"How often do movies have things straight?" Mr. Snodgrass asked, which was a good question. The answer was, Not very often. He went on, "If that's so, I'm not surprised we've never seen it here. The courts wouldn't let in a film that showed somebody shooting at a consul or whatever Adams called himself—too likely to give folks nasty ideas, and they get too many already as is."
In some states, you could print anything you wanted or say whatever you pleased in movies or on TV or on the radio or online. In others, the censors would land on you with both feet if you tried. Virginia was one of those. What would happen to somebody here who tried to say on the air that Negroes ought to have equal rights? Nothing good—Beckie was sure of that.
Where you couldn't publish different ideas, almost everybody had the same ones. But Justin didn't. Beckie reminded herself of that. He was nervous about admitting it, but he didn't. He seemed embarrassed to come from this state at all.
Beckie took a last look at the United States quarter dollar. If you had one government stretching from coast to coast, you wouldn't need to be embarrassed about where you came from. Maybe a state like that would have fought wars with Quebec and Ontario and Monterrey, but would it have fought as many wars as the real North America had seen? Beckie didn't think so.
"Not much point in driving," Mr. Brooks said. "It's only a few blocks. Come on—the walk will do you good."
"What if somebody knocks us over the head and steals your coins?" Justin asked.
"I'm a big boy now. I can take care of myself. Besides, even if I can't, everybody here knows everybody else. Everyone would know who did it as soon as it happened."
"But you said before that we're not from here, so would they tell?"
"Well, I hope they're starting to get used to us. I don't intend to get them mad or anything. I'm not going to rip off Ted Snod-grass, and I don't expect you to bang the drum for Negro rights where you'll tick folks here off." Mr. Brooks eyed Justin over his glasses. "What you say to the young lady from California . . . Well, be careful about that, too, okay?"
Justin's ears heated. "Okay. I'll try, anyhow."
"I suppose that'll do." Mr. Brooks grinned, which took a lot of tension out of the air. "Come on. Let's go."
As they walked down to Prunty, they passed three or four people out walking dogs or just walking for exercise. Everyone said hello. Nobody tried to knock the strangers from the big city over the head. Justin felt foolish. He felt even more foolish when one of the dogs licked his hand as he was petting it. "01-lie right likes you," said the woman who had the mutt on the leash.
"Uh, I guess he does," Justin answered. Ollie's frantically wagging tail said it was a good guess. So did the dog spit on Justin's fingers.
Mr. Snodgrass let them in when Mr. Brooks rang the bell.
"Mornin', gents," he said. "I've got the coffee on, and there's fizzes in the icebox if you don't care for that."
"I'll have a fizz, thanks," said Justin, who wasn't much of a coffee drinker.
"I'll get it for you," Ted Snodgrass said. Beckie walked into the front room then. Mr. Snodgrass chuckled. "No, I'll let the spry young legs do the job. Rebecca, seems like Mr. Monroe here is perishin' of thirst. You suppose you might lend him a hand?"
"Well, I know you've got a garden hose . . ." Beckie said. Mr. Snodgrass snorted.
"Helpful," Justin said.
"That's me," Beckie agreed. She went into the kitchen and came back with two fizzes.
"Thanks," Justin said when she handed him one. Mr. Snodgrass poured coffee for Mr. Brooks. They started talking about coins. Beckie raised an eyebrow. Justin nodded. The two of them went out into the back yard. "Where's your grandmother?" Justin asked.
"She and Mrs. Snodgrass went down to Palestine to shop," Beckie answered.
"You didn't want to go along?" he said.
She shook her head. "Nope. All they'll want to look at is clothes for old ladies, and that's so exciting I can't stand it." She yawned. Justin laughed. She went on, "Besides, the less I have to do with Gran, the happier I am, and you can take that to the bank. I've been traveling with her for seventy-four days now, and that's about seventy-five too many."
"Oh," Justin said, which seemed safe enough.
Beckie nodded as if he'd said something more. "Yeah, that's about the size of it," she said. "I don't think I'll ever get along with Gran again. I mean, I can still put up with her and everything, but that's not the same as liking her. She's . . . sour."
Justin didn't say anything this time. People could talk about their own relatives as if they were swindlers and bank robbers and grouches. If anybody else said the smallest bad thing about the same people, though, they'd rise up like tigers in their defense. Even if Justin thought he was right—no, especially if he thought she was right—keeping quiet about it looked like a good idea.
"Ever wonder how things might have been?" Beckie asked out of the blue.
"Huh?" Justin said. Brilliant, he thought. Now she won't think you're an idiot. Now she'll be sure of it.
But she wasn't—or it didn't show if she was, which was good enough. "If things were different," she said again.
"What kind of things?" Justin asked. At least that was a better question.
"All kinds of things," Beckie answered. "Things from way back when. Last night, Mr. Snodgrass showed me a coin from the United States. I asked him to, because I was thinking about that stuff."
"Were you?" Justin said. What he was thinking now was, Uh-oh. It worried him a lot more than Huh? had.
Beckie nodded seriously. "I sure was. I wondered what it would have been like if all of this were one state—one country, I guess I mean—and not a whole bunch of them." She waved her arms to show all of this meant everything from sea to shining sea. Except it didn't mean exactly that here, because nobody ever wrote "America the Beautiful" in this alternate. It came along in 1893, and by then this North America was chopped into more pieces than the chicken in a Chinese chicken salad.
"I don't see how that could have happened," he said—a lie he had to tell. In the home timeline, it had happened. The big states and the little ones compromised, and they all agreed to the Constitution, and it worked. But he couldn't let on that he knew anything about that. He'd already talked too much once.
Beckie didn't point her finger at him and go, Oh, yes, you do! She couldn't know he didn't belong in this alternate. All she knew was that he made kind of a peculiar Virginian. And even Virginians were entitled to be peculiar. It was a free state—as long as you weren't an African American, and as long as you didn't push it too hard.
Instead of pointing a finger, Beckie said, "Mr. Snodgrass told me the same thing. I suppose he's right—I suppose you're right, too. It's interesting to think about, though, isn't it? What might have been, I mean."
"Sure," Justin said. "There isn't any way to tell for sure what would have happened after that, though." He knew how true that was, where Beckie didn't. One alternate where the South won the Civil War had racial problems that made the ones here look like a walk in the park. Another alternate U.S.A. was a nasty tyranny that ran most of its world because it could squash anybody else. Yet another, in a world where the Germans won World War I and all the wars afterwards, remained under occupation by the Kaiser's soldiers even now. Endless possibilities . . .
Beckie, who didn't know about any of those alternates or the home timeline, was thinking along different lines. "Not being able to know makes it more interesting, not less. It isn't like some math problem in school, where there's only one right answer. You can just talk about it and see how it might have gone this way, or that one, or even the other one."
Or it might have gone all those different ways—only you'd need a transposition chamber to see how they worked out. Justin couldn't talk about that, either. He was just glad his face didn't give him away. For all practical purposes, Beckie had figured out the crosstime secret.