All you had to do was look around to see how much got lost when the Fire fell. The buildings, the rusting corpses of cars, the fancy firearms, the diseases people couldn't cure anymore… “Why do you need to be reminded?” Dan asked.
“Like I said, I'm interested.”
“Mrm.” Dan made a noise deep in his throat. “Are you interested because you're trying to scope out plans for Old Time weapons?” People nowadays could imitate some of them.
But Liz 's father just shook his head. “No.”
“Can I see the magazines? I need to be sure of that.” Dan said.
With a shrug. Liz 's lather said, “Sure. Why not? “You'll probably arrest me if I try to tell you no. And the magazines really are what I said they are. Handle them carefully-that's all I ask. I paid more than a dollar apiece for them.”
“So much?” That anybody would spend so much money for something to read blew Dan 's mind. Yes. the trader said he would make money on the magazines sooner or later. How could he. though, when he threw away silver like that?
Into the courtyard Dan went. Savory odors wafted from the kitchen. Dan 's nostrils twitched. If that wasn't going to be a mutton stew, his nose needed rewiring. He wondered why people said things like that. What did wires have to do with your nose? Wires had to do with electricity, and electricity was one more thing they'd had in the Old Time that they didn't any more. Somebody had once written that electricity would propel a streetcar better than a gas jet and give more light than a horse. The person who read that to Dan said it was supposed to be a joke, but neither one of them got it.
“Here are the magazines,” Liz 's lather said.
The ginger-whiskered trader- Luke -had been right: they were funky. Some of them had rockets on their covers. Others talked about gas mileage for cars. Dan paged through them. He didn't see anything that had to do with weapons. Even if they were weird, they seemed harmless.
He gave them back to Liz 's father. “I can't figure out why you think they're so cool.”
“We were going to go to the moon.” The older man pointed up. There it was, a little more than half full, pale and white in the blue daylight sky. “To the moon, Dan. We'd already sent rockets up there. I've seen pictures that they took of craters and things, just before they crashed down onto it. And we were going to send people after them. People, all the way to the moon and back! And then we used the rockets to blow ourselves up instead. But we were so close.” He held his index fingers maybe half an inch apart.
“What's that got to do with these?” Dan pointed to the magazines. The familiar musty smell of old, old paper came from them.
“They were sure we were going. They knew we could do it,” Liz 's father said. “What if we really had? What would we have done after that?” He tapped a magazine, one with a rocket on the front, with his finger. “These tell the stories of what might have been.”
“And look what we have instead.” All of a sudden, Dan 's heavy matchlock didn't seem so wonderful. It was about as fancy a weapon as people nowadays could make. Everything else was on the same level. And they could have gone to the moon instead! Tears stung his eyes, tears of rage and embarrassment. “Isn't this a wonderful world we gave ourselves?”
“A little bit at a time, it does get better,” Liz 's father said. “The time right after the Fire fell, that was really bad.”
“That's what they say,” Dan agreed. “It'll be a lot better once King Zev gets done licking the Westside.”
“Well, maybe,” the trader said. “Do you think King Zev is the one who'll put the United States back together again?”
“Don't be silly!” Dan exclaimed. “Everybody knows Los Angeles is only a little part of the old United States. It would have to be Zev's son, maybe even his grandson.”
“Right,” Liz 's father said, and Dan had left the house before he even thought to wonder whether the older man meant it.
Liz couldn't seem to poke her nose outside without seeing Luke. When she went up to UCLA, she would spot him sunning himself on the grass or playing solitaire. When she went into the market square to buy vegetables, he'd be gnawing on a baked potato or haggling over the price of a cheese sandwich.
He always looked innocent. Some people had a knack for that. He didn't quite have a halo glowing above his broad-brimmed hat, but he seemed as if one might pop out any minute. That made Liz suspicious. From what she'd seen, people who worked so hard to project that air of innocence were often chameleons. And what Luke might be hiding…
She had a pretty good idea there. Dad didn't want to spy for Cal and the rest of the Westside bigwigs who'd got thrown out of Westwood. If Luke could find out what Cal wanted to know, he'd get the payoff.
At first, that was the only thing Liz thought of. Then something else occurred to her, and she started to worry. “What if the Westsiders throw the Valley soldiers out again?” she asked her folks over supper. She'd earned her tacos. She'd made the tortillas from cornmeal, and she'd chopped up the beef that went into them. They tasted especially good to her because of that-and, no doubt, because all the ingredients were fresh as could be.
“Well, what if they do?” Mom said. “We did business with them before. We can do business with them again.”
“But now they asked us to help them, and Dad told them no,” Liz said. “How happy will they be about that?”
Her father paused to dab at his chin with a napkin. The tacos weren't neat, no matter how tasty they were. “The worst thing that happens is, we go back to the home timeline a little early,” he said. “That wouldn't break my heart.” He gave her a crooked smile. “And then Dan would be out of your hair, and it wouldn't even look bad. What's wrong with that?”
“Nothing… if they give you some warning first,” Liz said. “Then we get away, sure. But what if they just grab you off the street or something? They can do whatever they want in that case.”
One of the lessons Crosstime Traffic taught was, Anything that can happen can happen to you. People who worked in the alternates sometimes lost sight of that. They sometimes paid for losing sight of it, too. People everywhere lost sight of it too often. In the home timeline, the price might be your job or your lover. In the alternates, it could easily be your neck.
“I don't think that will happen,” her father said. “They've got no reason to grab me, not like that.”
“No? What about Luke?” Liz said. “ Dan wondered about us before. And now he's asking questions about somebody who really does want us to spy for the Westside? That's not good.”
“ Luke 's managed to live through a whole swarm of things we can't even imagine,” Dad replied. “I don't think he'll lose any sleep about a Valley soldier who barely needs to shave.”
The fuzz on Dan 's chin and cheeks and upper lip was a pretty sorry excuse for a beard. “I wish the guy were dumb,” Liz said. “He's just ignorant, though. Now I understand the difference.”
Her father made clapping motions that produced silent applause. Liz 's ears got hot. “Congratulations,” Dad said, less sarcastically than he might have. “A lot of people never do figure that one out.”
“That's 'cause most of them don't go out to the alternates, I guess,” Liz said. “Everybody's ignorant in this alternate, but you can still tell who's smart and who isn't. Cal 's pretty smart. Dan 's pretty smart. Luke -”
“Would be a CEO or something in the home timeline,” Dad broke in. “No flies on Luke, no, sir.”
“How smart is King Zev?” Liz asked.
“Well, I haven't met him, so I don't know for sure,” her father answered. “Finding that heavy machine gun in good working order won him the war. You don't need to be smart to have something like that happen-you just need to be lucky. He's got some pretty good officers-I do know that. But I have the feeling he's not the brightest bulb in the hardware store. How come?”
“I wondered,” Liz said. Her father made an exasperated noise. She went on, “If the Westside and Speedro team up to try to take Westwood back, how w
ell will Zev do against Cal and his buddies?”
“Ah. Gotcha.” Dad nodded. “That's a good question. The only good answer I can find is, Well find out.''
“Thanks a bunch. I could have done that well myself,” Liz said.
“Sorry. I don't know what you want me to say.” Dad spread his hands and shrugged. “I'm not a prophet, not from the Bible and not one of the new ones, either.”
“I hope not!” Liz told him. “You're not dirty and shaggy-enough, anyway.” Dad laughed, not that she was joking. In the years since the Fire fell, plenty of people had said they knew why God let it happen. So far, none of their preachings held a very big audience. But who could guess what the holy books in this alternate would look like a thousand years from now? In the middle of the second century, how many people thought Christianity would turn out to be such a big deal?
“I wonder how much Luke has found out on his own,” Dad said in musing tones. “Probably more than I could have told him. Cal will pay him plenty, I bet.”
“But you've got Cal 's money,” Liz said.
“I've got some of it. I'd be amazed if Cal gave me all of it, or anything close to all of it,” Dad said. “'If he's going to get people in Speedro to do things for him, he'll have to pay them off. And he likes to live high on the hog, and that costs money, too-not as much as it would in the home timeline, but a lot, anyway.”
Liz started to say something, then stopped. Dad had thought about a few things she hadn't. “What happens if what's left of the Westside and Speedro do beat the Valley?” she asked at last.
“I don't know that, either,” he replied. “I'm not sure they can, because I don't know what all they've got. I didn't know the Valley had that heavy machine gun, and it made all the difference in the last round. Even if they do win. I don't think Cal can go over the hill and invade the Valley. He'd be nuts if he tried. The most he can hope for is getting Westwood back.”
“Which means the shooting would all be right here,” Liz said, and her father nodded, none too happily. She went on, “We never would have had any of this trouble if he hadn't built that dumb wall across the 405.” The idea that there could be a wall across what was, in the home timeline, one of the two or three busiest freeways in the world told what a disaster this alternate had known.
Dad nodded. “And do you know what that shows?”
“No? What?” Liz said.
“That even smart people can do dumb things. He thought he could get away with it. He thought King Zev would put up with it. He thought he could beat the Valley if Zev didn't put up with it. And he was wrong every time.”
“You should have talked him out of it,” Liz said.
“Get real. For one thing, he didn't ask me. He was head of the City Council-he still is, for all the good it does him-and I'm just a trader. Besides, why do you think he would have listened even if I got a chance to talk to him about it? There's a particular kind of smart person who thinks everybody around him is a dope. Is that Cal, or isn't it?”
“Sure sounds like him,” Liz admitted. “But that kind of smart person isn't as smart as he thinks he is.”
“Not usually, no,” Dad agreed. “You don't find that out till too late a lot of the time, though. A lot of really smart people go a long way on their own before they foul up. Afterwards, you wonder how much further they could have got if they realized other people are really people, not just ladder rungs for them to step on. You treat somebody like a rung, pretty soon he'll break under your foot.”
“Then you go splat,” Liz said.
“That's about the size of it.” Dad sighed. “Way things are now, I wish we could bulletproof the walls here.”
“You think the new fight's coming soon, then.” Liz said in dismay.
“Don't you?” Dad said. “ Cal wouldn't have sent Luke up here to find out what we know if he didn't aim to move. Luke wouldn't be sniffing around on his own if he didn't want to bring something back. He's sure Cal will pay oil if he does. Cal wouldn't pay off if he weren't going to move. And so…”
“Yeah. And so,” Liz said. Everything fit together, almost as neatly as in a geometry proof. But no geometry proof since the days of Archimedes had got anybody killed.
“Cheer up.” Dad told her. “Like I said, you'll be rid of Dan. That's something, anyhow.”
“Something, yeah,” Liz answered. “I don't want him to get shot, though-I don't hate him or anything.” She sighed. “You just want to yell at these people, you know? They had their great big stupid war, but they go on fighting these little wars that are even stupider. Don't they learn anything from history?”
“The first thing you learn from history is that nobody ever learns anything from history, or not for long,” her father answered. “People used to say that in the home timeline, but now that we can look at a bunch of different histories we see it's true in all of them. People are like that. You wish we weren't, but we are.”
“We already got stuck at the edges of one battle. I don't want to get stuck in the middle of another one,” Liz said.
“Well, who does?” Dad said. “If it gets too bad, we disappear. I already told you that.”
“Yeah, I know you did,” Liz replied. If they were all here at the house when trouble came, they could do that. If they weren't, if one of them or two of them or all of them happened to be out in Westwood… But Dad was ignoring even the possibility. Liz called him on it.
He spread his hands. “I don't know what you want from me.
The fighting won't get here right away. We'll know it's coming ahead of lime. And when we do know, we'll be able to come back to the house, so we won't get stuck. Right?”
“I sure hope so,” Liz said.
“You have to have some confidence that things will work out. Otherwise, you can't do your job,” Dad said.
“I guess,” Liz answered. “I'd like that better if this weren't an alternate that's had an atomic war.” She got the last word. Then she had to decide if she really wanted it.
Eight
“'Musketeers… shoulder arms!” Sergeant Chuck yelled.
Proudly, Dan did. He wondered whether the other new musketeers had that tiny moment of hesitation, too. He still had to work to remember he was a musketeer, not a no-account archer any more. The few remaining archers in Captain Kevin 's company were already carrying their bows ready to string and shoot.
''Riflemen… shoulder arms!” the sergeant shouted.
Their faces serious, the riflemen obeyed. With their fancy Old Time guns and cartridges, they could hit targets far beyond any a musketeer could hope to reach. But they took chances musketeers didn't, too. A musket wouldn't explode unless you loaded several charges of powder into it without lowering the match to the touch-hole. Old Time cartridges were just plain old nowadays, you never could tell about them till you pulled the trigger. Most of the time, they did what they were supposed to- you wouldn't dare use them if they didn't. Sometimes, though, they didn't do anything at all. And every once in a while, one would blow up in your face and wreck your rifle… and you. Riflemen needed steady nerves-and nerve, period.
Chuck nodded to Kevin. “All ready, sir.”
“Very good, Sergeant.” The company commander had the sling off, but his left arm still wasn't what it had been before he got shot. He raised his voice: “Forward… march!”
Along with the rest of the Valley soldiers, Dan tramped south down Westwood Boulevard toward the Santa Monica Freeway line. Some of the people on the sidewalk glanced at the marching men. Others just went about their business. Quite a few of them were bound not to like the Valley men. You couldn't tell which ones, though. They knew better than to show a company's worth of armed men that they were hostile.
Then the company had to stop, because a wagon full of beer barrels drawn by six big horses clattered across Westwood Boulevard from a side street. Sergeant Chuck yelled at the driver. So did some of the soldiers. The fellow on the wagon spread his hands, as if to say, What can I do? It's my job.<
br />
The pause let Dan glance over in the direction of Liz 's house. He'd be going a couple of miles away-not impossibly far, but far enough. Too far, really. He would have felt even worse about it if he thought Liz cared. He sighed.
He didn't see her, even if he'd hoped to. He did see Luke the trader, who watched the Valley soldiers with keen attention. Was he counting them? For whom?
He caught Sergeant Chuck 's eye. “See that scraggly fellow with the whiskers?” he said in a low voice.
“The guy with the pistols?” Chuck said. Dan nodded. “What about him?” the underofficer asked. “He looks like a tough customer, but so what?”
“He's a trader. He says he is, anyway,” Dan said. “But he's mighty snoopy. I've seen him prowling around, kind of looking us over, know what I mean? And now he's doing it again.”
“How about that?” Chuck said. “Well, when we get where we're going, I'll put a flea in Captain Kevin 's ear. Maybe he'll want to pick this guy up, ask him a few questions. Sharp questions. Pointed questions. Hot questions.” Chuck had a very nasty smile when he felt like using it. “What's the guy's name? You know?”
“He goes by Luke, I think,” Dan answered.
“Okay. Well, we'll see what he goes by once we start finding out what's what.” Chuck looked at the company and went from that special nasty smile to his usual sergeant's scowl. “Come on, you muttonheads! Straighten it up!” he bellowed. “You're not a herd of camels galumphing down the street. If you think you are, I'm here to teach you different.”
They straightened up. Doing what Chuck said was easier than trying to get around him. Armies were made that way, and had been since the beginning of lime. Dan didn't think about such things. As long as he stayed in step with the men around him, he didn't need to.
A couple of large Old Time buildings still stood on West-wood Boulevard, even if awnings and curtains and shutters replaced almost all the glass in their windows. Most of the buildings, though, were modern shops and houses. They were made from the rubble of what had stood there before. Stone and brick and wood and chunks of stucco with chicken wire in it made up the walls. The patchwork was odd if you weren't used to it. Dan was. A lot of stuff in the Valley was built the same way.
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