“It may take a while, though,” her father added. “I envy ancient historians. There's only so much for them to know. It's not like that when you get up into the twentieth century. You're drowning in data. It does seem plain that the breakpoint has to do with the Vietnam War, though.”
“We already knew that,” Liz said. “Or we were pretty sure, anyhow.”
Her father nodded. “It was always a good bet, since the big war started while the Vietnam War was going strong. But it still isn't obvious whether the U.S. escalation here scared the Russians enough to make them start throwing rockets, or whether the United States threw them first when we didn't like what Russia and China were doing.”
“Whoever shot first, an awful lot of people on both sides ended up dead.” Liz eyed this sorry version of the UCLA campus. “And there's been nothing but trouble ever since.”
“Nobody's going to tell you you're wrong, hon,” her father said. “At that, they got off lucky here. They got bombed back to the Middle Ages, but they didn't get bombed back to the Stone Age.”
“They didn't all get killed, either,” Mom said. “That happened in some alternates.”
Liz nodded. People really could be stupid. Just in case the home timeline didn't have enough examples of that, the alternates offered even more. People in the home timeline hadn't been stupid some ways. They hadn't tried blowing one another off the map with H-bombs, for instance. They were proud of that, and relieved about it, too.
Seeing what other people, people much too much like them, had done in different alternates should have made them prouder of escaping-and also more relieved. To some degree, it did. But only to some degree. Too many people in the home timeline still had axes to grind. Big wars seemed unlikely these days. Terrorist strikes, on the other hand…
“I've got a question,” Liz said.
“What?” her mother and father asked together.
“What happens if something now makes the home timeline split into two alternates?” Liz said. “They'd both have Crosstime Traffic in them. Which one would be the real home timeline?”
Mom and Dad looked at each other. They walked on for several steps without answering. At last, her father said, “If there are no other questions, class is dismissed.”
“Dad!” Liz said reproachfully.
“We're just historians. We can't deal with questions like that,” her mother said. “You need to talk to the chronophysicists. If anybody can tell you, they're the ones.”
“Talk to them at a convention, after they've got a few drinks under their belts,” Dad added. “If you get 'em when they're in the lab, they'll look wise and tell you things like that can't happen. I hope they're right. Everybody does.”
“How will we find out?” Liz asked.
“The same way people usually do, I bet,” her father answered. “The hard way.”
“Come on! Come on! Get moving!” Sergeant Chuck booted Dan in the seat of the pants. He didn't kick him hard enough to hurt, but it was plenty hard enough to wake him.
Chuck went on shouting and booting other soldiers awake. Dan yawned and stretched and looked around. The sun hadn't risen yet, but it would soon. It was already bright enough to see colors. Only a handful of the brightest stars still shone, and they faded out as he watched.
He pulled a square of hardtack and some smoked sausage from his pack. Some soldiers crumbled up their hardtack and fried it in bacon grease. He just crunched on his. You needed good teeth to do that. He had good teeth, and knew how lucky he was to have them. Wounded soldiers got ether before surgeons went to work on them. Ordinary people with toothaches? You needed to be rich to get knocked out before a dentist pulled a tooth that was driving you nuts.
“Everybody ready?” Captain Kevin called. “You better be ready, 'cause we're moving out!”
Dan stuffed a last chunk of sausage into his mouth. As he chewed on it, he probably looked like a hamster with its cheek pouches full. He didn't care. He kind of liked hamsters. They were a lot cuter than rats and mice. They didn't have pointy noses, and they didn't have long, naked tails, either.
Old men and women said their grandparents said there hadn't been any wild hamsters before the Fire fell. There also hadn’t been any wild iguanas or parrots. And lakes and ponds hadn't had any piranhas in them. Dan wasn't sure he believed that. Wasn't it like saying there'd been a time without possums and starlings and cabbage butterflies? If there had been a time like that, nobody remembered it now.
“Form up!'“ the captain shouted. “Chances are we'll be in action later on today.”
The soldiers who were about Dan 's age hurried into place. They were as eager as he was. Older men, men who'd gone to war before, didn't move so fast. Dan thought that was because they were old. That it might be because they'd already seen battle and didn't much care for it never crossed his mind.
As carefully as if handling gold and precious jewels, the machine-gun crew loaded their lovely weapon onto the pack horse's back. Extra ammunition went onto another horse. When the men waved to Kevin, he got the company moving.
“Be alert-the enemy may have pushed scouts forward,” he warned.
That made Dan try to look every which way at once. Old Sepulveda gave scouts plenty of places to hide. One could lurk in any of those dead houses, watching the Valley soldiers with field glasses. But if one was, how would he get word back to his commanders? This wasn't the Old Time. He wouldn't have a television or a radio or a telephone handy.
Here and there, people did still use telegraphs. Could a scout have strung wire out behind him so he could click away and pass on information like that? Dan supposed it wouldn't be impossible, but he didn't think it would be easy.
And how much did it matter? As they started to march, they moved uphill, toward the top of the pass. The Westsiders were already looking down into the Valley. If they didn't know King Zev 's army was moving toward them, they were even dumber than Dan thought. Could you be that dumb and live? He doubted it.
That set him looking toward the top of the pass. He already knew there was a wall across the 405. Was there one across Sepulveda, too? Squint as he would, he couldn't tell. Sepulveda was lower than the freeway, and didn't show up so well against the sky.
Something howled, up ahead in the distance. The noise seemed to echo from the brush-covered walls of the pass. The hair at the back of his neck stood up. “Is that a coyote?” he asked, trying not to sound scared.
“If it is, it's a coyote the size of the Coliseum,'' Sergeant Chuck answered. The saying reached back to Old Times. The Coliseum didn't exist anymore. One of the bombs that got L.A. and ended the good days came down not far from it.
“Does Cal really have a dog the size of a house?” Yes, Dan was nervous.
“ Idon't know. We'll see what comes out of the tunnel, that's all,” Chuck said. Old Sepulveda went through a cliff near the highest part of the pass. The Westside held both ends of the tunnel. Dan would have liked it better if the border went through the middle. Then either side could have blocked the other from using that way through. As things were, the Westside had the edge.
We've got to beat them, that's all, he thought. Then we'll hold both ends of the tunnel, and let's see how they like that.
A cannon boomed. He thought the sound came from near the barricade the Westsiders had built. It was a black-powder boom, not the sharper crack of Old Time explosives. If you were on the wrong end of a cannonball, though, you wouldn't care one way or the other.
“Come on! Step it up!” Captain Kevin shouted. “Our friends, our neighbors, are in action. We'll help them out! Hurrah for King Zev!”
“Hurrah for King Zev!” Dan yelled. Along with the rest of Kevin 's company, he trotted forward.
Another boom, this one from near the mouth of the tunnel. Dan could see this cannonball flying through the air. He ducked. He couldn't help himself. He felt ashamed till he realized the other Valley soldiers were ducking, too. The cannonball hissed over his head and smashed into an empty house with a noise like a thunderclap. Startled crows flew up, screeching.
“Spread out!” Kevin and Chuck yelled the same thing at the same time. “That way, they won't be able to get so many of you with one round,” Chuck added.
Oh, boy, Dan thought. It didn't mean they wouldn't be able to get him. It just meant they'd have to work a little harder, or he'd have to be a little less lucky. He wished he hadn't thought of that.
There wasn't a whole lot of room to spread out in, either. The cracked asphalt of Old Sepulveda and the wider expanse of the 405 were the only good routes through the pass. Wreckage and undergrowth clogged the rest.
That horrible howl came again. “Holy moley!” somebody shouted, pointing south. “There he is!”
The dog had to be enormous to be noticed from that far away. Was it really as big as a house? Dan wasn't sure. It was plenty big enough-he was sure of that. Some Westside soldiers ran forward with it, to guide it toward the Valley men. Then, as it saw them or smelled them or did whatever it did to know they were there, it ran on by itself. They just wore uniforms, while it had on armor like a cavalry charger's. It easily outdistanced them even so.
Dan reached back over his shoulder for an arrow. A heartbeat later, he started to laugh at himself. As if an arrow would do anything to a creature like that even if by some accident it hit! He wanted to run. The fearsome Westside dog could bite him in half with one chomp.
A couple of Valley soldiers did run. Their sergeants swore at them, which didn't make them stop. They'd get in trouble later on. They had to think that was better than getting eaten right now.
Then Dan heard a sharp, repeated hammering noise: bang! bang! bang! bang! bang! The reports were bigger and louder than any he'd ever heard from an Old Time rifle. He looked around. The machine-gun crew had got their weapon down from the pack horse. They were banging away at the Westside monster dog as if their lives depended on it-and they did.
The dog-monster's growls changed to yelps of agony. The beast's armor would have turned arrows, maybe even musket balls. Dan didn't know about ordinary Old Time rifle bullets. He did know the armor had zero chance against the enormous slugs the.50-caliber machine gun spat.