“I can't hear you!” King Zev cupped a hand behind one ear.
“No!” This time, Dan yelled so loud, it hurt. All around him, other young men in uniform were shouting themselves hoarse, too.
King Zev smiled. “All right. Good,” he said. “Far freaking out. We've told them we won't stand for it, but they don't want to listen. So what are we, like, going to do about it?”
“Fight 'em!” Dan bellowed. The other soldiers were shouting things like “Kill them!” and “Nuke 'em!” and “Smash 'em to bits!”
Zev's smile got wider. “That's just what we'll do. I've given Ambassador Mort his walking papers. He can go down there and tell the Westside City Council our soldiers will take care of their miserable, stupid wall.”
Everybody cheered. No one liked the ambassador much. Even for a Westsider, he was pompous. He seemed to think getting sent to the Valley was a punishment, not a diplomatic appointment. He walked around as if everything up here smelled bad.
“Send him back where he belongs!” Dan yelled. The soldiers sitting near him laughed and clapped.
“I'm going to send him back,” Zev said, picking up on Dan 's shout. That made Dan feel pretty special. All the people in the Valley were special, just because they were lucky enough to live here. He'd learned that in school, too. But he felt especially special right now. King Zev went on, “And I'm going to tell him to tell the City Council they can look for our soldiers right behind him!”
“Right on!” Dan thrust his fist in the air in a gesture that came from the Old Time. “Right on, your Majesty!”
“Heavy! That's soooo heavy!” Sergeant Chuck agreed. Soldiers and civilians cheered and pounded on things and made as much noise as they could.
King Zev raised his hands. The hot Valley sun gleamed off the golden megaphone. “I thank you, my people, for rolling with me on this one.” Now he'd said the closing words. It was official. It was democratic. It was war.
Two
What the Westside called a City Council meeting wasn't like the ones in the home timeline. Liz didn't think so. anyway. The Council decided whatever it decided and then told the people what that was. That was what the meeting was about.
When Liz complained to her dad, he smiled a sour smile. “It's not as different as you think, hon,” he said. “They're smoother about hiding what they're really up to in the home timeline-I will say that for them.”
The nine members of the City Council knew what they wanted to get across. What had been the UCLA Sculpture Garden was now the Westside assembly area. Some of the sculptures still stood. Others-mostly the abstract ones-had disappeared, probably melted down for the metal in them.
Ambassador Mort was tall and skinny. He wore a double-breasted Old Time sport jacket over baggy modern pants. “The Valley humiliated me!” he shouted to the people who'd come to the meeting. “Humiliated me, I tell you! They put me on a donkey with my face turned towards its tail and rode me to the border that way. It's a shame and a disgrace, that's what it is!”
It was also the standard way to send an ambassador home when you declared war on his country. Mort didn't say anything about that. How many of the men and women listening to him knew what the custom was? Not many- Liz was sure of that. The Council wanted to get people all worked up, and knew how to get what it wanted.
A big man named Cal was the chairman of the City Council. He wore an Old Time jacket, too-an ugly plaid one. He also wore a big white Stetson for no reason Liz could see. “Are we going to let the Valley get away with treating our ambassador that way?” he shouted, his voice high and quick and glib. Liz wouldn't have wanted to buy a used car from him. “I don't think so!”
“No way! No way! No way!” people chanted. They were a claque, a group set up in advance to make the kind of noise their patrons wanted when their patrons wanted it. They were too loud and too smooth to be anything else. When others joined in the chant, they sounded different-less rehearsed, maybe.
“I'm gonna sic my dog on the Valley!” Cal shouted. That was no idle threat. Cal 's dog was famed-and feared-all over the Westside. There weren't nearly so many mutations alter the atomic war as people had feared. But there were some, and that dog was descended from them. It was a German shepherd about three quarters as big as a horse, with teeth a Tyrannosaurus might have envied. It was, mostly, a nice dog. But if it got mad…
“Feed King Zev to it!” yelled somebody from the claque. In a moment, that whole group was shouting the phrase. Again, people who didn't belong joined more slowly. But they did join. The stage managing would have been too open, too blatant, to work in the home timeline- Liz hoped so, anyhow. But it did just fine here.
“So shall we show the Valley that they can't tell us what to do?” Cal asked.
“Yes!” ''That's right!” “Bet your bippy!” people shouted back. Liz didn't know what a bippy was. She wondered if the men who used the word knew what it meant. Back in 1967, it had probably had a meaning. Now it was just a noise here. People said it without thinking about it. There were words like that in the home timeline, too.
“Is it war, then?” Cal wanted to make it official.
“War!” The word came back as a roar. That seemed official enough to Liz.
It seemed official enough to the head of the Westside City Council, too. “Thanks, folks,” he said. “We'll lick 'em. You wait and see. When they got a good look at my dog Pots, they'll be so scared, they'll run away before the fighting really gets going.”
Everybody cheered. As the meeting was breaking up, Liz asked her father, “Why does he call that monster of a dog Pots?”
“Because nobody here seems to remember who the Fenris Wolf was,” Dad said, which both was and wasn't an answer. He added, “Besides, whatever you call a critter like that, the dog is bigger than the name.”
There were old children's books in the home timeline about a dog like that, although he wasn't mean. What was his name? Clarence? That was close, but it wasn't right. “ Clifford!” Liz exclaimed.
“Where did you come up with that?” Dad said. “My grandmother had some of those books. She read them to me when I was little. Her mother used to read them to her, she said.”
“Oh, wow,” Liz said-in the home timeline, a phrase even more old-fashioned than Clifford books. People still used it here, and it did come in handy now and then. She went on, “Will the Westside win?”
“They sure think so,” her father replied. “But the Valley thinks it'll win, too, or it wouldn't have started the war in the first place. I haven't been up there. I don't know what all they've got. I don't know how serious they are about the fighting, either. That's one of the reasons people fight wars-to find out how serious both sides are.”
“If the Westside weren't serious, it wouldn't have built that wall across the 405,” Liz said.
“Or maybe it just didn't think the Valley would think the wall was worth fighting about.” Dad shrugged. “'If it didn't, it was wrong. And it looks like a lot of people will get hurt because of that.”
If the fighting came all the way down into Westwood, the Mendozas could escape back to the home timeline. A transposition chamber would whisk them away in nothing flat. The locals weren't so lucky. They were stuck here. They had to hope the struggle stayed far away. Liz hoped for the same thing. She didn't want anything bad to happen to the locals, and she really didn't want anything bad to happen to UCLA.
Dan watched a couple of officers load an impressive-looking piece of ordnance onto a horse's back. “Wow,” he said. “What's that?” The cartridges gleamed in the sunshine. Each one looked as big as his thumb. The weapon had to come from the Old Time. Nobody nowadays could make anything like that.
“Machine gun-.50-caliber,” one of them answered proudly. “We test-fired it, and it shoots great.”
“That is so cool!”' Dan said. “I didn't know anything like that was left in the armory.”
“It didn't come from the armory,” the captain said. “Scrounger found it in a house.”
“No kidding?” Dan said, and the officer nodded. Dan went on, “Ordinary people could have a piece like that in their houses? Wow! Old Time must've been something else.” That gun might beat the Westside all by itself now.
“Old Time was something else,” the other officer said.
“Oh, yes, sir.” Dan knew better than to show he disagreed with any officer, even when he did. But he didn't disagree with this one. “Ordinary people had guns like this, the way folks have belt knives now. Makes you wonder what all the kings- no, they called them presidents-had. though.”
“They had the Fire,” the first captain said grimly. “They had it, and they used it. And that's how come we don't have so much anymore.”
He was right about that. The Russians threw the Fire at America, and then the Americans threw it back. That was what the schoolbooks said, and why would they lie? Dan didn't know exactly where Russia was. Somewhere far away-he was sure of that, anyhow. Farther than TJ, farther than Vegas, farther than Frisco. You went a whole lot farther than that, you probably fell off the edge of the world. Schoolbooks also insisted the world was round. Again, why would they lie? But Dan had his doubts. The world sure looked flat to him. Well, bumpy in spots, but basically flat.
The officers with the machine gun looked at him, then at each other. The second one spoke up: “I bet you've got something you need to do, don't you, soldier? If you have time to rubberneck, we'll find you something to do.”
“Oh, no, sir. I've got plenty. It was just seeing the fancy gun that made me stop, that's all.” Dan saluted and beat a hasty retreat. You didn't always have to be busy in the army. But you always had to look busy. If you didn't look busy, somebody would make sure you were.
He hustled over to the barracks. He had a whetstone in his kit. He started using it to sharpen the points on his arrows. He'd sharpened them just the other day. They couldn't very well have got dull between then and now. Anybody who saw him, though, would think he had plenty of work and didn't need anything more. That was the point, all right.
Had officers and sergeants been so silly back in the Old Time? Dan didn't want to believe it. They'd known so much. They'd been able to do so many things. They wouldn't have wanted soldiers to waste time for the sake of wasting time… would they?
Of course, in the end the Old Time folks, the Americans and the Russians, had blown themselves up. They'd thrown away all their marvels, thrown them into the Fire. In school, the books and the teachers said they'd been about to fly to the moon before they went to war instead. The moon! There were still pictures of airplanes, and nobody doubted that the Fire Hew before it fell. But the moon! Could people really have gone there?