ning. He was up here at Livermore, dripping gAu. And he was buying everything that moved: autos, tanks, crawlers, aircraft.

The man was a strange one. He'd made a big show of being friendly, and Wili was cool enough now to take advantage. Wili asked the Jonque what he was going to do with his loot Richardson had been vague, but said he wasn't returning to Aztlán. "I like the freedom here, Wachendon. No rules. Think I may move north. It could be very profitable." And he'd had some advice for Wili, advice that just now seemed without ulterior motive: "Don't go back to L.A., Wachendon. The Alcalde loves you - at least for the moment. But the Ndelante has figured out who you are, and old Ebenezer doesn't care how big a hero you are up here at Livermore."

Wili looked back at Allison. "What can you do to stop it?"

"The things I've already said for a start. A hundred thousand new people, most with my attitudes, should help the education process. And when the dust has settled, I'm hoping we'll have something like a decent government. It won't be in Aztlán Those guys are straight out of the sixteenth century; wouldn't be surprised if they're the biggest o? the new land grabbers. And it won't be the ungoverned land. that most of the US has become. In all of North America, there seems to only one representative democracy left-the Republic of New Mexico. It's pretty pitiful geographically, doesn't control much more than old New Mexico. But the) seem to have the ideals we need. I think a lot of my old friends will think the same.

"And that's just the beginning, Wili. That's just housekeeping. The last fifty years have been a dark age it some ways. But technology has progressed. Your electronics is as far advanced as I imagined it would be.

"Wili, the human race was on the edge of something great. Given another few years, we would have colonized the inner solar system. That dream is still close to people's consciousness - I've seen how popular Celest is. We can have that dream for real now, and easier than we twentieth-century types could have done it. I'll bet that hiding away in the theory of bobbles, there are ideas that will make it trivial."

They talked for a long while, probably longer than the busy Allison had imagined they would. When he left, Wild

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was as much in a daze as when he arrived - only now his mind was in the clouds. He was going to learn some physics. Math was the heart of everything, but you had to have something to apply it to. With his own mind and the tools he had learned to use, he would make those things Allison dreamed of. And if Allison's fears about the next few years turned out to be true, he would be around to help out on that, too.