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to life. Lucy exclaimed at that. So did her father.
"Voice signature recognized," the computer said. "Go ahead." Lucy and her
father did some more exclaiming. Paul only half heard them. He spoke the code
phrase that meant everything was okay and nobody was holding a gun to his
head. Then he called for a chamber as fast as the home timeline could send
one. His words showed up on the screen as he said them. Even Michael Woo
exclaimed at that.
Again, Paul hardly noticed. He hoped the Crosstime Traffic people were
monitoring this chamber's equivalent in the home timeline.
Wong scattered a little bit of white powder on the floor in one corner of the
room. He dropped a gold coin near it. "What's that for?" Paul asked.
"Let the Germans think we were smuggling," the older man answered. "That's a
normal kind of thing, just like stealing jewelry is a normal kind of thing. If
they think it's smuggling, they won't think about alternates.
Them not thinking about alternates is what we want." The transposition chamber
appeared out of nowhere.
The door opened. Wong asked, "Paul, did you warn the home timeline about
neofentanyl?"
"Oops," Paul said.
Oops it was. The chamber operator passed out as soon as she got a whiff of the
air in the basement.
Enough neofentanyl had come in through the trapdoor to knock her for a loop.
Sammy Wong picked her up off the floor and gave her the antidote. She was not
happy, to say the least.
"Never mind that," Paul's father said as he and everybody else hurried into
the transposition chamber. "You can yell at us later. Just get us out of here
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now."
The door slid shut. After that, nothing seemed to happen. "Is it all right?"
Lucy asked. "Are we supposed to feel something?"
"It's fine," Paul answered. "It'll feel like it takes about fifteen minutes.
When we get to the home timeline, though, the clocks will say the same thing
as they did in the alternate we just left."
"That's weird," Michael said.
"That's impossible," his father said.
Paul only shrugged. "It's what happens, honest."
"Won't be long, any which way," his father said, and he was right. When the
door opened again, they were back in the home timeline.
This new San Francisco endlessly fascinated Lucy. It was the city she knew,
and yet it wasn't. Most of the streets had the same names as the ones in her
San Francisco. They went the same places as the ones she'd always known. She
could find her way around. South of Market here was the same place as it was
there.
But finding her way around didn't mean a thing. The streets were the same, but
most of the buildings were different. A few old ones, like City Hall and some
of the churches, were the same. Somehow, that only made them seem stranger,
not more familiar.
For those were the buildings that had ruled the skyline in her San Francisco.
Here, they huddled in the shadows of structures she'd not only never seen but
never even imagined. Paul called them skyscrapers.
That word had fallen out of use in the English she knew. It seemed to fit
them, though. They did leap far, far up into the sky.
Some of them had elevators you could ride all the way to the top. One had a
restaurant up there, a restaurant that revolved once an hour. She could eat a
hamburger and fries and a milkshake and look out at the whole city. She knew
she would remember that for the rest of her life.
But the people in this San Francisco were even more interesting than the
scenery. Men's clothes weren't too different from what she was used to. The
things girls and women wore, though .. . They showed more skin, and skin in
odder places, than she'd thought anybody could or would. They weren't
embarrassed about doing it, either. It was as normal to them as her clothes
had been to her.
By her standards, just about everybody was rich. That wasn't because everyone
had millions of dollars, though everyone did. A million dollars here were only
ten thousand benjamins, and ten thousand benjamins were worth about what she'd
made in a year at the sewing machine. But people here all had cars those who
wanted them, anyway and radios and televisions and telephones they carried
around with them and those marvelous machines called computers and all sorts
of other things she hadn't dreamt of. Paul hadn't been kidding. The things
they knew about here put Curious Notions to shame.
She discovered supermarkets. So many things, all right there together! People
filling shopping carts full of whatever they wanted. They didn't seem to worry
about the prices. That told Lucy they had plenty of money, too. If they
hadn't, they would have complained more or bought less.
Signs above some of the vegetables said they came from one alternate or
another. Lucy pointed at Paul when she noticed those. "So that's why you dealt
with those farmers from the Central Valley," she said.
He nodded. "That's right." When he was in her alternate, he'd sounded just a
little funny. Here in what he called the home timeline, everyone talked the
way he did. Lucy was the one with a tiny trace of accent. If she was going to
stay here, she'd have to lose it to fit in. That shouldn't be too hard.
"What about the Central Valley here?" she asked. She hadn't seen it yet. She
hadn't seen anything but this amazing new San Francisco.
"It grows things, too," Paul answered. "But this is a crowded place. We need
more food than we can grow ourselves. We need more of lots of things than we
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can get from this world."
"And so you get them from other. . . alternates," Lucy said. "That's what you [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]