Horace 's eyebrows leaped for the sky. “How in blazes did a girl whip you?”
“Sir, she fights better than our dirty-fighting coaches. That's the truth.”
“Where could she have learned to fight like that?” the officer demanded.
“In the home timeline, sir,” Dan answered. “It’d have to be.”
“What the devil is the home timeline?”
Dan explained-as well as he could, anyhow. Looking back, he didn't know how good a job he did. All he knew was the little Liz had told him. And he was trying to remember it after she'd knocked him cold.
When he got done. Captain Horace said, “That's the craziest thing I ever heard in my life.”
“Yes. sir.” Dan said. You didn't want to argue with officers. Even when you were right, you were wrong if you did something like that. But the electric lights overhead hurt his sensitive eyes. Pointing to them, he went on, “Where in this world do we have lights like that? Where do we have all the other stuff here? Where do we have Coca-Cola?”
“That's a… good question, Sergeant,” Horace said slowly. “And I wish I had a good answer for you. This Liz was heading north, you say?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then she and her folks are likely at the Brentwood market square, eh? We'll send some men up there right away.” The captain scowled. “But chances are they'll already be gone. I wouldn't hang around, anyway, not after I got into a fight with one of King Zev 's soldiers.” In his own way. he was tactful. He didn't remind Dan that Liz had not only got in a fight but won it. “So we'll also pass the word to the border stations. They must have come up from the south, right?”
“I'd think so, yes, sir,” Dan replied.
“Then we'll catch 'em when they try to escape, that's all. No one can assault a Valley soldier and expect to get away with it.” Captain Horace sounded plenty confident.
“That all sounds good, sir. The only thing is… The only thing is, they're sneaky.” Dan had the feeling his superior was missing something. Trouble was, he had no idea what. It had something to do with Liz and her folks and how sneaky they were. But what? His poor battered brain wouldn't tell him.
“I don't care how sneaky they are. They can only go one way,” Horace said. “And when they do, we've got 'em.”
The Chevy wagon reached the top of Sepulveda Pass. This was the place where the Westside had built its stupid, greedy wall, the one that touched off the war with the Valley. Looking north, Liz could see all the lights of King Zev 's domain flickering in the darkness.
What she saw was how few and faint those lights were. When you came to the lop of the pass in the home timeline and started down toward the Valley, all the neon and fluorescent lights blazed out at you. These fires seemed pathetic by comparison.
“Doesn't seem to be anybody after us.” Mom said.
“Nope.” Dad sounded smug. “We would've heard people on our trail. With no motors or anything, you can hear a long way in this alternate.” As if to prove his point, an owl hooted in the hills off to one side of the pass. Liz never would have heard that driving along in a car with a million other cars all around. Now they had the old freeway almost to themselves.
“'They must think we are heading down to Speedro,” Liz said.
“Sometimes the fastest way to get somewhere is the long way around,” Dad said. That sounded as if it ought to make sense, in a Zen kind of way. Almost everything Dad said sounded as if it ought to make sense. Sorting out what really did from what didn't could be a full-time job, though.
“We can sell jeans to King Zev himself,” Mom said. “Who wouldn't want a pair of brand new Old Time jeans? They'd be fit for a king.”
“If we have a pair that fits him,” Liz said. “Isn't he supposed to be sort of short and round?”
“He's a bowling ball with a mustache,” Dad said, which gave her a case of the giggles. “But he is fairly smart, I think- which won't help him fit into denim.”
Mom started to snore. Liz was jealous. She was also way too wound up even to try to sleep. Escaping from occupied Westwood was bad enough. But that she'd been in a fight with somebody she knew, that she'd hurt him… She didn't like the idea, not even a little bit.
If she'd lost, Dan and his buddies would be questioning her right now. They wouldn't be gentle about it. She understood all that perfectly well. She'd done what she had to do if she wanted to stay safe. Remembering that truth made her feel better-but not enough better.
The owl hooted again, or maybe it was another one. A coyote howled at the moon, for all the world as if it were a dog. She wouldn't have heard that zooming along in a car, either-or stuck in traffic not zooming at all. No morning and afternoon rush hours in this alternate.
Mom stirred. “I think we're all right,'“ she said sleepily. “If they were going to come after us, they really would have done it by now.”
“It's my fault. I feel bad about it,” Liz said. “If Dan hadn't liked me too much, nobody would have paid any attention to our house. Then none of this would have happened. It would have been like another alternate.”
“Maybe it is. Maybe it's one where we know the breakpoint,” Dad said. “Maybe there's a whole Mendoza family going on about its business in an alternate almost like this one- except Dan didn't like you or didn't meet you, and we never ran into any trouble.”
“I don't think so,” Liz said. They hadn't found any alternates with breakpoints after the discovery of crosstime travel. Otherwise, there wouldn't be a home timeline. There would be a bunch of home timelines, each a little different from all the others. And if that didn't make your head want to explode…
“'Probably not. It's not a big enough deal,” Mom said. “But that kind of thing could happen one of these days.”
“It'll be a mess if it does, too,” Dad said. “We've never found another alternate that goes crosstime, right? If we can't find others, we'll just have to make our own.” He might call it a mess, but he sounded cheerful about it.
“Brr!” Liz shivered, though the night was mild. The idea gave her the horrors. They didn't talk about that kind of thing in school. She knew why not, too. It would give people even more to worry about than they already had. As if life wasn't complicated enough!
After a while, Dad said, “I think we can pull off onto the shoulder and stop. They haven't realized we might have headed north.”
“A good thing, too, or we'd be in even more trouble,” Mom said. But she turned around on the seat and grabbed a couple of blankets. Sleeping in the wagon was cramped, but it wouldn't be chilly.
The horses seemed glad to stop. Some scraggly grass grew by the side of the road. They nibbled at that. Dad spread some oats on the ground, too, and put out a water bucket for each animal. “They aren't like cars,” he remarked. “You've got to take care of them all the time, not just lube and oil them every seventy-five thousand kilometers.”
“They might as well be people,” Liz said. “And I sure could use a lube and oil change right now.” She shifted under the blankets, trying to get comfortable.
Next thing she knew, it was dawn. She yawned and stretched. She'd meant it about the lube job-she really was stiff and sore. By the way her folks grumbled, so were they. Yeah, they were older than she was. But they hadn't had a Valley soldier try to throw them into the middle of next week and almost succeed.
Down the north side of the Sepulveda Pass went the wagon. Dad had to ride the brake, which made the wheels squeal. Otherwise, on the downhill slope, the wagon would have bumped the horses' backsides. He breathed a sigh of relief when the terrain leveled out.
He got off the 405 at Victory. “Here we are, in the wonderful, romantic Valley,” he said.
It didn't look wonderful or romantic to Liz. It looked a lot like Westwood: a relative handful of people living in what had been part of a great city. Without imported water and food, the Los Angeles basin couldn't support anything close to the population it had in the home timeline.
Ruined, tumbledown houses and shops spread as far as the eye could see. The dead zone in the Valley lay off to the northwest, where the aerospace factories had stood. The Russians knew that, of course, and gave them a bomb.
A man selling avocados on a street corner called, “What have you got?”
“Blue jeans-genuine Old Time Levi's,” Dad answered. “Top quality, too. I don't have many left.”
“How many avocados you want for a couple of pairs?”
“Whoa,” Dad told the horses. Not stopping would have been out of character. He and the man with the avocados haggled for a while. Levi 's were hard to come by, while avocados grew all over the place in Southern California. On the other hand, as the local pointed out, you couldn't eat blue jeans. When the man threw in a beat-up basket to hold the avocados, Dad made the deal. “We can eat some on the way and give the rest to the Stoyadinoviches,” he said.
“Do we have more to worry about than avocados?” Mom pointed up the street. Marching their way came a platoon of Valley soldiers: archers, musketeers, and a few tough-looking riflemen.
“Well, I hope not.” Dad steered the wagon over to the curb, the way you'd steer a car in the home timeline if an ambulance or a fire engine or police car came at you. The platoon tramped past with no more than a couple of sidewise glances toward the traders.