“You won't believe me if I tell you.”
“Try me.”
“Okay. Remember, you asked for it. I unloaded some magazines from Old Time, from the days just before the Fire came down.”
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. f 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 rare 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 anymore?”
“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 anymore… “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 lather 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 lather 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.