clear day, dozens of tiny bobbles could be seen about the skirts of the Vandenberg Dome.