A truck driver leaned on his horn. That could have happened in the home timeline, too. Paul wished the noisy idiot would cut it out. It did no good, and only annoyed everybody in earshot. That was probably why the trucker did it.
Snarling motorcycles with sidecars rolled past. The sidecars had machine guns mounted on them. The German soldiers who rode in them didn't believe in taking chances.
"You know what this is?" Dad said. "This is an alternate that never heard of Adolf Hitler. That's not bad."
"It's still not a very pretty place," Paul said.
Elliott looked from one of them to the other. "You're just a big, happy family, aren't you?" he said. "Will you be all right here after I go back to the home timeline?"
"We'll be fine," Dad answered. "Paul's a little wet behind the ears, that's all. It's nothing to worry about."
"Thanks a lot, Dad," Paul said.
"Any time." His father seemed to think he meant that for real thanks.
Elliott plainly knew better. He also plainly knew better than to try to step into the middle of a quarrel between father and son. The only thing that happened when you did that was, you got shot at from both sides. The departing shopkeeper just said, "Well, you know the drill here. To the authorities, we sell these little gadgets and we deal in produce on the side. I've told our people in the Central Valley that the two of you would be taking over for a while."
"Sounds good," Dad said. "We'll manage. Don't you worry about a thing. We've been here before. They know us. They know we'll treat 'em right." He nudged Paul. "Don't they?"
"Huh?" Paul said, taken by surprise, and then, "Uh, sure, Dad." He couldn't argue with his father about that. As far as the local merchants went, Lawrence and Paul Gomes were some of the most reliable people in the world.
Dad laughed. "Dealing here is fun, too. When I think I can get an enormous trailer full of garlic from down in Gilroy for twenty-five dollars . . ." He laughed again, louder.
So did Paul, without any hesitation. Prices here were a joke if you came from the home timeline. A dollar there was a little aluminum coin, worth nothing in particular.
A dollar for your thoughts, people said. Even a benjamin wasn't worth all that much. Things were different here. You could buy more, much more, with a dollar here than with a benjamin back home. Even cents were real money here: bronze coins, not aluminum. And the phrase this alternate used was a penny for your thoughts.
Somewhere off in the distance, a fire engine roared through the streets, bell clanging. Police cars here used bells, too. They were painted red, not black and white like the ones in the home timeline.
Dollars, not benjamins. Bells, not sirens. Red, not black and white. Those were the small differences, even if they were the ones you noticed first after crossing the timelines. Occupation, not freedom. Poor people, not prosperous ones. Those were the differences that really counted.
As things went in Chinatown, Lucy Woo's family wasn't badly off. They didn't have a television—they weren't rich. But they did have a radio and a small refrigerator. The money she brought home from the shoe factory helped pay for luxuries like that. Plenty of their neighbors got by with less.
"So long," her younger brother said. Michael hurried out the door. He was ten, and had a summer job as a grocery delivery boy. He'd go back to school when fall started. He needed to learn as much as he could—he'd take over their father's business one of these years. Lucy would have liked to stay in school, too. It hadn't worked out. They needed the money. And sons got breaks like that more often than daughters did.
Lucy hurried to finish her own bread and jam. She drank tea with breakfast. It helped her forget how tired she was when she first got up in the morning. Dad was already gone, opening up the shop. He bought, sold, and repaired anything that ran on electricity, from lamps to large adding machines. He was teaching Michael, too, all the time. Lucy's brother was already getting pretty good with a soldering iron.
"Got to go," Lucy said, and grabbed her lunch pail. She was tempted to open it and see what was inside, but she didn't. Mother tried to surprise her every day, at least with something. It wasn't always easy, but she usually managed.
Mother blew Lucy a kiss when she went out the door. Lucy yawned in spite of the tea. She really wished she could go back to bed. But no such luck. She had to head for the shoe factory.
Down the stairs. Other people in the apartment building were going to work, too. She nodded to some. With others, she didn't bother. They were as bleary-eyed as she was. Out the front door, turn left. Down Powell toward Market. She yawned again. If she couldn't have more sleep, she wished for more tea, or maybe coffee. Coffee, she decided. It was stronger.
The morning was nice and clear. San Francisco wasn't foggy all the time, just often enough to be annoying. Gulls soared overhead. They mewed like cats. On the cracked sidewalks, pigeons paraded underfoot. They cocked wary orange eyes at passing people. Sometimes they got handouts. Sometimes they wound up in pigeon stew. They couldn't tell which ahead of time. No wonder they were wary.
Newsboys waved papers and shouted headlines. Divers had found the skeleton of the Hindenburg where it crashed off the coast of France almost a hundred fifty years earlier. That was interesting, but not interesting enough to get Lucy to part with two cents for a newspaper.
Some shops were opening up as she walked by. Shopkeepers called out to passersby in English and Chinese and Spanish—and, if the passersby looked rich, in German. People in San Francisco sold anything that moved. If you stepped away from your shadow for a minute, they'd pry it off the sidewalk and try to sell it back to you. Lucy heard men and women hawking pork, clothes, jewelry, watches, vegetables, secondhand books, medicines, radios, slide rules, bicycle tires, and everything else under the sun.
She'd grown up here. She knew the "fine gold jewelry" would turn your arm green if you wore it very long. The "Swiss watches" were cheap copies sold at not-so-cheap prices—either that or they were stolen. The black-and-orange Seals shirts and beige ones for Missions backers would come apart at the seams sooner than they should have. The bicycle tires were liable to be retreads. Sometimes the medicines were what they claimed. More often, they were sugar pills. If you bought from somebody you didn't know, you took your chances. If you came expecting wonderful things at rock-bottom prices—well, that was what people here wanted you to do. Truth was, you got what you paid for, here as anywhere else.
A few places showed OPEN signs but didn't have people out front telling the world about how wonderful they were. Those quiet places were the ones where you could get good stuff... if you knew what you were looking for, and knew what you were looking at. Fine gold jewelry was for sale—for those who could afford it. Some "antiques" hadn't been made day before yesterday in a room behind the shop where they were for sale. Not all radios had their original innards replaced by junk that would wear out in weeks. Because of what her father did, Lucy knew some of the tricks of that trade.
And there was Curious Notions. Lucy's father was curious about that place. She couldn't blame him. They had phonographs smaller than anyone else's that sounded better than machines costing five times as much. They had radios you could put in your pocket and listen to with earphones. They had battery-powered games that were like nothing anyone else sold.
They could have been millionaires, selling what they sold. By all the signs, they weren't interested in being millionaires. What they sold here in San Francisco was almost an afterthought. People said they did most of their business with the grape growers and produce fanners in the Central Valley. Lucy knew how much—or rather, how little—what people said was often worth.