Mr. Brooks knocked on the Snodgrasses' door. Mr. Snod-grass opened it a moment later. "You didn't need to do that," he said when he saw the flowers.
"I think I did," Mr. Brooks said. "And whether I needed to or not, I wanted to. How's she doing? Have you heard?"
"Well, that's right kind of you. Come on in." Ted Snodgrass stepped aside to make room. He didn't seem to want to answer Mr. Brooks' question, but finally he did: "I haven't heard anything really bad. They've got her in intensive care in Parkers-burg, and they're doing everything they know how to do. Heaven only knows how I'm going to pay for it all, but I'll worry about that later. We'll see what the insurance covers."
Virginia didn't have government-paid health coverage, the way the U.S.A. in the home timeline did. You bought insurance yourself. If you couldn't afford to, you paid up front when you got sick. If you couldn't afford to do that, you went in hock up to your eyebrows—or you stayed away from doctors. To Justin, that wasn't a medical system. It was more like a bad joke.
Several other bouquets already perfumed the living room. Neighbors, Justin thought. He lived in a suburb in northern Virginia in the home timeline. If someone in his family got sick, the neighbors might not even know about it. This alternate had good points as well as bad.
Beckie came into the front room. "How are you?" Justin asked her.
"Worried," she said, which was a straight answer. "You?"
"Yeah, me, too. Still okay so far, though." As he had once before, Justin knocked on his head, as if to knock on wood. He had more confidence in the home timeline's immunity shots than in this alternate's gamma globulin, but he wasn't quite sure he ought to. "Shall we go out back and talk?" he asked.
"Sure. Why not?" she said.
The back yard wasn't likely to be bugged. Of course, if his own clothes were ... He didn't think that was likely, either, but Mr. Brooks was right to worry. You never could tell. They grabbed a couple of fizzes from the refrigerator and went out. Justin laughed. "Maybe we should have stayed inside after all. It sure is nicer with the air conditioning."
"You grew up in Virginia, and you say that? The humidity here drives me nuts," Beckie said. "But out here we won't have Gran hovering around trying to listen to everything we say."
He laughed again. She wasn't worried about bugging—she was worried about being bugged. "Your grandmother seems nice enough," he said. He'd done that before, too. You had to stay polite about other people's relatives.
The people whose relatives they were didn't have to stay polite. That was part of what made having relatives fun. Beckie sure didn't bother. "Only goes to show you don't know her very well," she said. "She's . . ." She stopped, shaking her head.
"That bad?" Justin was thinking of an aunt of his who drank too much every once in a while. When she did, she liked to tell stories—endless stories—about him as a little boy. That made him awfully glad to have her around.
"Worse," Beckie said without the least hesitation. "Back home, I could put up with her—sort of, anyhow—because we could get away from each other. But we've been in each other's pockets ever since this miserable trip started, and I don't think I'm going to want to have much to do with her for the rest of my life. All she ever does is complain and blame other people. Nothing's ever her fault. If you don't believe me, just ask her."
Justin laughed. Then he realized Beckie wasn't kidding, not even a little bit. "I'm glad you made the trip," he said.
"/'to not!" she exclaimed. "I wish I were in California, thirty-five hundred kilometers away from bombs and missiles and uprisings and diseases and everything else."
"Oh," Justin said in a very small voice. He'd wanted to say he was glad she'd come to Virginia because he wouldn't have met her if she hadn't. That would have made a pretty speech. But it was also pretty selfish when you got right down to it, which he hadn't. Coming to Virginia made it a lot more likely that she would get killed. Had he thought about that before he stuck his foot in his mouth? No, not even a little bit.
She raised an eyebrow. He had the bad feeling she knew exactly what he was thinking. "I like you," she said. "Don't get me wrong. As long as I'm stuck here, it's nice that I've made a friend. But I'd still rather be home. If that hurts your feelings, I'm sorry."
"It's okay," he said, which was . . . half true, anyway. "I understand how you feel." He wasn't lying there. He wished he'd thought faster.
She changed the subject on him: "Remember how I was talking about the old United States a while ago?"
"Uh-huh." Justin wasn't likely to forget that, or how much it had scared him.
"If they hadn't fallen apart, this kind of stuff couldn't happen," she said. "States wouldn't go to war with each other whenever they felt like it, because there'd be something bigger to stop them."
She was right—if you ignored the Civil War. But this was one of those times when being right did no good at all. "You're only about three hundred years too late to worry about it now," he pointed out.
"I know." She nodded sadly. "Still, they should have been able to do something back then. Have you ever written a story or drawn a picture where you know exactly how you want it to turn out—you've got this image inside your head—but what you end up with isn't like that because you just aren't good enough to make it come out right?"
"Oh, sure." Justin nodded, too. "Who hasn't?"
"That's what the United States reminds me of," Beckie said.
"It was a good idea—they were a good idea?—but the people in charge didn't know how to put them together so they'd stick. It's too bad."
"I guess." Justin was lucky enough to come from a timeline where the Constitution took care of the problems with the Articles of Confederation. Till coming here, he took that for granted. He didn't now.
Beckie sighed. "But you're right—it's too late now. Nothing will make any of the states give up power to some bigger government. And so we'll have lots of stupid little wars. I just hope we don't have any big ones."
"Me, too," Justin said. "How many states have atomic bombs and missiles these days?"
"Most of them," Beckie said, which was answer enough.
"Well, we haven't blown ourselves up yet. They haven't blown themselves up in Europe yet, either," Justin said. "They may be luckier over there than we are, because they've come closer." This was an alternate where people talked about great powers, not superpowers. There were no superpowers here. But there were plenty of great powers, powers with bombs and missiles and know-how enough to ruin anyone who pushed them too far. Britain, France, Prussia, and Italy in Europe, Russia and Ukraine farther east, India, two or three Chinese states, Japan, California, Texas, New York, Brazil, Argentina, Chile . . . Nobody with any sense messed with them. Virginia and Ohio were down in the second rank. They could devastate each other, but couldn't really stand up against, say, Britain or California.
Alliances ran around this alternate like fault lines. Every so often, somebody shifted from one camp to another. When that happened, it was like an earthquake. This alternate had known about nuclear weapons almost as long as the home timeline.
They'd been used a few times here, as they had there. But the Big One, the nuclear exchange with everyone throwing everything at everyone else, hadn't happened either place. Maybe that was luck. Maybe it was simply terror.
There were alternates where the missiles did fly. Crosstime Traffic didn't operate in many of them. What was the point? Crosstime Traffic needed to trade to stay in business, and those shattered alternates didn't have much worth trading. If this one blew itself to hell and gone, Crosstime Traffic would pull out of here, too. Nobody would have to worry about whether this alternate discovered crosstime travel on its own, not any more.