Curious Notions ct-2

by Harry Turtledove

  That Lucy didn't believe it went a long way toward proving her mother right. She didn't think of it that way, though. But she didn't feel like arguing with Mother, either. All she said was, "I'm home, and I'm fine. What needs doing now?"

  She helped her mother with dinner. It wasn't very exciting: noodles and cottage cheese. But enough noodles made hunger go away, and there were enough. Then she did the dishes. After that, she yawned and listened to music on the radio while she darned socks. Pretty soon, she'd go to bed.

  At the top of the hour, the radio played five minutes of news. Lucy would have got up to change the station to find more music, but she was too tired. She wondered what her brother did to socks. Did Michael have little hole-eating animals inside his shoes? She wouldn't have been surprised.

  "Today, the Imperial German government announced a new campaign against terror and subversion," the newsman said. "Suspicious persons will be questioned and punished. Disloyalty will not be tolerated. Examples will be made of those foolish enough to resist the rightful authority of the German government."

  Lucy's mother was sewing a patch onto one knee of Michael's jeans. She looked up at that. Her eyes met Lucy's. They shared a silent moment of worry. What would happen to Father if the Germans were talking tough like that?

  "There are reports of new scientific advances in Berlin," the announcer went on. "Details are not available. The Kaiser's officials know how important it is to keep scientific progress secret."

  That kind of story just made Lucy yawn. She heard one like it about every other week. The Germans always wanted to prove they were smarter than anybody else. Lucy thought that made them dumber than anybody else, but nobody cared about her opinion.

  The radio played a commercial for a local bakery. Lucy's mind went back to the first piece the newsman had read. Slowly, she nodded to herself. If she had to, if Paul Gomes and his father didn't do what they'd said they would, she had a chance to make them pay. Would I use it? she wondered, but she didn't wonder long.

  A truck pulled up in the alley behind Curious Notions. Two big, burly, suntanned men got out of the cab. They both wore overalls. One had on a shapeless, low-crowned cloth cap, the other a straw hat with a wide brim. Neither had taken a bath any time lately. But the odor of garlic wafting out of the crates in the back of the truck did a good job of covering that up.

  Paul Gomes opened the back door to the shop. "Let's bring it in," he said, and pointed to the waiting storage room. The farmers up from Gilroy had dollies with them. That made moving their fragrant cargo easier. Paul counted off the loads. If they'd brought a third dolly for him, he would have pitched in. He'd done it before.

  Panting at the end, the fellow in the cloth cap said, "That's all of it, kid."

  That kid grated on Paul. He didn't let it show, though. "Here you are," he said, and handed the man a twenty-dollar bill and a five.

  "Thank you kindly," the farmer said. 'That's a... real good price." It was at least five dollars more than he could have got at the city markets. Curious Notions didn't worry about money so much, and aimed to keep the people they dealt with happy.

  "My pleasure, Mr. Mouradian," Paul said. "You've got good garlic. We're glad to get it from you."

  "I expect you must sell to just about every Italian and Greek restaurant in the whole Bay Area, the way you buy," Mouradian said. Paul only smiled. The garlic here traveled a lot farther than the local could imagine. The farmer went on, "Well, you know your own business best, and I'm no snoop. I do want to tell you, though—that movie player your dad sold me works great."

  They had CDs and DVDs here—not quite the same as the ones in the home timeline, but pretty close. They weren't on the civilian market, though. Anything that had anything to do with lasers was an Imperial German military secret. Even VCRs that played tapes were fairly new here. In the home timeline, VCRs were as obsolete as typewriters. But, before they'd gone obsolete, they'd grown a lot more bells and whistles than the local machines had. Local video-cassettes weren't the same size as the ones in the home timeline. Except for that, nobody'd had to change a thing to start making the players again.

  "I'm glad you like it," Paul said. "We want satisfied customers."

  "Well, you've sure got one." Mouradian turned to his helper. "Come on, Dave. Let's head on back home."

  "Okay," Dave said—the first word out of his mouth since he'd got there. They climbed into the truck. The windows rattled in their frames when they slammed the doors. Mouradian started the motor and put the truck in gear. It rolled away. The harsh diesel exhaust fumes made Paul cough. They didn't have hydrogen-burners and electrics in this alternate the way they did back home.

  Dad was out front dealing with customers. That meant Paul got to lug the garlic down to the subbasement by himself. He could have done without the honor. By the time he got the last of it down there, he hoped he would never see another set of stairs as long as he lived. It all but surrounded the place where the transposition chamber would materialize. The operator would have to make several trips to get it all back to the home timeline. The biggest complication in buying produce here was making sure they didn't buy too much to fit in the basement.

  Wearily, Paul went up and pushed the filing cabinet over the trapdoor again. Then he trudged all the way upstairs—not just to the back room, but up to the apartment over the shop where he and his father lived. He jumped in the shower. Till he did that, he wasn't fit to be around anybody. He made the water as hot as he could stand. It felt good on his back and shoulders and legs. He knew he'd still be sore in the morning. He didn't do that kind of hauling often enough to get hardened to it.

  He laughed as he dried off his hair. His dad grumbled about aches and pains a lot more than he did. Paul didn't think it was because Dad enjoyed complaining, either. He's past forty, he thought. No wonder he's wearing out.

  He'd never come out and said that to his father. They already argued about enough other things. Calling his old man an old man wouldn't help.

  When he went downstairs and out into the shop, Dad was selling a clock radio to a fat woman with a mink stole draped over her shoulders. Paul's stomach lurched. In the home timeline, wearing furs wasn't illegal, but it was disgusting—sickening, even.

  There, if not in more important things, he and his father agreed.

  But no matter how sick Dad felt inside, he didn't show it at all. Part of growing up was learning to put up with stuff you wouldn't think you could stand. Paul, who'd never heard his dentist say root canal, didn't understand that as well as someone twice his age might have. But, at eighteen, he was starting to get the idea.

  "You'll like that one, Mrs. Pastrano," Dad was saying. "It's got terrific sound, and it'll pull in stations from a long way away."

  "Well, I sure liked the record player I bought from you," Mrs. Pastrano said. In the home timeline, records were even more outdated than videocassettes. If a few fanatics hadn't kept playing them and even making them, Crosstime Traffic would have had a lot harder time turning out players for alternates where people still used them. The local woman paused and sniffed. "I smell garlic."

  I'll bet you do, Paul thought. His father only shrugged and said, "I've got a bit of a cold. I can't smell a thing."

  "It's there," Mrs. Pastrano declared, and she wasn't wrong. She wrapped the stole around herself more tightly. The flying end almost hit Dad. Paul thought he would have lost his lunch if it had got him. Dad never turned a hair. Mrs. Pastrano said, "So how much do you want for this?"

  The price tag was attached to the clock radio. The red numbers had to be five centimeters high. Again, Dad acted as if everything were ordinary. He said, "It's $199.95."

  Mrs. Pastrano squawked, but she paid. If she could afford a mink stole, she could afford a fancy radio that cost eight truckloads' worth of garlic, too.

  Four

  Everybody talked about the midnight knock on the door. It was such a cliche—and held so much truth—the Imperial German censors had given up tryi
ng to stop that talk. It showed up in books, in movies, in radio plays, and even—for those who had the money— on TV.

  The knock that woke Lucy Woo and her family didn't come at midnight. It came at ten after three, as she saw when she stared at the alarm clock on the nightstand. That was even worse. It meant she had a good fighting chance of losing the rest of the night's sleep. Of course, when people came knocking at midnight—or at ten after three—they weren't likely to care whether you lost sleep or not.

  Yawning, more than a little punchy, she staggered out of bed. The pounding at the door went on and on. It would wake the neighbors, too. They wouldn't be happy about that. Lucy yawned again. She had bigger worries than the neighbors right now.

  Her mother turned on a lamp in the living room. They both blinked at the sudden explosion of light. Then Mother did something Lucy admired forever. She went to the door and asked, "Who is it?"

  That question had only one possible answer. But that Mother had had the nerve to ask it... ! The pounding stopped. A gruff male voice said, "The Feldgendarmerie of Imperial Germany. Open at once, in the name of the Kaiser!"

  They would kick the door down, or maybe shoot through it, if Mother gave them any more trouble. She had to know that as well as Lucy did. She opened the door. But she couldn't help asking, "What's so important that it won't wait till morning?"

  This time, she got an answer she didn't expect. The Feldgen-darmerie men, all of them over six feet tall, shoved a much shorter man into the living room. "Father!" Lucy squealed.

  "Hello, sweetheart," Charlie Woo said. He hugged Mother first, then Lucy, then her brother, who came running up in his pajamas. "I'm home."

  "You would do well not to make the Kaiser's government suspect you," the big Feldgendarmerie man said. "Next time, you may not be so lucky."

  "But I didn't do anything," Lucy's father said.

  "If you had not done anything, we would not have arrested you." The German sounded as sure as if he'd said the sun would come up in the morning. "Just because we cannot prove it does not prove a thing." He also sounded sure he made sense. Lucy almost called him on it. But the weak didn't challenge the strong. America had been under the Kaiser's thumb for a long time. That was one lesson everybody in the country had learned, and learned well.

  Without another word, the Feldgendarmerie men turned and strode off. Their jackboots thudded on the bare boards of the hallway. They slammed the door to the stairs behind them. Even so, Lucy could hear them clumping all the way down to the ground floor.

  "Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!" Michael squealed. Her mother closed the door so his noise wouldn't bother the neighbors quite so much. Lucy didn't care if it bothered them. She joined right in. The Kaiser's secret police didn't let somebody go every day.

  Paul kept his promise, she thought in surprise. She couldn't come up with any other reason the Feldgendarmerie would have released Father. / owe him an apology. I ought to do something for him to keep things balanced, but I have no idea what I could do.

  Her mother's thoughts were running on different lines. "Let me get you something to eat," she said to Father. "What did they do to you while they had you?"

  "Not as much as I was afraid they would." Father looked tired and he needed a shave, but Lucy didn't see any bruises or cuts on him. He stood there in the middle of the front room as if he couldn't believe he was free. As Lucy's mother disappeared into the kitchen, he went on, "They spent a lot of time yelling at me and asking questions, but that was all. They didn't try any strongarm stuff." He sounded as if he couldn't believe it, either. The Feldgendarmerie wasn't known for being kind and gentle.

  "Here." Mother came out with a bowl of cold noodles and a steaming cup of tea she'd made in what seemed like nothing flat.

  "Oh, my," Father said. By the way he dug into the noodles, the Germans hadn't fed him much while they held him. He ate standing up, as if he didn't want to waste time going over to the couch or a chair. When he finished, he made a small ceremony of handing the bowl back to Mother. "Thank you, dear. That was wonderful." He sipped the tea and smiled. Just making the corners of his mouth go up took effort. Lucy could see that. But Father managed.

  After Mother took the bowl into the kitchen, she came back and herded Michael into bed again. She didn't try to make Lucy go. That was a good thing, because Lucy didn't intend to. She knew she'd be even more tired than usual when she got home from work tonight, but so what? If this wasn't a special time, what was?

  Besides, there were questions she wanted to ask Father. The first one was, "What do you know about Curious Notions?"

  "Only what I told you before," he answered. "That's what I told the Germans, too. If I knew more, I would've sung like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. You'd better believe I would, sweetie. I don't owe those people at Curious Notions a thing. If they're in trouble with the Kaiser's men, it's their lookout."

  "Um," Lucy said, and then, "Urn," again, and finally, "I think maybe you do, Father."

  "What do you mean?"

  Lucy told him about her visits to the strange store and about her talks with the Gomeses, especially Paul. She finished, "He said he'd talk to officials who'd squeeze the Germans. The Feldgendarmerie doesn't turn people loose very often, so I guess maybe he did."

  Charlie Woo scratched his head. He yawned. Lucy wondered how very tired he was. "I guess maybe he did, too," he said slowly. "That means he knows officials who can squeeze the Germans. He knows them well enough to get favors out of them. It's just an ordinary-looking little shop, though. How do the people who run it get that kind of pull?" By the way he sounded, he wished he had that kind of pull himself.

  "The shop looks ordinary, but they don't sell ordinary things there," Lucy said. "You told me that, and I've seen it for myself, too."

  "No, they don't," her father agreed. "They're . . . curious, the things those people sell—and the people, too, it sounds like." He yawned again, so wide that Lucy could see his tonsils. Then he finished his tea at a gulp. "I'm going to bed." He shook his head. "No. I'm going to take a bath, and then I'll go to bed."

  That was just what he did, too. Lucy also went back to bed. She didn't go back to sleep, though. She hadn't thought she'd be able to. Yes, she'd be a zombie by the time she got home from work. "So what?" she said after tossing and turning for an hour. She got up again and got dressed. "So what? Father's home. Who cares about anything else?"

  Paul's father said, "Well, I hope you're happy. They sprung that fellow from Chinatown." He didn't sound any too happy about it.

  "Did they? That's great." Paul was plenty pleased for both of them. He had good reason to be pleased, too: "Nice to know people will come through for you once in a while."

  "Maybe." Dad still seemed gloomy. "Trouble is, if you do pull strings like that, you get noticed. The locals will wonder why you did it. They'll wonder about this Charlie Woo—and they'll wonder about us. We don't want them wondering about us."

  The shop had no customers in it, so they could talk freely. Paul hesitated when a man put his hand on the doorknob. But then the man got a look at the prices in the display window. He jerked his hand away as if the brass knob were red-hot.

  Paul had seen that reaction before. He smiled as the almost-customer hurried off down the street. "If we don't want to draw any notice, we shouldn't sell most of the stuff we carry," he said. "We should stick to things just like the ones this alternate makes for itself."

  They'd had this argument before. His father made the usual countermove: "But if we do that, we won't make so much money here. If we don't make money, how are we going to buy the produce? That's what we're really here for, that and making sure the locals don't start trying to go crosstime."

  "How can we stop them if they do start making those experiments?" Paul asked.

  "I don't know if we can," his father said, sending a sour look his way. "What we want to do, I guess, is make sure the idea never occurs to them in the first place."

  "How?" Paul asked again.

 
; "I already told you—one thing we need to do is keep them from noticing us," Dad said.

  "Wait a minute. There's a hole in that," Paul said. "If we don't want them to notice us, we don't sell stuff that's any different from what they already make here. If they really get serious about finding out where what we've got comes from, isn't that a problem?"

  "It hasn't been so far," his father said. "Curious Notions has been doing business here for years, and we haven't had much trouble." He made money-counting motions with his hands. Paul knew what that meant. If a local had got curious about the shop, Crosstime Traffic people had paid him enough to make him lose his curiosity. Why not? It wasn't as if it were real money from the home timeline.

  That might have worked well in the past. No—that had worked well in the past. But could you count on it to keep working forever? Paul had his doubts. He said, "I wouldn't want to try bribing that Inspector Weidenreich. He looks like he's after any old excuse to bust us."

  "There are ways around people like that," Dad said. He didn't say what those ways were, though. Maybe they were secret. Maybe he thought Paul already knew them. And maybe he was making it all up and didn't know them himself.

  Paul wondered if asking that was worthwhile. Regretfully, he decided it wasn't. Either Dad would ignore him or he'd start a fight. And if he started a fight, it would be one Paul couldn't hope to win. He wouldn't convince his father. Making Dad change his mind was like wearing away Mount Everest with a feather. You could try, yeah, but you wouldn't get anywhere. Dad was that stubborn. (Paul's own stubbornness didn't even cross his mind.)

  He wouldn't be able to persuade Crosstime Traffic that Dad was doing anything wrong, either. He already knew that. Dad wasn't going against Crosstime Traffic policies or guidelines. He was just following them in what Paul didn't think was the best possible way.