“They were—and then they weren’t.” Sergeant Max snapped his fingers. “Gone. Like that.”
“Where’d they go?” Dan asked. “Did they have some secret way out?”
“Well, we turned Rocky and Bullwinkle loose in there to see if they could find the freshest trail.” Max looked unhappy.
“What happened? Did they disappear into a wall or something?” Dan thought such things were impossible. He thought so, yeah … but you never could tell.
“Almost,” the dog handler answered. “The hounds went down to the basement, and they just kind of parked there, right in the middle of the floor. And there’s nothing there. So maybe the mutts are wrong. It can happen, I guess. But I sure don’t know where else those people could’ve gone.”
“They didn’t get out the back door,” Sergeant Mike put in. “We had somebody posted there, and they just didn’t. Besides, that door’s still barred from the inside.”
“Was Luke in that house, sir? Did he have a hiding place there?” Dan asked the captain.
“We talked to him about that. He finally told us where it was at,” the officer replied. Dan wondered how they’d persuaded Luke to talk. Some things, he decided, he might be better off not knowing. The captain still didn’t look very happy. “We found the hideout. We could have looked for a month if we didn’t know it was there, and we never would have. No sign the traders had used it, though.”
“Oh.” Dan chewed on that. “Where’d they go, then?”
“Good question.” The captain looked hard at him. “C’mon back to the house with us. If anybody on our side has a chance of figuring it out, you’re the one.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll try, sir.” Dan felt he had to add, “I don’t think I can promise you anything.”
Up Westwood Boulevard he went with Sergeant Max and Sergeant Mike and the captain, whose name he still didn’t know. Some of the other Valley soldiers on the street gave him stern looks, others stares full of sympathy. He felt embarrassed. A common soldier in the company of two sergeants and an officer almost had to be in dutch.
Well, maybe I am, Dan thought. Maybe I just don’t know it yet.
They turned right on Wilshire and went over to Glendon, which was the next street east. Then up a couple of blocks, towards UCLA, and there stood the house, with soldiers outside the front door. They saluted as the captain approached.
If they couldn’t find Liz and her folks, how am I supposed to? Dan wondered. I don’t know where they’re hiding. Maybe they really did work magic and disappear. He shrugged. He had to try.
He went inside with the officer and the underofficers. Everything was familiar, but everything was very quiet. The captain took him to a ladder leaned up against the inner courtyard wall. “Go on up,” the older man said. “Have a look.”
“Yes, sir,” Dan said, and he did. Sure enough, it was a hiding place, about as comfortable as a cramped one could be. “This is where Luke was?” he asked.
“He says so,” the captain answered. “Do you know about any others?”
“No, sir. I didn’t know about this one,” Dan said. “I guess the only way to find others would be to take a close look at all the walls and ceilings.”
“We’ll do that … eventually.” The captain didn’t sound thrilled about it. Dan had trouble blaming him. He went on, “Now come down from there and have a look at the basement.”
“Yes, sir,” Dan said again, and descended. He followed the captain and Mike and Max downstairs to the below-ground level. It held crates full of trade goods and sacks of beans and barley and parched corn—about what he would have expected.
Sergeant Max stepped on a flagstone. “This is where Rocky and Bullwinkle think they went,” he said. “But it’s just floor.”
“I guess.” Dan got down on his hands and knees. Only a couple of lamps burned in there. “Could I have one of those?” he said. Even though he forgot the please, Max handed him one. The smell of the hot olive oil took him back to when he was a little tiny kid. He held the lamp as close to the floor as he could.
“What are you looking for?” Max asked.
“Beats me. Anything, really.” Dan held his nose as close to the floor as he could, too. He squinted, staring as hard as he could. His sight hadn’t started to lengthen, so he could peer closer than the captain or the sergeants could. He tried to stick his fingernail into a crack between flagstones. Then he thrust the blade of his belt knife into the crack. Excitement surged in him. “The dogs are right, I bet. This looks like a doorway, see?” He traced a rectangle with the knife. “And the cement here isn’t just like the rest of it.”
The captain stood on the rectangle and stomped hard. He cocked his head, considering the sound. “Might be something hollow under there. What do you boys think?” The question included the sergeants. It plainly didn’t include Dan.
Mike stomped, too. He was a big, heavyset man with a lot of weight to put behind his boot. “Dog my cats if there isn’t, sir. Now how do we go about prying it up?”
They tried the most basic way first: they wedged another knife in there and used it for a lever. The blade promptly snapped. It was Sergeant Max’s knife. He had several unpleasant things to say.
They ended up needing army engineers. The engineers had trouble getting the door up, too. They dug up a flagstone beside the door, only to discover concrete beneath it. “Something funny’s going on here,” one of the engineers said. “I wonder if this is an Old Time fallout shelter.”
Dan shuddered at the thought. Fallout was poison—he knew that much. Nobody in the Valley knew much more.
“If it is, it would make a perfect hiding place now, wouldn’t it?” the captain said.
“Sure would,” the engineer agreed. “I bet there’s a lock on the other side of that trap door. Gonna take some work to break it. But with that other stone gone, we’ve got more room to pry.”
They needed till late afternoon before they finally defeated the lock. “You found the door, kid,” the captain told Dan. “You can go down there first if you want to.”
Gee, thanks, Dan thought. But he couldn’t look afraid, even if he was. “Yes, sir,” he said. Holding a lamp, he went down into the blackness.
The soles of his boots clanged on metal stairs. He held the lamp high now, but it didn’t throw much light. All it did was push the darkness back a little—he still couldn’t see the walls of this chamber. He supposed it did have some.
He couldn’t see the floor, either, not till just before his feet came down on it. It was hard, like asphalt or concrete—it felt too smooth for flagstones. He bent down with the lamp at the base of the stairs for a closer look. Yes, that had to be concrete.
“Well?” the captain called from up above. He wasn’t coming down till he found out whether the fallout had eaten Dan.
“Well, what … sir?” Dan let a touch of impatience show. You couldn’t come right out and say an officer had no guts. But he would have bet the sergeants got the message, even if the captain didn’t. “It’s a plain old room, that’s all.”
He straightened up, took a couple of steps forward, and proved himself wrong. It wasn’t a plain old room, whatever else it was. When he walked out toward the middle, the lights in the ceiling went on.
He stopped and stared up at them, his mouth falling open like a fool’s. Who could blame him? Those had to be electric lights—they were too bright for anything else. But he was as sure as made no difference that nobody had seen electric lights since the Fire fell and ended the Old Time.
“What did you just do, soldier?” the captain asked in a very small voice.
“I didn’t do anything, sir,” Dan said, even if he wasn’t exactly sure that was true. “They came on all by themselves.” He looked around. Here were these miraculous lights, but they sure didn’t light up much. He might have been inside a concrete box with a glowing lid. The floor had yellow lines painted on it. Outside of the lines were words, also in yellow paint, and plainly done with stencils. KEEP C
LEAR—CROSSTIME TRAFFIC REG. 34157A2.
Dan scratched his head. What was that supposed to mean? Did it mean anything? Not to him, it didn’t.
Slowly, cautious, the captain and the two sergeants descended. “What is this place?” Sergeant Max asked in a low voice.
“Beats me,” Dan said. “I don’t think anybody’s hiding here, though.”
Sergeant Mike walked over to a wall and thumped on it with his fist. He got back a good, solid thunk. He moved over a couple of feet and did it again. Thunk. And again, and again, till he’d gone all the way around the chamber. “I don’t think there are any secret rooms,” he said.
“Didn’t sound like it,” Max agreed. “I wonder what Rocky and Bullwinkle would tell us.”
“Why don’t you go get them, Sergeant?” The captain kept staring up at the lights in the ceiling. They weren’t bulbs, or what Dan thought of as bulbs. They were more like tubes of light seen through the kind of glass that survived here and there in bathroom windows. “How do those work?” the officer whispered. “How can they work?”
“There’s electricity somewhere in this house.” Dan looked at the floor again, as if expecting to see it sneak along there. Maybe it did. He wouldn’t have recognized it had he seen it. Had he seen anything strange then, he would have called it electricity.
But he didn’t. The floor was only a floor, with that big painted rectangle and some kind of funky warning on it.
The captain looked at that, too. “What’s ‘Crosstime Traffic’?” he asked, as if Dan were supposed to know.
“Can’t tell you, sir.” Dan denied everything.
“D’you think it’s something the Westsiders know about? Electricity!” The captain’s gaze went back to those impossible ceiling panels.
Dan could answer that question: “No way, sir. Nohow. We haven’t seen anything like this anywhere else.” The two sergeants solemnly nodded. Dan went on, “Besides, if the Westsiders had it, they’d use it above ground, wouldn’t they? They wouldn’t hide it in a basement under a basement.”
“I sure wouldn’t,” Sergeant Max agreed.
“Well, neither would I,” the captain said. “So that means these traders aren’t ordinary Westsiders. What are they, in that case?” He looked at Dan, as if still expecting the common soldier could come right out and tell him.
But Dan said, “Sir, I only wish I knew,” and that was nothing but the truth. Who was Liz, really? What was she, really? He wondered if he’d ever find out. And then he stared up at those magical glowing electric tubes again. Looking at them, blinking at the impossible light they shed, he realized Liz was only part of the question, and probably a small part at that.
Part of Liz was glad to be back in the home timeline again. Cars. Cell phones. Hot showers. Microwaves. Supermarkets. TV. Radio. The Net. Fasartas. Flush toilets. You didn’t know how much you missed your comforts till you went without them for a while.
The home timeline held other pleasures, too. A UCLA campus that wasn’t a crumbling ruin overgrown with weeds. A Santa Monica that wasn’t grass trying to push up through the glass that nuclear strikes had fused. A Los Angeles that wasn’t divided up into a bunch of squabbling little kingdoms.
No, the home timeline wasn’t perfect. Not even close. She knew that all too well. But her time in that post-atomic alternate had taught her more than she’d ever imagined about the difference between better and worse.
But …
“We ought to go back,” she told her father a couple of days after they’d escaped from the Valley soldiers.
“I know,” he said. “We were really getting close to finding out what started the war there. That’s what the grant was for. If we give incomplete results …” He sighed. “Well, if we do, we won’t see any more research money for crosstime travel, that’s for sure.” He sighed again. “Stuck in the home timeline.”
If you had to be stuck anywhere, there were lots of worse places. Liz understood that, in ways she never had before. Even so, she said, “I don’t want to be stuck anywhere.”
Dad smiled. “You aren’t, sweetie. Even if I turn out to be, you aren’t. They won’t come down on you because of this. I got the grant, so I get the blame. And I deserve it. If I didn’t hide Luke—”
“They would have shot him!” Liz broke in.
“They shot him anyway,” Dad reminded her. “But for you it’s no harm, no foul. You’ve still got to go to college and get your career going. Nobody’ll hold anything that happened when you were eighteen against you. It’s not like you robbed a store or something.”
“I blame me, even if nobody else does,” she said. “If Dan hadn’t kept coming around, he wouldn’t have got suspicious of us. I’d bet my last benjamin that that’s what made them come looking for Luke the second night.”
“You don’t know for sure. You can’t know for sure,” her father said. “Besides, what you’re really blaming yourself for is being a pretty girl. There’s nothing wrong with that. Believe me, there isn’t.”
There is when it causes trouble. And it does, Liz thought. But that didn’t want to come out. Instead, she said, “I should have told him to get lost when he started visiting all the time.”
“You would have been out of character if you did,” Dad said.
“I didn’t think he’d turn out to be such a pest,” she said, as if her father hadn’t spoken. “After all—”
“He’s just a barbarian from an alternate where everybody’s a barbarian,” Dad finished for her. She wouldn’t have put it quite the same way, which didn’t mean she thought he was wrong. He went on, “And yeah, he is a barbarian. He’s ignorant. He has fleas and lice and bad breath. And he doesn’t smell good. But none of that makes him dumb. He can see when things are peculiar.”
“He sure can!” Liz interrupted in turn. “I kept making little mistakes, and he kept pouncing on them.”
“Making little mistakes and getting pounced on because of them is the biggest problem we have going out to the alternates,” her father said. “Almost everybody does it. It’s like going to a foreign country. You can speak perfect French, but you’ll still have a devil of a time making a real Parisian believe you grew up on the Left Bank.”
Speaking perfect French, or almost any other language, was easy. Like everybody else, Liz had a computer implant behind her left ear. It interfaced with the speech center in her brain, so software could feed her the words and the grammar and the logic behind a language. She wished learning history and math and literature were that simple. Maybe one day they would be. Software engineers improved implants all the time.
But that was a distraction now. She said, “Can we get back to that alternate without giving ourselves away? A lot of people know who we are.”
“Tell me about it!” her father said unhappily. “I wish we had another outlet for a transposition chamber closer than Speedro.” He muttered to himself. “Maybe I should count my blessings. A lot of alternates, there’s only one for the whole world.”
“We can’t be traders again, not if we go back up into Westwood. What would we be instead?” Liz liked acting. She was pretty good at it. She had to remind herself her life would depend on her performance here.
“Maybe just people looking for work,” Dad said. “There are always people scrounging in that alternate, because there isn’t enough to go around.”
Liz wasn’t so sure she liked that. People looking for work would go hungry a lot of the time. People pretending to look for work would go hungry, too. And … “How do I get back to the UCLA library for more research? The people there know me, too.”
“Well, they’re Westsiders. They wouldn’t give you away to the Valley soldiers.” But her father checked himself and did some more muttering. “Only they might. It just takes one to sell you out, and we’ve never yet found an alternate where some people won’t do things like that.”
“People who didn’t wouldn’t be human,” Liz said.
“No, I guess not,” Dad agreed. “We h
aven’t gone to any alternates where the people aren’t human beings. There are bound to be some, but the transposition chambers haven’t traveled that far yet. Probably just as well.”
“What do you mean?”
“If we make little mistakes in the alternates where people are just like us, how would we pretend to fit in where they’re really, really different?”
“Oh.” Liz chewed on that. “I don’t know. But I bet we could be back up to the Westside in disguise. I always wanted to see how I’d look in a blond wig.”
“You’d look silly, that’s how.”
He wasn’t wrong, not when Liz was slim and dark like most people in the home timeline’s Los Angeles. The Westside and the Valley in the bomb-ravaged alternate had many more fairskinned people. Lots of waves of immigration hadn’t happened there. But even if Dad was right—maybe especially because he was right—Liz gave him a dirty look. “You’re mean!” she said.
“Why? Because I told you the truth?”
“Sometimes telling the truth is the meanest thing you can do.”
That brought Dad up short. He thought it over, then nodded. “Well, you’ve got something there. But I don’t think I’m guilty this time around. Honest, I don’t. I’d look silly in a blond wig, too.”
Liz eyed his close-cropped black hair. He was starting to get some gray at the temples. When did that happen? Some time when I wasn’t looking, Liz thought. What did her parents think they were doing by getting older behind her back? That was pretty sneaky. She nodded to herself. They should cut it out.
“Blond wigs or no blond wigs, do you think we can get back up to the Westside without giving ourselves away?” she asked.
“Sure,” Dad said. “What could go wrong?”
“They could recognize us and shoot us for spies?” Liz suggested. “They could torture us before they shoot us for spies?”
The Valley-Westside War Page 16