by Vernor Vinge
“The choice of ‘experiment sites’ is very strange, sir: the Ross Iceshelf, Tucson, Ulan Ude. And I don’t see how such an organization could escape direct detection.”
Fifty-five years ago, before the War, what had become the Peace Authority had been a contract laboratory, a corporation run under federal grants to do certain esoteric—and militarily productive—research. That research had produced the bobbles, force fields whose generation took a minimum of thirty minutes of power from the largest nuclear plant in the lab. The old US government had not been told of the discovery; Avery’s father had seen to that. Instead, the lab directors played their own version of geopolitics. Even at the rarefied bureaucratic heights Della inhabited, there was no solid evidence that the Avery lab had started the War, but she had her suspicions.
In the years following the great collapse, the Authority had stripped the rest of the world of high-energy technology. The most dangerous governments—such as that of the United States—were destroyed, and their territories left in a state that ranged from the village anarchy of Middle California, to the medievalism of Aztlán, to the fascism of New Mexico. Where governments did exist, they were just strong enough to collect the Authority Impost. These little countries were in some ways sovereign. They even fought their little wars—but without the capital industry and high-energy weapons that made war a threat to the race.
Della doubted that, outside the Enclaves, there existed the technical expertise to reproduce the old inventions, much less improve on them. And if someone did discover the secret of the bobble, Authority satellites would detect the construction of the power plants and factories needed to implement the invention.
“I know, I may sound paranoid. But one thing you youngsters don’t understand is how technologically stultified the Authority is.” He glanced at her, as though expecting debate. “We have all the universities and all the big labs. We control most degreed persons on Earth. Nevertheless, we do very little research. I should know, since I can remember my father’s lab right before the War—and even more, because I’ve made sure no really imaginative projects got funded since.
“Our factories can produce most any product that existed before the War.” He slapped his hand against the bulkhead. “This is a good, reliable craft, probably built in the last five years. But the design is almost sixty years old.”
He paused and his tone became less casual. “During the last six months, I’ve concluded we’ve made a serious mistake in this. There are people operating under our very noses who have technology substantially in advance of pre-War levels.”
“I hope you’re not thinking of the Mongolian nationalists, sir. I tried to make it clear in my reports that their nuclear weapons were from old Soviet stockpiles. Most weren’t usable. And without those bombs they were just pony sol—”
“No, my dear Della, that’s not what I am thinking of.” He slid a plastic box across the table. “Look inside.”
Five small objects sat in the velvet lining. Lu held one in the sunlight. “A bullet?” It looked like an 8-mm. She couldn’t tell if it had been fired; there was some damage, but no rifling marks. Something dark and glossy stained the nose.
“That’s right. But a bullet with a brain. Let me tell you how we came across that little gem.
“Since I became suspicious of these backyard scientists, these Tinkers, I’ve been trying to infiltrate. It hasn’t been easy. In most of North America, we have tolerated no governments. Even though it’s cost us on the Impost, the risk of nationalism seemed too high. Now I see that was a mistake. Somehow they’ve gone further than any of the governed areas—and we have no easy way to watch them, except from orbit.
“Anyway, I sent teams into the ungoverned lands, using whatever cover was appropriate. In Middle California, for instance, it was easiest to pretend they were descendents of the old Soviet invasion force. Their instructions were to hang around in the mountains and ambush likely-looking travelers. I figured we would gradually accumulate information without any official raids. Last week, one crew ambushed three locals in the forests east of Vandenberg. The quarry had only one gun, a New Mexico eight-millimeter. It was nearly dark, but from a distance of forty meters the enemy hit every one of the ten-man crew—with one burst from the eight-millimeter.”
“The New Mexico eight-millimeter only has a ten-round clip. That’s—”
“A perfect target score, my dear. And my men swear the weapon was fired on full automatic. If they hadn’t been wearing body armor, or if the rounds had had normal velocity, not one of them would have lived to tell the story. Ten armed men killed by one man and a handmade gun. Magic. And you’re holding a piece of that magic. Others have been through every test and dissection that Livermore labs could come up with. You’ve heard of smart bombs? Sure, your air units in Mongolia used them. Well, Miss Lu, these are smart bullets.
“The round has a video eye up front, connected to a processor as powerful as anything we can pack in a suitcase—and our suitcase version would cost a hundred thousand monets. Evidently the gun barrel isn’t rifled; the round can change attitude in flight to close with its target.”
Della rolled the metal marble in her palm. “So it’s under the control of the gunman?”
“Only indirectly, and only at ‘launch’ time. There must be a processor on the gun that queues the targets, and chooses the firing instant. The processor on the bullet is more than powerful enough to latch the assigned target. Rather interesting, eh?”
Della nodded. She remembered how delicate the attack gear on the A511’s had been—and how expensive. They’d needed a steady supply of replacement boards from Beijing. If these things could be made cheaply enough to throw away…?
Hamilton Avery gave a small smile, apparently satisfied with her reaction. “That’s not all. Take a look at the other things in the box.”
Della dropped the bullet onto the velvet padding and picked up a brownish ball. It was slightly sticky on her fingers. There were no markings, no variations in its surface. She raised her eyebrows.
“That is a bug, Della. Not one of your ordinary, audio bugs, but full video—we expect in all directions, at that. Something to do with Fourier optics, my experts tell me. It can record, or transmit a very short distance. We’ve guessed all this from x-ray micrographs of the interior. We don’t even have equipment that can interface with it!”
“You’re sure it’s not recording right now?”
“Oh yes. They fried its guts before I took it. The microscopists claim there’s not a working junction in there.
“Now I think you see the reason for all the precautions.”
Della nodded slowly. The bobble bursts were not the reason; he expected their true enemies already knew all about those. Yes, Avery was being clever—and he was as frightened as his cool personality would ever allow.
They sat silently for about thirty seconds. The chopper made another turn, and the sunlight swept across Della’s face. They were flying east over Long Beach toward Anaheim—those were the names in the history books anyway. The street pattern stretched off into gray-orange haze. It gave a false sense of order. The reality was kilometer on kilometer of abandoned, burned-out wilderness. It was hard to believe that this threat could grow in North America. But, after the fact, it made sense. If you deny big industry and big research to people, they will look for other ways of getting what they need.
…And if they could make these things, maybe they were clever enough to go beyond all the beautiful quantum-mechanical theories and figure a way to burst bobbles.
“You think they’ve infiltrated the Authority?”
“I’m sure of it. We swept our labs and conference rooms. We found seventeen bugs on the West Coast, two in China, and a few more in Europe. There were no repeaters near the overseas finds, so we think they were unintentional exports. The plague appears to spread from California.”
“So they know we’re on to them.”
“Yes, but little more. They’ve made
some big mistakes and we’ve had a bit of good luck: We have an informer in the California group. He came to us less than two weeks ago, out of the blue. I think he’s legitimate. What he’s told us matches our discoveries but goes a good deal further. We’re going to run these people to ground. And do it officially. We haven’t made an example of anyone in a long time, not since the Yakima incident.
“Your role in this will be crucial, Della. You are a woman, and outside the Authority the frailer sex is disregarded nowadays.”
Not only outside the Authority, thought Della.
“You’ll be invisible to the enemy, until it’s too late.”
“You mean a field job?”
“Why, yes, my dear. You’ve certainly had rougher assignments.”
“Yes, but—” but I was a field director in Mongolia.
Avery put his hand on Della’s. “This is no demotion. You’ll be responsible only to me. As communications permit, you’ll control the California operation. But we need our very best out there on the ground, someone who knows the land and can be given a credible cover.” Della had been born and raised in San Francisco. For three generations, her family had been ’furbishers—and Authority plants.
“And there is a very special thing I want done. This may be more important than all the rest of the operation.” Avery laid a color picture on the table. The photo was grainy, blown up to near the resolution limit. She saw a group of men standing in front of a barn: northern farmers—except for the black child talking to a tall boy who carried an NM 8-mm. She could guess who these were.
“See the guy in the middle—by the one with the soldier frizz.”
His face was scarcely more than a blotch, but he looked perfectly ordinary, seventy or eighty years old. Della could walk through a crowd in any North American enclave and see a dozen such.
“We think that’s Paul Hoehler.” He glanced at his agent. “The name doesn’t mean anything to you, does it? Well, you won’t find it in the history books, but I remember him. Back in Livermore, right before the War. I was just a kid. He was in my father’s lab and…he’s the man who invented the bobble.”
Della’s attention snapped back to the photo. She knew she had just been let in on one of those secrets which was kept from everyone, which would otherwise die with the last of the old Directors. She tried to see something remarkable in the fuzzy features.
“Oh, Schmidt, Kashihara, Bhadra, they got the thing into projectable form. But it was one of Hoehler’s bright ideas. The hell of it is, the man wasn’t—isn’t—even a physicist.
“Anyway, he disappeared right after the War started. Very clever. He didn’t wait to do any moral posturing, to give us a chance to put him away. Next to eliminating the national armies, catching him was one of our highest priorities. We never got him. After ten or fifteen years, when we had control of all the remaining labs and reactors, the search for Dr. Hoehler died. But now, after all these years, when we see bobbles being burst, we have rediscovered him…You can see why I’m convinced the ‘bobble decay’ is not natural.”
Avery tapped the picture. “This is the man, Della. In the next weeks, we’ll take Peace action against hundreds of people. But it will all be for nothing if you can’t nail this one man.”
FLASHFORWARD
Allison’s wound showed no sign of reopening, and she didn’t think there was much internal bleeding. It hurt, but she could walk. She and Quiller set up camp—more a hiding place than a camp, really—about twenty minutes from the crash site.
The fire had put a long plume of reddish smoke into the sky. If there was a sane explanation for all this, that plume would attract Air Force rescue. And if it attracted unfriendlies first, then they were far enough away from the crash to escape. She hoped.
The day passed, warm and beautiful—and untouched by any sign of other human life. Allison found herself impatient and talkative. She had theories: A cabin leak on their last revolution could almost explain things. Hypoxia can sneak up on you before you know it—hadn’t something like that killed three Sov pilots in the early days of space? Hell, it could probably account for all sorts of jumbled memories. Somehow their reentry sequence had been delayed. They’d ended up in the Australian jungles…No that wasn’t right, not if the problem had really happened on the last rev. Perhaps Madagascar was a possibility. That People’s Republic would not exactly welcome them. They would have to stay undercover till Air Force tracking and reconnaissance spotted the crash site…A strike-rescue could come any time now, say with the Air Force covering a VTOL Marine landing.
Angus didn’t buy it. “There’s the dome, Allison. No country on Earth could build something like that without us knowing about it. I swear it’s kilometers high.” He waved at the second sun that stood in the west. The two suns were difficult to see through the forest cover. But during their hike from the crash site they’d had better views. When Allison looked directly at the false sun with narrowed eyes, she could see that the disk was a distorted oval—clearly a reflection off some vast curved surface. “I know it’s huge, Angus. But it doesn’t have to be a physical structure. Maybe it’s some sort of inversion layer effect.”
“You’re only seeing the part that’s way off the ground, where there’s nothing to reflect except sky. If you climb one of the taller trees, you’d see the coastline reflected in the dome’s base.”
“Hmm.” She didn’t have to climb any trees to believe him. What she couldn’t believe was his explanation.
“Face it, Allison. We’re nowhere in the world we knew. Yet the tombstone shows we’re still on Earth.”
The tombstone. So much smaller than the dome, yet so much harder to explain. “You still think it’s the future?”
Angus nodded. “Nothing else fits. I don’t know how fast something like stone carving wears: I suppose we can’t be more than a thousand years ahead.” He grinned. “An ordinary, Buck Rogers-like interval.”
She smiled back. “Better Buck Rogers than The Last Remake or Planet of the Apes.”
“Yeah. I never like it where they kill off all the ‘extra’ time-travelers.”
Allison gazed through the forest canopy at the second sun. There had to be some other explanation.
They argued it back and forth for hours, in the end agreeing to give the “rescued from Madagascar” theory twenty-four hours to show success. After that they would hike down to the coast, and then along it till they found some form of humanity.
It was late afternoon when they heard it: a whistling scream that grew abruptly to a roar.
“Aircraft!” Allison struggled to her feet.
Angus shook himself, and looked into the sky. Then he was standing, too, all but dancing from one foot to the other.
Something dark and arrow-shaped swept over them. “An A-five-eleven, by God,” exulted Angus. “Somehow you were right, Allison!” He hugged her.
There were at least three jets. The air was filled with their sound. And it was a joint operation. They glimpsed the third coming to a hover just three hundred meters away. It was one of the new Sikorsky troop carriers. Only the Marines flew those.
They started down the narrow path toward the nearest of the ships, Allison’s gait a limping jog. Suddenly Angus’ hand closed on her arm. She spun around, off balance. The pilot was pointing through a large gap in the branches, at the hovering Sikorsky. “Paisley?” was all he said.
“What?” Then she saw it. The outer third of the wings was covered with an extravagant paisley pattern. In the middle was set a green phi or theta symbol. It was utterly unlike any military insignia she had ever seen.
14
The atmosphere of an open chess tournament hadn’t changed much in the last hundred years. A visitor from 1948 might wonder at the plush, handmade clothing and the strange haircuts. But the important things—the informality mixed with intense concentration, the wide range of ages, the silence on the floor, the long tables and rows of players—all would be instantly recognizable.
O
nly one important thing had changed, and that might take the hypothetical time-traveler a while to notice: The contestants did not play alone. Teams were not allowed, but virtually all serious players had assistance, usually in the form of a gray box sitting by the board or on the floor near their feet. The more conservative players used small keyboards to communicate with their programs. Others seemed unconnected to any aid but every so often would look off into the distance, lost in concentration. A few of these were players in the old sense, disdaining all programmatic magic.
Wili was the most successful of these atavists. His eyes flickered down the row of boards, trying to decide who were the truly human players and who were the fakes. Beyond the end of the table, the Pacific Ocean was a blue band shining through the open windows of the pavilion.
Wili pulled his attention back to his own game, trying to ignore the crowd of spectators and trying even less successfully to ignore his opponent. Though barely out of a Ruy Lopez opening—that’s what Jeremy had called it the other night, anyway—Wili had a good feeling about the game. A strong kingside attack should now be possible, unless his opponent had a complete surprise up her sleeve. This would be his fifth straight win. That accounted for the crowd. He was the only purely human player still undefeated. Wili smiled to himself. This was a totally unexpected by-product of the expedition, but a very pleasant one. He had never been admired for anything (unless his reputation within the Ndelante counted as admirable). It would be a pleasure to show these people how useless their machines really were. For the moment he forgot that every added attention would make it harder for him to fade away when the time came.
Wili considered the board a second longer, then pushed his bishop pawn, starting a sequence of events that ought to be unstoppable. He punched his clock, and finally raised his eyes to look at his opponent.