The ambulance screeched to a stop in front of the house. All up and down Prunty, people would be coming out to stare at it. Beckie was as sure of that as if she could see them herself. What else did they have to do for excitement? And, like her, they had something real to worry about.
Mr. Snodgrass let the paramedics into the house. They were dressed in what looked like spacesuits. A shame space travel never quite panned out, Beckie thought. Satellites that relayed signals and kept an eye on the weather came in handy. Probes had flown all across the Solar System and men had gone to the moon and Mars. But there didn't seem to be much room for people anywhere but Earth.
All that went through Beckie's mind in less than a second. The lead paramedic hurried over to Mrs. Snodgrass, who'd got visibly sicker while everybody waited for the ambulance. "How do you feel, ma'am?" he asked. Coming from behind his respirator, his voice sounded all ghostly.
"Cold," she answered. "Cold and kind of purple. I mean ... I don't know what I mean." Beckie shivered. That didn't sound good.
The paramedic stuck a thermometer tip in Mrs. Snodgrass' ear. "What's her temperature?" her husband asked anxiously.
"It's just over 104, sir," the paramedic said. Beckie translated that into the Celsius degrees she was used to. Over forty! That was a high fever. The man went on, "We'll have to take her in." He turned to his partner. "Give these people shots, George."
"Right," George said.
"What kind of shots?" Mr. Snodgrass said.
"Gamma globulin, made from the blood serum of people who've had this thing," the paramedic answered. "We don't know how much good it will do, but it won't hurt you. And you've sure as the devil been exposed."
Mr. Snodgrass took his shot without a word. So did Beckie, but it wasn't easy—she didn't like needles, not even a little bit. Gran kicked up a fuss. Beckie might have known she would— she kicked up a fuss about everything. "They say gramma glo-fulin isn't good for you," she squawked. Beckie was sure she'd never heard of gamma globulin in her life before—if she had, she would have pronounced it better. But her mysterious they had something to say about everything.
"Look here, ma'am—if you want to get sick, that's your business," George said. "But if you get sick and spread it to other people like this pretty little girl here"—he pointed at Beckie with a gloved hand—"that's Virginia's business. So I'm going to give you this shot no matter what. It's the best hope for staying well you've got."
"They say—" Gran broke off with a yip, because the paramedic did what he'd said he would do. She let him put alcohol on the spot where he'd stuck her. If looks could have killed, though, George would have fallen over on the floor.
Instead, he and his partner put Mrs. Snodgrass on a stretcher and carried her out. The ambulance shrilled away. Gran watched avidly till it turned the corner on State Route 14 and disappeared. Other people's catastrophes were meat and drink to her.
Mr. Snodgrass watched, too, but not the same way. All at once, he looked shrunken and ancient. He'd been spry enough to seem much younger than his years. He suddenly didn't. They'd crashed down on him like a landslide, and his shoulders slumped under the weight of them. "Are you all right?" Beckie asked softly.
He shook himself like a man coming out of cold water. Every bit of his attention had been with the ambulance. Now he had to call himself back to the real world, and it wasn't easy for him. "Am I all right?" He might have been asking himself the same question. After some serious thought, he shook his head. "Well, now that you mention it, no. Ethel and me, we haven't spent more than a handful of nights apart the past forty-five years. It'll be powerful strange, lying down tonight and trying to sleep without her lying there next to me."
"I'm sorry," Beckie said. "I'm sorry about everything."
"I only wish I could have gone with her, but they weren't about to let me," he said. "I guess they worried I might come down with it myself. Like I care! If she's not with me, what difference does it make whether I live or die? But I suppose I might pass it on to other folks if I come down sick, and that wouldn't be right."
How am I supposed to answer him? Beckie wondered. She couldn't see any way at all. The ambulance siren faded into silence. Mr. Snodgrass still seemed old.
"Do you think we ought to be doing this?" Justin asked as he and Mr. Brooks walked toward the Snodgrasses' house. Then he answered his own question: "Well, why not? Way things are, it's about even money who's exposing whom to what."
Randolph Brooks nodded. "That's how I look at it, too. What with Irma breathing in our faces every day for who knows how long, we're not taking any big chances ourselves. And everybody there has already been up close to the virus. Besides, Ted Snodgrass is a friend of mine. These are the least I can do." He hefted the flowers he was carrying.
Justin nodded. Before coming to Elizabeth, he'd wondered if people from the home timeline really could make friends with the locals. Now that he'd got to know Beckie, he saw they could. People were people, no matter where they came from. And this alternate's breakpoint was only a little more than three hundred years old. Folks here still had a lot in common with those from his America.
The weather had everything in common with his America's. It was hot and humid. Walking just the few blocks from the motel to the house on Prunty made sweat stand out on his face and made his shirt stick to him as if it were glued to his hide. He wondered how people had lived, he wondered how they'd worked, before air-conditioning was invented. A lot of them hadn't, or not for very long—doing hard labor in weather like this really could lay you low.
That was one of the reasons the white colonists imported African slaves into the South. They thought the Negroes could stand the climate better than they could themselves—and if the Negroes were doing the hard work in the fields, they wouldn't have to. If you thought of people as chattels, as property of the same sort as cattle or sheep, it made good logical sense.
If.
African Americans weren't property any more in this alternate, of course. Even in the states that tried hardest to keep them as slaves, they'd been legally free for two centuries now. But the difference between legally free and legally equal—let alone socially equal—made a gulf as wide as the Grand Canyon. Blacks hadn't been able to cross it anywhere here— except in Mississippi, where they'd put whites on the wrong side of it. People here had a lot in common with those from his America, yes . . . but not enough.
"No wonder Charlie Clark carried a gun," Justin muttered.
"No wonder at all—but don't say that out loud," Mr. Brooks replied.
"Don't say this out loud. Don't say that out loud." Justin knew he was losing his temper, but couldn't seem to help it. "Sure is a wonderful place where we're staying. Oh, yeah."
"Do you want the VBI men knocking on our door again?" the coin and stamp dealer asked. "They will, if you make people in Elizabeth suspicious of you. And if they think you've got anything to do with a Negro uprising, all the gloves come off. Can you blame them for thinking like that?"
You bet I can. Justin started to say it, but a gesture from Mr. Brooks made him hold his tongue. The older man mouthed one word. Bugs. Was somebody aiming a parabolic mike at them right now? Had the VBI men planted tiny microphones in their hotel room? In the Snodgrasses' home? In their pockets? It could happen in the home timeline. Here? The technology here wasn't as good, but was it good enough? Justin wouldn't have been surprised.
So Mr. Brooks was talking as if other people were listening. And Justin knew he had to do the same—for now, anyway. "No, of course not," he said. "An uprising would be terrible." That was true .. . from a white Virginian's point of view. Justin's real opinion was better left unsaid if anyone here was listening.