She made up her mind. "Okay, Justin. I'll see what happens, that's all. I hope you're not just trying to impress me or something. If you're blowing smoke on this, I never want to have anything to do with you any more. You hear me?"
"I hear you," he said soberly.
"All right, then." Without giving him a chance to answer, she turned and walked out of the shop and started back to the hotel. When she went past the stinking, swollen body in the street, she was reminded you didn't need a plague to die. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time could do the job every bit as well.
As soon as the door closed behind Beckie, both Justin's mother and Mr. Brooks turned on him. "What do you think you can do for her grandmother?" Mom asked, at the same time as Mr. Brooks was saying, "What do you think you're going to do for the old bat?" The only difference between them was that Mr. Brooks knew Mrs. Bentley while Justin's mom didn't.
"I don't know," he admitted. "If I talk with people back in the home timeline, maybe I'll come up with something. I do want to try."
"Because you're sweet on Beckie, that's why," Mr. Brooks said.
"Are you?" Justin's mother demanded.
Justin didn't like getting yelled at in stereo any more than anyone else would have. He couldn't do anything about it here. "Some," he said, because Mr. Brooks would have made him out to be a liar if he tried to deny it. But he went on, "Seems only fair we try to help her grandmother, though. She might have picked up the disease from one of us."
"Not likely, not when the immunity shots seem to be working," Mr. Brooks said.
"You didn't let me finish!" Justin said. Mr. Brooks blinked. Justin didn't talk back a whole lot. Most of the time, he was on the easygoing side. That seemed to make him more effective when he did lose it. He went on, "Or she might have caught it— probably did catch it—when she was coming down to Charleston with you. Any way you look at it, it's our fault. We ought to fix it if we can."
"Would you say the same thing if you didn't like this girl?" his mother asked.
"I hope so," Justin answered.
Mr. Brooks started to laugh. Justin stared at him. So did his mom. "Let him try, Cyndi," the coin and stamp dealer said. "Sometimes, if you're eighteen or so, you've got to lower your head and charge. If he can talk the people in the home timeline into doing something about it, more power to him. And if he can't—well, he gave it his best shot, and he won't be mad at us for stopping him."
"It won't work," Justin's mother said.
"I don't think it will, either." Mr. Brooks talked as if Justin weren't there, which annoyed him. But they did let him try, and that was all that really mattered.
He went down to a room in the basement he had to enter through a palm lock. The wrong prints would have immovably locked the door and turned on self-destruct switches behind it. He had some of the right ones.
Inside, everything came from the home timeline: plastic chairs, desk, PowerBook. Any kind of communication between alternates was hard. You needed enormous bandwidth to send even old-fashioned e-mail. And Justin did exactly that.
If you have a cure for the disease Ohio has turned loose on Virginia ready, please send some doses as soon as you can, he typed.
He waited. And he waited. And he waited some more. After what seemed like forever but was nine minutes by the clock on the wall (also from the home timeline, even if local ones were just as good), he got an answer. Who is ill, and how serious is it? wrote the person on the other end of the line.
It's pretty serious, Justin answered. An old lady we stayed with in Elizabeth is sick now. She came to Charleston with Mr. Brooks. She probably caught the disease riding in the car with him. Only fair for us to help out if we can.
Another pause. The message crossed the timelines in an instant. Figuring out what to do about it—figuring out whether to do anything—took longer. After another eternity, this one of eleven minutes, a reply appeared on the PowerBook's screen. Regret that the possibility of spreading disease across the alternates makes this impossible.
Justin said something that had to do with manure. He'd had plenty of time to think about this, and he wasn't going to take no lying down. You've got to have a quarantine center on some alternate with no people in it, he wrote. Send the transposition chamber there and decontaminate it before you use it again.
There is a quarantine center, admitted whoever it was back in the home timeline. But there is no opening for a transposition chamber at what matches your location. The chamber cannot materialize inside solid ground, not without an explosion.
He talked about fertilizer some more. He already knew a chamber couldn't come out inside of something solid. The boom that followed if it tried wouldn't be small. How far from here is the closest digging equipment? he asked. If the person back in the home timeline said it was five hundred kilometers away, he knew he'd have to give up.
Another pause followed. He had a pretty good idea of what was going on this time. The person back in the home timeline was checking the answer to his question. As time stretched, Justin started to suspect that person was also checking to see whether to tell him the truth.
About 500 meters away, Justin knew it was crazy to think the response appeared on the screen reluctantly, but it felt that way to him. He had to read it twice to be sure no kilo lay in front of meters. When he was, he whooped and did a war dance in the bare little room.
They couldn't see the war dance back in the home timeline. So the quarantine alternate did have some kind of installation in what corresponded to Charleston, did it? He ran back to the laptop and wrote, Then what are you waiting for?
Authorization of the effort and expense. The answer came as a dash of cold water. It reminded him he was working for a big corporation. The people who ran Crosstime Traffic worried about right and wrong only as much as they had to. They thought about cost and trouble first.
We would be fixing a problem we helped cause, Justin typed. We're not supposed to interfere here. Curing Mrs. Bentley would be fixing our interference.
And would be an interference of its own, came the coldblooded reply. It was followed by, Wait. I'll get back to you.
Justin wondered where the person back in the home timeline thought he would go. Out of the basement here? Not likely! He wanted that answer. And he wanted it to be what he wanted it to be. He tried to sort that out inside his head. He didn't have much luck, but he knew what he meant.
He waited, and kept on waiting. This time, a good half-hour went by before new words appeared on the PowerBook's screen. Okay, it said. They're digging. As soon as the GPS says they're in just the right place, we'll send a transposition chamber from the home timeline to you. Go in, take what you find inside, and get out. The chamber will head for the quarantine alternate. Don't hang around, or you'll go with it. Do you understand?
Oh, yes. I understand, Justin wrote. Thank you!
Don't thank me. It wasn't my idea, and I don't think it's a good one, said the person on the other end of the connection. But they're going to do it anyway. This Mrs. Bentley will let them make sure the antiviral is as good as they think it is, and one more connection to the quarantine alternate may come in handy. Out. The dismissal looked very final.
He didn't care how it looked. He punched his fist in the air and shouted, "Yes!" The secret basement room echoed with it. He had wrestled with the powers that be, and had prevailed.
He went back upstairs, first carefully closing the door behind him. As soon as he walked into the shop, his mother started, "Justin, honey, I'm sorry they wouldn't give you. . . ." Then she got a look at his face. She stared. "They didn't?" Behind his spectacle lenses, Mr. Brooks' eyes were enormous, too.