“How many bad adventure videos have you downloaded lately?” he asked. “That kind of thing doesn’t happen if you’re careful.”
“If we were careful enough, they never would have got suspicious of us in the first place,” Liz said.
“Well, do you want to stay behind when your mother and I go back?” Dad asked. “You can do that. It won’t look bad on your record or anything. You can just start college a quarter earlier than you would have.”
“No!” Liz didn’t even need to think about that. “I don’t want you sticking your necks out if I’m not there. And I do want to go back and find out what was going on in that alternate in 1967.” She paused, looking inside herself. “And I want to find out how things turn out there now, too.”
Her father gave her a sly smile. “And you want to find out how Dan’s doing, too, right?”
She sniffed. I won’t let him get my goat, she told herself. I just won’t. “Dan can do whatever he does, as long as he does it a long way from me,” she said. “If he sees me after we go back, that’s trouble.”
“Mm, so it is,” Dad agreed. He nodded, as if making up his mind. “Okay. We’ll see what we can set up.”
“Cool!” Liz grinned. “Speedro, here we come!”
The strap on Dan’s binoculars was new. The binoculars themselves dated back to the Old Time. TASCO, they said, whatever a TASCO was, and Made in Japan. He knew where Japan was: he’d been to school, after all. It was on the far side of the Pacific, thousands and thousands of miles away. Once in a blue moon, a sailing ship from Japan would come in to Speedro. But those were fishing boats, blown off course in storms. He tried to imagine a steamboat—there still were some steamboats, for coastal trade—or a big sailing ship crossing the ocean full of binoculars.
And what would America have sent back to Japan in that steamboat, or in another one? Guns, maybe? Or automobiles? He knew he was just guessing.
He raised the binoculars to his eyes and peered south from the Santa Monica Freeway. Everything there leaped closer. Binoculars weren’t magic, any more than Old Time guns were. Still, even though he’d been to school, he didn’t understand how they worked. He did understand that they worked, which was all that really counted.
He scanned back and forth, looking for any signs that the Westsiders were getting frisky. He spotted one fellow who was plainly a soldier. The man was standing on the roof of a tall building maybe half a mile south of the freeway. He was looking north … through binoculars.
Do his say TASCO, too? Dan wondered, and then, Is he looking straight at me? He raised his left arm and waved. After a moment, the guy on the rooftop waved back. Why not? They might be enemies, but they both had the same job. And nobody was shooting at anybody right this minute.
A gong stood only a few feet from Dan. If he did see anything that looked like trouble, he was supposed to clang on it for all he was worth. That would send Valley soldiers running to help him … if nobody’d shot him before they got here.
In the meantime, he waved to the other soldier again and fought against a yawn. This wasn’t a very interesting duty. Necessary, maybe, but dull. But he could still think about all the mysteries at Liz’s house. He understood those even less than he understood how binoculars worked which only made him more eager to try to figure them out.
Electric lights! Nobody in the world had electric lights, as far as Dan knew. But Liz’s house did. And they came on when you went down onto that floor and moved around. When you walked back up the stairs, they went out. How did they know? Was somebody watching, to make them go on and off? Dan didn’t see how that was possible. He couldn’t imagine any other way it would work, either.
Does that make me dumb? he wondered. If it did, everybody else in the Valley was as dumb as he was. Sergeant Max and Sergeant Mike were floored, and weren’t too shy to admit it. The captain—Dan had finally found out his name was Horace—was baffled, too.
Captain Horace had gone looking for scholars at UCLA. He’d brought back one fellow who claimed he understood electricity. The scholar wore a dirty white coat and a frayed necktie from Old Time. He looked like a bright man. He talked like a bright man.
And when he saw those ceiling lights come on? Dan had been down there with him, and watched him stare the way everybody else did. “Impossible,” he said.
“You’re looking at it. It must be possible,” Captain Horace said. That sure made sense to Dan.
Not to the guy from UCLA. “Impossible,” he said again. “No battery could hold its charge from the time when the Fire fell till now.”
“Maybe these are new batteries,” Dan had suggested. Captain Horace beamed at him.
By the way the scholar looked at him, he was an idiot who’d never wise up enough to become a moron. “I know what batteries can do. I know what kind of batteries we can make nowadays,” the man said, fiddling with the knot on his tie. “I’m familiar with the research not just here, but in Frisco and Vegas and as far away as Salt Lake City. Nobody can do anything like this. Nobody.”
“How long does it take for research news to get from Salt Lake City to here?” Captain Horace asked.
“Less time than you’d think,” the scholar said. “The telegraph between Salt Lake and Vegas works most of the time. Of course, you only get an outline on the telegraph. The real journal articles arrive after a couple of years. But people couldn’t keep anything like this a secret. And why would they want to?”
Captain Horace had no answer for that. Neither did Dan. The officer did have a question of his own: “If this stuff is impossible, what’s it doing here? Kindly tell me that.”
The scholar couldn’t. He just stared up at the glowing ceiling some more. “As far as I can see, it’s a miracle,” he said.
A lot of people believed God was angry at the world, and stopped working miracles after the Fire fell. Didn’t that explain why things were so messed up nowadays? But some people said it was a miracle anybody lived through the Russian-American war. Dan didn’t know what to believe.
He did know thinking about that stuff was a lot more interesting than sweeping the southern horizon with his binoculars. He wondered what was going on at Liz’s house right this minute. He didn’t want to be on duty here in the sun. He would rather have gone back to the basement under the basement and stared at the electric lights.
Fluorescents. They were called fluorescents. So the scholar said, anyhow. It was an awfully fancy name. He tried to explain how they were different from ordinary light bulbs, but Dan didn’t get it. He wondered if the scholar made up the word to sound smart. Captain Horace didn’t seem to think so, though.
Right now, they were fluorescing or doing whatever fluorescents did. And I’m not there to see them, Dan thought angrily. I have to stay out here to try to make sure Cal’s soldiers don’t sneak up and murder us. It hardly seemed fair.
You couldn’t tell you were going anywhere when you rode in a transposition chamber. And, in a very real sense, you weren’t going anywhere. You got out in exactly the same place as the one you’d left. The same place, yes, but not the same alternate.
Details, details, Liz thought. Traveling between alternates was as boring as flying coach. More boring, really. You didn’t have a video screen inside a transposition chamber, and you couldn’t look out the window. Transposition chambers had no windows. And if they did, all you’d see out of them was Nothing, with a capital N. She sighed. She just had to sit in her seat and sog, like breakfast cereal soaking up milk.
Going between the home timeline and the nuked alternate didn’t seem to take any longer than coming back had. In reality, neither took any time at all. But the body perceived something that felt like time while the chamber shuttled between worlds. Duration, the chronophysicists called it.
A few lights on the control panel at the front of the chamber went from amber or red to green. “We’re here,” the operator announced.
Liz and her mother and father stepped out of the transposition chamber. The b
are, concrete-walled chamber in which they stood was a lot like the one from which they’d departed. But it wasn’t the same chamber. And, even if they were in the same place, they were also in a new place. They’d left San Pedro, the harbor district of Los Angeles, in California, in the United States. Now they’d come to the independent Kingdom of Speedro.
Behind them, the transposition chamber disappeared. Chambers never hung around long once they’d delivered their passengers. They always had something else to do, some other alternate to go to.
“Hello, there,” someone called from up above, where the trap door opened. “We knew you were coming, so we baked a cake!”
The Stoyadinoviches, who ran Crosstime Traffic’s Speedro trading center, turned out to be very nice people. A lot of the sailors and fishermen in Speedro were descended from Serbs, so the Stoyadinoviches fit right in. And, just as George said, his wife—her name was Irma—really had baked a cake. It was sweetened with honey and raisins, because sugar was rare and expensive here. That didn’t mean it wasn’t good.
George Stoyadinovich had an amazing mustache. Asterix and Obelix and even Vitalstatistix would have envied it. The ends hung down onto his chest. He also had a good grasp of what was going on in Speedro. “Yeah, they’re all hot to help the Westside,” he said. “If Cal gets Westwood back, Speedro will take some of the South Bay as payment for giving him a hand.”
“And if Cal doesn’t get Westwood back, Speedro will grab some of the South Bay anyhow,” Irma Stoyadinovich added. “In that case, the Westside won’t be strong enough to do anything about it.”
“Can we get over the border between Speedro and the Westside?” Dad asked.
“Sure.” Mr. Stoyadinovich nodded, which made his soupstrainer waft up and down. “Long as you’re carrying something the Westside army can use—bullets, boots, whatever—they’ll give you a big hug and a kiss.”
“What’s going on up at the Santa Monica Freeway line?” Liz asked.
Both Stoyadinoviches frowned. “Well, that’s a long way off,” Mrs. Stoyadinovich said. It wasn’t more than forty-five minutes by car, unless the traffic was bad. But that was in the home timeline. Here, it was a couple of days away, at least.
“Yeah, we aren’t so sure about the news we get from up there,” George Stoyadinovich agreed. “Most of the time, it’s gone through six or eight people by the time it gets to us. Who knows how weird it gets while it’s doing that? It’s like playing telephone at a party, you know?”
Liz nodded. By the time a phrase got whispered from a dozen mouths into a dozen ears and came back to the person who started it, it sounded nothing like what that person said at first.
“There isn’t much shooting right now—we’re pretty sure of that,” Mr. Stoyadinovich went on. “You guys are going to try to sneak back up into Westwood, right?”
“Gotta do it,” Dad answered. “We got the grant to see why things went kablooie here, and the YRL’s the best place to look.”
“The URL,” Mom reminded him. “It’s the URL here.”
Dad made a face. He hated making mistakes—Liz took after him there. Mom was more easygoing about it. But if he said that around locals, they’d wonder where the devil he came from. And it was such an easy slip to make. Liz shook her head. No wonder Dan got so curious—or suspicious—about her. Did she betray herself every time she opened her mouth? She could hope not, anyway.
That mustache made Mr. Stoyadinovich’s frown a fearsome thing. “Well, you know what you’re doing, I guess. But if they chased you out of there once, I sure wouldn’t want to go back so soon.”
“If the grant runs out …” Dad didn’t go on, or need to. Mr. and Mrs. Stoyadinovich both nodded. “Yeah, I know that song,” he said. “But watch yourselves just the same.”
“You’ve got a wagon and a team for us, don’t you?” Mom said.
“Sure do,” the Stoyadinoviches said in chorus. George went on, “You’ll dig it. Body’s made from an Old Time station wagon, so it’ll hold a lot, and you’ll look rich. And the horses are as gentle as you please.”
To Liz, that mattered more than the rest. Till she came here, horses were animals that ran races or lived on farms. She’d never dreamt how important they could be in alternates where machines didn’t work. Oh, she’d known, but she hadn’t seen with her own eyes. That made all the difference in the world.
Now how will I get back into the URL? she wondered. Somebody from her family would have to figure out a way. Well, they still had some time to think about it. They wouldn’t get up to the Westside right away. In an alternate like this, nothing happened in a hurry.
Ten
Dan pulled the trigger on his matchlock. The serpentine swept down. The glowing end of the match set off the priming powder around the touch-hole. The charge inside the barrel of the gun exploded. The matchlock bucked against Dan’s shoulder.
Sergeant Chuck went down the range to examine the target.
“How’d I do?” Dan called after him.
“Well, you hit it.” Chuck didn’t sound as happy as he should have. Like a lot of sergeants, he was allergic to sounding happy, no matter what. And he had another bone to pick with Dan: “I don’t see how you hit it. You aren’t getting enough practice, and you know you aren’t.”
“I can’t help it, Sergeant,” Dan said. “They want me to help them find out stuff about the traders’ house.” He didn’t mention Liz’s name. That would only have set Chuck off again.
Chuck turned out to need zero help from him. “So they found electric lights there. Big deal!” he said. “All I’ve got to tell you is, they may have found electric lights, but they’re ruining somebody who was a pretty good soldier.”
That might have been the first time he’d ever said he thought Dan made a pretty good soldier. It was just like him to say it so it suggested Dan had been but wasn’t any more. “If I’m all ruined and everything, Sergeant, how did I hit the target?” Dan asked.
“Luck,” Chuck answered at once. “Nothing but dumb luck.”
“I bet I do it again.” Dan knew he was taking a chance. The matchlock wasn’t a very accurate weapon. Even a good shot could go astray. If his did, Chuck would make him pay for it. Oh, would he ever!
But the sergeant shook his head. “Nah, don’t bother. Even if you hit, it doesn’t really prove anything. Besides, you’re getting soft because you’re not exercising enough. You can’t tell me you are, either.”
Since Dan couldn’t, he tried to change the subject: “I’m just doing what the officers tell me to do, Sergeant.”
“Yeah, like officers know anything,” Chuck said scornfully. “Are they gonna figure out electric lights? Get serious! Are you gonna help ’em figure those lights out? What do you know about electricity?”
“Nothing, Sergeant.” Dan gave the only honest answer he could.
“Well, then!” Triumph filled Chuck’s voice.
“But neither does anybody else,” Dan said.
“And you’re gonna be the one who finds out? Ha! Don’t make me laugh.”
Even though Dan didn’t think that was real likely, either, he didn’t like the sergeant teasing him about it. And he had a good way to get Chuck off his back: “I do need to go back. They want me there.”
“The more fools them,” Chuck said. But he couldn’t tell Dan not to go, not when Dan had orders. He did tell Dan to clean his musket first. Dan did. He took keeping the musket clean very seriously.
Then he hurried off to the traders’ house on Glendon. Even if Liz hadn’t lived there, he would have been glad to go. Every time the electric lights came on (and how? by magic?), he felt as if he were back in the Old Time. If he only had some gasoline, he might have gone looking for an automobile, to see if he could make it start.
Captain Horace had put sentries at the front door. He didn’t want anybody who wasn’t supposed to be there getting in and gawking at the lights. The sentries knew who Dan was. He had no trouble getting past them.
Sergeant
Max and his bloodhounds were in the courtyard. By now, the bloodhounds knew who Dan was, too. They came over and sniffed his boots. He patted their heads and scratched them behind the ears. They looked as happy as you could if your face was made for saying your grandmother had just died.
“Do you expect them to find anything here after all this time?” Dan asked Max.
The sergeant shook his head. “Nah, not really. But I can give ’em a rest from running around, so that’s cool, you know? They’re good dogs. They won’t get into any trouble.”
“Okay,” Dan said. If you argued with a sergeant, you lost unless you were an officer. Sometimes you lost even if you were an officer. A lot of young lieutenants let their sergeants run their platoons. More often than not, that was smart, too, because sergeants usually had a better notion of what was going on.
Dan went downstairs. He wanted to look at the electric lights again. Even if he didn’t understand them, he liked being around them. They told him something about how marvelous Old Time really was. To have lights like those whenever you wanted them … How cool was that?
Captain Horace was down there, too, with a gray-haired man whose hair stuck out in tufts that went every which way. Dan recognized him straight off. Dr. Saul was the closest thing to a scientist the Valley had. Up till now, Dan had thought he was the smartest man in the world.
Maybe he was … these days. But now Dan couldn’t help wondering how he stacked up against a real Old Time scientist. Was he still smart, or nothing but a bumbling fool? Then again, no matter how clever the Old Time scientists were, they went and blew up the world. How smart did that make them, really?
Right now, Dr. Saul was pitching a fit. “Those lights have got to have a power source somewhere!” he shouted at Captain Horace.
“Where?” the officer asked—reasonably, Dan thought. “What does it look like?”
“I don’t know!” Yes, Dr. Saul sounded plenty peeved. “If I knew things like that, I’d be able to do them myself. Where do the wires from the fluorescent tubes go?”
The Valley-Westside War Page 17