A woman's voice shrieked in her ear, '
Will twisted, his face agonized, like someone trying to waken from a dream.
But if he woke, if his dream died, then all their dreams would die. 'Drive, Allison. Please drive,' Wili's synthetic voice came cool from her earpiece. 'Paul... Paul wants this more than anything.' Behind her, the boy's real voice was softly moaning. And Paul moved not at all.
Allison closed out everything but her job: They were on a surfaced street. She rammed the throttle forward, took the crawler up to seventy kph. She had only vague impressions of the buildings on either side of them. It looked like residential housing, though more opulent than in her time. All was deserted. Coming up on a T-intersection. Over the roofs of the multistory residences, the towers at the center of the Enclave seemed no nearer.
Wili's voice continued, 'Right at the intersection. Then left and left. Foot soldiers are coming from east. So far they think we're one of them, but I'm breaking laser contact... now,' Allison whipped into the turn, 'and they should guess what we are very soon.'
They continued so for several minutes. It was like dealing with an ordinary voice program: Turn right. Turn left. Slow down. Keep to the edge of the street.
'Five hundred meters. Take the service alley here. They're onto us. Gunships coming. They can't locate us precisely enough to bobble. Whoever sees us is to shoot.' He was silent again as Allison negotiated the alley. Still no sign of life from Paul.
'He still lives, Allison. I can still... hear... him a little.'
Through the front periscope she had a glimpse of something dark and fast cross the narrow band of sky between the houses.
'Pull under that overhang. Stop. Throttle up to charge the cells. Thirty seconds for local conditions and I'll be ready to fire.'
The moment they were stopped, Allison was out of her harness and bending over Paul. 'Now leave me. I need to think. Take Paul. Save Paul.'
She looked at the boy He still hadn't opened his eyes. He was further off than she had ever seen him.
'But Wili —'
His body twitched, and the synthetic voice was suddenly angry in her ear. 'I need time to think, and I don't have it. Their planes are on the way. Get out. Get out!'
Allison unbuckled Paul and removed the scalp connector. He was breathing, but his face remained slack. She cranked at the rear doors, praying that nothing had been warped by their fall into the ditch. The doors popped open and cool morning air drifted in, along with the keening of the engines.
She ripped off her headset and struggled to get the old man's body over her shoulder. As she staggered past Wili, she noticed his lips were moving. She bent down awkwardly to listen. The boy was mumbling, 'Run, run, run, run...'
Allison did her best.
FORTY
No one understood the conflict as Wili did. Even when he was linked with Jill, Paul had only a secondhand view. And after Paul, there was no one who saw more than fragments of the picture. It was Wili who ran the Tinker side of the show — and to some extent the Peacer side, too. Without his directions in Paul's voice, the thousands of separate operations going on all over the Earth would be so scattered in time and effect that the Authority would have little trouble keeping its own control system going.
But Wili knew his time would end very, very soon.
From the crawler's recon camera, he watched Paul and Allison moving away, into the managerial residences. Their footsteps came fainter in his exterior microphones. Would he ever know if Paul survived?
Through the narrow gap between the sides of the alley a Peacer satellite floated beyond the blue sky. One reason he had chosen this parking spot was to have that line of sight. In ninety seconds, the radio star would slide behind carven wooden eaves. He would lose it, and thus its relay to synchronous altitude, and thus his control of things worldwide. He would be deaf, dumb, and blind. But ninety seconds from now, it wouldn't matter; he and all the other Tinkers would win or lose in sixty.
The whole system had spasmed when Paul was knocked out. Jill had stopped responding. For several minutes, Wili had struggled with all the high-level computations. Now Jill was coming back on line; she was almost finished with the local state computations. The capacitors would be fully charged seconds after that. Wili surveyed the world one last time:
From orbit he saw golden morning spread across Northern California. Livermore Valley sparkled with a false dew that was really dozens — hundreds — of bobbles. Unaided humans would need many versions of this picture to understand what Wili saw at once.
There were ground troops a couple of thousand meters east of him. They had fanned out, obviously didn't know where he was. The tricky course he had given Allison would keep him safe from them for at least five minutes.
Jets had been diverted from the north side of the Valley. He watched them crawl across the landscape at nearly four hundred meters per second. They were the real threat. They
