"Voice signature recognized," the computer said. "Go ahead." Lucy and her father did some more exclaiming. Paul only half heard them. He spoke the code phrase that meant everything was okay and nobody was holding a gun to his head. Then he called for a chamber as fast as the home timeline could send one. His words showed up on the screen as he said them. Even Michael Woo exclaimed at that. Again, Paul hardly noticed. He hoped the Crosstime Traffic people were monitoring this chamber's equivalent in the home timeline.
Wong scattered a little bit of white powder on the floor in one corner of the room. He dropped a gold coin near it. "What's that for?" Paul asked.
"Let the Germans think we were smuggling," the older man answered. "That's a normal kind of thing, just like stealing jewelry is a normal kind of thing. If they think it's smuggling, they won't think about alternates. Them not thinking about alternates is what we want." The transposition chamber appeared out of nowhere. The door opened. Wong asked, "Paul, did you warn the home timeline about neofentanyl?"
"Oops," Paul said.
Oops it was. The chamber operator passed out as soon as she got a whiff of the air in the basement. Enough neofentanyl had come in through the trapdoor to knock her for a loop. Sammy Wong picked her up off the floor and gave her the antidote. She was not happy, to say the least.
"Never mind that," Paul's father said as he and everybody else hurried into the transposition chamber. "You can yell at us later. Just get us out of here now."
The door slid shut. After that, nothing seemed to happen. "Is it all right?" Lucy asked. "Are we supposed to feel something?"
"It's fine," Paul answered. "It'll feel like it takes about fifteen minutes. When we get to the home timeline, though, the clocks will say the same thing as they did in the alternate we just left."
"That's weird," Michael said.
"That's impossible," his father said.
Paul only shrugged. "It's what happens, honest."
"Won't be long, any which way," his father said, and he was right. When the door opened again, they were back in the home timeline.
This new San Francisco endlessly fascinated Lucy. It was the city she knew, and yet it wasn't. Most of the streets had the same names as the ones in her San Francisco. They went the same places as the ones she'd always known. She could find her way around. South of Market here was the same place as it was there.
But finding her way around didn't mean a thing. The streets were the same, but most of the buildings were different. A few old ones, like City Hall and some of the churches, were the same. Somehow, that only made them seem stranger, not more familiar.
For those were the buildings that had ruled the skyline in her San Francisco. Here, they huddled in the shadows of structures she'd not only never seen but never even imagined. Paul called them skyscrapers. That word had fallen out of use in the English she knew. It seemed to fit them, though. They did leap far, far up into the sky.
Some of them had elevators you could ride all the way to the top. One had a restaurant up there, a restaurant that revolved once an hour. She could eat a hamburger and fries and a milkshake and look out at the whole city. She knew she would remember that for the rest of her life.
But the people in this San Francisco were even more interesting than the scenery. Men's clothes weren't too different from what she was used to. The things girls and women wore, though .. . They showed more skin, and skin in odder places, than she'd thought anybody could or would. They weren't embarrassed about doing it, either. It was as normal to them as her clothes had been to her.
By her standards, just about everybody was rich. That wasn't because everyone had millions of dollars, though everyone did. A million dollars here were only ten thousand benjamins, and ten thousand benjamins were worth about what she'd made in a year at the sewing machine. But people here all had cars—those who wanted them, anyway—and radios and televisions and telephones they carried around with them and those marvelous machines called computers and all sorts of other things she hadn't dreamt of. Paul hadn't been kidding. The things they knew about here put Curious Notions to shame.
She discovered supermarkets. So many things, all right there together! People filling shopping carts full of whatever they wanted. They didn't seem to worry about the prices. That told Lucy they had plenty of money, too. If they hadn't, they would have complained more or bought less.
Signs above some of the vegetables said they came from one alternate or another. Lucy pointed at Paul when she noticed those. "So that's why you dealt with those farmers from the Central Valley," she said.
He nodded. "That's right." When he was in her alternate, he'd sounded just a little funny. Here in what he called the home timeline, everyone talked the way he did. Lucy was the one with a tiny trace of accent. If she was going to stay here, she'd have to lose it to fit in. That shouldn't be too hard.
"What about the Central Valley here?" she asked. She hadn't seen it yet. She hadn't seen anything but this amazing new San Francisco.
"It grows things, too," Paul answered. "But this is a crowded place. We need more food than we can grow ourselves. We need more of lots of things than we can get from this world."
"And so you get them from other. . . alternates," Lucy said. "That's what you were doing with Curious Notions."
"That's right," Paul said again. "Crosstime Traffic does that kind of thing on lots of different alternates. We don't take a whole lot from any one of them. That wouldn't be fair. We interfere as little as we can, too. Doing more wouldn't be fair, either."
"But you got my family and me out of there," Lucy said.
Paul seemed embarrassed. He was—but not, Lucy realized, on her account. No—he was embarrassed all on his own. 'That's one more thing we don't usually do. We wouldn't have if Dad and I hadn't pulled you into what was really our problem. Getting away ourselves and leaving you stuck there wouldn't have been right, either."
"What are the Germans and the Triads doing there?" Lucy asked. Just putting the question that way felt funny. The Germans had been the central fact in politics in her alternate since the middle of the twentieth century. The Triads had been around in her San Francisco even longer, though she hadn't bumped up against them till she got to know the people from Curious Notions. Now both were a mile beyond the moon.
"It's easier to monitor the Germans," Paul answered. "They think we were running drugs. There's a huge price on my head, and on Dad's. The Tongs have to be more secret. From what people have picked up, though, they've got a price on us, too—and on you, I'm afraid."
That sent a shiver through Lucy. She needed a moment to remember the Triads in her San Francisco were a mile beyond the moon. Then she thought of something else. "Are there Triads here? In this San Francisco, I mean?"
"Well, yeah. There are." Paul nodded. "They're—mostly—legit, though. And I promise they don't have thing one to do with the Tongs in your alternate."
"That's good." Lucy meant it. She also wondered whether he was right. If the Triads were anything, they were sneaky and patient. Crosstime Traffic might have people working for it who were working for them, too. But that was the company's worry. It—probably— wasn't hers.
And she had trouble worrying about anything here in this amazing temple of food. She pointed to a bin of very strange fruit. They were about the size of her fist, bright yellow, and covered all over with not too pointy spikes about half an inch long. (People here would have said a little more than a centimeter long. Everybody here used the metric system, the way the Germans did in her alternate. One more thing she had to get used to.)