They didn’t have microwaves here. Nuking something meant just one thing in this alternate—destroying it altogether. Studying the way languages changed from one alternate to another was a field that was just taking off.
On they went, on and on and on. Right where Victory finally curved a little south, two customs posts straddled the road. The Mendozas needed only a couple of minutes to clear the Valley post. The men at the other one wore green uniforms, not King Zev’s khaki. “Welcome to beautiful downtown Burbank,” one of them said.
It didn’t look beautiful to Liz. It didn’t look like downtown, either. It looked like the border between a couple of tinpot kingdoms that had forgotten they should have been suburbs.
For some reason, Dad seemed to think the Burbank customs man’s greeting was funny. Liz could tell, but she hoped the local couldn’t. Dad certainly sounded serious enough when he said, “Thank you, sir.”
“Anything to declare?” the customs man asked.
“Well, we’re traders,” Dad answered. “We’ve got what’s left of a nice load of Levi’s in the back of the wagon. We sold a good many in the Valley, and I expect we can move some more of them here.”
The customs man took a look at them. “Those are pretty fine, all right. Anybody can see they come from the Old Time. We charge duty on things we make ourselves, so our people will buy from Burbank craftsmen instead of foreigners. Clothes like that, though, with the zippers and everything … We can’t make anything quite like ’em ourselves, even if we are getting closer. I don’t know where you found these, pal, but I’m jealous. They look like they’re brand new.”
“They do, don’t they?” Dad still kept his face straight.
“Yeah.” The customs man sighed. “I wish I had the cash to buy clothes like that. They probably aren’t dutiable, but … . Maybe I’d better check the regulations.”
“Why don’t you find a pair that fits you, sir?” Dad said smoothly. “Why don’t your other inspectors do the same?” A real trader from this alternate probably would have been furious at the polite shakedown. He wouldn’t have dared to show it, though. Dad really had no reason to get upset, and plenty of reason to keep these people sweet.
“That’s mighty nice of you, pal,” the Burbank customs man said. He turned to his colleagues. “Melvin! Frodo! C’mere!”
Frodo, Liz thought. Yes, they knew about The Lord of the Rings in this alternate. No wonder the password in the basement hadn’t been good enough.
As soon as the Burbank customs men found jeans that fit them, the senior man swung aside the gateway. “Pass on!” he said.
Dad called, “Giddyap!” to the horses. They pulled the wagon through. The customs inspector closed the gate. Liz and Mom and Dad all grinned at one another. They were out of the Valley! They weren’t home free yet, but they were on their way.
Captain Horace was not a happy man. “Where the devil are they?” he growled. “They aren’t at that Brentwood market square—people saw them go. They aren’t anywhere in Westwood that we’ve been able to find. And I swear they haven’t sneaked past us heading south. So where are they?”
“Sir?” Dan said.
“What?” No, Horace wasn’t happy, not even a little bit.
“What if they didn’t go south, sir?” Dan said—it was about the worst thing he could think of. “What if they went north instead?”
“North?” By the way the officer said it, it might have been a dirty word. “Why the—dickens would they want to go and do a stupid thing like that?”
“If it throws us off the track, like, is it really stupid?” Dan asked.
Captain Horace bit down on that like a man crunching into a cherry pit. His expression was as dour as if he really had bitten down on something painful. “It could be,” he said at last, each word plainly tasting worse than the one before. “Yes, it could be. And if it is, we’ve wasted an awful lot of time waiting for something to happen when it won’t. Why didn’t you think of this sooner, confound it?”
“Sir?” was all Dan said. The unfairness of the crack took his breath away. Me? I just made sergeant. You’re so smart, Captain Horace, why didn’t you think of it for yourself?
But then Horace let out a sheepish laugh. “Well, you weren’t the only one here—I admit it. Why didn’t I come up with it on my own? I wonder if the telegraph between here and army HQ in the Valley is working.”
“Maybe we’d better find out, sir,” Dan said. The telegraph worked by electricity, and modern people still managed to use it … some of the time, anyhow. Dan didn’t understand how they could do that but not make things like electric lights and refrigerators. He asked Captain Horace.
“As I understand it, those need a lot more power than the telegraph does,” Horace said. “But just because I understand it that way doesn’t prove it’s so. I know a lot about electricity—for an army officer. If you want to get the straight skinny, though, you need to talk to somebody like Dr. Saul.”
“I’d like to do that, sir, one of these days,” Dan said. “For now, we probably ought to see if we can catch the traders.”
“Right.” Going to the telegrapher took more time. Somewhere—was it really somewhere up north, somewhere in the Valley?—the traders’ wagon was getting farther and farther away.
Will I ever see Liz again? Dan wondered. His head still ached dreadfully from the kick she’d given him. Do I want to see her again, after she did that? He did. In spite of everything, he did. The things she could tell him about the way her world worked—and the way this one did!
He still thought she was cute, too.
How could you think somebody was cute after she almost fractured your skull? He didn’t know, but he did anyway. He was also sorrowfully aware that she didn’t think he was cute. She probably looked at him the same way he looked at the wild men who’d lost all traces of civilization. Dan didn’t think that was fair. Well, the wild men probably didn’t think his opinion of them was fair, either.
He didn’t care what the wild men thought. Liz was much too likely not to care what he thought.
Captain Horace had him describe Liz and her parents for the telegrapher. He knew them better than anyone else from the Valley. But do I know them at all? he wondered. The captain described their wagon. Neither he nor Dan had seen that—they relied on what they’d heard from the traders in the Brentwood market square. Would it be enough? Dan couldn’t know. He had to hope.
The telegrapher’s clever finger sent Morse code north. Not long after he did, his clicker started making noise in reply. It wasn’t magic, though Dan didn’t fully understand why it wasn’t. “They have the message, sir,” the telegrapher told the captain. “They’ll do what they can.”
“Right on,” Horace said. “Far out.”
How far out was it? Dan had his doubts. The brass up in the Valley hadn’t seen the marvels down here with their own eyes. How hard would they try to catch Liz and her folks? Would they put real effort into it, or just go through the motions? And how much did any of that matter? If the traders had headed north, wouldn’t they be long gone by now?
Dan hoped not. They knew so much. They could do so much. How much could they help this world if only they wanted to? But they didn’t—Liz had made that much too clear. There was no money in it for them. If they hadn’t been studying this alternate, they wouldn’t have come here at all.
Alternates … The idea made Dan’s head spin even worse than Liz’s foot had. All those possibilities, and each one coming true. A world where the Fire didn’t fall. That one by itself was plenty to take Dan’s breath away. But it was far from the only thing that might have happened. He could see that, too.
He had a friend who’d become a secretary because a teacher praised his handwriting. If the teacher hadn’t, Norm probably would have been a leatherworker like his father. And there were the guys who just happened to wind up at the wrong spot in a battle. If they’d stood a couple of feet to the left or right, they would have been fine. As things were,
they stopped a bullet with their chest or their head.
So easy to see how changes, big changes, could turn a person’s life upside down and inside out. And if a person’s life could change that way, why couldn’t a country’s or a whole world’s? No reason at all, not that Dan could see. When he thought about it in those terms, he had no trouble understanding why he believed Liz.
Besides, how could anybody make up a story like hers? And even if somebody did, how could she back it up with things that had been gone since the Old Time? Dan didn’t think it was possible.
“Maybe we’ll catch them yet,” Captain Horace said. “I bet we do.”
“Yes, sir. Maybe we will,” Dan answered. What else can I say? he wondered, and didn’t see anything else. But he didn’t believe it. The traders had too long a start. And they could disappear—they really could. What else was traveling between alternates but disappearing from one and appearing in another one? How were you going to catch somebody who could do that?
Very late that afternoon, a wire came in about somebody who’d got two pairs of denims from some people who might have been Liz and her folks. They were heading east, toward beautiful downtown Burbank. If they got there, King Zev’s soldiers would never lay a hand on them again.
Zev might threaten war to get them … . Dan laughed at himself. Not a chance. With the Valley still fighting the Westside and Speedro, Zev couldn’t make beautiful downtown Burbank mad at him, too. Fighting one war was bad enough. Fighting two wars at once had to be four times as bad, or maybe eight.
“Do you think they’ll stay in beautiful downtown Burbank?” Horace asked him. “Or are they more likely to go somewhere else from there? If they do go somewhere else, where do you think it would be?”
This is the stuff you’re supposed to worry about—you’re the officer. Dan was learning to think like a sergeant in a hurry. But he did know Liz and her family better than the captain did. “Well, from what we found out, they came up from the south,” he answered “My guess is, they’d go back that way, too. Maybe they’ve got another watchamacallit—a transposition chamber—down there somewhere.”
“How far down there?” Captain Horace persisted. “The part of the Westside we didn’t take? Speedro? Sandago? Teejay?”
“Sir,” Dan said mournfully, “I have no idea.” So many things about Liz and her folks he didn’t know. So many things he wanted to know. So many things he knew he’d never find out. So many things he’d wonder about for the rest of his life.
One surfaced right now. If she came from this world or I came from hers, would she have liked me better? He could hope so, anyhow. And that led to another thought. If she was still working in the UCLA library, she and her folks hadn’t found all of their answer, whatever it was. Maybe she’d be back one day to look for it. If we make this world more like the one she comes from, would people from there and people from here get along better?
Again, Dan could hope so. And he could do more than hope: he could work to make it so. He realized he suddenly had something to do with however much time he had left. He’d never known a feeling like that before. He … decided he liked it.
“Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like … the Stoyadinoviches’ trading post.” Dad looked pleased with himself. “That’s an old saying I just made up.”
“I never would have guessed.” Liz grinned as she zinged him.
“Now, children.” Mom sounded amused, or maybe just resigned. Liz thought about asking which, then decided she’d rather not know.
“I wish we could have stayed longer this time around, but we did pretty well, anyway,” Dad said. “That stuff we found out about Molotov—nobody knew that about this alternate before.”
“Who’s this ‘we’?” Mom wondered. “You and your tapeworm? Liz did all the finding. You’re just the guy who’ll write the articles about it.”
“Guilty,” Dad agreed. “That’s guilty, guilty, guilty—always quote from the classics if you can’t make up your own old sayings. But I will give her credit. I may borrow, but I don’t steal—much. And it’s definitely an important lead. If the Soviet government here was more hard-nosed than in the home timeline … Well, it’s not a smoking gun, but—”
“A smoking mushroom cloud, don’t you mean?” Liz put in. “Or don’t I get to make up old sayings, too?”
“That one fits this alternate too well,” Mom said.
Gulls wheeled overhead. You could see the ocean—and, when the wind blew in, as it did more often than not—smell it, too. Its clean salt tang helped cut the usual city reek of Speedro. Sailboats and a few wood- or coal-burning steamboats glided across the water.
Those were only details, though. For the most part, Speedro was like any other part of L.A.—any other part of this whole alternate—after the Fire fell. The buildings were put together from some new bricks and a lot of pieces of what had been here in 1967. There were lots of open spaces, because far fewer people lived here now. Groves of citruses and olives and almonds and avocados grew where houses and shops and factories had stood once upon a time. Pigs and chickens and ducks and turkeys made a racket. So did stray dogs and scrawny children. Speedro’s flag—a white sailing ship on a blue background—flew over it all.
The Stoyadinoviches greeted the Mendozas like long-lost siblings. In this alternate, they were. The two families shared 130 years of experience no one else here had. “What’s the password for your safe room down below?” Liz asked.
“‘Rosebud,’” George Stoyadinovich answered. “Why? You want to get a soda or something? Long as you stay down there to drink it, help yourself.”
“No, thanks. I was just thinking it’s from before the breakpoint, so maybe you ought to change it.” Liz told him what had gone wrong up in Westwood. “We never imagined they could figure out something like that, but they did. The movies of The Lord of the Rings are from the start of this century, but the books are older.”
“I don’t think ‘Rosebud’ is a problem,” Dad said. “It’s from before the breakpoint, yeah, but it’s from a movie. I don’t believe there is a book to Citizen Kane. And nobody here has watched any movies since before the big war.”
Liz hadn’t thought about that. Slowly, she nodded. The risk with the Stoyadinoviches’ password was bound to be smaller than with the one her family had picked. She didn’t think there was no risk at all, though.
“We’ll change it,” Mr. Stoyadinovich said. “I know what we’ll use—‘Shaquille.’ He was from long after the breakpoint.”
“He played … baseball, didn’t he?” Liz knew she was guessing.
Mr. Stoyadinovich and Dad grinned in a way that told her she’d guessed wrong. “Basketball,” they said together. She shrugged. As long as he came from after ’67, it didn’t matter.
“Did you get any research done up there?” Irma Stoyadinovich asked. “You weren’t gone very long.”
“We did quite a bit, matter of fact,” Dad said. Mom coughed. “Well, Liz did the digging,” he acknowledged. “Looks like the Soviets were more hardline here than they were in the home timeline, so chances are they did push the button first. Can’t nail it down a hundred percent, but it seems a lot more likely.”
Mr. Stoyadinovich nodded. “Makes sense. So coming back turned out to be worthwhile?”
“Sure did.” Dad nodded, too.
Mom set a hand on Liz’s shoulder. “Tell them what else your darling daughter did, dear.”
“She KO’d the Valley soldier who recognized her and tried to grab her.” Pride rang in Dad’s voice. “That bought us the time we needed to get away.”
“Good for you, sweetheart!” George Stoyadinovich boomed.
“I guess,” Liz said. “I mean, I know it was, but it’s sad, too. The only reason Dan did recognize me is because he liked me.”
“Which didn’t keep you from kicking him in the head when he needed it,” Dad said.
“I know. But even so …” The fight embarrassed Liz more than it made her proud. It was so
mething she’d needed to do—Dad had that right—but not something she’d wanted to do. “I mean, he was nice enough. If he came from the home timeline, he wouldn’t have been too bad.”
“That’s more than you ever said before,” Mom told her.
“Well, I’ll never see him again, so I can say what I think,” Liz answered. “And even if I did see him again now, he’d want to shoot me, I bet, and not just ’cause he’s a Valley soldier. Guys don’t keep on liking girls who knock them cold.”
“Well,” Mr. Stoyadinovich said solemnly, twirling his mustache, “you’re right.”
Liz didn’t tell him how much of the crosstime secret she’d spilled to Dan. She didn’t aim to say anything about that to anyone but her folks. Not that the locals could do anything with it, but all the same … . If Crosstime Traffic found out they knew more than they should, the company could assume it was because of what they’d found in the underground rooms.
If Dan hadn’t liked her, he wouldn’t have listened anyhow. He would have gone on trying to deck her, and he might have done it. She’d needed the breathing space, maybe more than he did. And if he’d decked her, the Valley soldiers might have got her folks, too.
She knew she was talking herself into something, but she didn’t much care. A Greek philosopher had called man the rational animal, and that was true. But man was also the rationalizing animal. You did what you had to do or what you wanted to do, and you worried about why later, when you had the chance.
“I got away. We got away,” Liz said. “It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t neat—what is in this alternate? But we did it.”
“That’s what counts,” Dad said. Everybody nodded. The Mendozas would go back to the home timeline soon, and Dan … Poor Dan. Liz did feel sorry for him. She wondered what he thought he ought to do now. She was absolutely, positively, sure she’d never find out.
Tor Books by Harry Turtledove
Between the Rivers
Conan of Venarium
The Two Georges (by Richard Dreyfuss and Harry Turtledove)
The Valley-Westside War Page 24
