Curious Notions ct-2

by Harry Turtledove

  "I don't care." Paul had made up his mind. He didn't know whether he was right or wrong. A lot of the time, that didn't become clear till later on anyhow. "If she doesn't go, I don't go."

  "I ought to bop you over the head and drag you," Wong said savagely.

  Paul tensed. "You can try." Could the man from Crosstime Traffic do it? Maybe. Paul had had self-defense courses, but he'd never be a black belt or anything like that. He told himself he'd put up the best fight he could. And even if he lost. . . "Good luck explaining why you're lugging me down the street on your back."

  Wong said several things in Chinese that didn't sound like compliments. Then he said several things in English that weren't compliments. Paul just smiled. Wong yelled, "You won't work for Crosstime Traffic again!" Paul's smile got bigger. That threat hurt. He refused to let Sammy Wong see how much. Besides, some things were more important.

  "How soon do you think it'll be before somebody phones?" Paul asked.

  Some of the things the older man called him made what he'd said before sound like a love letter. Paul looked down at his wrist. He wasn't wearing a watch, but the message came through loud and clear. "Here," Wong snarled, and the one word sounded worst of all. He took out a hypo and jabbed it into Lucy's arm.

  Twelve

  When Lucy woke up, she needed a moment to realize she had awakened. She'd gone to sleep or passed out or whatever it was so fast, she hardly even knew she'd done it. But the Asian man in the room with her and Paul sure hadn't been there what seemed like only a few seconds before. He looked mad enough to bite nails in half.

  "Hi," Paul said. "This is Sammy Wong. He's one of my friends from the Sunset District."

  "Oh. Hello," Lucy managed. Did that mean what she thought it did? Was this furious-looking Mr. Wong from whatever other San Francisco Paul came from? If he was, Paul had said so in a way he wouldn't know about. She nodded to the older man. "I'm pleased to meet you."

  "I'm not pleased to meet you, not even a little bit," he snapped. The glare he sent Paul could have melted iron. "Come on. Let's get out of here."

  That made Lucy squeak in surprise. "What about the Germans?" she asked.

  "What about 'em?" Sammy Wong said. He walked to the door and opened it. Lucy and Paul followed him.

  Feldgendarmerie men sprawled in the corridor. They weren't dead—their chests were going up and down. But they'd passed out as fast as Lucy and Paul had. One of them had held a cup of coffee. He'd spilled it on himself, and all over the floor.

  More Germans had dropped in their tracks, all through the jail. "How did you do this?" Lucy asked.

  Sammy Wong gave her a smile that was anything but friendly. "I'm magic."

  She was tempted to believe him. She was also tempted to kick him for not telling her what she wanted to know. Paul suffered from that disease, too. But this Sammy Wong didn't suffer from it—he reveled in it. He hustled her and Paul along as if every second counted. And every second probably did.

  The guards outside the jail hadn't been flattened by the magic, or whatever it was. When one of them asked Wong, "Was ist hier los?" he answered in fluent German. It wasn't the bits and pieces of the language that most Americans picked up. He spoke German like a German—like a high-ranking German, in fact. He pulled papers from his pocket to back up his words. When he finished, all the guards came to attention and clicked their heels. "Jawohl!" they chorused. Wong led Paul and Lucy down the stairs and down the street.

  "What did you tell them?" Lucy whispered once they were out of earshot.

  He looked at her. "That I was the Kaiser's cousin, and I wanted to play hopscotch with the two of you."

  She did try to kick him then. He sprang out of the way—he might have been good at hopscotch. Paul said, "He told them he was going to use us for bargaining chips to try to trap some of the men from the Tongs."

  Lucy hadn't known Paul understood German that well. It didn't surprise her. By that time, nothing much would have surprised her.

  Had Sammy Wong really turned out to be the Kaiser's cousin, she would just have nodded and filed the news away, like a folder back in the office.

  Would she ever see the office again? How could she, when she'd just broken out of the Feldgendarmerie jail? The Germans and their American stooges were going to start turning San Francisco upside down and inside out.

  "What happens now?" she asked, still in a very small voice.

  "Now we have to get Dad out of his mess," Paul said.

  "And then we have to get out of here," Wong added.

  Paul's we plainly included Lucy. Wong's we, even more plainly, didn't. Lucy called him on it: "What happens to me now? What happens to my family?"

  He scowled. Instead of answering her, he rounded on Paul. "We ought to leave her in the lurch. You know it bloody well, too." He sounded as furious—and as sure he was right—as anyone Lucy had ever heard.

  Paul didn't even blink. "Go ahead," he said calmly. "But if you leave her, you leave me, too."

  "Wait!" Lucy exclaimed.

  He shook his head. "I'm not waiting for anybody. We've been through too much together. I'm not going to let anything bad happen to you if I can stop it."

  "You blockhead." Sammy Wong still sounded savage. "Half of what's happened here—more than half—is your own stupid fault."

  "Some of it is, yeah. I made plenty of mistakes," Paul said with a shrug. "More than half? No way, Jose"." Lucy had no trouble figuring out what that meant, but nobody in this San Francisco would have said it. Paul went on, "I'll tell you what the real trouble is— what we were selling. It was too good. It got us noticed."

  Wong said something about what they'd been selling that should have made the sidewalk catch fire. "Elliott didn't have any trouble," he finished.

  Paul ignored the bad language. "No. You're wrong," he said, replying to the older man's last sentence. "Elliott didn't see any trouble. We had it from day one. That means it was here waiting for us ahead of time."

  "Any old excuse in a storm," Sammy Wong jeered.

  "Okay, think like that. Go ahead. But we can find out." Paul turned to Lucy. "How long has your dad been wondering about Curious Notions and what it sold?"

  "Quite a while now," she answered. "At least two or three years. Maybe longer—I'm not real sure."

  "You see?" Paul said to Sammy Wong.

  "I see somebody who got himself in trouble and who's looking for a way out," Wong said.

  "I got myself into some of this trouble, yeah, but not all of it," Paul said. "And the trouble between the Tongs and the Germans has been here since ... for longer than we've been alive."

  Sammy Wong didn't notice that he'd changed course there. Lucy did. He'd probably been about to say something like since before we got here. But if he did say that, it would give away that he and Wong had come from a different world. He might also have given away that Lucy already knew they were from that other world.

  "When we get home—" Wong didn't just change course. He broke off, and went back to nasty muttering in English and Chinese.

  He led Lucy and Paul south, away from Market Street—off to an area not too far from where Lucy worked. Paul said, "Where are we going? This isn't the way back to the Palace Hotel."

  Lucy started howling laughter. She couldn't help it. It poured out of her, peal after peal, till she couldn't even walk any more. She stood there, doubled over, tears running down her cheeks. Paul and Sammy Wong stared at her as if she'd lost her mind. So did people walking by on the street. "You were . . ." she started, and then had to stop, because another spasm seized her. Finally, she got it out: "You were staying ... at the .. . Palace Hotel?"

  "Yeah, we were." Paul reached out. She had to lean on his arm to straighten up. He still looked puzzled, and almost angry, too. "What about it? You scared me half to death there."

  "When you disappeared—I guess that's when Mr. Wong found you—the Triads were trying to figure out where you'd gone." Lucy spoke carefully. Her ribs and stomach hurt from laughi
ng too much. "Your father didn't know, either. When he and Stanley Hsu were talking, he got rude and said he thought you were staying at the Palace. Oh, my." She wiped her streaming eyes on her sleeve.

  Paul thought about it. Then he said, "I guess maybe you had to be there."

  "I guess maybe you did," Sammy Wong said. "Come on. In here." Here was a not very fancy house in a not very fancy neighborhood. It had two bedrooms, a bathroom, a tiny living room, and an even tinier kitchen. Wong sighed. "I'll sleep on the sofa. I didn't expect to have more than one person along." He sent Paul one more sour stare.

  "Life is full of surprises," was all Paul said.

  "If you sit tight, that'll sure be one," Wong snapped. Paul turned a dull red.

  "We're all on the same side here—I think," Lucy said. "Can we try to get along till we figure out what we ought to do next?" She had no idea what that would be. She had to hope Paul and Sammy Wong did. They'd better, she thought. They can do almost anything. But when it comes to knowing what they should do, they're no better than anybody else—worse than some people. The thought was oddly cheering.

  "You make good sense," Paul said. "You usually do, I think." "Thank you," Lucy said. She looked toward Sammy Wong. The other man from that other Sunset District still seemed anything but happy, but he nodded. That made Lucy feel a little better. If only she'd had the faintest notion where they were going from here, she would have felt better yet.

  Somebody shook Paul awake in the middle of the night. A bright light shone in his face. Panic threatened to grab hold of him. But it wasn't the Feldgendarmerie. It was Sammy Wong in a flannel nightshirt. In its own way, that was almost as scary a sight as a big, beefy German in a trench coat.

  "Listen, kid, we've got to talk," Wong said in a voice that brooked no argument.

  "Go ahead. I'm listening," Paul said around a yawn. His wits slowly started to work. He pointed back behind Wong. "You closed the door."

  "You bet I did. This is Crosstime Traffic business, not stuff for the locals."

  Paul didn't like it when Wong talked about Lucy that way. She was a local, of course, but it made her sound like part of the background in a movie. "Well, go on," he said.

  "You really know how to complicate things, don't you?" Wong said.

  "Things were complicated before I got here," Paul said. "I keep telling you that, but you don't want to listen to me."

  "Okay, fine. I'm listening now. Things were complicated before you got here. I even believe you, for whatever you think that's worth." Sammy Wong's voice dropped to an angry growl: "But you sure haven't done one stinking thing to make 'em any simpler, have you?"

  Paul bit his lip. He couldn't very well argue with that. If he said he'd just tried to stay out of jail and stay out of trouble, the man from Crosstime Traffic would ask him how much luck he'd had—either that or he'd just laugh himself silly. Quietly, Paul asked, "Where do we go from here?"

  Wong pointed a stubby, accusing finger at him. "You made me show some of my cards getting you out of jail. The Germans will be having kittens trying to figure out how I did that. And now we've got your stray kitty in the next room." He jerked his chin toward the bedroom Lucy was using."

  "It's not like that," Paul said wearily. He also thought for a moment about the marmalade cat that had started to adopt Curious Notions. He hoped it was all right, and that someone else was giving it handouts these days.

  Sammy Wong snorted. "Yeah, yeah. But even if it's not, it's every bit as much trouble as if it were. The Germans and the Triads and her folks will all be wondering what's happened to her." Paul would have put Lucy's folks first, but he saw Wong's point.

  "If we'd left her in jail, they'd know what was happening to her. And so would I." He glared at Wong. "I bet you've broken all the mirrors in your house so you don't have to look at them."

  With a shrug, the older man answered, "When you've got a mug like mine, looking in the mirror never was much of a thrill." That made Paul glare in a different way. Wong ignored him and went on, "You really do complicate my life. You complicate things for the company, too. Lucy knows too much." A stab of fear shot through Paul. Sammy Wong ignored that, too. He said, "Now we've got to do something with her. Probably with her whole blinking family, too."

  For a second, Paul thought he'd said do something to her. He braced himself to jump the man from Crosstime Traffic. He knew that would likely get him nothing but a set of lumps, but he was going to try it. Even if he did knock Wong cold, he'd stay stuck in this alternate forever—or till Crosstime Traffic brought in somebody else and hunted him down. All the same . . .

  Then he heard what Sammy Wong had really said. He gaped. "What—what can we do with them?" he stammered.

  "Get 'em out of this alternate, if we can," Wong answered. He pointed at Paul again, this time with his thumb upraised to make his hand into a gun. "Kid, you would not believe the kind of forms you're gonna have to fill out when you get home. Would not believe. Serves you right, too. When we have to extract somebody from an alternate, and especially when we have to extract a bunch of somebodies . . . You miserable nuisance."

  Paul went right on gaping. "You mean—we do that?" He shook his head in disbelief. "In all the training we got, they said we never do stuff like that. Never, with a capital N, no matter what."

  "Yeah, well, there are plenty of good reasons for that, too. I bet you can figure out most of 'em for yourself." Sammy Wong proceeded to spell out what he meant in spite of what he'd just said. Grownups did that too often, as far as Paul was concerned. "Biggest one is, we want people to act like we never do it. If they thought there were times they could smuggle a boyfriend or a girlfriend— 'cause that's what it's usually about—back to the home timeline, they'd do it too often. People in the alternates would start wondering what was going on. And besides, not everybody from the alternates can fit into the home timeline. Most of the time, moving people is a lot—a lot—more trouble than it's worth. Every once in a while . . ." He shrugged. "Every once in a while, you have to fill out all those stupid forms."

  "The Woos could fit in," Paul said eagerly. "This alternate isn't as far along as we are, but it's pretty well up there. They work hard. They speak English. They're even Americans, sort of."

  "Yeah, sort of," Wong said. "And sort of not, too. To be real Americans, they'll have to stop looking over their shoulders all the time. But I won't say you're nuts—not on account ofthat, anyway." By the look on his face, not all was forgiven or forgotten. Oh, no. He went on, "Now we've just got to make it happen."

  He made it sound easy. Paul wished he thought it were. "How?" he asked.

  "Way I see it, we've got four problems," the man from Crosstime Traffic said. "We've got to get your dad away from the Triads. We've got to make the Woos disappear. We've got to get to the transposition chamber. And we've got to do all that so nobody—not the Feldgen-darmerie, not the Triads, nobody—is any the wiser about what we really are and where we're really from. Am I forgetting anything?"

  "I don't think so." Paul knew he sounded troubled. "That seems like enough all by itself."

  "One step at a time, that's all." Wong reached out and clapped Paul on the shoulder. Paul would have thought he'd resent the attention. Instead, he was oddly glad to have it. The man from Crosstime Traffic went on, "Anyway, I wanted to make sure we were on the same page. Now go back to sleep."

  "Yeah, right," Paul said. Sammy Wong laughed. Ten minutes later, Paul was snoring.

  Mr. Wong went out early in the morning. Before he did, he sat Lucy and Paul down on the sofa. He said, "Stay here, you two, okay?" He pointed to Paul and spoke in tones of heavy menace: "This means you."

  Lucy thought Paul would get mad. Instead, he just nodded and said, "Okay." Lucy wanted to scratch her head. Paul didn't usually take something like that from anybody. But she didn't think he was lying.

  Evidently, Sammy Wong didn't, either. He nodded back and walked out the door. When Lucy looked over at Paul, she found he was looking at her, too
. "Hi," she said.

  "Hi, yourself," he answered. After a moment, he added, "I'm sorry we got you into this mess."

  She started to tell him it was okay, but she didn't. That went too far. "At least you're trying to get us out of it," she said. Yes, that was better.

  "Now I think we are," he said, and glanced toward the door through which his—acquaintance? colleague? what was the right word? not friend, plainly—had just left. He hesitated again. His words came out in a rush: "How would you like to see what that other Sunset District is like?"

  "That. . . other Sunset District?" Lucy said slowly. She'd figured out that Paul had to come from a different world. He'd admitted it, too. Now she discovered the difference between believing it and believing it. "You really can do that? You really do do that—go back and forth, I mean?"

  "We can. We do. We have to," he said. "We're going to get you and your family out of here. Once you get used to things where I come from, I think you'll like it a lot better than you like this San Francisco."

  This San Francisco. The words brought home his strangeness all over again. She wondered if he was strange because he was crazy. She shook her head. Crazy people didn't have the kinds of things Curious Notions sold. Crazy people didn't get you out of the Germans' jail, either. "Can you really do that?" she whispered.

  "I hope so. We're working on it," Paul answered. "Um, one other thing." He looked a little embarrassed, or maybe more than a little.

  "What is it?" Lucy asked.

  "When you find out about other alternates—worlds where things didn't happen the way they did in this one—act surprised, okay? You're not supposed to know anything about that. You're not supposed to know big time."

  That was one more bit of slang nobody from this San Francisco would have used. Lucy didn't have any trouble figuring out what it meant, though. "I'll remember," she promised.