“How can I say no?” Chuck replied. “If the Westsiders attack, we'll just have to try and fight the war without you. I don't know that we've got much of a chance then, but we'll do our best.”
Propelled by such pungent sarcasm, Dan was glad to get away. He let the messenger lead him down to the level of the ordinary streets and take him back to the house where Liz had lived. (Of course, her parents had lived there, too, but he didn't think about them very much.)
With electric lights down there in the bottom basement, could they have had TV and a telephone, too? A moment's thought made Dan decide that was silly. What would they watch? Whom would they call?
He couldn't ask the messenger. You weren't supposed to gossip about what was in that house. He would be violating an order if he did, and he'd be making the other soldier violate one, too. He kept quiet.
When he got to the house, he asked Captain Horace, “What's up. sir?”
“You know the way you found the door down into the room with the electric lights?” the Valley officer said.
“Yes. sir.”
“Well, we found another door like that,” Horace said.
“Under the basement, sir?” Dan asked. “What's in it?” He could imagine all kinds of things, each more marvelous than the last. A TV set that worked? An auto that worked? Why think small? What about an airplane that worked? If only you could fly!
But Captain Horace shook his head. “No, not under there. It's set into the wall in the regular basement, the room above the one with the lights.”
“Oh.” Dan knew he sounded disappointed. A room there wouldn't be so big. You couldn't put a car into it. let alone an airplane. But maybe you could put other cool stuff in there. “How do we get in?”
“I hope you can help us figure that out,” Horace said. “So far, we haven't had much luck.”
As if to show what he meant, somebody started banging on the wall with what had to be a sledgehammer. Boom! Boom! Boom! The racket made Dan 's head ache. “Got to be a better way than that,” he said.
“It'd be nice if there were,” the captain agreed. “What can you come up with? If you can get us in there without tearing the place apart. I’ll make you a sergeant on the spot.”
Dan imagined three stripes on his sleeve. He imagined the look on Sergeant Chuck 's face when the underofficer saw him with three stripes on his sleeve. That look would be worth ten dollars-no, twenty. And twenty dollars was a lot of money. “I'll do what I can,” he said.
“See what you come up with, that's all. We don't expect miracles.” Horace 's mouth twisted in a crooked grin. “I sure wouldn't mind one, though.” He went to the top of the stairs and shouted down to the basement: “Knock it off!… Knock it off!” Mercifully, the banging stopped. Horace breathed a sigh of relief. “That's better. Now the top of ray head doesn't want to fall off.”
“Yes, sir,” Dan said again. He'd had the same idea. He thought like a captain-or the captain thought like him! What would Sergeant Chuck say about that if he were ever rash enough to mention it out loud? Something interesting and memorable-he was sure of that.
He went downstairs. A burly Valley common soldier was leaning on the handle of his sledgehammer. The musclebound man didn't look sorry to take a break. Nodding to Dan, he said, “You're the guy with smart ideas, huh?”
“I don't know. We'll see,” Dan said. “Where's this door at. anyway?”
“In the wall there. If you look real close, you can just see the crack,” the other soldier answered, pointing. “I sure hope you psych something out, man. This wall's gotta be reinforced concrete, or else whatever's tougher than that. I could keep banging away at it from now till everything turns blue, and I don't know if I'd ever bust in.”
“Okay.” Dan peered at the wall the way he’d peered at the floor when he found the trap door. He wasn't sure he would have spotted this hairline crack if the muscular man hadn't pointed it out. He wondered how anybody'd found it in the dim light down here.
When he said as much, the guy with the sledgehammer said, “ Dr. Saul went over the whole wall with a magnifying glass. That's how.”
“Oh,” Dan said. “How… scientific of him.” You had to be thorough to do something like that. You also had to be a little bit crazy, or more than a little bit. Except if it paid off. the way it had here, you weren't really crazy, were you? Or maybe you were, and lucky, too.
“What are you gonna do?” The other soldier didn't sound as if he thought Dan could do anything. A moment later, he explained why: '“ Dr. Saul tried everything under the sun. He sure couldn't get in.”
“Groovy.” Dan had just been thinking how lucky Dr. Saul was. Well, so much for that. He eyed the almost invisible door. He eyed the sledgehammer, and the broad-shouldered, sweaty soldier who'd been swinging it. He eyed the tiny handful of concrete chips on the floor. No. brute force didn't seem to be the way to go.
What then? If you couldn't break down a door, how did you go about tricking one? He remembered a story he'd read, one that seemed to have been all the rage right around the time the Fire fell. It wasn't a true story-or people nowadays didn't think so. anyhow. But the wizard and his followers had got stuck outside a door into a mountainside that didn't want to open.
Dan pointed at this one. “Friend!” he said. Nothing happened. He laughed at himself. He might have known. Then another idea struck him. What was that word?
Before he could remember it, the guy with the sledgehammer started laughing at him. “f know what you're doing,” he said. “My folks read me that story, too. But it's only, like, a story, man.”
Never argue with somebody with a sledgehammer, especially when his shoulders are twice as wide as yours. That was an old rule Dan had just made up. Instead of arguing, he said, “Yeah, it's only a story. What have I got to lose, though? I mean, do you want to pound reinforced concrete for however long it takes?”
The other soldier looked at the pitifully small bits of concrete he'd managed to break loose. He looked at Dan. His wave of invitation was almost a bow. “Go for it, man.”
“I will, as soon as I…” Dan snapped his fingers. The Elvish word did come back to him! He pointed at the doorway, even though he had no idea whether that made any difference. “ Mellon!” he said.
Silently and without any fuss, the door swung open.
Valley soldiers did guard the west-facing approaches to West-wood. Liz supposed that made sense. With all the fighting the day before, the Westsiders might have tried to sneak a column through the dead zone. But she'd hope she and her folks would be able to get into Westwood and start selling their jeans before the occupiers noticed they were around.
No such luck. The soldier who seemed to pop up out of nowhere didn't have a matchlock. He carried an Old Time rifle. His U.S. Army helmet was two lifetimes old. “Halt!” he called, and his voice said they'd belter do it. “Who are you people, and what are you doing here?”
“Whoa!” Dad called to the horses. He pulled back on the reins. The animals stopped. Then he said, “We were coming up here with a load of denim pants-genuine Old Time Levi's, fresh like they were made yesterday-when all the shooting started. We couldn't go through, so we went around. And here we are.”
“ Levi 's fresh like yesterday, huh?” The rifleman laughed.
“I've heard traders sling it before, but you've got more nerve than anybody. How about telling me one I'll believe?”
“Pull out a pair, Liz,” Dad said, cool as a superconductor. “Let Doubting Thomas here see for himself.”
“Sure.” Liz scrambled over the seat and into the back of the wagon. She grabbed a pair of jeans and showed them to the soldier. “See? With a zipper and everything.” The only trousers in this alternate that didn't close with buttons used zippers recycled from Old Time clothes. But not many zippers still worked, and not many tailors bothered with them. Buttons did the job. Zippers were mostly for show, the way cuff buttons on suit jackets were in the home timeline.
Before asking for a closer look, the Valley soldier called. “Hey, Harvey!”
“Yo!” A voice came from nowhere. “What's happening, man?”
“Cover me. I need to check something out.”
“You got it.” Harvey still didn't show himself.
“Now let me see those jeans,” the soldier who'd challenged the wagon told Liz. She didn't make any sudden moves when she handed them to him. Maybe his father was a tailor, or maybe he was when he didn't carry a gun. He felt the fabric. He held the pants up against the sun to see if they had any thin spots. He worked the zipper several times and peered at the way it was sewn to the rest of the fly. The more he examined them, the more surprised he looked.
“See?” Liz said.
“Yeah.” The Valley rifleman seemed to nod in spite of himself. “Unless this is just one supercool pair to show people… You've got a whole bunch of these in the back there?”
Liz nodded. “You better believe it. Look for yourself if you want to. We're no ripoff artists.” She made herself sound angry, the way a trader who'd been unfairly challenged naturally would.
“I'll do that.” the soldier said. His expression said a lot of the people who protested hardest were the biggest thieves. That only made Liz mad for real. Nobody liked getting called a liar, even if just by a raised eyebrow.
And she wasn't lying. She walked around to the back of the wagon and pointed to the big old stack of Levi 's. “Go ahead. Pick any pair you want.”