And Liz clapped both hands over her mouth, the way somebody would after blurting out a secret she didn't mean to tell. “Oh-!” she said, and then something that would have made Sergeant Chuck 's ears turn green.
Dan was almost too surprised to be shocked-that was not the kind of thing he expected to hear from a girl he liked. But neither was talk about movies. “You really are a time traveler from the days before the Fire fell!” he exclaimed. “Nobody wanted to believe me. Everyone said I was nuts.”
“You are nuts,” Liz said. “You can't travel forwards and backwards in time-it's impossible.” She had a scratch on her cheek, and a bigger one on the heel of her hand.
Dan noticed he had sore ribs along with an ache on his hipbone where her knee had got him. She'd hurt him other places, too, but those were the bad ones. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “So how did you get here-sideways?”
Liz didn't look amazed this time-she looked horrified. “If I tell you the answer to that, I'll have to kill you,” she said, and she sounded dead serious.
“It wouldn't do you any good.” Dan hoped he was right.
He didn't like the calculating look in Liz 's eyes. “No? You said nobody believed you. If you had an accident…”
If she really intended to kill him, she'd just try to do it. She wouldn't warn him she was thinking about it-would she? No way, Dan decided. Liz was a lot of things, but not even slightly stupid.
And the way she'd looked when he guessed sideways… He'd hit on something there, even if he didn't know just what. “How could you be from sideways in time?” he asked. “What's sideways from here?”
“I'm not supposed to tell you,” Liz answered seriously. “It won't do you any good if you find out, and it won't hurt me any, but I'm not supposed to.”
“Why not?” Dan said. “Knowing stuff is supposed to help, isn't it?” That was what they taught in school, anyhow.
“How much can knowing something help when you can't do anything about it even if you know?” Liz said. Dan only shrugged-he couldn't imagine anything like that. She must have seen as much, because she sighed before going on, “Okay. Remember, you asked for it.”
“I promise,” he said.
“Yeah, right,” she told him. But she didn't stop talking: “I'll tell you what's sideways from here. Everything is, pretty much. There are alternates where the Nazis won-you know who the Nazis were, right? There are alternates where the Russians won and there was no atomic war. And there's the one I'm from. In my world, there was no atomic war, and the West won. And we just kept going forward from the way things were in 1967. What looks all superscientific and cool to you seems silly and old-fashioned to me. There. That's the truth. What are you going to do about it?”
“You've got-your people have-all the stuff they had back in the Old Time and then some?” Dan said slowly. If he hadn't seen the secret rooms in her house, he never would have believed it. But he had, and he did.
Liz nodded. “That's right. You aren't so dumb after all.”
He'd just thought the same thing about her. “Gee, thanks a lot,” he said. But he had a hard time feeling insulted. “Why aren't you helping us more, then?” he demanded. “Look at us! We're a mess! You could make us more like vou.”
Maybe for the first time since he'd known her, Liz looked embarrassed. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I really am-I'm sorrier than I know how to tell you. But there's no money in fixing up an alternate. It's that simple. There just isn't. Besides, do you have any idea how big a whole world is? You can't go and fix something that size once it's messed up. Too much to do. Too much even to try.”
“No money in it.” Dan paid the most attention to the first part of what she said. “What are you doing here, then?”
She looked even more embarrassed. “Well, my dad got a grant.”
“A grant?” It sounded like the English word Dan understood, but he didn't know what it meant here.
Liz nodded. “That's right. He teaches at UCLA-the UCLA in the alternate I come from. We call it the home timeline, but never mind that. Somebody's paying him money to come to this alternate and find out why you guys blew yourselves up.”
“The Russians did it!” Dan said automatically. “The Reds! The Commies!” He didn't know quite what a Commie was, but it had something to do with being a Russian. He was pretty sure of that.
“As a matter of fact, [think you're right-here,” Liz said. “But there are some other alternates where we're pretty sure America launched first. And there are a few where the Chinese started the big war, and some where the Nazis did, and even one where the Kaiser's Germany did-and won the war, and still is top dog today. All kinds of different possibilities.”
Dan thought one of the possibilities, right then, was that his head would explode. It wasn't that he thought Liz was lying to him. He didn't. Nobody could make up a story like that and have so many details straight. But… he'd heard people talk about getting their minds blown. Now he knew exactly what that meant.
He stabbed out an angry forefinger at her. “What if I tell my officers about you people, about all this?”
She only shrugged. “What if you do? Who'll believe you? And even if somebody does, what can he do about it?”
“I'll show you!” He sprang.
Next thing he knew, he was on the ground again, with the wind knocked out of him. He fought to breathe. Anything more than that? Forget it. Liz said, “I probably ought to kill you for real, but I won't. You're just doing what you're supposed to do.”
He tried to knock her off her feet once more, but she was wary this time. He wanted to tell her off, or to yell for help, or to do anything else that might be useful. What with struggling to breathe, he couldn't.
“Besides, I know you were sweet on me,” Liz added. At this stage, it was insult on top of injury. He thought so, anyway, till she kicked him in the head. He spiraled down into blackness.
Dad and Mom were taking down the display when Liz came back to the Brentwood market square. “We've got to get out of here,” she said. “Sorry, but we do.”
“What went wrong?” Dad assumed something must have- and boy, was he ever right.
Liz told him what had gone wrong. She finished, “If he were only a little bit better-I mean, a little-the Valley soldiers would be asking me questions instead of you.” She hadn't counted all her bruises and scrapes yet. She did count herself lucky that they were only bruises and scrapes.
“How soon will he wake up? How much will he remember when he does?” Mom asked.
“I don't know. I kicked him pretty good.” Liz 's foot hurt, too- Dan had a hard head. “But I don't think we ought to waste any time, you know?”
“Maybe he won't remember anything about the other alternates. We can hope not, anyway.” Dad sighed as he walked over to the horses and led them back to the wagon. “Did you have to tell him about that? We aren't supposed to spill the crosstime secret, you know.”
“'Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Liz said impatiently. “But even if they've got it here, what can they do about it? They won't have the technology for hundreds of years, if they ever do. And even if they do by then, this'll be a legend if they haven't forgotten all about it.”
The horses snorted. They didn't want to go back to work at night. Some other merchants were eyeing the Mendozas. The locals had to be wondering why they were getting ready to bail out. That wasn't so good. If the Valley soldiers asked them, they might say which way the wagon went.
“I did find some stuff about Molotov at the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1967,” Liz said. “We aren't leaving with no answers, or I hope we aren't.”