“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 lather 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 West-wood. 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 haven'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.”
“W hat do you mean?”
“II 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. Hut 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 fair-skinned 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?”
“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, alter 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 m 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.