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?” Captain 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, lake 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 Benjamin’s 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 sc
rap 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.
Still other high-tech alternates ruthlessly limited population and energy use. If they couldn't get more, they'd make do with less. That worked, after a fashion, but Liz was glad she didn't live in one of those alternates. They were tyrannies, and tight ones. They had to be, to keep people from having too many babies and consuming too much. She'd grown up free, and was glad of it.
She scanned all the stories she could find about Russia and Vietnam and the Middle East. None of them grabbed her by the arm and yelled, Hey! Look at me! I’m different! She had the data, though. Maybe her folks could run with it if she couldn't.
When the sun got low in the west, she put away the bound volume and left the library. No electric lights here. None anywhere in this alternate except in the secret rooms of the house the Mendozas had used and at the Stoyadinovich.es' place down in Speedro. The locals would never find any of those.
Dan didn't know why he came back to the UCLA campus. He was tempted to go into the big, fancy library. If he could find out anywhere whether time travel was possible, that would be the place.
But he didn't think he could. If somebody back then knew how to do that, it would have been a heavy-duty secret, a bigger secret than the Fire. And something else occurred to him as he tramped along the cracked, weed-infested concrete. Why would anybody from the Old Time want to see this? They had things so much better back then. Everybody knew that. Next to what they'd had and thrown away, what was left was just a mess. People were lucky anything at all was left-if this counted for luck.
That was one side of the dime. The other side was, where did all that stuff in the traders' house come from if it didn't come from the Old Time? Nobody nowadays could make any of those things and keep them working. Fluorescent lights? A refrigerator? Coca-Cola? A door that opened when you said the right word? No, none of that was part of the world Dan knew.
He laughed at himself. He didn't know which world he was really in, not any more. If Mellon hadn't made the door open, the next thing he would have tried was Open, sesame! He was pretty sure Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves was nothing but a made-up story. But when you ran into marvels like the ones under the traders' house, how could you be certain about anything?
You couldn't. It was that simple.
There was Bunche Hall. The University Research Library sat a little north and a little west of the taller building. Dan still wondered how the devil Liz and her folks had managed to disappear from her house. So did a lot of other people from the Valley. If they didn't have a time-travel machine, what did they have?
He laughed again. He told himself he wouldn't have been real surprised to see Liz come out of the URL, just the way she had before all this weird stuff started.
Two heartbeats later, Liz came out of the URL, just the way she had before all this weird stuff started. Dan turned out to be wrong. He was so surprised, he tripped over his own feet and barely saved himself from falling on his face.
The wild stumble and flail kept him from yelling out her name. As he caught himself, he realized that might not be such a good idea. She and her folks were fugitives, after all. They wouldn't want anybody to know they were back in Westwood. If Liz found out he knew, wouldn't she disappear right before his eyes?
Could she do that? He shrugged. He didn't know she couldn't, and he didn't want to take the chance.
So instead of yelling, he followed her. She headed north- away from the house where she'd been staying-as if she had not a care in the world. He skulked along behind her, using everything he'd learned as a soldier not to be noticed. It was getting dark, which helped him.
What to do, what to do? If he just trailed her, she'd have a chance to get away when he went off to tell somebody about it and get help. If he grabbed her, she might disappear. When all your choices were bad. which one did you pick? The one that didn't look worst, whichever that happened to be.
He decided she had less chance of disappearing if he grabbed her than she did of getting away if he left her alone for a while. Maybe he was right, maybe he was wrong. But at least he was doing something. She'd almost got to Sunset Boulevard when he broke cover and ran toward her, calling. “Halt in the name of King Zev!”
She whirled. There was just enough light to let him see that she looked as astonished as he had a few minutes earlier. Then he was on her. If she wouldn't halt, he had to make her do it.
Next thing he knew, she'd grabbed his outstretched arm. He went up over her shoulder, flew through the air with the greatest of ease-and with a startled grunt-and landed, thump!, on his back.
Liz made a mistake then. She had pretty good combat reflexes, but not perfect ones. Instead of getting out of there as fast as she could, she stood and admired what she'd done. And Dan had combat reflexes of his own. Crashing to the ground made them kick in. He snaked an arm around her ankle and brought her down. She let out a startled grunt of her own, and then a squawk when her bottom bounced off the dirt.
He was bigger and stronger than she was. She had more skill. She didn't mind fighting dirty, either. She tried to do something that would have ended the fight in a hurry, but he took her knee on the point of his hip instead. It hurt, but it didn't ruin him.
“Is that how they fought in the Old Time?” he panted.
“Are you nuts? What are you talking about?” she said, and then, cautiously, “Truce?”
He thought about it. As cautiously, he nodded. “Truce.”
They both got to their feet. She didn't try to kick him again where it would do the most good. He couldn't try to shoot her- his matchlock wasn't loaded. Just clouting her with
the musket took a moment to cross his mind. By the time it did, she'd moved back too far to let him do it. Could he run her down if he had to? Maybe. Probably, even. Did he want to? That was a different question.
“What am I talking about?… I'll tell you what.” Dan was still panting. Liz didn't seem to be. Did that mean he couldn't run her down? If they just talked, he wouldn't have to find out. “Coca-Cola. Electric lights. Mellon . That's what.”
She looked almost comically amazed. “You've read The Lord of the Rings!”
“I didn't know I wasn't supposed to,” Dan answered.
“But the movies are from the start of the twenty-first century,”' she said, more to herself than to him. “Are the books that much earlier?”'
“What movies?” Dan asked. He had only a vague idea of what a movie was-sort of like TV, only bigger; sort of like a play, except it wasn't really there in front of you. It was like a photo that moved. He knew what photos were. He'd seen them. People still knew how to take them, even if not in color any more. How they were supposed to move… that, he didn't understand. He didn't know anything about movies of The Lord of the Rings. He was sure nobody else did, either, especially not movies from around the year 2000. Nobody could make movies then-it was after the Fire fell.
And Liz clapped both hands over her mouth, the way somebody would after blurting out a secret she didn't mean to tell. “Oh-!” she said, and then something that would have made Sergeant Chuck 's ears turn green.
Dan was almost too surprised to be shocked-that was not the kind of thing he expected to hear from a girl he liked. But neither was talk about movies. “You really are a time traveler from the days before the Fire fell!” he exclaimed. “Nobody wanted to believe me. Everyone said I was nuts.”
“You are nuts,” Liz said. “You can't travel forwards and backwards in time-it's impossible.” She had a scratch on her cheek, and a bigger one on the heel of her hand.
Dan noticed he had sore ribs along with an ache on his hipbone where her knee had got him. She'd hurt him other places, too, but those were the bad ones. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “So how did you get here-sideways?”
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