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. / 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 CLEAR-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…