A lot of Negroes in Charleston sure seemed to think so.
Going out on the street, getting away from those people who wouldn't have been polite if they weren't getting paid, came as a relief. . . for a little while. Then she found out how much the hotel's soundproofing muffled the noise of gunfire. It was much louder, and much closer, than she'd thought.
"Let's see your papers!" a soldier barked at the first checkpoint she came to. She handed them over. His eyebrows jumped in surprise, almost disappearing under the brim of his helmet. "California passport! What in blazes are you doing here?"
"Visiting friends," Beckie said, which wasn't even a lie. "I didn't know I'd get stuck when the war started." That was also true.
"Who are these friends?" the soldier asked.
"Justin Monroe and his uncle, Randolph Brooks," Beckie answered. "Mr. Brooks runs a coin shop not far from here."
"He does, Everett," another soldier said. "I remember seeing the place."
"Okay." Everett looked at the passport again, shook his head, and gave the document back to Beckie. "You can go, I guess. But be careful. Things aren't exactly safe around here yet."
She found out what he meant when she walked around the corner. Two bodies lay there—one white, one black. Flies buzzed over them and settled in the blood that had pooled on the sidewalk. A mockingbird—a cheerful, sweet-voiced mockingbird— pecked at one of the corpses and swallowed . . . something. Stomach knotting, Beckie waved her arms. The bird screeched but flew away.
Those bodies were fresh. Something in the air told Beckie of others she couldn't see. The ones she smelled had been dead longer. How long would that stench last? How could anyone stand to live here till it went away?
People were on the streets. Some moved warily, as if afraid of what might happen next. Beckie moved that way herself. Who could tell when a wacko of any color might pop out of a doorway and start shooting? But others walked along as if things were normal. A man in his twenties smiled at Beckie the way he might have on any street in the world. She nodded, but couldn't make herself smile back.
Three blocks over then a left turn, then downhill toward the Kanawha. Lots of Charleston—lots of western Virginia— seemed to be uphill or downhill or sidehill or somethinghill. California had country more rugged than this, but hardly anybody lived in it. There were no towns in the Sierras with a couple of hundred thousand people in them.
On the way down toward the river, she had to go by one of the bodies she'd been smelling. There it lay, all bloated and stinking, a monument to ... what? To stupidity. To man's inhumanity to man. But the Virginians wouldn't see it, neither the whites nor the blacks. Why not? It sure looked obvious to her.
Not even Justin and Mr. Brooks would admit it, and they seemed different from the other Virginians she'd met. The Snodgrasses couldn't even see the problem. Beckie had the feeling Justin and his uncle could, but they didn't want to look.
She wondered if she was imagining things. She didn't think so. That was probably a big part of why she was on her way to the coin and stamp shop. They were unusual people, and they might have unusual ways to help.
And there was the shop, across the street. Actually, first she saw the car in which Mr. Brooks drove her and Gran to Charleston. But COINS AND STAMPS was neatly lettered in gold on the plate-glass window closest to it. So was the street number. In Los Angeles, odd numbers were on the western and northern sides of the street, evens to the south and east. She hadn't needed long to see they didn't do things that way in Ohio and Virginia. The stamp and coin shop was on the west side of the street, but its address was 696. Close to the number of the beast, but not quite, Beckie thought.
There wasn't much traffic. Beckie didn't feel the least bit guilty about jaywalking. In Charleston right now, she was more likely to get hit by a sniper than by an oncoming car. She wished she hadn't thought of it like that. She especially wished she hadn't when a burst of automatic-weapons fire only a couple of blocks away made her jump in the air. A woman screamed, and went on screaming. She shuddered. One more noise you never wanted to hear.
She tried the door to the coin and stamp shop. It was locked, which wasn't the biggest surprise in the world. But she could see people in there, even if the sun film on the window kept her from telling who they were. She knocked. When nobody came to the door right away, she went on knocking.
Justin opened up. "Come on in," he said. "You're no looter."
An assault rifle leaned against the far wall. He was dirty and needed a shave. "What's up?" he asked.
Beckie was glad to see him no matter how he looked. "Gran's got it," she said baldly.
"Ohhh." It was almost the noise Justin would have made if someone hit him in the belly. Behind the counter, Mr. Brooks made an almost identical sound. A tall woman Beckie hadn't met winced. Justin said, "This is my mom. Mom, this is Beckie Royer, who I've been telling you about."
"I'm glad to meet you," Mrs. Monroe said. "I'm not glad about your news, though, not even a little bit. We've already had too many cases in Charleston."
Picking his words with obvious care, Mr. Brooks asked, "What do you want us to do, Beckie?"
"Whatever you can," she said. "I'm a stranger here. I don't have any money, not on my own. The credit cards are all in Gran's name, and she's . . . not with it right now." She told him about the muffins, whatever that was supposed to mean. Then she took a deep breath and went on, "I don't know that I'll ever be able to stand her after spending all this time with her. You've seen what a pain she is. But that doesn't mean I want her to up and die on me." Tears stung her eyes. No, it didn't mean that at all.
"We could get her to a hospital for you," Justin's mother said slowly.
"They aren't having a whole lot of luck with this in hospitals," Justin said. "Either you get better on your own or you don't. Mostly you don't." He sent Beckie an apologetic look, but he wasn't saying anything she didn't already know. "Doctors here are kind of dim," he added.
Both his mother and Mr. Brooks coughed loudly. Under the dirt and stubble, Justin turned red. He didn't take it back, though.
"Hospital's still my best bet, isn't it?" Beckie said. "I want to do everything I can."
"Well. . ." Justin started. He got two more sharp coughs. Beckie wondered what was going on. Whatever it was, nobody seemed to want to come out and tell her. Justin said, "Let me see what I can do."
What was that supposed to mean? Whatever it meant, Justin's mom and Mr. Brooks didn't like it for beans. Beckie could see as much, even if she had no idea why they felt the way they did. "What exactly do you think that is?" Beckie spoke as carefully as Mr. Brooks had a few minutes before.
"I don't know yet. Give me till five o'clock," Justin said, while the two older people in the shop looked daggers at him. He went on, "If she gets really, really sick, don't wait for me. I don't want her to die before I do ... whatever I can do."
He still wouldn't say what that was. What could a coin and stamp dealer's nephew do that a hospital couldn't? But he sounded as if he thought he could do something, somehow. And Beckie knew the hospitals weren't having much luck with the disease. Would they have done better in California? How could she tell?
She made up her mind. "Okay, Justin. I'll see what happens, that's all. I hope you're not just trying to impress me or something. If you're blowing smoke on this, I never want to have anything to do with you any more. You hear me?"
"I hear you," he said soberly.
"All right, then." Without giving him a chance to answer, she turned and walked out of the shop and started back to the hotel. When she went past the stinking, swollen body in the street, she was reminded you didn't need a plague to die. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time could do the job every bit as well.
As soon as the door closed behind Beckie, both Justin's mother and Mr. Brooks turned on him. "What do you think you can do for her grandmother?" Mom asked, at the same time as Mr. Brooks was saying, "What do you think you're going to do for the old bat?"
The only difference between them was that Mr. Brooks knew Mrs. Bentley while Justin's mom didn't.
"I don't know," he admitted. "If I talk with people back in the home timeline, maybe I'll come up with something. I do want to try."
"Because you're sweet on Beckie, that's why," Mr. Brooks said.
"Are you?" Justin's mother demanded.
Justin didn't like getting yelled at in stereo any more than anyone else would have. He couldn't do anything about it here. "Some," he said, because Mr. Brooks would have made him out to be a liar if he tried to deny it. But he went on, "Seems only fair we try to help her grandmother, though. She might have picked up the disease from one of us."
"Not likely, not when the immunity shots seem to be working," Mr. Brooks said.
"You didn't let me finish!" Justin said. Mr. Brooks blinked. Justin didn't talk back a whole lot. Most of the time, he was on the easygoing side. That seemed to make him more effective when he did lose it. He went on, "Or she might have caught it— probably did catch it—when she was coming down to Charleston with you. Any way you look at it, it's our fault. We ought to fix it if we can."
"Would you say the same thing if you didn't like this girl?" his mother asked.
"I hope so," Justin answered.
Mr. Brooks started to laugh. Justin stared at him. So did his mom. "Let him try, Cyndi," the coin and stamp dealer said. "Sometimes, if you're eighteen or so, you've got to lower your head and charge. If he can talk the people in the home timeline into doing something about it, more power to him. And if he can't—well, he gave it his best shot, and he won't be mad at us for stopping him."
"It won't work," Justin's mother said.
"I don't think it will, either." Mr. Brooks talked as if Justin weren't there, which annoyed him. But they did let him try, and that was all that really mattered.
He went down to a room in the basement he had to enter through a palm lock. The wrong prints would have immovably locked the door and turned on self-destruct switches behind it. He had some of the right ones.
Inside, everything came from the home timeline: plastic chairs, desk, PowerBook. Any kind of communication between alternates was hard. You needed enormous bandwidth to send even old-fashioned e-mail. And Justin did exactly that.
If you have a cure for the disease Ohio has turned loose on Virginia ready, please send some doses as soon as you can, he typed.
He waited. And he waited. And he waited some more. After what seemed like forever but was nine minutes by the clock on the wall (also from the home timeline, even if local ones were just as good), he got an answer. Who is ill, and how serious is it? wrote the person on the other end of the line.
It's pretty serious, Justin answered. An old lady we stayed with in Elizabeth is sick now. She came to Charleston with Mr. Brooks. She probably caught the disease riding in the car with him. Only fair for us to help out if we can.
Another pause. The message crossed the timelines in an instant. Figuring out what to do about it—figuring out whether to do anything—took longer. After another eternity, this one of eleven minutes, a reply appeared on the PowerBook's screen. Regret that the possibility of spreading disease across the alternates makes this impossible.
Justin said something that had to do with manure. He'd had plenty of time to think about this, and he wasn't going to take no lying down. You've got to have a quarantine center on some alternate with no people in it, he wrote. Send the transposition chamber there and decontaminate it before you use it again.
There is a quarantine center, admitted whoever it was back in the home timeline. But there is no opening for a transposition chamber at what matches your location. The chamber cannot materialize inside solid ground, not without an explosion.
He talked about fertilizer some more. He already knew a chamber couldn't come out inside of something solid. The boom that followed if it tried wouldn't be small. How far from here is the closest digging equipment? he asked. If the person back in the home timeline said it was five hundred kilometers away, he knew he'd have to give up.
Another pause followed. He had a pretty good idea of what was going on this time. The person back in the home timeline was checking the answer to his question. As time stretched, Justin started to suspect that person was also checking to see whether to tell him the truth.
About 500 meters away, Justin knew it was crazy to think the response appeared on the screen reluctantly, but it felt that way to him. He had to read it twice to be sure no kilo lay in front of meters. When he was, he whooped and did a war dance in the bare little room.
They couldn't see the war dance back in the home timeline. So the quarantine alternate did have some kind of installation in what corresponded to Charleston, did it? He ran back to the laptop and wrote, Then what are you waiting for?
Authorization of the effort and expense. The answer came as a dash of cold water. It reminded him he was working for a big corporation. The people who ran Crosstime Traffic worried about right and wrong only as much as they had to. They thought about cost and trouble first.
We would be fixing a problem we helped cause, Justin typed. We're not supposed to interfere here. Curing Mrs. Bentley would be fixing our interference.
And would be an interference of its own, came the coldblooded reply. It was followed by, Wait. I'll get back to you.
Justin wondered where the person back in the home timeline thought he would go. Out of the basement here? Not likely! He wanted that answer. And he wanted it to be what he wanted it to be. He tried to sort that out inside his head. He didn't have much luck, but he knew what he meant.
He waited, and kept on waiting. This time, a good half-hour went by before new words appeared on the PowerBook's screen. Okay, it said. They're digging. As soon as the GPS says they're in just the right place, we'll send a transposition chamber from the home timeline to you. Go in, take what you find inside, and get out. The chamber will head for the quarantine alternate. Don't hang around, or you'll go with it. Do you understand?
Oh, yes. I understand, Justin wrote. Thank you!
Don't thank me. It wasn't my idea, and I don't think it's a good one, said the person on the other end of the connection. But they're going to do it anyway. This Mrs. Bentley will let them make sure the antiviral is as good as they think it is, and one more connection to the quarantine alternate may come in handy. Out. The dismissal looked very final.
He didn't care how it looked. He punched his fist in the air and shouted, "Yes!" The secret basement room echoed with it. He had wrestled with the powers that be, and had prevailed.
He went back upstairs, first carefully closing the door behind him. As soon as he walked into the shop, his mother started, "Justin, honey, I'm sorry they wouldn't give you. . . ." Then she got a look at his face. She stared. "They didn't?" Behind his spectacle lenses, Mr. Brooks' eyes were enormous, too.
"They sure did!" Justin said.
"But how? Why?" His mother shook her head in disbelief. "They told me—they told me over and over—they wouldn't, they couldn't, get me out even if I came down sick. They meant it, too. I was sure they meant it."
"Maybe that's it," Randolph Brooks said. "You believed them, so you didn't argue very hard. Justin wouldn't take no for an answer. He kept looking for angles, and I guess he found one. Congrats, kid." He stuck out his hand. Justin gravely shook it.
He pictured a bulldozer in the quarantine alternate, an alternate where men never evolved at all. He pictured a virgin forest full of passenger pigeons and other birds extinct for centuries in the home timeline. He pictured one humongous hole in the ground. When it was deep enough, they'd be able to send a transposition chamber there.
"What exactly is going on?" His mother's voice had something in it he'd never heard there before, not directed at him. She was asking the question the way she would have to another grown-up—and wasn't that something, as long as we were on the subject?
He explained. Then he said, "I'm going down to the sub-basement to wait for th
e chamber to come through."
"Or for the Robert E. Lee," Mr. Brooks said, which didn't mean anything to Justin. The older man added, "You may have a long wait if they're digging."
"That's okay. I don't care." Justin all but flew down the stairs. He got past another palm lock to go down to the lowest level below the shop. Yellow lines showed where the chamber would materialize. He stayed behind them. He knew the drill.
An hour went by, then another one. Some of his enthusiasm disappeared. But he was too stubborn to go back up for a sandwich or a fizz or whatever. At last, after close to four hours, the transposition chamber appeared. It had no human backup operator. Under the circumstances, that made sense. A package sat on one of the front seats. Justin grabbed it, then got out as fast as he could. Half a minute later, the chamber softly and silently vanished away.
He didn't care. He had the package. That was all that really mattered.
Thirteen
Beckie watched Gran and watched the clock and worried more with every few minutes that slid past. Justin was right— hospitals couldn't do much for this disease. But could he do anything at all? And would waiting to find out cost her—and Gran—too much?
Gran wasn't even pretending to watch TV any more. She just lay on the couch, as out of it as a yam. Beckie had made a cold compress from a hand towel in the bathroom and ice from the noisy machine down the hall. She'd bought aspirins with Virginia money from Gran's purse. She'd even got her grandmother to take them, which wasn't easy. But the fever stayed high.
A hospital could give her an IV, keep her from drying up like a raisin. Once the thought came to Beckie, it didn't want to go away. She kept looking over at Gran and trying to decide when bad turned to worse. The more she brooded, the more she doubted she would wait till five o'clock.
On the other hand, would an ambulance even come if she called one? She still heard spatters of gunfire, and sometimes gunfire that wasn't spatters. A firefight seemed to last forever. It really did go on for half an hour. Even after it ended, quiet didn't come—more spatters followed on its heels.
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