“What is it, then?” Dan said. “It isn't water, it isn't wine, it isn't cider or grape juice. It isn't anything” He wanted things to fit into their own neat little slots. Well, who didn't?
Captain Horace took a bigger swig. “It's Coca-Cola, that's what it is.” He handed the can back to Dan. Dan drank some more, too. Horace wasn't wrong. Something like this deserved a name for itself, all right. It wasn't like anything else. It was something out of the Old Time. How did it end up here in the modern world?
The captain let out a loud burp. A moment later, so did Dan. He looked at the can of Coca-Cola. “It's the bubbles, that's what it is,” he said.
“Well, sure.” Captain Horace said indulgently. Then his gaze sharpened. “How did these traders get their hands on Coca-Cola, though? It's an Old Time thing. It doesn't really belong here.”
“Neither does a refrigerator that works. Neither do electric lights,” Dan said.
“I know.” The officer took the can back again and drained it. Dan almost got mad, but the impossible refrigerator held more impossible cans. Captain Horace belched again. “It's all righteously freaky, man.”
“Really,” Dan agreed. His mind leaped. “What if the traders aren't from now? What if they're really from the Old Time? That would explain why they acted funny sometimes, too. They were trying to, like, lake it, you know? They didn't exactly grok how we do things nowadays.”
“I don't know. That doesn't sound very scientific to me,” Captain Horace said. “It doesn't sound very likely, either.”
“Sir, none of this stuff is very likely, either.” Dan 's wave took in the lights, the refrigerator, and the can the officer was still holding. “But it's here. What's that thing the Great Detective says?”
“'When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Captain Horace knew what he was talking about, all right. He went on, “But everything here seems impossible! How do we go about eliminating any of it?”
“It may be impossible, but it's here.” Dan reached in and took out another can of Coca-Cola. This one was easier to open than the last one had been-now he knew how. He drank from it. It tasted like the real thing, all right.
Going back onto the UCLA campus brought Liz the usual, almost pleasant, pain. They still respected learning there, even if they embalmed it instead of helping it to grow. That was good. A lot of the buildings were familiar, which wasn't true down in Westwood. But it was like looking at an old friend filthy and starving and dressed in rags. It did hurt.
“Haven't seen you for a while,” one of the librarians said when she walked in.
“Life's been… complicated,” she answered. The librarian nodded. Liz had the feeling that was true no matter which alternate you visited.
Just how complicated was life, though? Did this bespectacled fellow report to the Valley soldiers occupying Westwood? If he did, would he slip away to let them know she was back? One thing for sure: he couldn't phone them in this alternate.
She went upstairs and started going through the bound issues of Newsweek. She had a pretty good notion of what had happened in 1967 in the home timeline. Most of what had happened in this alternate seemed about the same.
Maybe the Soviet Union really had started the war here. Maybe the Communist leaders reacted differently to something- Vietnam? the Six-Day War?-from the way they did in the home timeline. If that was so, American news magazines wouldn't have such a good idea of what was happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
Or would they? Something would have leaked out, wouldn't it? Here was a story about Vyacheslav Molotov going back to Moscow from his post at the International Atomic Energy Agency for consultations. Molotov 's name rang a bell with Liz from the AP Euro course. He was the longtime Russian foreign minister in the middle of the twentieth century. She didn't remember that he'd been on the IAEA in 1967.
Excitement tingled through her. Maybe, in the home timeline, he hadn't. What did that mean? Did it mean anything?
She couldn't be sure. She didn't know enough. But she made sure she scanned the story. She was mighty glad these Newsweeks hadn't crumbled to dust between the time when the Fire fell and now. How many people had looked at them in those 130 years? Not many-she was sure of that. One reason they were still around was that not many people ever looked at them.
Liz wanted to find the missing puzzle pieces and put the whole thing together herself. She knew that wasn't real likely. Mom and Dad knew more about the 1960s in the home timeline than she did. And they knew as much as anybody-including the natives of this alternate-about the 1960s here. It wasn't enough yet to let them know what went wrong.
She didn't think they knew about Molotov, though.
Well, they would once she told them. And she had the data inside the little handheld scanner. From what she remembered, Molotov was a hardliner, a tough guy. If he had a more important slot in this 1967 than in the home timeline, that said something about the way the Russians' minds had worked here.
Did it say enough? There was no transposition chamber that ended in this alternate's Moscow or Leningrad-or was it Petrograd here, or St. Petersburg? She couldn't remember. It had got nuked, too. Most major cities here had. Any which way, there wouldn't be a chamber that could reach either place here unless somebody waved lots and lots of Benjamin’s under Crosstime Traffic's nose. CT wasn't in business for its health.
No way the Mendozas could come up with that kind of money on their own. But if they landed another grant…
Maybe finding out about Molotov would help them do that. Liz could hope so. She didn't think she wanted to make a career out of studying this alternate, but her folks already had. If she could give them a hand while she was working with them- well, why not?
She closed the bound volume of Newsweeks. A scrap of old, brittle paper fluttered down and fell to the floor. She didn't think it had any printing on it, but sooner or later-probably sooner-all these magazines would get too fragile to read, and then they'd crumble to dust and be gone forever.
Except for what I’ve scanned, she thought. That was a funny feeling. She had history in her scanner. She didn't just have it, either. She felt like its custodian. What she and her folks took back to the home timeline had a better chance of lasting than anything that stayed here.
Maybe this alternate would rebuild two or three hundred years from now. It would want to know what had made the Fire fall. Maybe people from the home timeline could give back this information then. We're custodians, all right, she thought.
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?-a bit of Latin came back to her. Who would watch the watchmen? There was no guarantee that the home timeline would be in great shape by the time this alternate was ready to find out about its past. Not long before her folks were born, the home timeline was right on the edge of going down the tubes. Too many people, not enough resources. Finding out how to go crosstime saved everybody's bacon.
Which didn't mean everybody in the home timeline was happy all the time. Old political and religious rivalries remained very much alive. And national governments were still figuring out how to deal with Crosstime Traffic, which was as big and as rich as any of them.
Well, complications came with being alive. The simplest alternates were the ones where the atomic wars had killed everybody and everything. A graveyard the size of a planet… Liz shivered. This alternate hadn't missed by much.
She got the next volume of Newsweek down from the shelf. Paging through the ads in the first issue, she thought about how confident everybody seemed. No one had any idea the USA and USSR were on the edge of blasting each other to kingdom come. No one seemed to suspect that, even if the superpowers left each other alone, the alternate would have run out of energy and food and drinkable water inside of a lifetime.