They had CDs and DVDs here—not quite the same as the ones in the home timeline, but pretty close. They weren't on the civilian market, though. Anything that had anything to do with lasers was an Imperial German military secret. Even VCRs that played tapes were fairly new here. In the home timeline, VCRs were as obsolete as typewriters. But, before they'd gone obsolete, they'd grown a lot more bells and whistles than the local machines had. Local video-cassettes weren't the same size as the ones in the home timeline. Except for that, nobody'd had to change a thing to start making the players again.
"I'm glad you like it," Paul said. "We want satisfied customers."
"Well, you've sure got one." Mouradian turned to his helper. "Come on, Dave. Let's head on back home."
"Okay," Dave said—the first word out of his mouth since he'd got there. They climbed into the truck. The windows rattled in their frames when they slammed the doors. Mouradian started the motor and put the truck in gear. It rolled away. The harsh diesel exhaust fumes made Paul cough. They didn't have hydrogen-burners and electrics in this alternate the way they did back home.
Dad was out front dealing with customers. That meant Paul got to lug the garlic down to the subbasement by himself. He could have done without the honor. By the time he got the last of it down there, he hoped he would never see another set of stairs as long as he lived. It all but surrounded the place where the transposition chamber would materialize. The operator would have to make several trips to get it all back to the home timeline. The biggest complication in buying produce here was making sure they didn't buy too much to fit in the basement.
Wearily, Paul went up and pushed the filing cabinet over the trapdoor again. Then he trudged all the way upstairs—not just to the back room, but up to the apartment over the shop where he and his father lived. He jumped in the shower. Till he did that, he wasn't fit to be around anybody. He made the water as hot as he could stand. It felt good on his back and shoulders and legs. He knew he'd still be sore in the morning. He didn't do that kind of hauling often enough to get hardened to it.
He laughed as he dried off his hair. His dad grumbled about aches and pains a lot more than he did. Paul didn't think it was because Dad enjoyed complaining, either. He's past forty, he thought. No wonder he's wearing out.
He'd never come out and said that to his father. They already argued about enough other things. Calling his old man an old man wouldn't help.
When he went downstairs and out into the shop, Dad was selling a clock radio to a fat woman with a mink stole draped over her shoulders. Paul's stomach lurched. In the home timeline, wearing furs wasn't illegal, but it was disgusting—sickening, even.
There, if not in more important things, he and his father agreed.
But no matter how sick Dad felt inside, he didn't show it at all. Part of growing up was learning to put up with stuff you wouldn't think you could stand. Paul, who'd never heard his dentist say root canal, didn't understand that as well as someone twice his age might have. But, at eighteen, he was starting to get the idea.
"You'll like that one, Mrs. Pastrano," Dad was saying. "It's got terrific sound, and it'll pull in stations from a long way away."
"Well, I sure liked the record player I bought from you," Mrs. Pastrano said. In the home timeline, records were even more outdated than videocassettes. If a few fanatics hadn't kept playing them and even making them, Crosstime Traffic would have had a lot harder time turning out players for alternates where people still used them. The local woman paused and sniffed. "I smell garlic."
I'll bet you do, Paul thought. His father only shrugged and said, "I've got a bit of a cold. I can't smell a thing."
"It's there," Mrs. Pastrano declared, and she wasn't wrong. She wrapped the stole around herself more tightly. The flying end almost hit Dad. Paul thought he would have lost his lunch if it had got him. Dad never turned a hair. Mrs. Pastrano said, "So how much do you want for this?"
The price tag was attached to the clock radio. The red numbers had to be five centimeters high. Again, Dad acted as if everything were ordinary. He said, "It's $199.95."
Mrs. Pastrano squawked, but she paid. If she could afford a mink stole, she could afford a fancy radio that cost eight truckloads' worth of garlic, too.
Four
Everybody talked about the midnight knock on the door. It was such a cliche—and held so much truth—the Imperial German censors had given up trying to stop that talk. It showed up in books, in movies, in radio plays, and even—for those who had the money— on TV.
The knock that woke Lucy Woo and her family didn't come at midnight. It came at ten after three, as she saw when she stared at the alarm clock on the nightstand. That was even worse. It meant she had a good fighting chance of losing the rest of the night's sleep. Of course, when people came knocking at midnight—or at ten after three—they weren't likely to care whether you lost sleep or not.
Yawning, more than a little punchy, she staggered out of bed. The pounding at the door went on and on. It would wake the neighbors, too. They wouldn't be happy about that. Lucy yawned again. She had bigger worries than the neighbors right now.
Her mother turned on a lamp in the living room. They both blinked at the sudden explosion of light. Then Mother did something Lucy admired forever. She went to the door and asked, "Who is it?"
That question had only one possible answer. But that Mother had had the nerve to ask it... ! The pounding stopped. A gruff male voice said, "The Feldgendarmerie of Imperial Germany. Open at once, in the name of the Kaiser!"
They would kick the door down, or maybe shoot through it, if Mother gave them any more trouble. She had to know that as well as Lucy did. She opened the door. But she couldn't help asking, "What's so important that it won't wait till morning?"
This time, she got an answer she didn't expect. The Feldgen-darmerie men, all of them over six feet tall, shoved a much shorter man into the living room. "Father!" Lucy squealed.
"Hello, sweetheart," Charlie Woo said. He hugged Mother first, then Lucy, then her brother, who came running up in his pajamas. "I'm home."
"You would do well not to make the Kaiser's government suspect you," the big Feldgendarmerie man said. "Next time, you may not be so lucky."
"But I didn't do anything," Lucy's father said.
"If you had not done anything, we would not have arrested you." The German sounded as sure as if he'd said the sun would come up in the morning. "Just because we cannot prove it does not prove a thing." He also sounded sure he made sense. Lucy almost called him on it. But the weak didn't challenge the strong. America had been under the Kaiser's thumb for a long time. That was one lesson everybody in the country had learned, and learned well.
Without another word, the Feldgendarmerie men turned and strode off. Their jackboots thudded on the bare boards of the hallway. They slammed the door to the stairs behind them. Even so, Lucy could hear them clumping all the way down to the ground floor.
"Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!" Michael squealed. Her mother closed the door so his noise wouldn't bother the neighbors quite so much. Lucy didn't care if it bothered them. She joined right in. The Kaiser's secret police didn't let somebody go every day.
Paul kept his promise, she thought in surprise. She couldn't come up with any other reason the Feldgendarmerie would have released Father. / owe him an apology. I ought to do something for him to keep things balanced, but I have no idea what I could do.