Liz 's sigh made him feel as if he'd got zinged again, but he didn't understand why. She sounded very patient, though, when she asked, “What would they say about us?”
“Who cares?” Dan blurted. The idea that anybody might care what the Russians said had never crossed his mind till this moment. Neither had the idea that the Russians might say anything at all.
“Well, if that's how you feel…” Liz started to turn away.
That wasn't just a zing. Again, she made Dan feel about three inches tall.
“Wait!” he said. If she didn't like him, he could deal with that. If she scorned him, if she thought he was a jerk, that was a different story. He desperately cast about for a way to go on which wouldn't leave her with the notion that he drooled whenever he wasn't careful. He surprised himself by finding one: “How do you know what the Russians say?”
Liz pointed back toward the library again. “A lot of it's in there. The records are still pretty good.”
“Those would be records for the Old Time, though,” Dan said, and Liz nodded. See? I'm not so dumb after all! He wanted to shout it. Instead, he went on, “How do you know what the Russians say now about what happened way back then?”
This time, the look she gave him was cautious and measuring. No, you aren't so dumb. Does that make you less of a pest or more? Dan didn't know that was what she was thinking, but he would have bet on it. “Traders talk to other traders,” she said, picking her words with care. “News comes in from farther away than you'd think sometimes. It doesn't move fast, but it moves.”
“News ordinary people don't hear?” Dan asked, an edge in his voice. Most of the time, he liked being ordinary fine. Ordinary people were what democracy, even King Zev 's democracy, was all about, weren't they? But sometimes being ordinary meant not finding out what the secret stuff, the good stuff, was all about. He didn't like thinking he was on the outside trying to look in.
“No, it's not news ordinary people don't hear,” Liz told him. “You're hearing it from me, aren't you? But sometimes traders do hear it first.”
Dan thought about that. His nod was grudging, but it was a nod. “I guess that's fair,” he said, and then, “Do you have any trader news on where Cal 's hiding? Big reward for whoever catches him.”
“No, I don't know about that.” Did Liz speak too quickly now? Or am I imagining things? Dan wondered. After a moment, he decided he probably was. He didn't know Liz well enough to be sure how she usually talked.
“Well, go on,” he said, and pointed south toward her house. “Nobody told me people couldn't look in the library. I'm not sure how much point there is to it after all these years, but it doesn't hurt anything.”
“Wow! Thanks a bunch!” When Liz was sarcastic, she was really sarcastic. She walked-stalked-past Dan with her nose in the air. If she'd wounded him with weapons, not words, she would have left him dead on the half-overgrown paving stones. As things were, he watched her get smaller and smaller till she finally walked around a building and disappeared. Even then, he had to remind himself to get back on patrol.
“I messed up,” Liz said when she got back to the house. “I think I talked my way out of it, but I messed up.”
“What did you do?” Dad asked. He was arranging a tray of fancy brass belt buckles. The Valley soldiers liked them well enough to pay through the nose for them.
Liz explained how she'd told Dan what the Russians in this alternate thought about who started the nuclear war. “We learn that when we go through training,” she said. “It didn't occur to me till too late that he wouldn't know anything about it.”
“I should have these on belts.” Dad pointed to the buckles. “Then I could take a belt and give you a whipping with it.”
Hardly anybody in the home timeline spanked even little children. It was thought of as the next thing to child abuse, or maybe not the next thing but the abuse itself. But things were different in this alternate, as they were in so many. Kids here got walloped all the time, walloped and worse. And so, for a split second, Liz thought Dad meant it. Then, when she noticed the twinkle in his eye-too late, as usual-she could only glare.
“You're impossible!” she said.
“Thank you. I do my best,” he answered, not without pride. “But you did talk yourself out of it?”
“I'm pretty sure,” Liz said. “He didn't seem suspicious when we got done. Jealous, maybe, but not suspicious. I wasn't even lying, or not very much-traders do get news before other people a lot of the time.”
“I know that, thank you.” When Dad was sarcastic, he didn't lay it on with a trowel the way Liz did. He underplayed instead. A lot of the time, that made him more dangerous, not less. After a moment, he went on, “I don't mind if he's jealous. Envy's a nice, ordinary feeling.”
“It can be dangerous, too,” Liz said. “When the Valley soldiers were stealing things here-”
“I know. That was bad, and it might have been worse. Sometimes you get stuck, that's all.”
“It's not supposed to work this way,” Liz said. “We've got the subbasement where the transposition chamber comes. If we can get down there-”
“Everything's golden. But that's if we can,” Dad reminded her. “Remember all the stuff they tell you in training, 'cause it's true. Life doesn't come with a guarantee. Anything that can happen can happen to you.”
Remembering that stuff and liking it were two different things. “I don't know how many releases I had to sign before I could get in a transposition chamber at all. Enough to get sick of them-I know that,” Liz said. “But I figured it was all-”
“Lawyer talk?” Dad interrupted her again.
She nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“Well, it is and it isn't.” Her father sighed. “They make you sign those releases because doing this is dangerous. Sometimes people don't come back. If anyone going out to an alternate didn't promise ahead of time not to sue if something went wrong, Crosstime Traffic couldn't stay in business. Some alternates look safer than others, but you never can tell. Your mother and I wouldn't've brought you here if we'd known this stupid war would start.”
“Would you have come yourselves?” Liz asked.
Dad sighed again. “Yeah, probably. But that's different. We're grownups. We can figure the odds for ourselves.”
That made Liz mad. “You think I can't.”
“You're not as good at it,” he said, which only made her madder. He held up a hand. “Don't start throwing things at me. You're as smart as you'll ever be-I'm not saying you aren't.”
“What are you saying, then?” Liz hoped she sounded dangerous. She sure felt dangerous.
“If we were computers, you'd have as much RAM as I do. But I've got more programs and files on my hard disk than you do. That means I can judge some things better than you can, because I've got more data than you do.” Dad grinned one of his patented crooked grins. “And one of the things you have trouble judging is the idea that you have trouble judging things.”
“So how am I supposed to get better at it?” Liz demanded.
“Do things. Sometimes you'll be right. Sometimes you won't. With a little luck, you'll start figuring out why, and how you can do better next time. It's called growing up. There's no way to hurry it much. Sometimes your folks need to give you a hand where you may not know enough to make a good choice by yourself.”
“If you were so smart, you would have seen the war coming yourselves,'“ Liz said. “You can make mistakes, too, and calling them bad choices doesn't make them anything but mistakes.”
“I didn't say it did. I'm not perfect-even if I can play perfect on TV.” Dad winked. Liz made a face at him. He went on, “Somebody who's a little older has more experience and a better chance to get things right, that's all. But it doesn't matter how old you are-sometimes you'll still mess up. That's part of being human.”