“I was in the library.” She pointed toward the lower, plainer building to the left and in back of the big waffle.
“What were you doing there?”
“Reading things. What do you think I’d be doing in a library, fishing?”
Dan’s ears heated. He’d got zinged, and he knew it. “What were you reading about?” he asked, figuring that was safe enough.
When Liz paused before she answered, he wondered if he was right. What was she doing there? Looking for ways to make Valley soldiers’ uniforms catch fire or something of that sort? Dan didn’t think anyone could do anything like that, but he wasn’t sure. He also wasn’t sure where science stopped and magic started, or which worked better. Few people he knew were.
After that hesitation, Liz said, “I was trying to find out why the Fire fell from the sky.”
“The Russians did it,” Dan said automatically. That was one of the first lessons you learned in school. He’d never seen a live Russian. He didn’t think anybody from the Valley—or the Westside—had. They lived far, far away, if any of them were still alive. The Fire fell on them, too—lots of it. Schoolbooks went on and on about the revenge America took.
“I’ve heard that the Russians say we did it,” Liz said. Before Dan could even get mad—the nerve of some people!—she went on, “But that’s not what I meant, anyhow. Even if the Russians did do it, I was trying to find out why they wanted to blow up the whole world.”
“Because they were evil, godless Communists.” Dan parroted another lesson. He didn’t know just what Communists were, only that they were evil and godless.
Liz’s sigh made him feel as if he’d got zinged again, but he didn’t understand why. She sounded very patient, though, when she asked, “What would they say about us?”
“Who cares?” Dan blurted. The idea that anybody might care what the Russians said had never crossed his mind till this moment. Neither had the idea that the Russians might say anything at all.
“Well, if that’s how you feel …” Liz started to turn away. That wasn’t just a zing. Again, she made Dan feel about three inches tall.
“Wait!” he said. If she didn’t like him, he could deal with that. If she scorned him, if she thought he was a jerk, that was a different story. He desperately cast about for a way to go on which wouldn’t leave her with the notion that he drooled whenever he wasn’t careful. He surprised himself by finding one: “How do you know what the Russians say?”
Liz pointed back toward the library again. “A lot of it’s in there. The records are still pretty good.”
“Those would be records for the Old Time, though,” Dan said, and Liz nodded. See? I’m not so dumb after all! He wanted to shout it. Instead, he went on, “How do you know what the Russians say now about what happened way back then?”
This time, the look she gave him was cautious and measuring. No, you aren’t so dumb. Does that make you less of a pest or more? Dan didn’t know that was what she was thinking, but he would have bet on it. “Traders talk to other traders,” she said, picking her words with care. “News comes in from farther away than you’d think sometimes. It doesn’t move fast, but it moves.”
“News ordinary people don’t hear?” Dan asked, an edge in his voice. Most of the time, he liked being ordinary fine. Ordinary people were what democracy, even King Zev’s democracy, was all about, weren’t they? But sometimes being ordinary meant not finding out what the secret stuff, the good stuff, was all about. He didn’t like thinking he was on the outside trying to look in.
“No, it’s not news ordinary people don’t hear,” Liz told him. “You’re hearing it from me, aren’t you? But sometimes traders do hear it first.”
Dan thought about that. His nod was grudging, but it was a nod. “I guess that’s fair,” he said, and then, “Do you have any trader news on where Cal’s hiding? Big reward for whoever catches him.”
“No, I don’t know about that.” Did Liz speak too quickly now? Or am I imagining things? Dan wondered. After a moment, he decided he probably was. He didn’t know Liz well enough to be sure how she usually talked.
“Well, go on,” he said, and pointed south toward her house. “Nobody told me people couldn’t look in the library. I’m not sure how much point there is to it after all these years, but it doesn’t hurt anything.”
“Wow! Thanks a bunch!” When Liz was sarcastic, she was really sarcastic. She walked—stalked—past Dan with her nose in the air. If she’d wounded him with weapons, not words, she would have left him dead on the half-overgrown paving stones. As things were, he watched her get smaller and smaller till she finally walked around a building and disappeared. Even then, he had to remind himself to get back on patrol.
“I messed up,” Liz said when she got back to the house. “I think I talked my way out of it, but I messed up.”
“What did you do?” Dad asked. He was arranging a tray of fancy brass belt buckles. The Valley soldiers liked them well enough to pay through the nose for them.
Liz explained how she’d told Dan what the Russians in this alternate thought about who started the nuclear war. “We learn that when we go through training,” she said. “It didn’t occur to me till too late that he wouldn’t know anything about it.”
“I should have these on belts.” Dad pointed to the buckles. “Then I could take a belt and give you a whipping with it.”
Hardly anybody in the home timeline spanked even little children. It was thought of as the next thing to child abuse, or maybe not the next thing but the abuse itself. But things were different in this alternate, as they were in so many. Kids here got walloped all the time, walloped and worse. And so, for a split second, Liz thought Dad meant it. Then, when she noticed the twinkle in his eye—too late, as usual—she could only glare.
“You’re impossible!” she said.
“Thank you. I do my best,” he answered, not without pride. “But you did talk yourself out of it?”
“I’m pretty sure,” Liz said. “He didn’t seem suspicious when we got done. Jealous, maybe, but not suspicious. I wasn’t even lying, or not very much—traders do get news before other people a lot of the time.”
“I know that, thank you.” When Dad was sarcastic, he didn’t lay it on with a trowel the way Liz did. He underplayed instead. A lot of the time, that made him more dangerous, not less. After a moment, he went on, “I don’t mind if he’s jealous. Envy’s a nice, ordinary feeling.”
“It can be dangerous, too,” Liz said. “When the Valley soldiers were stealing things here—”
“I know. That was bad, and it might have been worse. Sometimes you get stuck, that’s all.”
“It’s not supposed to work this way,” Liz said. “We’ve got the subbasement where the transposition chamber comes. If we can get down there—”
“Everything’s golden. But that’s if we can,” Dad reminded her. “Remember all the stuff they tell you in training, ’cause it’s true. Life doesn’t come with a guarantee. Anything that can happen can happen to you.”
Remembering that stuff and liking it were two different things. “I don’t know how many releases I had to sign before I could get in a transposition chamber at all. Enough to get sick of them—I know that,” Liz said. “But I figured it was all—”
“Lawyer talk?” Dad interrupted her again.
She nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“Well, it is and it isn’t.” Her father sighed. “They make you sign those releases because doing this is dangerous. Sometimes people don’t come back. If anyone going out to an alternate didn’t promise ahead of time not to sue if something went wrong, Crosstime Traffic couldn’t stay in business. Some alternates look safer than others, but you never can tell. Your mother and I wouldn’t’ve brought you here if we’d known this stupid war would start.”
“Would you have come yourselves?” Liz asked.
Dad sighed again. “Yeah, probably. But that’s different. We’re grownups. We can figure the odds for ourselves.”
“You’re not as good at it,” he said, which only made her madder. He held up a hand. “Don’t start throwing things at me. You’re as smart as you’ll ever be—I’m not saying you aren’t.”
“What are you saying, then?” Liz hoped she sounded dangerous. She sure felt dangerous.
“If we were computers, you’d have as much RAM as I do. But I’ve got more programs and files on my hard disk than you do. That means I can judge some things better than you can, because I’ve got more data than you do.” Dad grinned one of his patented crooked grins. “And one of the things you have trouble judging is the idea that you have trouble judging things.”
“So how am I supposed to get better at it?” Liz demanded.
“Do things. Sometimes you’ll be right. Sometimes you won’t. With a little luck, you’ll start figuring out why, and how you can do better next time. It’s called growing up. There’s no way to hurry it much. Sometimes your folks need to give you a hand where you may not know enough to make a good choice by yourself.”
“If you were so smart, you would have seen the war coming yourselves,” Liz said. “You can make mistakes, too, and calling them bad choices doesn’t make them anything but mistakes.”
“I didn’t say it did. I’m not perfect—even if I can play perfect on TV.” Dad winked. Liz made a face at him. He went on, “Somebody who’s a little older has more experience and a better chance to get things right, that’s all. But it doesn’t matter how old you are—sometimes you’ll still mess up. That’s part of being human.”
Liz wanted to stay angry, but he didn’t make it easy. If he’d said he had all the answers and she didn’t have any … But he hadn’t said anything like that. He’d just said he probably had more than she did. And he was probably right, no matter how little she cared to admit it.
“Okay,” she said. Sometimes life was too short for a quarrel. “I scanned some more Newsweeks at the library today.”
“That’s good.” Her father seemed relieved to talk about more ordinary things, too. “What kind of shape are they in?”
“Not real good,” Liz answered. “The paper’s getting crumbly. They’re not as bad as something like TV Guide—those fall apart if you look at them sideways. But I’ve got to be careful handling them just the same.”
Back in the home timeline, magazines like that were preserved in a nitrogen atmosphere. They were also scanned, so electronic images would survive even if paper didn’t. Here … Considering what had happened here, it was a miracle that anything from before the big war was still around.
The librarians at this UCLA didn’t fully understand what a treasure they had. They did their jobs as much because their parents and grandparents had done them as because they loved books themselves. But, in the end, why they did them didn’t really matter. As long as they could preserve things till civilization revived and appreciated them again, they were doing something worthwhile.
“What’s the name of that book? You know—the one with the funny title,” Liz said, not quite out of the blue.
Dad knew which book she meant, too. “A Canticle for Leibowitz,” he said. “Yeah, that one fits this alternate pretty well. And you know what else? It was written before the war started, so there’s probably a copy in the URL.”
“I wonder if the librarians ever found it,” Liz said.
Five
Dan gave the little old lady in the market square a dirty look. “Fifteen cents for a sandwich?” he said. “What do you think I am, rich or something?”
“No, sir,” she said. “But I have to live, too, you know.”
“I’ll give you a dime,” he said. Now she gave him a dirty look, but she nodded. He handed her the little silver coin. She tucked it away and gave him the sandwich, thick with ham and cheese and avocado. He took a big bite. Almost in spite of himself, he smiled. It was a mighty good sandwich.
And thinking about sandwiches made him think about money. Most dimes and quarters and almost all half-dollars were silver. But some were sandwiches themselves, copper at the core with gray metal like the stuff from which they made nickels on the outside. People argued and argued about what those sandwich coins were worth. Nobody nowadays could turn out anything like them, which made some people think they had to be very valuable. But they didn’t have any truly precious metal in them, so others preferred real silver. Even wealthy traders quarreled over that one.
The question mattered less to Dan than it did to those wealthy traders. His big problem with coins—silver or sandwich—was that he didn’t see enough of them. Common soldiers in King Zev’s army made three dollars a month. Yes, he would haggle over every nickel, even if it made little old ladies dislike him.
She’s only a Westsider, anyway, he thought as he walked along, munching. Who cares whether she likes me or not?
Sergeant Chuck waved to him. Pointing to what was left of the sandwich, the underofficer said, “That looks tasty. Where’d you get it?”
“That old gal there, the one in the blue-and-yellow bell bottoms.” Dan pointed back toward her. “She’ll try and get fifteen cents out of you, but she’ll settle for a dime.”
“Cool,” Chuck said. He made more money than Dan—here as anywhere, rank had its privileges, all right—but he wouldn’t end up with a fancy house and a four-horse carriage and a bunch of retainers, either. Nickels mattered to him, too. He hurried off to collect his sandwich.
Everything in the market square was peaceable enough. On the surface, Westwood seemed resigned to coming under King Zev’s rule. Some people had told Dan that King Zev’s taxes were lower than the ones they’d paid the City Council before. He thought they were dumb to admit it. That would only make Zev more likely to bump things up.
But you never could tell, not for sure. Captain Kevin was back on duty, with his arm in a sling. He went on and on about watching out for spies. Some of the Westsiders didn’t want—really didn’t want—to be ruled by the Valley. They would pass on whatever they could find out to their friends south of the Santa Monica Freeway line. That would mean trouble for the Valley soldiers in Westwood.
So Captain Kevin said, anyhow. He also said you had to remember that spies looked like ordinary people. You couldn’t tell who they were by the way they acted, either. They were supposed to act like everyone else—that let them do their spying. So you had to be careful about what you said around any Westsider.
Dan supposed that made sense. It wasn’t easy, though, no matter how Captain Kevin made it sound. Dan looked around. Yes, there were Westsiders within earshot. There almost always were. Unless he talked only when he was in the Valley soldiers’ encampment, Westsiders would probably hear him. And he couldn’t just talk about things that didn’t matter.
He looked north, toward the UCLA campus. That was probably worth more than the knowledge any number of spies could steal from the Valley soldiers. Whatever they’d known in the Old Times, the secrets were hidden somewhere in the library … weren’t they? And now those secrets belonged to King Zev. If he could figure them out … .
Then what? Dan wondered. Would cars start running again? Would airplanes fly? Would refrigerators keep food from spoiling? Would filter tips make cigarettes taste great?
Maybe. But if they would, why hadn’t the Westside City Council made all those wonderful things happen? Dan was a good Valley patriot. He was sure King Zev knew more about such things than Cal and the other councilmen. But Zev didn’t know enough now to make any of those things happen in the Valley.
A slow smile crossed Dan’s face. King Zev’s men knew enough to get that heavy machine gun working. Without it, chances were they wouldn’t have beaten the Westsiders. If the UCLA library held a book about old machine guns, the locals either hadn’t found it or hadn’t paid any attention to it.
That Liz … Dan smiled again. She hadn’t even thought about machine guns. She’d worried about history, of all the useless things! That would have been funn
y if it weren’t so sad.
The smile faded faster than it had formed. Liz said she was interested in history. How do I know that’s true? Dan wondered. He realized he didn’t know it, not for sure. Maybe she’d been looking up stuff about machine guns or bazookas or cannons or tanks. (He wasn’t quite sure what tanks were, but he knew they were supposed to be very bad news.)
He didn’t want to believe that about her. But how much did what he wanted to believe have to do with anything? She could talk about history all she wanted. If she was really studying flamethrowers or even A-bombs, what she talked about didn’t matter.
Dan shook his head. She could study A-bombs as much as she wanted. Nobody nowadays was able to make them work. Maybe that meant God loved mankind too much to let it blow itself up twice. (But why didn’t He love mankind too much to let it blow itself up once, then?) Or maybe the people of Old Times had used up all the atoms there were. Whatever the reason, the Fire hadn’t fallen from the sky since 1967. All kinds of other bad things had happened since then, but not that one.
He pulled his thoughts back to Liz. He needed to ask her some questions about what she was really doing at the UCLA library. Then he started to laugh. If he truly believed she was trouble, wouldn’t he turn her over to his superiors? Sure he would. A good, dutiful soldier would, anyhow.
Maybe I’m not a good, dutiful soldier, then, he thought. But if he were a bad soldier, he wouldn’t pay any attention to her at all, would he? He didn’t want to think of himself as a bad soldier. All he wanted to do was get through the time when he had to wear King Zev’s uniform. If he could do that without getting hurt, he could go on with the rest of his life once he took off the uniform.
And if the rest of his life happened to involve Liz … He laughed again. Down deep, he knew why he was paying attention to her. And it had nothing to do with whether he was a soldier—good, bad, or in the middle.
Liz was about as happy to see Dan come to the house as she would have been to come down with a toothache. For people in this alternate, toothaches were no joke. No biological repair here—not even any high-speed drills. No novocaine to let dentists work without hurting their patients. A few dentists did have ether or chloroform to let them pull teeth without causing pain. What that meant, though, was basically that, whenever anything went wrong with a tooth, out it came. Lots of smiles here had gaps in them.
The Valley-Westside War Page 8
