Dan did believe him. He sounded too pleased with himself to be lying. Dan was sorry he’d said he wouldn’t ask about money—he wondered how much this guy had got. But what the man said fit in pretty well with what Liz had told him before, which also made him think the trader was telling the truth. So all he asked was, “What kind of magazines? Did they have to do with Old Time guns and stuff?”
“Nah. I could see people wanting those.” The trader shook his head. His greasy hair flipped back and forth under his hat. “These were just weird, man. I think they were mostly pretend stories. Why would you care about those?” He sounded honestly puzzled.
Dan was puzzled, too. “That’s all?” he asked.
“That’s it. Cross my heart and hope to die.” The trader made the required gesture. For the first time, though, his eyes slipped away from Dan’s. Was he hiding something? If he was, Dan saw no way to make him turn loose of it. And the older man was impatient to be gone. “You gonna hassle me any more?”
“I wasn’t hassling you,” Dan said. “You want to get hassled? I’ll take you to my sergeant. He’ll show you more about hassling than you ever saw.”
“That’s okay, kid, if it’s all the same to you.” The trader’s tone warned it had better be okay with Dan. Even so, he sounded amused as he went on, “I have met up with a sergeant or three in my time, and it’s a fact that they can hassle better’n just about anybody.”
“You can say that again!” As soon as the words were out of Dan’s mouth, he wished he had them back. Now he’d given the trader something to use against him. That wasn’t smart. But he didn’t think Chuck would do much more than laugh. He hoped Chuck wouldn’t, anyhow. Sounding as gruff as he could, he said, “You can go.”
The trader touched the brim of his hat in what wasn’t quite a salute. “Much obliged, buddy. You know, that trader’s got a daughter about your age.” He jerked a thumb toward the house from which he’d come.
“I’ve met her.” Dan bit off the words.
“She’s smart, too.” The older man didn’t know how much trouble he was causing—or maybe he did know and didn’t care. “If I were as young as you are, I’d try and spend some time with her, I would.”
“Right,” Dan said. If looks could have killed, the trader’s fancy pistols wouldn’t have done him a nickel’s worth of good. Didn’t he know that Dan wanted nothing more than to spend as much time with Liz as he could? And didn’t he know that Liz didn’t seem the least bit interested in doing the same thing?
Of course he doesn’t know any of that, Dan realized. The trader had just set eyes on Liz for the first time. (Unless he’d come up here before the Valley took Westwood. But Dan thought that unlikely. The man would have talked about her differently if he had.) How could he know that Dan went over there whenever he found the chance? How could he know Dan was on his way over there now? Simple—he couldn’t.
Or could he? His leathery, weathered face was much too cunning as he said, “Well, have a nice day, pal,” and ambled off.
He didn’t look back over his shoulder to see whether Dan knocked on Liz’s door. Maybe that meant he didn’t care. Then again, maybe it meant he already had a pretty good notion of what Dan would do.
Steaming, Dan tramped right past that door. He was, after all, supposed to be on patrol. But he looked back over his shoulder after he’d gone half an extra block. No sign of the trader. If the miserable fellow had hung around to see what Dan would do, he was gone now. And if he was gone now …
Dan hurried back to Liz’s house and knocked on the door. The barred little telltale at eye level opened up. Dan didn’t think those were Liz’s eyes on the other side of it. He turned out to be right, because a man’s voice said, “Oh, it’s you. Wait a second.”
A thud meant the man was taking down the bar that held the door closed. When it swung wide, Dan found himself looking at Liz’s father. “Hello,” he said politely—he couldn’t bring himself to call anybody in occupied Westwood sir. “Is Liz at home?”
Her father nodded. “Yes, she is, but you can’t see her right now. She’s busy in the kitchen. We’ve got to eat—nothing we can do about that—and getting food ready takes a lot of time.”
Dan nodded, too. He remembered his mother working a lot in her kitchen. He also remembered her grumbling about it. Chopping and cutting and plucking and gutting and tending the fires and cleaning up afterwards … Sometimes she’d dragooned him into helping, but women did most of the work in there.
“Ask you something?” Dan said.
“I make a point of never saying no to a musketeer who’s carrying his gun,” Liz’s father answered. Dan wondered if he was telling the truth. Like the other trader, he was bound to have weapons of his own. But he wasn’t showing any right now. And so …
“Why did you buy freaky magazines from that whiskery scoundrel?”
Liz’s father looked startled for a moment. Then he smiled. “You must have run into Luke.”
“If that’s his name,” Dan said. “But you didn’t answer my question. Why did you? It could matter to the Valley.” He wanted the trader to understand he wasn’t just being snoopy on his own.
“I don’t see how,” Liz’s father said. “I’m interested in those kinds of magazines myself, the same way Liz is. They remind me how much we lost when the Fire fell. And, after I look at them, I can sell them. I’ll make good money when I do, too.”
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 any more … “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 father 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 father 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 well 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, We’ll 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 off 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 Valley-Westside War Page 13