“I didn't think the soldiers in Westwood would have got word about us up here so fast,” Dad said. “Still, I wouldn't have liked to find out I was wrong.”
That made Liz look back over her shoulder. She saw the Valley troops, other people on foot, people on horseback, and a few carts and carriages and wagons. Everything looked normal- normal for this alternate, anyhow. She told herself she was jumpy about nothing. Then she told herself to believe she was jumpy about nothing. Herself laughed at her.
“I wish you could step on the gas and make the horses go faster,” Mom said. That made Liz feel better-she wasn't the one with the jitters, then.
“Matter of fact, so do I,” Dad said. “But I can't.” He flicked the reins. Maybe the horses went a tiny bit faster. And maybe they didn't.
Step on the gas. That was a funny phrase. Cars in the home timeline burned clean hydrogen, so it made sense there. But people in this alternate also said it when they meant hurry up. Cars in 1967, when the Fire fell, hadn't burned hydrogen- they'd burned nasty, stinky, polluting petroleum. Petroleum wasn't a gas-it was a liquid. She knew that. She needed a moment to remember that the part of the petroleum Old Time cars burned was called gasoline. People must have clipped that to gas, even thought the stuff wasn't.
Victory went east, straight as a string for a long way. Dad stopped to rest the horses and bought lunch at a roadside taco stand. He could have done that in the home timeline, too, though people there would have had conniptions if he'd driven a team of horses on the street. The tacos were pretty good. They were handmade, not cranked out in a factory and nuked when the order came in. That helped.
Nuked. In the home timeline, you nuked something when you threw it in the microwave. Oh, it meant using nuclear weapons, too, but most people didn't dwell on that. The home timeline had escaped atomic war, and with a little luck would go right on escaping it.
They didn't have microwaves here. Nuking something meant just one thing in this alternate-destroying it altogether. Studying the way languages changed from one alternate to another was a field that was just taking off.
On they went, on and on and on. Right where Victory finally curved a little south, two customs posts straddled the road. The Mendozas needed only a couple of minutes to clear the Valley post. The men at the other one wore green uniforms, not King Zev 's khaki. “Welcome to beautiful downtown Bur-bank,” one of them said.
It didn't look beautiful to Liz. It didn't look like downtown, either. It looked like the border between a couple of tinpot kingdoms that had forgotten they should have been suburbs.
For some reason, Dad seemed to think the Burbank customs man's greeting was funny. Liz could tell, but she hoped the local couldn't. Dad certainly sounded serious enough when he said, “Thank you, sir.”
“Anything to declare?” the customs man asked.
“Well, we're traders,” Dad answered. '“We've got what's left of a nice load of Levi 's in the back of the wagon. We sold a good many in the Valley, and I expect we can move some more of them here.”
The customs man took a look at them. “Those are pretty fine, all right. Anybody can see they come from the Old Time. We charge duty on things we make ourselves, so our people will buy from Burbank craftsmen instead of foreigners. Clothes like that, though, with the zippers and everything… We can't make anything quite like 'em ourselves, even if we are getting closer. I don't know where you found these, pal, but I'm jealous. They look like they're brand new.”
“They do, don't they?” Dad still kept his lace straight.
“Yeah.” The customs man sighed. “I wish I had the cash to buy clothes like that. They probably aren't dutiable, but… Maybe I'd better check the regulations.”
“Why don't you find a pair that fits you, sir?” Dad said smoothly. ““Why don't your other inspectors do the same?” A real trader from this alternate probably would have been furious at the polite shakedown. He wouldn't have dared to show it, though. Dad really had no reason to get upset, and plenty of reason to keep these people sweet.
“That's mighty nice of you, pal,” the Burbank customs man said. He turned to his colleagues. “ Melvin! Frodo! C'mere!”
Frodo, Liz thought. Yes, they knew about The Lord of the Rings in this alternate. No wonder the password in the basement hadn't been good enough.
As soon as the Burbank customs men found jeans that fit them, the senior man swung aside the gateway. “Pass on!” he said.
Dad called, “Giddyap!” to the horses. They pulled the wagon through. The customs inspector closed the gate. Liz and Mom and Dad all grinned at one another. They were out of the Valley! They weren't home free yet, but they were on their way.
Captain Horace was not a happy man. “Where the devil are they?” he growled. “They aren't at that Brentwood market square-people saw them go. They aren't anywhere in Westwood that we've been able to find. And I swear they haven't sneaked past us heading south. So where are they?”
“Sir?” Dan said.
“What?” No, Horace wasn't happy, not even a little bit.
“What if they didn't go south, sir?” Dan said-it was about the worst thing he could think of. “What if they went north instead?”
“North?” By the way the officer said it, it might have been a dirty word. “Why the-dickens would they want to go and do a stupid thing like that?”
“If it throws us off the track, like, is it really stupid?” Dan asked.
Captain Horace bit down on that like a man crunching into a cherry pit. His expression was as dour as if he really had bitten down on something painful. “It could be,” he said at last, each word plainly tasting worse than the one before. “Yes, it could be. And if it is, we've wasted an awful lot of time waiting for something to happen when it won't. Why didn't you think of this sooner, confound it?”
“Sir?” was all Dan said. The unfairness of the crack took his breath away. Me? I just made sergeant. You're so smart. Captain Horace, why didn't you think of it for yourself?
But then Horace let out a sheepish laugh. “Well, you weren't the only one here-I admit it. Why didn't I come up with it on my own? I wonder if the telegraph between here and army HQ in the Valley is working.”
“Maybe we'd better find out, sir,” Dan said. The telegraph worked by electricity, and modern people still managed to use it… some of the time, anyhow. Dan didn't understand how they could do that but not make things like electric lights and refrigerators. He asked Captain Horace.
'“As I understand it, those need a lot more power than the telegraph does.” Horace said. “But just because I understand it that way doesn't prove it's so. I know a lot about electricity-for an army officer. If you want to get the straight skinny, though, you need to talk to somebody like Dr. Saul.”
“I'd like to do that, sir, one of these days,” Dan said. “For now, we probably ought to see if we can catch the traders.”
“Right.” Going to the telegrapher took more time. Somewhere-was it really somewhere up north, somewhere in the Valley?-the traders' wagon was getting farther and farther away.
Will I ever see Liz again? Dan wondered. His head still ached dreadfully from the kick she'd given him. Do I want to see her again, after she did that? He did. In spite of everything, he did. The things she could tell him about the way her world worked-and the way this one did!
He still thought she was cute, too.
How could you think somebody was cute after she almost fractured your skull? He didn't know, but he did anyway. He was also sorrowfully aware that she didn't think he was cute.
She probably looked at him the same way he looked at the wild men who'd lost all traces of civilization. Dan didn't think that was fair. Well, the wild men probably didn't think his opinion of them was fair, either.
He didn't care what the wild men thought. Liz was much too likely not to care what he thought.
Captain Horace had him describe Liz and her parents for the telegrapher. He knew them better than anyone else from the Valley. But do I know them at all? he wondered. The captain described their wagon. Neither he nor Dan had seen that-they relied on what they'd heard from the traders in the Brentwood market square. Would it be enough? Dan couldn't know. He had to hope.
The telegrapher's clever finger sent Morse code north. Not long after he did, his clicker started making noise in reply. It wasn't magic, though Dan didn't fully understand why it wasn't. “They have the message, sir,” the telegrapher told the captain. “They'll do what they can.”
“Right on.” Horace said. “Far out.”
How far out was it? Dan had his doubts. The brass up in the Valley hadn't seen the marvels down here with their own eyes. How hard would they try to catch Liz and her folks? Would they put real effort into it, or just go through the motions? And how much did any of that matter? If the traders had headed north, wouldn't they be long gone by now?
Dan hoped not. They knew so much. They could do so much. How much could they help this world if only they wanted to? But they didn't- Liz had made that much too clear. There was no money in it for them. If they hadn't been studying this alternate, they wouldn't have come here at all.
Alternates… The idea made Dan 's head spin even worse than Liz 's foot had. All those possibilities, and each one coming true. A world where the Fire didn't fall. That one by itself was plenty to take Dan 's breath away. But it was far from the only thing that might have happened. He could see that, too.
He had a friend who'd become a secretary because a teacher praised his handwriting. If the teacher hadn't, Norm probably would have been a leatherworker like his father. And there were the guys who just happened to wind up at the wrong spot in a battle. If they'd stood a couple of feet to the left or right, they would have been fine. As things were, they stopped a bullet with their chest or their head.
So easy to see how changes, big changes, could turn a person's life upside down and inside out. And if a person's life could change that way, why couldn't a country's or a whole world's? No reason at all, not that Dan could see. When he thought about it in those terms, he had no trouble understanding why he believed Liz.
Besides, how could anybody make up a story like hers? And even if somebody did, how could she back it up with things that had been gone since the Old Time? Dan didn't think it was possible.
“Maybe we'll catch them yet,” Captain Horace said. “I bet we do.”