She got twenty minutes for lunch. Some women bought food at the factory cafeteria. That made the bosses extra money, and the place never had anything good. Lucy brought rice and vegetables and a little fish from home. She'd be hungry before she went back there for supper, but she couldn't do anything about that.
"Back to work!" Hank Simmons yelled three or four minutes before the lunch break ended. "I don't want you dilly-dallying around, now. You hear me?"
What he wanted was to cheat them out of some of the little break they got. Lucy made sure she was working when she was supposed to. She also made sure she didn't get busy till she was supposed to.
She would have had to if Simmons came by. But he didn't, not today, and so she didn't, either.
She hardly remembered the rest of the afternoon. That happened sometimes. Your hands would do the work, and your brain just sort of went away. You would look up in amazement and discover hours had gone by and you'd never even noticed. Sometimes that was nothing but a relief.
Sometimes it scared Lucy half to death. It was a little like dying. You weren't there. Where were you?
She came back to herself half an hour before her shift finally ended. She shook herself as if she were coming out of a cold bath. The world was back. If she could get home fast, she'd be able to spend a little time with her family before she got so tired she'd have to fall into bed. That little while was what she looked forward to— unless she was squabbling with Michael. He had more bounce than she did. He didn't have to work so much.
"See you tomorrow," Mildred said when they went to clock out.
"Oh, yes," Lucy said in a hollow voice. "You sure will."
"This is one of the alternates where we need to be especially careful," Paul Gomes' father warned him for what had to be the fiftieth time.
"Yes, Dad. I know that. Thank you." Paul sounded more sarcastic than patient, though he wouldn't have thought so. He'd graduated from high school the month before. He planned on going to UC Berkeley, but not till he'd spent a couple of quarters in the alternate San Francisco his father had been warning him about.
However much Paul tried not to see it, the two of them were much alike. They were both of medium height, with swarthy skin, dark hair, and dark eyes. They were both stocky, with square faces and eyebrows that would quirk up when they thought something was funny. Lawrence Gomes wore a bushy mustache that made him look like a bandit. Paul wouldn't have been caught dead with such a horrible thing on his upper lip.
"We can get into real trouble here," Dad persisted. "We can get Crosstime Traffic into real trouble, too."
"I know, Dad. Jawohl." Paul hoped throwing in a little German would persuade his father he took this seriously. "We've been over it before, you know."
He might as well have saved his breath. Dad went on as if he hadn't spoken: "This is one of those alternates where, if they find we can travel across timelines, they can probably start building their own transposition chambers. And if they do—if anybody does— we've got a lot of trouble on our hands."
Paul started to tell him he knew that, too. He decided not to bother. How much good would it do? None—he could see that. He felt as if he were back in a high-school history class. Dad thought he thought he knew more than he did. He thought Dad thought he knew less than he did.
About fifty years earlier, not long before Dad was born, the home timeline was a mess. It was running out of food and energy at the same time. Then Galbraith and Hester figured out how to travel not through space but across time, to visit other Earths where history had taken different turns from the way it had gone here. There were alternates where the Roman Empire never fell. There were others where the Armada conquered England, or where the South won the Civil War, or where the Communists won the struggle with capitalism. There were alternates where no one from Europe discovered America, and the Native Americans were still going through the early Bronze Age. There were others where the Chinese colonized the New World. And there were some where man never evolved at all.
The home timeline began trading with the inhabited alternates. It began taking what it needed from some of the empty ones. That trade probably saved the world from collapse. Inside a very few years, it made Crosstime Traffic even bigger than Microsoft had been at the end of the twentieth century.
So far as anybody knew, the home timeline was the only one where people had figured out how to travel from one world of if to another. But quite a few alternates with fairly recent breakpoints had the technology to do it, if the idea occurred to them. Crosstime traders had to be doubly careful in places like those. Dad was right about that, even if he did go on and on about it. But they couldn't stay away from worlds like those. If they did, somebody might find the secret while they weren't looking. That wouldn't be good, either.
The alternate where Paul and his father were going was one of those. Its breakpoint was 1914, less than two hundred years in the past. In the home timeline, Germany was stopped short of Paris in the opening days of World War I. Four years of trench warfare followed. In the end, the Germans lost. A generation later, Hitler and the Nazis tried again—and lost again, even worse than before.
Things were different in this alternate. The Russians had moved against eastern Germany more slowly than in the home timeline. The Germans had been able to put a few more divisions into the attack on France. Their Schlieffen plan had worked here, where it failed in the home timeline. They'd wheeled around beyond Paris, not in front of it, and they'd knocked the French Army and the British Expeditionary Force clean out of the war. Then a lot of them had climbed onto trains and headed east. When they met the Russians, they smashed them, too.
After that, everything looked different. The Kaiser ended up sitting on top of the world. France and England were humbled— France more so, because it took a worse beating. When they tried to get their own back at the end of the 1930s, Germany beat them again. It didn't need to worry about Russia this time around. Russia had fallen to pieces in a long civil war, and a lot of the pieces— Poland, Finland, Courland, the Ukraine—were German puppets.
Once Germany won that second war, it dominated Europe the way no one had since the days of the Roman Empire. It looked west across the Atlantic. The United States looked east— nervously. It hadn't fought in either European war. It didn't believe in getting tangled up in the affairs of foreign powers. It paid for its mistake.
In the home timeline, the USA got the atomic bomb first. One of the reasons it did was that a lot of scientists had fled Hitler's Germany. Quite a few of them, like Einstein, were Jews. Others couldn't stand what the Nazis were doing.
Again, things were different in this alternate. The Kaiser didn't persecute Jews. Those talented scientists stayed in Germany. They were happy to work for the German Empire, because it wanted them. And, here, the Germans got the bomb first.
They got it—and they used it. War between Germany and the United States broke out in 1956. The Germans had the bomb, and they had airplanes to deliver it. A dozen American cities went up in smoke the first day (the only reason San Francisco didn't was that both bombers aimed at it got shot down). The war lasted a couple of months, but most of it was just mopping up for the Kaiser's men.
In this alternate, imperial Germany had run things ever since, for close to a century and a half now. The United States was a second-rate power now, and had to do what the Kaiser's officials said. Technology wasn't as far along here as it was in the home timeline. It wasn't that far behind, though. If the locals ever got their hands on a transposition chamber, for instance, they might be able to build one of their own.