Whatever Sunset District Paul came from, he reacted the way Lucy would have. He went down a path that took both of them away from those guttural consonants and flat vowels. After a while, his voice as casual as he could make it, he asked, "So—have you heard anything from Stanley?"
Lucy needed a moment to think of the jeweler by his first name. Paul was smart to talk about him that way, though. Plenty of people were called Stanley. Even so, she had to shake her head. "No," he said. "Nothing. You?"
"Also nada," he answered.
She cocked her head to one side. She could see what that had to mean, but it wasn't English—not to her, anyway. All her doubts and curiosity came flooding forward. "Where are you from?" she asked.
"I told you before," Paul said. "From here. From San Francisco. From the Sunset District. From Thirty-third Avenue."
"I know what you told me," Lucy said. "I believe all of those except that you're from here. You can't be from here—you just cant." She started talking about all the strange things Curious Notions had, and about Paul's own strangeness (especially if he was supposed to come out of the Sunset District), and about her own thoughts about how maybe there were other worlds. The longer she went on, the more foolish she felt. It all seemed so silly, to say nothing of unlikely.
That was what she thought till she turned and looked at Paul's face. He'd gone white as skimmed milk. His voice shook when he asked, "Who told you about this? Who else has heard about it?"
She'd thought of a lot of questions he might ask, but not those. "Nobody," she said. "Not from me, anyhow."
"What does that mean?" He didn't sound shaky any more. He sounded hard and dangerous. "Is anybody else saying that kind of thing?"
If she'd said no, what would he have done? Knocked her over the head with a rock and dragged her into the bushes? She wouldn't have been surprised. He looked so intense, he frightened her. But she answered, "The people from the Triads wonder about you, too. They don't see how you can be from here, either."
Paul went even paler. Watching him, Lucy began to realize her crazy idea might not be so crazy after all. "Oh, great. Just. . . great," he said, and she could make a pretty good guess about what he hadn't quite said. He wouldn't have got so upset if she were crazy. He needed a little while to gather himself. Once he did, he went on, "Listen, you've got to promise me something. You've got to, Lucy, you hear me?"
"I hear you," she said. "I'm not going to promise anything till I know what it is."
He nodded jerkily. "Okay," he said, though it seemed anything but okay to him. "You've got to promise me not to talk about this business with anybody. Anybody at all. Ever. You don't know how much trouble it could cause."
"I think maybe I do," she said.
But Paul said, "If you think so, you're wrong. Americans here thought they knew what atomic bombs could do, too. It turned out they didn't. They didn't even come close. This would be like that, too, only worse—maybe thousands of times worse."
Americans here. What other Americans were there? But as soon as Lucy asked herself the question, she saw the answer. There were Americans of whatever sort Paul was. Were there other kinds besides his? Were there . .. thousands of other kinds besides his?
Lucy looked around. The Japanese garden seemed to press in on her. She knew that wasn't real, but it felt real. All of a sudden, this whole world seemed nothing more than a single grain of sand on the beach. And how many other grains, almost but not quite like it, lay there on the beach beside it? Thousands? Millions? What came after millions?
Quietly, Paul asked, "Do you see?" What must her face have been showing?
"I think maybe I do," she said again, and now maybe she did, or began to. "That's . . . the biggest thing I ever tried to imagine in my whole life."
"Yeah, well, now that you've done it, try to imagine forgetting about it, okay?" Paul said. "Please? It's important. You don't know how important it is."
That was true enough. How could she know such a thing? But she said, "Maybe you ought to tell me, then. I'm stuck in the middle of this, aren't I?"
"I wish you weren't. I wish there weren't any middle to be stuck in," Paul told her. She believed that. If there weren't any middle for her to be stuck in, he wouldn't have been in trouble, either.
If. If. If. Was that how all the separate worlds were different? A different if in each one? She almost asked him. Seeing if he could go any paler than he was already might have been fun. She had more urgent things to worry about, though. "Well, there is a middle, and I'm in it, just like you," she said. "The real question is, how do we get out of it?"
"Good question. Real good question. I wish I had a real good answer," he said. "By now, my people will know something's wrong. But they can't do anything about it, not while the Feldgendarmerie is sitting in Curious Notions."
"That's where you go back and forth?" Lucy asked.
Paul nodded, then looked as if he wished he hadn't "Don't ask me stuff like that," he said. "Don't ask me anything. The less you know, the less they can get out of you."
Lucy wondered what sort of they he had in mind. The Kaiser's men? The Triads? Everybody in this whole world? The last seemed the most likely. He really was a stranger here. "You know how to get in touch with me," Lucy said. "How do I get in touch with you if I need to?"
"You shouldn't," he said. "If you find out where I'm staying, other people will, too. You're okay. Other people?" He shook his head. "You know about the kinds of other people who want to talk to me."
She did, too. She didn't care for his answer, but she saw it made sense. He had a way of doing that. She said, "I think I'd better go. There are a lot of things I need to sort out now." She wondered if she'd be able to go to sleep tonight. She didn't see how.
Her face must have given her away again. Paul laughed—not so much because he thought it was funny, she judged, but because he didn't know what else to do. "I wish you wouldn't," he said. Then he let out another laugh. "I may as well wish for the sun not to come up tomorrow, too. I can see that."
"I can't help it," Lucy said. "This is important. You told me so yourself."
"Me and my big mouth," he muttered. But then he waved her away. "Now you know what you always wanted to. I hope you're not sorry later on."
How could I be? Lucy didn't say it out loud. It was another one of those questions where she could already see the answer.
Paul sat at the edge of his lumpy mattress, staring down at the worn carpet. Every once in a while, he would shake his head. He'd just broken every rule drilled into him in Crosstime Traffic training. Somebody in this alternate knew it was an alternate, and he'd admitted as much.
Try as he would, though, he didn't see what else he could have done. Lucy had already figured most of it out on her own. That was bad enough. But she'd also said the guys from the Tongs weren't far behind her. She couldn't do anything about what she knew (except take it to the Germans, but she wouldn't do that). They . . . might be able to. Paul didn't know enough to be sure.
He also didn't know whether he dared visit Stanley Hsu's jewelry store again. If he showed up there, would the jeweler and his pals grab him and start trying to pull what he knew out of him? If he didn't show up there, wouldn't Stanley Hsu forget about getting his father out of jail? He was too likely to be wrong—dreadfully wrong—whether he chose to go or to stay away.
Before long, he had the problem solved for him. He was walking up O'Farrell Street when a Chinese man a couple of years older than he was fell into step beside him. "You're Mr. Gomes, aren't you?" the fellow asked in a friendly voice.