She politely served the guest first: “Here you are. Colonel.”
“Groovy, sweetheart,” he said, and she didn't crack a smile. If somebody in 1967 had heard someone else say Bully, by jingo!, it would have sounded just as old-fashioned in his ears.
“Thank you,” her father said when she gave him his water. You didn't have to talk like a hippie here. You didn't have to. no-but you could. Dad turned back to Colonel Morris. “What can I do for you, sir?”
“You'll have heard it's probably war with the Valley?”
“I've heard it. I hoped it wasn't true,” Dad answered.
“Well, it is.” Colonel Morris said. “We're going to collect a toll at the top of the pass, and they don't like it. I hope we'll be able to buy some more of those fine muskets and revolvers you sell. They're the next best thing to Old Time guns.”
“I'll see what I can do,” Liz 's father said. As far as anyone here knew, the guns he sold came up from a cousin's shop in Sandago. They really came from the home timeline. People there used them as trade goods in several low-tech alternates. Dad went on, “Do you really need the toll enough to fight to keep it?”
“The City Council says we do.” The City Council was the band of nine nobles who ran things in the Westside. The title made it sound as if they were elected, but they weren't. A lot of names from the days before the war hung on, even if they pointed to different things now. Colonel Morris added, “I'm loyal to the Council and obey its orders, of course.”
“Of course.” Dad didn't even sound sarcastic. The West-side officer had to say stuff like that. The City Council's spies were everywhere. Colonel Morris couldn't know Dad wasn't one of them.
“Do you really have to follow orders even when they're dumb?” Liz asked.
Colonel Morris blinked. Dad sent her a look that said she'd got out of line. A mere girl wasn't supposed to challenge authority. For that matter, nobody in the Westside was supposed to.
“That's a heavy question, sweetie,” Colonel Morris said, by which he meant it was important. When he said sweetie, he meant Liz wasn't. She was only a girl, somebody he could patronize. She wanted to pick up a chair and clout him over the head with it. Maybe that would knock sense into him. Or maybe not.
Instead, she smiled-sweetly-and said, “Well, have you got an answer for it?”
Dad coughed. She wasn't supposed to push like this. She didn’t much care, not when the Westsider insulted her without even knowing he was doing it.
“I have the only answer I need,” Colonel Morris said. “Whatever the City Council tells me to do, I do it.”
I'm just following orders. How many people in how many alternates said the same thing? How much grief did they cause when they did? Too much- Liz knew that.
“How long will we have to wait for the guns?” the colonel asked Liz 's father. He tried to ignore her now. Was that better than patronizing her? Was it worse? Was it as bad in a different way?
“It'll be a while, sir,” Jeff Mendoza answered. “Long way down to Sandago.” It wasn't even two hundred kilometers. If traffic on the 405 wasn't bad, you could get to San Diego in a couple of hours. You could in the home timeline, anyhow. If you were traveling in a horse-drawn wagon in this alternate, the town with the rubbed-down name was more like a week away.
“Well, do what you can,” Colonel Morris said. “We need those guns, especially the six-shooters. See you later.” He sketched a salute to Dad, nodded to Liz, and left.
After the door was barred behind the local, Dad turned to Liz and said, “You can't poke him with a pin whenever you feel like it, you know.”
“I guess not,” she said. “But he ticked me off.”
“He didn't even realize he was doing it.”
“That's the point,” Liz said. “I sure knew.”
“What am I going to do with you?” Her father sounded half annoyed, half amused.
“Send me home. I don't like it here very much,” Liz answered. “Or if you can't do that, let me go up to the campus.”
“You know we won't send you home. You know you don't really want to go home, too.” Now Dad donned patience like a suit of armor. The most annoying thing was, he was right. She wanted the year of crosstime service on her college applications, even if she didn't like coming here to get it. Dad went on,
“Sending you up to UCLA wasn't so simple, either. What we had to pay to get you a stack pass…”
Liz sighed. “What is simple?”
Her father gave her a hug. “Welcome to the world, sweetheart.”
“Groovy,'* she said, as sardonically as she could. He only laughed.
Along with the rest of Captain Kevin 's men, Dan marched back to the barracks in the Sepulveda Basin. Piles and piles of sandbags were stacked close to the halls. Most of the time, the Sepulveda Basin was as dry as the rest of the Valley. But it could flood in a hurry when the rains came down. The sandbags had saved the barracks more than once over the years.
No rain now, not in the summertime. The Valley was full of cisterns to hold the rain that had fallen the winter before. Watermasters doled it out to farms and families. In years with dry winters, everyone worried about whether there'd be enough for crops-and for people.
Back in the Old Time, irrigation had brought water from hundreds of miles away. Everybody in Los Angeles had had plenty. All the houses and apartments and factories and shops showed as much. There were far more of them than the people who lived here now could ever hope to fill. All over L.A., in all the little countries that had sprung up since the day the Fire fell, scavengers scrounged through the swarms of abandoned buildings for whatever they could find.
Something occurred to Dan. *'Hey, Sergeant!” he said. If Sergeant Chuck didn't know everything, he didn't know he didn't know it.
“What is it, kid?” The three stripes on his sleeve-genuine Old Time stripes, machine-embroidered-gave him the right to treat everybody below him the way Dan 's father treated him before he got drafted.
“Is it true what they say about swimming pools?”
“You mean, did the Old Time people really fill those cement holes in the ground with water and swim in them? They didn't just use 'em for cisterns or put dirt back in 'em?”
“Yes, Sergeant. That's what I mean.” Dan nodded.
“Oh, it's true, all right.” Sergeant Chuck nodded, too, solemnly. “I've seen pictures in Old Time magazines.”
That proved it, all right, unless… “Were they for-true magazines?”
“Well, I sure think so,” the sergeant answered. “They had other things that sure are real-cars and things, you know.”
“Oh, yeah.” Dan nodded. You couldn't not know about cars. Their rusting corpses filled the streets. To this day, they were the main source of iron for blacksmiths. Their wheels-with tires of wood, not the rubber that had rotted away-still turned on carts and wagons. Glass from their windows gave homes light to this day. “I wonder how they moved so fast all by themselves, though.”
“Well, who doesn't?” Chuck said. “Must've been something like a steam engine, I expect.”
Big, puffing steam engines pumped water. A few of them moved engines along railroads. But so many rail lines were broken, and so many bandits prowled the routes, that railroads often seemed more trouble than they were worth. “How did Old Time people keep railroads from getting raided?” Dan asked.
“I don't think they did,” the sergeant told him. “'You know the story of Jesse James and Annie Oakley, don't you?”
“Little Orphan Annie? I hope I do!” Dan said.
“Well, they were train robbers, right?”
“They were,” Dan admitted. “But they got caught and paid the price. Jesse did, anyway. Annie married Judge Warbucks and got off. Too many robbers these days never even get caught.”
“Too many places for bad guys to slip through the cracks,” Sergeant Chuck said. “What you've got to remember is, back in Old Time days this was all one country-the Valley and the Westside and Burbank and Speedro. All the way from Sandago to Frisco. Even Vegas. All one country. Bad guys couldn't just skip over a border and disappear, like.”