That was also a worry for another time. She pointed to the yellow . . . whatchamacallits. "What are those things, and which alternate do they come from?"
He laughed. "Most people call 'em hand-grenade melons. As a matter of fact, they're from here—from New Zealand, I think. They probably have 'em in your alternate, too, only not for export."
"Oh." Lucy had seen food from China and Chile and the Philippines and Canada and all over Europe and some places that weren't even places in her alternate—Indonesia, for instance, wherever that was. "Everything's for export here, isn't it?"
"Just about," Paul answered. "We—the United States—export a lot ourselves—grain and meat and soybeans, mostly."
Lucy nodded. She believed him. In her alternate, the United States had trouble feeding itself. Maybe this USA did, too, but if it did, it was for different reasons. She wondered how many people lived here. This San Francisco was more crowded than the one she'd known. And this United States hadn't had a lot of its biggest cities blown off the map by German atomic bombs. She gathered they'd worried about the Russians instead. That seemed ridiculous to her.
When she and Paul left the supermarket, he asked, "What shall we do now?"
"I don't know." Lucy stood in the parking lot and thought for a little while. (That the supermarket had a parking lot told how important it was.) The breeze off the ocean ruffled her hair. Even though this San Francisco was such a crowded place, exhaust fumes didn't fill the breeze. Cars were cleaner than they were in her alternate. Lucy didn't know how the home timeline managed that, but it did. All of a sudden, she snapped her fingers. "Yes, I do so know. Take me to the zoo!"
"I'll do that." Paul grinned at her. "The bus'll go through the Sunset District, too, so you'll see I wasn't fooling you about it."
"Okay." She grinned back. The grin slipped a little when she found out the bus fare was $145 for each of them. Even though she was starting to know better, that still seemed like a lot of money to her. When she worked it out, though, she decided it wasn't really a whole lot more than the nickel she was used to paying. And the buses here were much nicer than the ones in her alternate. They didn't stink. They didn't roar and lurch. They even had comfortable seats.
Paul hadn't been kidding about the Sunset District. A lot of the houses were old. Some of them might have been old enough to date from before her alternate and the home timeline split apart. All of them, though, were beautifully kept up. They had fresh paint. Their lawns were green as the emeralds in Stanley Hsu's shop. The cars in front of them were bright and shiny and clean.
"My house is just like one of these," Paul said. "Too bad we're not going down Thirty-third Avenue, or I'd show it to you. Oh, well— you'll get over there one of these times."
"Yes, I guess I will," Lucy said. "It's not like we haven't met each other's parents and everything."
"Uh—yeah." Paul turned red. Isn't that interesting? Lucy thought.
The zoo was just where it would have been in her alternate. There was still a lot of ivy, and a lot of birds flew around. They were all pretty much the same birds, too. But the zoo sure wasn't the same. No crumbling concrete here. They'd spent a lot of dollars—a lot of benjamins—fancying this place up. The enclosures all looked as if they came from the lands where the animals inside them lived. The displays in front of the enclosures weren't just signs. They were TV screens, and told all kinds of things about the beasts and birds on display.
Not everything had changed, though. That was what Lucy thought, anyhow, when a boy threw peanuts to a bear. The same thing could have happened in her alternate. But this kid got in trouble. A guard came up to him and led him out of the zoo. There were DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS signs at the zoo in her alternate, but nobody paid any attention to them. Things were different here.
"This is what a zoo is supposed to be like," Lucy said.
"You think this is something, you ought to see the one in San Diego," Paul told her. "They have all kinds of animals there that are extinct in the wild. Tigers and rhinos, even."
The zoo in Lucy's San Francisco had had tigers and rhinos, too. None of the signs there had said they were extinct in the wild. As far as she knew, they weren't in her alternate. Maybe not quite all the differences in the home timeline were for the best.
She and Paul walked past an enclosure that held slim yellow cats with black spots. "We do have cheetahs here," he said. "None of those left in the wild, either."
"Cheetahs never prosper," Lucy agreed gravely. Paul nodded. He took a step, and half of another one. Then he stopped and gave her a horrible look. She winked at him. He tried to stay disgusted, but couldn't do it. He started to laugh.
"You're going to fit right in here," he told her. "You're out of your tree."
"Thank you," she said.
They stopped and got something to eat. For reasons Lucy couldn't figure out, people here called wieners hot dogs. No matter what people called them, they were still wieners. Lucy slathered hers with sauerkraut and mustard. Paul put onions and pickle relish on his. They wrinkled their noses at each other's choices. Paul said, "I think you like sauerkraut because the Germans were running things in your alternate."
"Maybe," Lucy said. "But plenty of people here must like it, too, or the stand wouldn't put it out." Paul changed the subject, which made her decide she was right.
She frowned a little as she sipped from her Coke. The straw was made of see-through plastic. In her alternate, it would have been waxed cardboard. That wasn't what puzzled her, though. The soda tasted almost the same as it did in her San Francisco, but not quite. It tasted almost as good, too—but, again, not quite.
When she asked Paul if he knew what the difference was, he said, "Yeah. Here they sweeten it with corn syrup. In your alternate, I think they still use real sugar."
"Why don't they here?" Lucy asked. "Is sugar extinct in the wild, too?"
That made him laugh again while he shook his head. "No. Corn syrup's cheaper to use, that's all."
"But it's not as good!" Lucy said.
"That counts, but so does the other," Paul said. "I guess the people who decide what goes into Coke figured they made more money with corn syrup than they lost flavor, and so they kept on putting it in."
Lucy took another sip. This Coke wasn't bad. If you didn't know how it was supposed to taste, you'd think it was fine. She suspected the people in the Triads would think the same way the Coke-makers here did. A little bigger profit margin did count. But so did having something really good, not just good enough. Lucy thought so, anyway.
They rode the bus back toward the apartment Crosstime Traffic had got for her family. It was bigger than the one the Woos had had in Lucy's San Francisco. It had a TV and a computer and a fasarta and all the other things people in the home timeline took for granted. In Lucy's alternate, even the richest German noble couldn't have had most of them.
The apartment wasn't far from the western edge of this San Francisco's Chinatown. Lucy had been there a couple of times. It amazed and fascinated her. It was so much more Chinese than the one she'd grown up in. In her San Francisco, Chinese was a secret language only the Triads and a few other people remembered. Here, people spoke it on the street. There was a Chinese-language newspaper. There was even a Chinese-language TV station in this San Francisco, with most of the shows in Mandarin and some in Cantonese.
Lucy wasn't alone in being of Chinese blood but speaking only English. That came as a relief. But here she found herself wanting to learn some Chinese, too. In her alternate, that hadn't even crossed her mind.
Paul got off the bus with her and walked her to the apartment. He stayed on the sidewalk when she started up the stairs. She turned back to him from about halfway up. "Thanks ... for everything," she said. "I had a terrific time today."