Of course, a lot of mysteries had been solved these last days, the greatest the first night. When she had brought the old man in, the servants had been very surprised. All they would say was that the "master will explain all that needs explaining." "The master" was nearly unconscious at the time, so that was little help. Otherwise they had treated her well, feeding her and giving her clean, though ill-fitting clothes. Her bedroom was almost a dormer, its windows half in and half out of the roof. The furniture was simple but elegant; the oiled burl dresser alone would have been worth thousands back... where she came from. She had sat on the bright patchwork quilt and thought darkly that there better be some explanations coming in the morning, or she was going to leg it back to the coast, unfriendly armies or no.
The huge house had been still and dead as the twilight deepened. Faint but clear against the silence, Allison could hear the sounds of applause and an audience laughing. It took her a second to realize that someone had turned on a television — though she hadn't seen a set during the day. Ha! Fifteen minutes of programming would probably tell her as much about this new universe as a month of talking to "Bill" and "Irma." She slid open her bedroom door and listened to the tiny, bright sounds:
The program was weirdly familiar, conjuring up memories of a time when she was barely tall enough to reach the "on" switch of her mother's TV "Saturday Night?" It was either that or something very similar. She listened a few moments more, heard references to actors, politicians who had died before she ever entered college. She walked down the stairs, and sat with the Moraleses through an evening of old TV shows.
They hadn't objected, and as the days passed they'd opened up about some things. This was the future, about a half-century forward of her present. They told her of the war and the plagues that ended her world, and the force fields, the "bobbles," that birthed the new one.
But while some things were explained, others became mysteries in themselves. The old man didn't socialize, though the Moraleses said that he was recovered. The house was big and there were many rooms whose doors stayed closed. He — and whoever else was in the house besides the servants — was avoiding her. Eerie. She wasn't welcome here. The Moraleses were not unfriendly and had let her take a good share of the chores, but behind them she sensed the old man wishing she would go away. At the same time, they couldn't afford to have her go. They feared the occupying armies, the "Peace Authority," as much as she did; if she were captured, their hiding place would be found. So they continued to be her uneasy hosts.
She had seen the old man scarcely a handful of times since the first afternoon, and never to talk to. He was in the mansion though. She heard his voice behind closed doors, sometimes talking with a woman — not Irma Morales. That female voice was strangely familiar.
God, what I wouldn't give for a friendly face right now. Someone to talk to. Angus, Fred, Paul Hoehler
Allison slid down from her rocky vantage point and paced angrily into the sunlight. On the coast, morning clouds still hung over the lowlands. The silver arch of the force field that enclosed Vandenberg and Lompoc seemed to float halfway up the sky. No structure could possibly be so big. Even mountains had the decency to introduce themselves with foothills and highlands. The Vandenberg Bobble simply rose, sheer and insubstantial as a dream. So that glistening hemisphere contained much of her old world, her old friends. They were trapped in timelessness in there, just as she and Angus and Fred had been trapped in the bobble around the sortie craft. And one day the Vandenberg bobble would burst...
Somewhere in the trees beyond her vision there was a cawing; a crow ascended above the pines, circled down at another point. Over the whine of insects, Allison heard padded clopping. A horse was coming up the narrow trail that went past her rock pile. Allison moved back into the shadows and watched.
Three minutes passed and a lone horseman came into view: It was a black male, so spindly it was hard to guess his age, except to say that he was young. He was dressed in dark greens, almost a camouflage outfit and his hair was short and unbraided. He looked tired, but his eyes swept attentively back and forth across the trail ahead of him. The brown eyes flickered across her.
"Jill! How did you get so far from the veranda?" The words were spoken with a heavy Spanish accent; at this point it was an incongruity beneath Allison's notice. A broad grin split the boy's face as he slid off the horse and scrambled across the rocks toward her. "Naismith says that-" the words came to an abrupt halt along with the boy himself. He stood an arm's-length away, his jaw sagging in disbelief. `Jill? Is that really you?" He swung his hand in a flat arc toward Allison's midsection. The gesture was too slow to be a blow, but she wasn't taking any chances. She grabbed his wrist.
The boy actually squeaked — but with surprise, not pain. It was as if he could not believe she had actually touched him.
She marched him back to the trail, and they started toward the house. She had his arm behind his back now. The boy did not struggle, though he didn't seem intimidated either. There was more shock and surprise in his eyes than fear.
Now that it was the other guy who was at a disadvantage, maybe she could get some answers. "'you, Naismith, none of you have ever seen me before, yet you all seem to know me. I want to know why." She bent his arm a bit more, though not enough to hurt. The violence was in her voice.
"But, but I have seen you." He paused an instant, then rushed on. "In pictures, I mean."
It might not be the whole truth, but... Perhaps it was like those fantasies Angus used to read. Perhaps she was somehow important, and the world had been waiting for them to come out of stasis. In that case their pictures might be widely distributed.
They walked a dozen steps along the soft, needle-covered path. No, there was something more. These people acted as if they had known her as a person. Was that possible? Not for the boy, but Bill and Irma and certainly Naismith were old enough that she might have known them ...before. She tried to imagine those faces fifty years younger. The servants couldn't have been more than children. The old man, he would have been around her own age.
She let the boy lead the way. She was more holding his hand than twisting his arm now; her mind was far away, thinking of the single tombstone with her name, thinking how much someone must have cared. They walked past the front of the house, descended the grade that led to a belowground-level entrance. The door there was open, perhaps to let in the cool smells of morning. Naismith sat with his back to them, his attention all focused on the equipment he was playing with. Still holding his horse's reins, the boy leaned past the doorway and said, "Paul?"
Allison looked past the old man's shoulder at the screen he was watching: a horse and a boy and a woman stood looking through a doorway at an old man watching a screen that... Allison echoed the boy, but in a tone softer, sadder, more questioning. "Paul?"
The old man, who just last month had been young, turned at last to meet her.
TWENTY-THREE
There were few places on Earth that were busier or more populous than they had been before the War. Livermore was such a place. At its pre-War zenith, there had been the city and the clusters of commercial and federal labs scattered through the rolling hills. Those had been boom times, with the old Livermore Energy Laboratories managing dozens of major enterprises and a dozen-dozen contract operations from their square-mile reservation just outside of town. And one of those operations, unknown to the rest, had been the key to the future. Its manager, Hamilton Avery's father, had been clever enough to see what could be done with a certain staff scientist's invention, and had changed the course of history.