Do I think Lucy Woo is cute? Paul wondered. He shrugged. He probably did. She wasn't gorgeous or anything, but she wasn't bad. Is that why I'm trying to help her, though? That was a different question. He shook his head. Not a chance. He said, "You're the one who got her into this scrape, remember. You can't just treat the locals like a bunch of movie characters. If something bad happens to them, it happens. They're people, too, same as we are."
"Very pretty," his father said. "You'd win points for your high-school debating team. But I need to remind you of something. This alternate is also full of people who want to nail our hides to the wall. It's full of people who want to squeeze our secrets out of us. Keeping them from doing that is more important than anything else we do here. If we don't, if we mess up, we could ruin Crosstime Traffic and put the home timeline in a lot of danger. Next to keeping our secrets, what happens to the locals doesn't matter, not for beans. Have you got that?"
If Paul didn't have it, that wasn't because they'd ignored it in training. They'd hammered away at it, in fact. The home timeline came first. Nothing else counted next to keeping the home timeline safe and secret. In the training sessions, that seemed to make a lot of sense. Here in this alternate, this might-have-been San Francisco, the differences between us and them felt a lot smaller.
"It's not as simple as you make it sound, Dad," Paul said.
His father rolled his eyes. "The devil it's not," he said. "You're behind the counter. That Weidenreich comes in and starts grilling you. If you don't give him some kind of answer, what's he going to do? Haul you off to jail and start ripping answers out of you, that's what. So, Mr. Not-As-Simple, what do you tell him?" He folded his arms across his chest and waited.
Paul opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. He didn't know what to say. He knew what the Feldgendarmerie often did to people who didn't care to talk. The Germans in this alternate had the same sort of attitude as Crosstime Traffic wanted its people to show. They came first, and everybody else could look out for himself.
"Well?" Dad wasn't shy about rubbing it in. Dad wasn't shy about anything. That made him good at running this operation. But there were too many times when it made him a real pain to be around.
"Well, all right, we had to tell the inspector something. I can see that," Paul said at last. "But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to fix the damage. If we do it so we don't get noticed, where's the harm?"
His father looked at him—looked through him, really. "Okay," he said. "If we don't tip our hand, it's not so bad. But that's not the way you were acting. You sounded more like you wanted to charge right out there, slay the dragon, and rescue the fair maiden. And that's not a good idea—not, you hear me?"
"I hear you, Dad. I always hear you," Paul said wearily.
"Yeah, you hear me. But do you listen?"
Instead of answering, Paul turned away. Neither one of them was going to change the other's mind. Paul already knew the only way to reach his father was to hit him over the head with a two-by-four. Dad still hadn't quite figured out that Paul was just as stubborn. It didn't show so much in Paul, because he was quieter about it. But if he saw something he thought needed doing, he'd do it, and he wouldn't let anything or anybody—his father included—get in his way.
Or maybe Dad had figured out more than Paul thought. He said, "Look, son, what you do on your own is fine, as long as nobody can trace it back to Crosstime Traffic. This is one of those alternates we want to keep quarantined. The Germans here hold down everybody else's technology. We have to hold theirs down. We don't want them thinking about transposition chambers."
He wasn't wrong about that. An Imperial Germany that could rampage across the alternates was the last thing Paul wanted to see. But Imperial Germany already oppressed the Americans in this world. For people from the home timeline to oppress them, too, added insult to injury.
When Paul said as much, his father only shrugged. "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs," he said. He seemed to think answering one cliche' with another meant winning the argument. Paul gave it up. He would do what he would do. If Dad turned out not to like it, he was welcome to try to do something better.
Lucy waited for several days to see if her father would come home. When he didn't, she decided to visit Curious Notions again. She was tired after a long day at the shoe factory. She didn't even know if the shop would be open when she got there. She only knew she had to try.
Curious Notions hadn't closed. But when Lucy looked in the front window, she saw Paul Gomes wasn't there. That was his father writing something behind the counter. The big, black, bushy mustache he wore did nothing to cut the resemblance.
A bell rang when Lucy opened the door. The man who looked like Paul put down his pen and nodded to her. "Hello. How can I help you today?" He sounded pleasant enough. "We have some things here you won't find anywhere else, at prices most people can afford."
Maybe the people he usually dealt with could afford those prices. Lucy couldn't come close. She said, "I'm Lucy Woo. Do you have my father? What kind of price do I have to pay to get him back?"
The man's face changed. Not even that big mustache could hide his frown. "I think maybe you'd better come back another time," he said, and all of a sudden he didn't sound nearly so pleasant.
"Why? So you can have the Feldgendarmerie waiting for me?" Lucy pronounced the hard g and the guttural r's without a bobble. Feldgendarmerie was a German word most Americans used too often to get it wrong.
"No." The man shook his head. "So you can talk to my son. He's the one who's taking care of that."
Taking care of it how? Lucy wondered. Really trying to get Father out? Or just pretending till I give up and go away? She said, "I've already talked with Paul. He said he'd help. He hasn't yet."
Paul's father shook his head. "That isn't true. He's done stuff, all right. He's done more than I would have, as a matter of fact. It just hasn't paid off yet. Do you see the difference?"
Lucy would have expected to think he was lying. Oddly, though, she found herself believing him. She wondered why. Probably because he looked so disgusted when he talked about what Paul had done. She would have bet anything she owned that he wouldn't have done it himself.
She said, "When do you think it will pay off?"
"I don't know." Paul's father sounded disgusted, too. No, he wouldn't have lifted a finger to help Charlie Woo. When he saw his answer didn't satisfy Lucy, he let out a long, put-upon sigh. "If I had to make a guess, I'd say things would start happening in maybe another week or so. But I'm only guessing. I'm not promising."
"Another week?" Lucy said in dismay.
"It's not such a long time," Paul's father said.
He wasn't sixteen. He didn't have a father locked up in a German jail. But, again, Lucy didn't think he was trying to pull the wool over her eyes with his guess. He meant it, even if he didn't have the faintest idea how hard it was on her. Reluctantly, she nodded. "A week," she said. "But if he's not out by then . . ."
Paul's father leaned across the counter toward her. His face didn't change. His voice didn't change, either, unless it got a little softer. But when he said, "You don't want to threaten me, Miss Woo. You really don't want to threaten me. Have you got that?" she nodded before she even thought about it. She'd always known the Germans could do dreadful things. What American didn't know that? Could Paul Gomes' father be just as dreadful, or maybe worse? Right then, she didn't doubt it. He smiled, seeing that he'd made her afraid. "Anything else?"
"No, I don't think so." Lucy gathered herself. She couldn't just slink out of the shop, no matter how much her feet wanted to do exactly that. She made herself look Paul's father straight in the face. "I wasn't kidding about what I said. If my father doesn't come home, there will be trouble."