Does that make me dumb? he wondered. If it did. everybody else in the Valley was as dumb as he was. Sergeant Max and Sergeant Mike were floored, and weren't too shy to admit it. The captain- Dan had finally found out his name was Horace -was baffled, too.
Captain Horace had gone looking for scholars at UCLA.
He'd brought back one fellow who claimed he understood electricity. The scholar wore a dirty white coat and a frayed necktie from Old Time. He looked like a bright man. He talked like a bright man.
And when he saw those ceiling lights come on? Dan had been down there with him, and watched him stare the way everybody else did. “Impossible,” he said.
“You're looking at it. It must be possible,” Captain Horace said. That sure made sense to Dan.
Not to the guy from UCLA. “Impossible,” he said again. “No battery could hold its charge from the time when the Fire fell till now.”
“Maybe these are new batteries,” Dan had suggested. Captain Horace beamed at him.
By the way the scholar looked at him, he was an idiot who'd never wise up enough to become a moron. “I know what batteries can do. I know what kind of batteries wre can make nowadays,” the man said, fiddling with the knot on his tie. “Fm familiar with the research not just here, but in Frisco and Vegas and as far away as Salt Lake City. Nobody can do anything like this. Nobody.”
“How long does it take for research news to get from Salt Lake City to here?” Captain Horace asked.
“Less time than you'd think,” the scholar said. “The telegraph between Salt Lake and Vegas works most of the time. 01 course, you only get an outline on the telegraph. The real journal articles arrive after a couple of years. But people couldn't keep anything like this a secret. And why would they want to?”
Captain Horace had no answer for that. Neither did Dan. The officer did have a question of his own: “If this stuff is impossible, what's it doing here? Kindly tell me that.”
The scholar couldn't. He just stared up at the glowing ceiling some more. “As far as I can see, it's a miracle,” he said.
A lot of people believed God was angry at the world, and stopped working miracles after the Fire fell. Didn't that explain why things were so messed up nowadays? But some people said it was a miracle anybody lived through the Russian-American war. Dan didn't know what to believe.
He did know thinking about that stuff was a lot more interesting than sweeping the southern horizon with his binoculars. He wondered what was going on at Liz 's house right this minute. He didn't want to be on duty here in the sun. He would rather have gone back to the basement under the basement and stared at the electric lights.
Fluorescents. They were called fluorescents. So the scholar said, anyhow. It was an awfully fancy name. He tried to explain how they were different from ordinary light bulbs, but Dan didn't get it. He wondered if the scholar made up the word to sound smart. Captain Horace didn't seem to think so, though.
Right now, they were fluorescing or doing whatever fluorescents did. And Fm not there to see them, Dan thought angrily. Ihave to stay out here to try to make sure Cat's soldiers don't sneak up and murder us. It hardly seemed fair.
You couldn't tell you were going anywhere when you rode in a transposition chamber. And, in a very real sense, you weren't going anywhere. You got out in exactly the same place as the one you'd left. The same place, yes, but not the same alternate.
Details, details, Liz thought. Traveling between alternates was as boring as flying coach. More boring, really. You didn't have a video screen inside a transposition chamber, and you couldn't look out the window. Transposition chambers had no windows. And if they did, all you'd see out of them was Nothing, with a capital N. She sighed. She just had to sit in her seat and sog, like breakfast cereal soaking up milk.
Going between the home timeline and the nuked alternate didn't seem to take any longer than coming back had. In reality, neither took any time at all. But the body perceived something that felt like time while the chamber shuttled between worlds. Duration, the chronophysicists called it.
A few lights on the control panel at the front of the chamber went from amber or red to green. “We're here.” the operator announced.
Liz and her mother and father stepped out of the transposition chamber. The bare, concrete-walled chamber in which they stood was a lot like the one from which they'd departed. But it wasn't the same chamber. And, even if they were in the same place, they were also in a new place. They'd left San Pedro, the harbor district of Los Angeles, in California, in the United States. Now they'd come to the independent Kingdom of Speedro.
Behind them, the transposition chamber disappeared. Chambers never hung around long once they'd delivered their passengers. The} always had something else to do, some other alternate to go to.
“Hello, there.” someone called from up above, where the trap door opened. “We knew you were coming, so we baked a cake!”
The Stoyadinoviches, who ran Crosstime Traffic's Speedro trading center, turned out to be very nice people. A lot of the sailors and fishermen in Speedro were descended from Serbs, so the Stoyadinoviches fit right in. And. just as George said, his wife-her name was Irma -really had baked a cake. It was sweetened with honey and raisins, because sugar w?as rare and expensive here. That didn't mean it wasn't good.
George Stoyadinovich had an amazing mustache. Asterix and Obelix and even Vitalstatistix would have envied it. The ends hung down onto his chest. He also had a good grasp of what was going on in Speedro. “Yeah, they're all hot to help the Westside,” he said. “If Cal gets Westwood back, Speedro will take some of the South Bay as payment for giving him a hand.”
“And if Cal doesn't get Westwood back. Speedro will grab some of the South Bay anyhow,” Irma Stoyadinovich added. “In that case, the Westside won't be strong enough to do anything about it.”
“Can we get over the border between Speedro and the Westside?” Dad asked.
“Sure.” Mr. Stoyadinovich nodded, which made his soup-strainer waft up and down. “Long as you're carrying something the Westside army can use-bullets, boots, whatever-they'll give you a big hug and a kiss.”
“'What's going on up at the Santa Monica Freeway line?” Liz asked.
Both Stoyadinoviches frowned. “Well, that's a long way off,” Mrs. Stoyadinovich said. It wasn't more than forty-five minutes by car, unless the traffic was bad. But that was in the home timeline. Here, it was a couple of days away, at least.
“Yeah, we aren't so sure about the news we get from up there,” George Stoyadinovich agreed. “Most of the time, it's gone through six or eight people by the time it gets to us. Who knows how weird it gets while it's doing that? It's like playing telephone at a party, you know?”
Liz nodded. By the time a phrase got whispered from a dozen mouths into a dozen ears and came back to the person who started it, it sounded nothing like what that person said at first.
“There isn't much shooting right now-we're pretty sure of that,” Mr. Stoyadinovich went on. “You guys are going to try to sneak back up into Westwood, right?”
“Gotta do it,” Dad answered. “We got the grant to see why things went kablooie here, and the YRL's the best place to look.”
“The URL,” Mom reminded him. “It's the URL here.”
Dad made a face. He hated making mistakes- Liz took alter him there. Mom was more easygoing about it. Rut if he said that around locals, they'd wonder where the devil he came from. And it was such an easy slip to make. Liz shook her head. No wonder Dan got so curious-or suspicious-about her. Did she betray herself every time she opened her mouth? She could hope not. anyway.