THIRTEEN
Still five meters up, the twin rotor chopper sent a shower of grit across the Tradetower helipad. From her place in the main cabin, Delia Lu watched the bystanders grab their hats and squint into the wash. Old Hamilton Avery was the only fellow who kept his aplomb.
As the chopper touched down, one of her crew slid open the front hatch and waved at the standing VIPs. Through her silvered window, she saw Director Avery nod and turn to shake hands with Smythe, the L.A. franchise owner. Then Avery walked alone toward the crewman, who had not stepped down from the doorway.
Smythe was probably the most powerful Peacer in Southern California. She wondered what he thought when his boss submitted to such a cavalier pickup. She smiled lopsidedly. Hell, she was in charge of the operation, and she didn't know what was coming off either.
The rotors spun up even has she heard the hatch slam. Her crew had their orders: The helipad dropped away as the chopper rose like some magic elevator from the top of the Tradetower. They slid out from the roof and she looked down eighty storeys at the street.
As the helicopter turned toward LAX and Santa Monica, Delia came to her feet. An instant later Avery entered her cabin. He looked completely relaxed yet completely formal, his dress both casual and expensive. In theory, the Board of Directors of the Peace Authority was a committee of equals. In fact, Hamilton Avery had been the driving force behind it for as long as Della Lu had been following inner politics. Though not a famous man, he was the most powerful one in the world.
"My dear! So good to see you." Avery walked quickly to her, shook her hand as if she were an equal and not an officer three levels below him. She let the silver-haired Director take her elbow and lead her to a seat. One might think she was his guest.
They sat down, and the Director looked quickly about the cabin. It was a solid, mobile command room. There was no bar, no carpets. With her priority; she could have had such, but Della had not gotten to her present job by sucking up to her bosses.
The aircraft hummed steadily westward, the chop of the blades muted by the office's heavy insulation. Below, Della could see Peace Authority housing. The Enclave was really a corridor that extended from Santa Monica and LAX on the coast, inland to what had once been the center of Los Angeles. It was the largest Enclave in the world. More than fifty thousand people lived down there, mostly near the News Service studios. And they lived well. She saw swimming pools and tennis courts on the three-acre suburban lots that passed below.
In the north glowered the castles and fortified roads of the Aztlÿn aristocrats. They had governmental responsibility for the region, but without Banned technology their "palaces" were medieval dumps. Like the Republic of New Mexico, Aztlÿn watched the Authority with impotent jealousy and dreamed of the good old days.
Avery looked up from the view. "I noticed you had the Beijing insignia painted over."
"Yes, sir. It was clear from your message that you didn't want people to guess you were using people from off North
America." That was one of the few things that was crystal clear. Three days before she had been at the Beijing Enclave, just returned from her final survey of the Central Asian situation. Then a megabyte of instructions and background came over the satellite from Livermore - and not to the Beijing franchise owner, but to one Della Lu, third-level counter-guerrilla cop and general hatchetman. She was assigned a cargo jet- its freight being this chopper -and told to fly across the Pacific to LAX. No one was to emerge at any intermediate stop. At LAX, the freighter crew was to disgorge the chopper with her people, and return immediately.
Avery nodded approvingly. "Good. I need someone who doesn't need everything spelled out. Have you had a chance to read the New Mexico report?"
"Yes, sir." She had spent the flight studying the report and boning up on North American politics. She had been gone three years; there'd have been a lot of catching up to do even without the Tucson crisis.
"Do you think the Republic bought our story?"
She thought back on the meeting tape and the dossiers. "Yes. Ironically, the most suspicious of them were also the most ignorant. Schelling bought it hook, line, and sinker. He knows enough theory to see that it's reasonable."
Avery nodded.
"But they'll continue to believe only if no more bobbles burst. And I understand it's happened at least twice more during the last few weeks. I don't believe the quantum decay explanation. The old USA missile fields are littered with thousands of bobbles. If decays continue to happen, they won't be missed."
Avery nodded again, didn't seem especially upset by her analysis.
The chopper did a gentle bank over Santa Monica, giving her a close-up view of the largest mansions in the Enclave. She had a glimpse of the Authority beach and the ruined Aztlÿn shoreline further south, and then they were over the ocean. They flew south several kilometers before turning inland. They would fly in vast circles until the meeting was over. Even the Tucson event could not explain this mission. Della almost frowned.
Avery raised a well-manicured hand. "What you say is cor-- rect, but may be irrelevant. It depends on what the true explanation turns out to be. Have you considered the possibility that someone has discovered how to destroy bobbles, that we are seeing their experiments?"
"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 Aztlÿn, 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."