"What are they going to do if you bring in the shipment anyway?" Dad asked when the farmer ran down. "Burn down your house and poison your dog?" He meant it for a joke—a sarcastic joke, but a joke just the same. Mr. Triandos said something else. Whatever it was, it was short and not very sweet. Dad flinched when he heard it. "Oh. They did?" The next sound from the other end of the line was a click. "Hello?" Dad said. "Hello?" Then he said something else, something that wasn't even close to hello. He hung up, too.
"Somebody doesn't like Mr. Triandos?" Paul said.
His father shook his head. "No. Somebody doesn't like us. They told him bad things would happen if he did any more business with us. They made him believe it, too." He scratched at his mustache. "I bet he's not going to be the only one, either."
"Who doesn't like us?" Paul asked. "Who really doesn't like us, I mean?"
"Could be the Kaiser's merry men—but I don't think it is," his father answered. "If the Germans wanted to put on the squeeze, they'd grab one of us and use him to make the other one talk. Or maybe they'd grab both of us and just start smashing. If you're in charge, you don't have to waste time getting cute. So what does that leave? The way it looks to me, it leaves lovely Lucy's little pals."
Paul wished he could tell his father he was nuts. After the unpleasant visit he'd had outside the store, he knew too well he couldn't. "What do we do now?" he asked in a small voice.
"Good question," Dad said. "What the people with Chinese connections don't seem to get is that we're here in this alternate for more than one reason. We're not going to dry up and blow away even if nobody sells us produce. We've got to keep an eye on the Kaiser's crew, too—make sure they don't get any bright ideas about alternates."
"Will Crosstime Traffic leave us here if we can't bring in the produce?" Paul asked.
"A lot of alternates, they wouldn't. They'd pull us out so fast, it'd make your head swim," his father answered. "Not this one, though. Like I say, they have other reasons to worry about this one."
"Maybe," Paul said. "But they won't be worrying about stuff like that here in San Francisco. They'll be worrying about it in Berlin, or wherever the Germans do their fancy research."
His father only shrugged. "We're here. Till they tell us to leave, we're going to stay. And as long as we're gong to stay, we'd better not let the locals push us around so much that we can't do business."
Paul wasn't sure he liked the sound of that. "What have you got in mind?"
"Don't know yet." Dad shrugged again. "It'd be nice if we could get the Kaiser's men and the Tongs fighting each other, though. That way, they'd stop jumping up and down about us."
"Define 'nice,'" Paul said. "We're not far from Chinatown. If there is an uprising, or if the Germans go in there to clean house, we're still liable to get stuck in the middle."
One more shrug from Dad. "In that case, we go down to the sub-basement and back to the home timeline. Then the locals can do whatever they want. After things calm down, we come back and start looking around again."
When he said we, he didn't necessarily mean Paul and himself. If the Germans—or the Chinese—were after them in particular, Crosstime Traffic could send in somebody else, somebody the locals wouldn't know. But whoever showed up in this alternate would make a living selling odd things. And whoever showed up would want to buy produce, too. If the Tongs—or the Feldgendarmerie—figured that out, they could make life harder for people from the home timeline.
The other side of the coin was, people from the home timeline often looked down their noses at locals. There were so many things crosstime traders couldn't tell people in the alternates they visited. There were good reasons why they couldn't tell them those things, too. Paul made a sour face. Dad had rammed that down his throat not so long ago. All the same, it seemed unfair a lot of the time.
Dad grunted when Paul told him as much. "You wouldn't say so if you didn't like that Lucy Woo."
He'd made that crack before, too. It wasn't true, or not the way he meant it. Paul didn't try to argue. Dad wouldn't have listened to him if he did. Dad was a lot better at talking than listening. If Paul had tried to argue, Dad would have said he was just doing it because of Crosstime Traffic rules. They banned what they called fraternizing, which meant getting too friendly with the locals.
Crosstime Traffic had its reasons, too. In spite of the rules, people from the home timeline did fall in love with locals every once in a while. Those romances hardly ever had happy endings. They were often a bigger danger to the secret of crosstime travel than the Feld-gendarmerie and the Tongs put together.
Paul wasn't in love with Lucy. The more he tried telling his father so, though, the less Dad would believe him. He could see that coming like a rash. He just gave back a shrug of his own and went outside.
"Mrowr?" the marmalade cat said. It rolled on its back on the sidewalk and stuck its feet in the air and glanced at him with its head cocked at a silly angle and generally looked ridiculous. He laughed. He couldn't help it. He bent down and rubbed the cat's belly and scratched the velvety skin just above its nose. An angry breath escaped him. Dad hadn't even wanted him making friends with a cat here.
How could you not want to make friends with a cat like this, though? It purred like far-off thunder, and then even louder, like thunder that wasn't so far off. It scrambled to its feet and stropped itself against his leg. It shoved its face into his hand and purred louder still. He petted it some more. He didn't even have any goodies to give it right now. It was just being friendly. When he got to his feet and walked down the street, it followed him like a German shepherd.
He wished he hadn't thought of that particular breed of dog. It made him think of Germans, of Feldgendarmerie men. (The Feldgen-darmerie didn't use German shepherds, though. They used Alsatians, which were bigger and meaner.) He looked down at the cat. It kept trotting along, half a pace to his left and half a pace behind him.
Finally, when it spotted a squirrel that might have strayed too far from a tree, it peeled off. Even then, though, it looked back over its shoulder once before starting to stalk. It might have been saying, Sorry, friend, but this is business.
Or maybe I'm really starting to imagine things, Paul thought. He didn't stay around to see whether the cat caught the squirrel. He wished it luck. As far as he was concerned, squirrels were nothing but rats with fluffy tails. But what he most wanted to do just then was get as far away from Curious Notions and his father as he could. He kept on walking.
Five minutes later, he stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, wondering if he'd made a mistake. The cat was the only thing he'd find in this alternate that he could like without worrying whether he'd get in trouble or it would get him in trouble.
Clerks in the front office at the shoe factory complained about their hours. They grumbled about how hard they had to work. Listening to them, Lucy didn't know whether to laugh or to cry. They had no idea how well off they were. If they went back to the machines, they'd find out in a hurry.
She wondered if they would give her trouble because she'd escaped from the factory floor. People were often mean like that. The clerks here didn't seem to be, though. Oh, she got some of the jobs nobody else much wanted, and she did all the coffeemaking the first couple of weeks she was there. But that sort of thing happened to anybody who was new anywhere. Lucy didn't let it worry her.
Maybe because she didn't, she got on pretty well with the other girls and women. As they got to know her, they treated her like one of themselves. They gossiped with her, they borrowed dimes from her, they didn't mind when she borrowed pens from them. She was . . . part of the gang.