'Yes, but-'
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.'
Delta'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
'Yeah. I never like it where they kill off all the `extra' timetravelers.'
