They needed till late afternoon before they finally defeated the lock. “You found the door, kid,” the captain told Dan. “You can go down there first if you want to.”
Gee, thanks, Dan thought. But he couldn't look afraid, even if he was. “Yes, sir,” he said. Holding a lamp, he went down into the blackness.
The soles of his boots clanged on metal stairs. He held the lamp high now, but it didn't throw much light. All it did was push the darkness back a little-he still couldn't see the walls of this chamber. He supposed it did have some.
He couldn't see the floor, either, not till just before his feet came down on it. It was hard, like asphalt or concrete-it felt too smooth for flagstones. He bent down with the lamp at the base of the stairs for a closer look. Yes, that had to be concrete.
“Well?” the captain called from up above. He wasn't coming down till he found out whether the fallout had eaten Dan.
“Well, what… sir? “ Dan let a touch of impatience show. You couldn't come right out and say an officer had no guts. But he would have bet the sergeants got the message, even if the captain didn't. “It's a plain old room, that's all.”
He straightened up, took a couple of steps forward, and proved himself wrong. It wasn't a plain old room, whatever else it was. When he walked out toward the middle, the lights in the ceiling went on.
He stopped and stared up at them, his mouth falling open like a fool's. Who could blame him? Those had to be electric lights-they were too bright for anything else. But he was as sure as made no difference that nobody had seen electric lights since the Fire fell and ended the Old Time.
“What did you just do, soldier?” the captain asked in a very small voice.
“I didn't do anything, sir,” Dan said, even if he wasn't exactly sure that was true. “They came on all by themselves.” He looked around. Here were these miraculous lights, but they sure didn't light up much. He might have been inside a concrete box with a glowing lid. The floor had yellow lines painted on it. Outside of the lines were words, also in yellow paint, and plainly done with Stencils. KEEP CLEAR-CROSSTIME TRAFFIC REG. 34157A2.
Dan scratched his head. What was that supposed to mean? Did it mean anything? Not to him, it didn't.
Slowly, cautious, the captain and the two sergeants descended. “What is this place?” Sergeant Max asked in a low voice.
“Beats me,” Dan said. “I don't think anybody's hiding here, though.”
Sergeant Mike walked over to a wall and thumped on it with his fist. He got back a good, solid thunk. He moved over a couple of feet and did it again. Thunk. And again, and again, till he'd gone all the way around the chamber. “I don't think there are any secret rooms,” he said.
“Didn't sound like it,” Max agreed. “I wonder what Rocky and Bullwinkle would tell us.”
“Why don't you go get them, Sergeant?” The captain kept staring up at the lights in the ceiling. They weren't bulbs, or what Dan thought of as bulbs. They were more like tubes of light seen through the kind of glass that survived here and there in bathroom windows. “How do those work?” the officer whispered. “How can they work?”
“There's electricity somewhere in this house.” Dan looked at the floor again, as if expecting to see it sneak along there. Maybe it did. He wouldn't have recognized it had he seen it. Had he seen anything strange then, he would have called it electricity.
But he didn't. The floor was only a floor, with that big painted rectangle and some kind of funky warning on it.
The captain looked at that, too. “What's “Crosstime Traffic'?” he asked, as if Dan were supposed to know.
“Can't tell you, sir.” Dan denied everything.
“ D'you think it's something the Westsiders know about? Electricity!” The captain's gaze went back to those impossible ceiling panels.
Dan could answer that question: “No way, sir. Nohow. We haven't seen anything like this anywhere else.” The two sergeants solemnly nodded. Dan went on. “Besides, if the Westsiders had it. they'd use it above ground, wouldn't they? They wouldn't hide it in a basement under a basement.”
“I sure wouldn't,” Sergeant Max agreed.
“Well, neither would I,” the captain said. “So that means these traders aren't ordinary Westsiders. What are they, in that case?” He looked at Dan, as if still expecting the common soldier could come right out and tell him.
But Dan said, “Sir, I only wish I knew,” and that was nothing but the truth. Who was Liz, really? What was she. really? He wondered if he'd ever find out. And then he stared up at those magical glowing electric tubes again. Looking at them, blinking at the impossible light they shed, he realized Liz was only part of the question, and probably a small part at that.
Part of Liz was glad to be back in the home timeline again. Cars. Cell phones. Hot showers. Microwaves. Supermarkets. TV. Radio. The Net. Fasartas. Flush toilets. You didn't know how much you missed your comforts till you went without them for a while.
The home timeline held other pleasures, too. A UCLA campus that wasn't a crumbling ruin overgrown with weeds. A Santa Monica that wasn't grass trying to push up through the glass that nuclear strikes had fused. A Los Angeles that wasn't divided up into a bunch of squabbling little kingdoms.
No, the home timeline wasn't perfect. Not even close. She knew that all too well. But her time in that post-atomic alternate had taught her more than she'd ever imagined about the difference between better and worse.
But…
“We ought to go back,” she told her father a couple of days after they'd escaped from the Valley soldiers.
“I know.” he said. “We were really getting close to finding out what started the war there. That's what the grant was for. If we give incomplete results…” He sighed. “Well, if we do. we won't see any more research money for crosstime travel, that's for sure.” He sighed again. “Stuck in the home timeline.”
If you had to be stuck anywhere, there were lots of worse places. Liz understood that, in ways she never had before. Even so, she said. “I don't want to be stuck anywhere.”
Dad smiled. “You aren't, sweetie. Even if I turn out to be, you aren't. They won't come down on you because of this. I got the grant, so I get the blame. And I deserve it. If I didn't hide Luke -”
“They would have shot him!” Liz broke in.
“They shot him anyway,” Dad reminded her. '“But for you it's no harm, no foul. You've still got to go to college and get your career going. Nobody'll hold anything that happened when you were eighteen against you. It's not like you robbed a store or something.”
“I blame me. even if nobody else does,” she said. “If Dan hadn't kept coming around, he wouldn't have got suspicious of us. I'd bet my last Benjamin that that's what made them come looking for Luke the second night.”
“You don't know for sure. You can't know for sure.” her father said. “Besides, what you're really blaming yourself for is being a pretty girl. There's nothing wrong with that. Believe me, there isn't.”
There is when it causes trouble. And it does, Liz thought. But that didn't want to come out. Instead, she said, “I should have told him to get lost when he started visiting all the time.”
“You would have been out of character if you did,” Dad said.
“I didn't think he'd turn out to be such a pest,” she said, as if her father hadn't spoken. “After all-”
“He's just a barbarian from an alternate where everybody's a barbarian,” Dad finished for her. She wouldn't have put it quite the same way, which didn't mean she thought he was wrong. He went on, “And yeah, he is a barbarian. He's ignorant. He has fleas and lice and bad breath. And he doesn't smell good. But none of that makes him dumb. He can see when things are peculiar.”