"Betcha that last will be an engineering impossibility for a long time. We should concentrate on making a low-power bobbler. That looks hard enough."
"Yes. Wili's right on schedule with that."
Jill's image suddenly froze, then flicked out of existence. Naismith heard the veranda door slide open. "Hi, Paul," came Allison's voice. She walked up the steps. "You out here by yourself?"
"...Yes. Just thinking."
She walked to the edge of the veranda and looked westward. These last weeks, every day had brought more change in Paul's life and in the world beyond the mountains than a normal year. Yet for Allison, it was different. Her world had turned inside out in the space of an hour. He knew the present rate of change was agonizingly slow for her. She paced the stone flags, stopping occasionally to glare off into the sunset at the Vandenberg Bobble.
Allison. Allison. Few old men had dreams come quite so stunningly true. She was so young; her energy seemed to flash about her in every stride, in every quick movement of her arms. In some ways the memories of Allison lost were less hurtful than the present reality. Still, he was glad he had not succeeded in disguising what became of Paul Hoehler.
Allison suddenly looked back at him, and smiled. "Sorry about the pacing."
"No problem. I..."
She waved toward the west. The air was so clear that-except for the lake and the coastline reflected in its base — the Dome was almost invisible. "When will it burst, Paul? There were three thousand of us there the day I left. They had guns, aircraft. When will they come out?"
A month ago he would not have thought of the question. Two weeks ago he couldn't have answered. In those weeks a theory had been trashed and his new theory born. It was totally untested, but soon, soon that would change. "Uh. My answer's still guessing Allison: The Authority technique, the only way I could think of then, is a brute force method. With it, the lifetime is about fifty years. So now I can represent radius or mass as a perturbation series about a fifty-year decay time. The smallest bobbles the Authority made were about ten meters across. They burst first. Your sortie craft was trapped in a thirty-meter bobble; it decayed a little later." Paul realized he was wandering and tried to force his answer into the mold she must want. He thought a moment. "Vandenberg ought to last fifty-five years."
"Five more years. Damn it." She walked back across the veranda. "I guess you'll have to win without them. I was wondering why you hadn't told your friends about me you haven't even told them that time stops inside the bobbles. I thought maybe you expected to surprise the Peacers with their long-dead victims suddenly alive."
"You're close. You, me, Wili, and the Moraleses are the only ones who know. The Authority hasn't guessed — Wili says they've carted your orbiter up to Livermore as if it were full of clues. No doubt the fools think they've stumbled on some new conspiracy... But then, I guess it's not so stupid. I'll bet you didn't have any paper records aboard the orbiter."
"Right. Even our notepads were display flats. We could trash everything in seconds if we fell among unfriendlies. The fire would leave them with nothing but slagged optical memory. And if they don't have the old fingerprint archives, they're not going to identify Fred or Angus."
"Anyway, I've told the Tinkers to be ready, that I'm going to tell them how to make bobble generators. Even then, I may not say anything about the stasis effect. That's something that could give us a real edge, but only if we use the knowledge at the right time. I don't want some leak to blow it...
Allison turned as if to pace back to the edge of the veranda, then noticed the display that Paul had been studying. Her hand rested lightly on his shoulder as she leaned over to look at the displays. "Looks like a recon pattern," she said.
"Yes. Wili and Jill synthesized it from the satellites we're tapping. This shows where Authority aircraft have been searching."
"For you."
"Probably" He touched the keyboard at the margin of the flat, and the last few days' activity were displayed.
"Those bums." There was no lightness in her voice. "They destroyed our country and then stole our own procedures. Those search patterns look SOP 1997 for medium level air recon. I bet your damn Peacers never had an original thought in their lives... Hmm. Run that by again." She knelt to look closely at the daily summaries. "I think today's sorties were the last for that area, Paul. Don't be surprised if they move the search several hundred klicks in the next day or two." In some ways, Allison's knowledge was fifty years dead and useless — in other ways, it could be just what they needed.
Paul gave a silent prayer of thanks to Hamilton Avery for having kept the heat on all these years, for having forced Paul Hoehler to disguise his identity and his location through decades when there would have otherwise been no reason to. "If they shift further north, fine. If they come all the way south. Hmm. We're well hidden, but we wouldn't last more than a couple days under that sort of scrutiny. Then... " He drew a finger across his throat and made a croaking noise.
"No way you could put this show on the road, huh?"
"Eventually we could. Have to start planning for it. I have an enclosed wagon. It may be big enough for the essential equipment. But right now, Allison... Look, we don't yet have anything but a lot of theories. I'm translating the physics into problems Wili can handle. With Jill, he's putting them into software as fast as he can."
"He seems to spend his time daydreaming, Paul."
Naismith shook his head. "Wili's the best." The boy had picked up symbiotic programming faster than Paul had ever seen, faster than he'd thought possible. The technique improved almost any programmer, but in Wili's case, it had turned a first-rank genius into something Naismith could no longer completely understand. Even when he was linked with Wili and Jill, the details of their algorithms were beyond him. It was curious, because off the symbiosis Wili was not that much brighter than the old man. Paul wondered if he could have been that good, too, if he had started young. "I think we're nearly there, Allison. Based on what we understand now, it ought to be possible to make bobbles with virtually no energy input. The actual hardware should be something Jill can prototype here."
Allison didn't come off her knees. Her face was just centimeters from his. "That Jill program is something. Just the motion holo for the face would have swamped our best array processors... But why make it look like me, Paul? After all those years, did I really mean so much?"
Naismith tried to think of something flippant and diversionary, but no words came. She looked at him a second longer, and he wondered if she could see the young man trapped within.
"Oh, Paul." Then her arms were around him, her cheek next to his.
She held him as one would hold something very fragile, very old.
Two days later, Wili was ready.
They waited till after dark to make the test. In spite of Paul's claims, Wili wasn't sure how big the bobble would be, and even if it did not turn out to be a monster, its mirrorlike surface would be visible for hundreds of kilometers to anyone looking in the right direction in the daytime.
The three of them walked to the pond north of the house. Wili carried the bulky transmitter for his symb link. Near the pond's edge he set his equipment down and slipped on the scalp connector. Then he lit a candle and placed it on a large tree stump. It was a tiny spot of yellow, bright only because all else was so dark. A gray thread of smoke rose from the glow.
"We think the bobble, it will be small, but we don't want to take chances. Jill is going to make its lower edge to snip the top of this candle. Then if we're wrong, and it is huge —"