“Sure, but that's not the only reason why the rules are there. They keep people from getting hurt, too,” Mom said. “No matter how you slice it, we're way different from people in the alternates, especially in low-tech ones like this. But if you can be friendly without…” Her mother paused, looking for the right words.
“Without acting like a floozy?” Liz suggested, acid in her voice.
Her mother made a face much like the one she'd pulled a moment before, but then nodded. “That's close enough. If you can, it might make things easier all the way around.”
“As long as you're not asking me to be easy,” Liz said.
“No, no, no. No, even.” Mom made pushing-away motions. “I want you to be able to live with yourself and to live in a world with Dan in it. Both at the same time, if you can.”
“That'd be good,” Liz said.
Her mother fed some of the roasted coffee beans into an old-fashioned-and very old-coffee grinder, all brass and wood and glass. In the home timeline, it would have been a fancy antique on a shelf. It still worked for a living here. Mom turned the crank. Freshly ground coffee started to fill the hopper. A wonderful aroma wafted through the air. Liz couldn't help smiling as she sniffed. What a shame coffee smelled so much better than it tasted! She thought so, anyhow. Her folks guzzled the stuff.
“Get me a canister, would you?” Mom said, still cranking.
“Sure.” Liz pulled a small one off the shelf. It was yellow plastic. Most of the decal of a green and red hen still survived to show which side was the front. Liz thought it was ugly. Most people from the home timeline would have. She would have bet that most people from the 1960s would have, too.
But nobody in this alternate could make plastic any more. Here, the ugly little canister was a symbol of better days. All the locals who saw it exclaimed over it. And it had an airtight lid. It would keep the ground coffee fresh.
“There we go.” Mom put the coffee in, then made sure the lid was on the way it should be. “Now your father and I can pry our eyes open in the morning.”
“I wish I could,” Liz said. In the home timeline, she got her caffeine from Cokes and chocolate. Cokes and other sodas survived here only as legends. Once in a blue moon, chocolate came up from the south, but it was much rarer and more expensive than coffee. And, once in a blue moon, a CARE package from the home timeline included real Cokes. Those had to stay-and be drunk-in a concealed basement storeroom. It lay behind reinforced concrete and had a passworded voice lock the locals weren't likely to figure out. So she mostly stayed decaffeinated in this alternate. When she had to have a jolt, she put up with coffee's bitterness.
“I don't know why you don't like coffee better,” her mother said. Liz stopped listening. Mom had been telling her that since she was twelve years old and first started trying to drink the nasty brew. What was the point of I don't know why you! The only answer was, Because I don't, that's why. Liz had said it again and again. It didn't seem to help, because Mom didn't want to hear it.
A lot of the time, Dad would be sensible when Mom wasn't. Not here. He liked coffee, too, and couldn't see why other people didn't. Where coffee was concerned, Liz couldn't win.
(And sometimes Mom could be sensible where Dad wasn't. Anything that had to do with boys… Dad wasn't as bad as some of her friends' parents, but he wasn't good, either-not even close. Liz hadn't said much about Dan to him. She worried what he would do if she did.)
“It'll be okay, Liz.” Her mother might have picked her fretting right out of her head. She wondered if somebody'd hooked up a news crawl above her eyes and connected it to her brain while she wasn't looking.
“Well, I hope so.” She let it go at that.
Guard duty in front of the Mendozas ' didn't last as long as Dan wished it would have. Pretty soon, things in Westwood Village settled down. The Westsiders started getting used to the idea that King Zev 's men were there to stay. And the Valley soldiers stopped carrying off everything that wasn't nailed down.
A lot of men went farther south, to hold the Santa Monica Freeway line against any Westside counterattacks. Maybe they'd push past the old freeway themselves. That would be something! Captain Kevin 's company stayed behind in West-wood, though. Somebody had to remind the locals that they'd changed hands.
One Valley soldier got knocked over the head, and nobody owned up to it. Not long after that, five Westsiders were hanged from lampposts. (A lot of the posts still stood, as they did in the Valley, but their lamps hadn't shone since the Old Time.) “Next time, it will be ten,” Lieutenant Hank warned. “You can't play those games with us, not after your soldiers lost.”
Nobody bushwhacked any more Valley soldiers.
Dan was glad of that. He didn't want to walk his patrols always looking over his shoulder, wondering if some Westsider with a brick or a knife was sneaking up behind him. He was starting to realize he didn't make a great soldier. Oh, he could do the job. But he liked people too well-he didn't want to hurt anybody. Some of the men in his company seemed to think the Westsiders had it coming just because they were Westsiders. Dan didn't feel that way.
Liz, for instance…
He got assigned to patrol the UCLA campus because he could read a map and wouldn't get lost. UCLA had a reputation even up in the Valley. It was supposed to be a place where Old Time knowledge still lived. Not everybody liked that-too many people remembered what Old Time knowledge had done to the world.
But when you thought about cars and planes and light that made nighttime bright as day and medicines that made people healthy all the time and all the other lost marvels, hadn't there been at least as much good as bad in those days? Dan thought so.
And then he stopped thinking about stuff that would never be anything but pictures in books with yellowing pages. (Even the pictures were marvelous. He knew what photographs were, but hardly anyone could take them anymore.) There was Liz, walking south from the direction of the tall building that looked like a waffle on its side.
He waved. “Hi! What are you doing here?”
“I was in the library.” She pointed toward the lower, plainer building to the left and in back of the big waffle.
“What were you doing there?”
“Reading things. What do you think I'd be doing in a library, fishing?”
Dan 's ears heated. He'd got zinged, and he knew it. “What were you reading about?” he asked, figuring that was safe enough.
When Liz paused before she answered, he wondered if he was right. What was she doing there? Looking for ways to make Valley soldiers' uniforms catch fire or something of that sort? Dan didn't think anyone could do anything like that, but he wasn't sure. He also wasn't sure where science stopped and magic started, or which worked better. Few people he knew were.
After that hesitation, Liz said, “I was trying to find out why the Fire fell from the sky.”
“The Russians did it,” Dan said automatically. That was one of the first lessons you learned in school. He'd never seen a live Russian. He didn't think anybody from the Valley-or the Westside-had. They lived far, far away, if any of them were still alive. The Fire fell on them, too-lots of it. Schoolbooks went on and on about the revenge America took.
“I've heard that the Russians say we did it,” Liz said. Before Dan could even get mad-the nerve of some people!- she went on, “But that's not what I meant, anyhow. Even if the Russians did do it, I was trying to find out why they wanted to blow up the whole world.”
“Because they were evil, godless Communists.” Dan parroted another lesson. He didn't know just what Communists were, only that they were evil and godless.