"Good. That's what you're supposed to do," he answered. "I'll see you again before too long." With an awkward little half-wave, he headed back toward the bus stop.
"Yes. You will." Lucy nodded. Except for her family, Paul was the only person she saw here who knew about the alternate where she'd grown up. A whole world, and it was gone forever. Part of her missed it, the part that misses an old house even after you've moved into a better one. Most ways, this was a better world—but it wasn't the one she was used to.
She slid the security cardkey into the lock in the apartment building's front door. A light flashed green. She turned the knob. The door opened. She closed it behind her. The card was just a flat piece of plastic. She wondered how the lock knew it was supposed to go in there.
Electronics, she thought. That meant a lot more here than it did in her alternate. Would she ever catch up with people who were born here and had had all these things their whole lives? She sometimes doubted it. Those were the times she got homesick. That other San Francisco might not have been so much, but she'd belonged there. It was hers. Here, she felt like a stranger, a tourist. But she wasn't going home again.
She didn't have to walk upstairs, the way she would have in her old apartment building. The elevator here was fast and silent as a dream. When she walked down the hall to her apartment, the carpeting muffled her steps. The cardkey that had let her into the building also let her into the apartment. It wouldn't let her into any of the others, though—she'd experimented. How did it know which was which?
Michael was playing a game on the TV screen. Lucy had never imagined such a thing, but her little brother took to it like a duck to water. The game involved killing dragons and the evil wizards who rode on them. Had dragons been real, they would have been extinct by the time Michael got done slaughtering them.
He's the one who'll do best here, Lucy thought suddenly. He has the fewest things to unlearn.
Father sat in a chair with his back to the chaos on the television set. He looked up from the book on his lap and managed a smile for Lucy. "How was your day?"
"It was great. We went to the zoo. It's a lot fancier—it's a lot cleaner—than the one in our San Francisco," she answered. "And the bus went through the Sunset District on the way there and back. It really is a nice place here." She pointed to the book. "What are you reading?"
"Well, it says it's a basic guide to repairing small appliances." Father's face was unhappy. "I'm following about one word in three. I think I need something more basic than basic."
"They've talked about classes for you," Lucy said. 'They aren't born knowing this stuff here. If they can learn it, you can, too."
"Maybe. I hope so. But they've got a forty-year head start on me," her father said.
"It'll be all right," Lucy said stoutly. "Nobody expects you to understand everything all at once."
He looked more unhappy yet. "No, I suppose not. But / expected to. I've been fixing small appliances since I was younger than Michael is. How much more was there for me to know?" His laugh was harsh. "Well, I've found out. I don't want to be useless here, or on charity. I want to earn my keep." He slammed the book shut with a noise like a gunshot. "Right now, I don't know if I ever can. I just don't know."
Behind him, Michael whooped, "Die, villain!" He had no worries. Lucy wished she could say the same.
Ignoring her little brother as best she could, she said, "You'll do it, Father." She meant it—she had confidence in him. "We'll all do it, sooner or later. Things are new here, that's all. We haven't been here very long. We can learn."
"Maybe. I hope so." Her father didn't sound sure. That worried her. But this new San Francisco had to be harder for him to get used to than it was for her, just as it was harder for her than for Michael. He'd had longer to become a part of the San Francisco they'd left behind.
So had Mother, come to that. But she didn't seem to be having too bad a time. She didn't feel the need to know why things worked, the way Father did. She just needed to know how they worked, and she was fine. When Lucy walked into the kitchen to see if she needed a hand, she found her chopping green onions in the food processor and heating something in the microwave. Till she came here, she'd never seen a food processor or a microwave. That didn't mean she couldn't figure out what they were good for.
"Want any help?" Lucy asked her.
"Not me." Her mother shook her head. "I'm doing fine." She paused. "I heard what you and your father were talking about in there. I think you're right. I think we'll all do fine after a while."
The telephone rang. There were telephones in the San Francisco Lucy had left, but there hadn't been one in the Woos' apartment there. In this San Francisco, phones were everywhere, either in buildings or carried around. Wherever you went, you heard snatches of other people's conversations. Paul carried a telephone. He'd got a couple of calls while they were at the zoo. Lucy wasn't sure she liked that. The phone here rang again. "I'll get it," she said, and dashed off to do just that. "Hello? . . . Oh, Paul. Hello!" Maybe carrying a phone around wasn't so bad after all.
When Sammy Wong told Paul he'd never work for Crosstime Traffic again, Paul had done his best to convince himself it didn't matter. The way his heart thudded when he and his father walked into the Crosstime Traffic San Francisco office said he'd lied to himself. He wanted to go out to the alternates again. He wanted to make a career of it. If he couldn't, if he was stuck in the home timeline . .. That would be pretty hard to take.
His father looked nervous, too, though he tried to hide it. Dad had been going out to the alternates for years. What would he do if his bosses said he couldn't any more?
Paul sighed. When I told Lucy how good the home timeline was, this is the stuff I didn't talk about. But it's here. It's real.
All the security procedures were real, too. They had to show their IDs. They had to get their retinas and their fingerprints scanned. They went through metal and explosives and biohaz-ard detectors. Terrorists were also real. They liked to strike Crosstime Traffic operations. Why not? The company was big and rich. They'd hit Romania not so long before. They could hit the USA, too.
"Go ahead," a guard said after everything checked out okay. "Your action hearing is set for room 582." He didn't call it a disciplinary hearing, but that was what it was.
A board of three women and two men sat waiting for Paul and his father. The chairwoman said, "These proceedings will be videorecorded for the archives and for further review if needed. Do you understand and agree?" She sounded bored. How many times had she said the same thing?
Dad nodded. Paul said, "Yes."
A man with a white handlebar mustache said, "Summarize the events in San Francisco in alternate 3477 from the time of your arrival there to the time of your departure. Keep your summary focused on the problems you ran into."
"Be brief," the chairwoman added.
Paul and his father looked at each other. Paul said, "The biggest problem we had was that two sets of locals were already much too curious about Curious Notions."
"No," Dad said. "The biggest problem was that we didn't know they were till too late."
"For whatever it may be worth to you, we have had some things to say to the person who operated the shop before you took it over," the chairwoman said.
So Elliott did get in trouble, Paul thought. He couldn't feel too sorry for Elliott. If the other man had warned Dad and him . . . Well, how much would have been different? Some, maybe.
"We still need to know what you did, though, and why," said the man with the white mustache. He was plainly number two on the board. "We need to know how the locals closed down the shop, why you failed to block that, and what you told them while they held you."