The Valley-Westside War

by Harry Turtledove

  They didn’t go to the market square just south of the UCLA campus. That was too close to their old house. There was another market square, a ritzier one, north of Sunset Boulevard in Brentwood. The only reason that square was ritzier was that the neighborhood had been ritzier before the Fire fell—and still was.

  As Dad guided the horses towards it, he said, “If we were proper traders, we’d go to the other market. It’s bigger, and there are more Valley soldiers around.”

  “All the more reason for staying away,” Mom said.

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Dad agreed. “The people who do buy from us may think we’re kind of dumb for setting up there, but they won’t think we’re anything more than kind of dumb.”

  “You hope,” Mom said.

  Dad nodded. “You bet I do.”

  “It’s not too bad,” Liz said. “The library’s up near the north end of campus. We won’t be any farther from it than we were before … as long as the librarians don’t tip off the Valley soldiers as soon as I go in there.”

  “I know it can happen. I hope it won’t,” Dad said. “They’re all people who’ve been there since the City Council ran things. Maybe there’s a quisling or two, but we can hope not, anyhow. With a little luck, we’ll get the job done yet.”

  “That would be good,” Liz said.

  “That would be wonderful,” Mom said. “Not seeing this alternate again wouldn’t break my heart.”

  “Get used to it, hon. If we land another grant, we’ll be back one of these days,” Dad said. By the look on her face, Mom had no trouble curbing her enthusiasm. Ignoring her expression, or at least pretending to, Dad went on, “That’s what happens when you have an academic specialty: you keep coming back to it. I’ll be coming back here when the beard I’m not wearing right now is all white—if I can keep getting grant money.”

  “And if you don’t have WANTED posters with your face on them in every little kingdom from Frisco all the way down to Teejay,” Mom added.

  “Well, yes, there is that.” By the look on his face, Dad kind of liked the idea. He glanced over at Liz. “Of course, by then we won’t have Liz to help get us in trouble.”

  “Hey, what are you blaming me for? You were the one who decided to hide Luke,” Liz said.

  “Yeah, but if Dan didn’t think you were cute, none of the other Valley soldiers would have paid any special attention to us,” Dad said.

  “I can’t help that!” Liz knew her voice went higher and shriller than she would have liked.

  “I didn’t say you could,” Dad answered, which was … sort of true. “But you won’t come to this alternate to stir up the boys here by the time my beard’s all white. You’ll be through with school by then, and you’ll find some other alternate to be especially interested in—or maybe something in the home timeline: who knows?—and then you’ll—”

  “If you say I’ll stir up the boys there—well, don’t say it, that’s all,” Liz broke in.

  “You can’t prove I was going to,” Dad said.

  “You’re lucky she can’t, too,” Mom told him. “If she could, you’d be in even more trouble than you’ve already got yourself into.”

  “And they said it couldn’t be done!” Dad sounded proud of himself for being such a pest. He probably was. He’s not the stuffy kind of professor, anyway, Liz thought. That would be worse … I think.

  Dad sure wasn’t stuffy after they got set up in the Brentwood market square. He put some Levi’s out on a card table with folding legs that could have come from the Old Time. (Like the jeans, it really came from the home timeline.) Then he started yelling and carrying on about how wonderful they were. He even pulled out a bugle. Heaven only knew where he’d got that. Maybe from the Stoyadinoviches? Wherever, he blew a long, tuneless blast on it. He couldn’t have been hokier if he tried. And he was trying … all kinds of ways.

  And it worked. The people who lived in Brentwood put down silver for the Levi’s. Pair after pair disappeared. Before too long, a Valley sergeant strode over to inspect the goods. He wasn’t a warrior. He was at least fifty, with a pot belly and shrewd eyes. He was a quartermaster sergeant: somebody who got fighting men what they needed to fight with. No army in the world kept going without people like that, and they won exactly zero glory.

  This one didn’t seem to care. He examined the jeans even more carefully than the Valley rifleman had. He carried a magnifying glass to help his aging eyes look at them up close. Once he was satisfied, he said, “How many pairs have you got left?” Dad told him. He nodded and asked, “What’s your price?” Again, Dad told him. Liz waited for the sergeant to pitch a fit. He just said, “Okay. I’ll take fifty pairs, assorted sizes.”

  It was as simple as that.

  Twelve

  When Dan stepped into the room he’d found with a word from The Lord of the Rings, lights in the ceiling came on. They were just like the ones in the room under the basement, so they had to be electric lights. Somehow, he wasn’t much surprised. And then, a moment later, not being surprised … surprised him.

  The room was full of strange, mostly plastic furniture. A rectangular metal box sat against the far wall. The front had hinges and a handle, which made it likely to be a door.

  “Oh, wow, man.” The guy with the sledgehammer pointed to it. “Like, what is that thing?”

  “It’s one of those refrigerators, isn’t it?” Dan said. You found them in houses every now and then. They could be dangerous. Little kids sometimes got them open and went inside. For some dumb reason, refrigerator doors didn’t work from the inside out. Too often, kids playing games suffocated before anybody found them.

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right. They kept stuff cold in the Old Time, right?” the other soldier said.

  “I think so. I wonder if this one still works.” Dan looked up at the bright ceiling. “The lights do.”

  “Oh, wow,” the muscular soldier said again.

  “Go get Captain Horace,” Dan said. “He needs to see this.”

  “Okay.” The other guy let the sledgehammer fall over with a clatter. Dan was half surprised he didn’t carry it with him.

  Horace came down the stairs on the double. He walked through the newly opened door. He looked at the furniture, at the refrigerator, and then at Dan. “Congratulations, Sergeant,” he said.

  Now Dan was the one who said, “Oh, wow!” Then he said, “Thank you, sir!” And then he walked over to the refrigerator. “Could this thing work?”

  “Beats me,” Captain Horace said, which struck Dan as a pretty honest answer. The officer continued, “Why don’t you open it and find out?”

  Why don’t you … sir? Dan thought. What if it didn’t work? What if it blew up instead? The captain would say, Well, so what? He was a captain, while Dan was only a just-promoted sergeant. Everybody in the whole Kingdom of the Valley would agree with him. Well, everybody but Dan. And nobody would care what he thought.

  He reached out, grabbed the door handle, and pulled. Obviously, that was what you were supposed to do. The door wasn’t real easy to open, but it sure wasn’t hard, either.

  As soon as it swung open about three inches, a light came on inside the refrigerator. Where does it go when the door closes? Dan wondered. But he had other things to worry about by then.

  He felt chilly air on his legs. “It does keep stuff cold!” he exclaimed.

  Captain Horace came up beside him. Why not? Now the captain knew it was safe. “It sure does,” he said. He reached out to touch a shelf. Then he jerked his hand back. “It’s as cold as a winter night in there.”

  Dan was eyeing the cans on the shelf. He’d seen tin cans before. In L.A.’s warm, dry climate, they didn’t rust away very fast. These, to look at them, might have been made yesterday. They were red, with fancy, swirly letters that ran along the whole length from top to bottom. The letters were so fancy, they were hard to read. When Dan finally puzzled them out, he said, “Oh, wow!” one more time.

  “Coca-Cola?” Cap
tain Horace read the name as if he had trouble believing it. Well, so did Dan. There were lots and lots of wasp-waisted green glass bottles around, all of them carrying that same swirling script. “You don’t think … ? Is there real Coca-Cola inside those things?”

  Nobody’d tasted Coca-Cola since the Old Time, or not long after it. Dan picked up a can. It had to be the coldest thing he’d ever touched: so cold, he almost dropped it. “How are you supposed to open this thing?” he wondered. But the can had a metal tab on top. He worked it with his thumb to see how it operated. If you pushed up from under it, the other end went down and …

  Ssss! The sudden hiss nearly made Dan drop the can again. Some brown bubbly stuff came out of the opening he’d made. He started to taste it, then paused and sniffed instead. What if it was rotten or something? But it smelled spicy—intriguing. He took a cautious sip.

  It had bubbles. They tickled his tongue, and then tickled his nose from the inside out. It tasted like … he didn’t know what it tasted like. It was pretty good, though. He took another sip—a bigger one this time.

  “Well?” Captain Horace asked. Dan handed him the can. He sipped, too. “It’s like sweet champagne!” he said.

  “Is it wine, then?” Dan asked. He knew champagne was wine with bubbles in it, but he’d never had any. It was expensive stuff.

  “No way,” the officer said. “You’d taste the booze in it if it were.” Dan nodded. He was like anybody else. He drank beer or wine—often watered down—instead of water whenever he could. Water would do at a pinch, but you always took a chance with it.

  “What is it, then?” Dan said. “It isn’t water, it isn’t wine, it isn’t cider or grape juice. It isn’t anything.” He wanted things to fit into their own neat little slots. Well, who didn’t?

  Captain Horace took a bigger swig. “It’s Coca-Cola, that’s what it is.” He handed the can back to Dan. Dan drank some more, too. Horace wasn’t wrong. Something like this deserved a name for itself, all right. It wasn’t like anything else. It was something out of the Old Time. How did it end up here in the modern world?

  The captain let out a loud burp. A moment later, so did Dan. He looked at the can of Coca-Cola. “It’s the bubbles, that’s what it is,” he said.

  “Well, sure,” Captain Horace said indulgently. Then his gaze sharpened. “How did these traders get their hands on Coca-Cola, though? It’s an Old Time thing. It doesn’t really belong here.”

  “Neither does a refrigerator that works. Neither do electric lights,” Dan said.

  “I know.” The officer took the can back again and drained it. Dan almost got mad, but the impossible refrigerator held more impossible cans. Captain Horace belched again. “It’s all righteously freaky, man.”

  “Really,” Dan agreed. His mind leaped. “What if the traders aren’t from now? What if they’re really from the Old Time? That would explain why they acted funny sometimes, too. They were trying to, like, fake it, you know? They didn’t exactly grok how we do things nowadays.”

  “I don’t know. That doesn’t sound very scientific to me,” Captain Horace said. “It doesn’t sound very likely, either.”

  “Sir, none of this stuff is very likely, either.” Dan’s wave took in the lights, the refrigerator, and the can the officer was still holding. “But it’s here. What’s that thing the Great Detective says?”

  “‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’” Captain Horace knew what he was talking about, all right. He went on, “But everything here seems impossible! How do we go about eliminating any of it?”

  “It may be impossible, but it’s here.” Dan reached in and took out another can of Coca-Cola. This one was easier to open than the last one had been—now he knew how. He drank from it. It tasted like the real thing, all right.

  Going back onto the UCLA campus brought Liz the usual, almost pleasant, pain. They still respected learning there, even if they embalmed it instead of helping it to grow. That was good. A lot of the buildings were familiar, which wasn’t true down in Westwood. But it was like looking at an old friend filthy and starving and dressed in rags. It did hurt.

  “Haven’t seen you for a while,” one of the librarians said when she walked in.

  “Life’s been … complicated,” she answered. The librarian nodded. Liz had the feeling that was true no matter which alternate you visited.

  Just how complicated was life, though? Did this bespectacled fellow report to the Valley soldiers occupying Westwood? If he did, would he slip away to let them know she was back? One thing for sure: he couldn’t phone them in this alternate.

  She went upstairs and started going through the bound issues of Newsweek. She had a pretty good notion of what had happened in 1967 in the home timeline. Most of what had happened in this alternate seemed about the same.

  Maybe the Soviet Union really had started the war here. Maybe the Communist leaders reacted differently to something—Vietnam? the Six-Day War?—from the way they did in the home timeline. If that was so, American news magazines wouldn’t have such a good idea of what was happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

  Or would they? Something would have leaked out, wouldn’t it? Here was a story about Vyacheslav Molotov going back to Moscow from his post at the International Atomic Energy Agency for consultations. Molotov’s name rang a bell with Liz from the AP Euro course. He was the longtime Russian foreign minister in the middle of the twentieth century. She didn’t remember that he’d been on the IAEA in 1967.

  Excitement tingled through her. Maybe, in the home timeline, he hadn’t. What did that mean? Did it mean anything?

  She couldn’t be sure. She didn’t know enough. But she made sure she scanned the story. She was mighty glad these Newsweeks hadn’t crumbled to dust between the time when the Fire fell and now. How many people had looked at them in those 130 years? Not many—she was sure of that. One reason they were still around was that not many people ever looked at them.

  Liz wanted to find the missing puzzle pieces and put the whole thing together herself. She knew that wasn’t real likely. Mom and Dad knew more about the 1960s in the home timeline than she did. And they knew as much as anybody—including the natives of this alternate—about the 1960s here. It wasn’t enough yet to let them know what went wrong.

  She didn’t think they knew about Molotov, though.

  Well, they would once she told them. And she had the data inside the little handheld scanner. From what she remembered, Molotov was a hardliner, a tough guy. If he had a more important slot in this 1967 than in the home timeline, that said something about the way the Russians’ minds had worked here.

  Did it say enough? There was no transposition chamber that ended in this alternate’s Moscow or Leningrad—or was it Petrograd here, or St. Petersburg? She couldn’t remember. It had got nuked, too. Most major cities here had. Any which way, there wouldn’t be a chamber that could reach either place here unless somebody waved lots and lots of benjamins under Crosstime Traffic’s nose. CT wasn’t in business for its health.

  No way the Mendozas could come up with that kind of money on their own. But if they landed another grant …

  Maybe finding out about Molotov would help them do that. Liz could hope so. She didn’t think she wanted to make a career out of studying this alternate, but her folks already had. If she could give them a hand while she was working with them—well, why not?

  She closed the bound volume of Newsweeks. A scrap of old, brittle paper fluttered down and fell to the floor. She didn’t think it had any printing on it, but sooner or later—probably sooner—all these magazines would get too fragile to read, and then they’d crumble to dust and be gone forever.

  Except for what I’ve scanned, she thought. That was a funny feeling. She had history in her scanner. She didn’t just have it, either. She felt like its custodian. What she and her folks took back to the home timeline had a better chance of lasting than anything that stayed here
.

  Maybe this alternate would rebuild two or three hundred years from now. It would want to know what had made the Fire fall. Maybe people from the home timeline could give back this information then. We’re custodians, all right, she thought.

  Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?—a bit of Latin came back to her. Who would watch the watchmen? There was no guarantee that the home timeline would be in great shape by the time this alternate was ready to find out about its past. Not long before her folks were born, the home timeline was right on the edge of going down the tubes. Too many people, not enough resources. Finding out how to go crosstime saved everybody’s bacon.

  Which didn’t mean everybody in the home timeline was happy all the time. Old political and religious rivalries remained very much alive. And national governments were still figuring out how to deal with Crosstime Traffic, which was as big and as rich as any of them.

  Well, complications came with being alive. The simplest alternates were the ones where the atomic wars had killed everybody and everything. A graveyard the size of a planet … . Liz shivered. This alternate hadn’t missed by much.

  She got the next volume of Newsweek down from the shelf. Paging through the ads in the first issue, she thought about how confident everybody seemed. No one had any idea the USA and USSR were on the edge of blasting each other to kingdom come. No one seemed to suspect that, even if the superpowers left each other alone, the alternate would have run out of energy and food and drinkable water inside of a lifetime.

  Would they have found out how to go between alternates here? She doubted it. She doubted it like anything, in fact—that had happened only once. (Or if it had happened more than once, nobody from Crosstime Traffic had ever found any evidence of it.) Other high-tech alternates exploited the rest of the Solar System as best they could. Too bad it was a less inviting place than science-fiction writers from the mid-twentieth century thought it would turn out to be.