“ Molotov? At the IAEA? In '67?” Dad fired questions in bursts. Liz nodded after each one. He whistled. “That does sound important.”
“It shows this alternate had already split off from the home timeline by then,” Mom agreed. “So the breakpoint's somewhere earlier.”
“Well, we won't worry about where it is right now,” Dad said. “When Dan comes to, the Valley soldiers will all want to find out what our breakpoint is.”
Liz wouldn't have put it like that, which didn't mean her father was wrong. “How long will he be out?” Mom asked.
How were you supposed to answer a question like that? “About this long.” Liz mimed how hard she'd kicked him.
“No way to tell for sure, not with something like that,” Dad said. “Maybe a few7 seconds, maybe a few minutes, maybe longer. Maybe-with a little luck-he won't remember what you were talking about before you punted him.”
“I wish you didn't have to do that,” Mom said. “In this culture, guys feel ashamed when girls beat them. I know' he liked you, but now all he'll think of is getting even.”
“In this culture?” Liz and Dad spoke in the same breath, “it's the same way in ours,” Liz added, though she admitted, “It is worse here.” As far as she was concerned, everything was worse here. Sexism sure was. Of course, without an industrial society and modem medicine, women really were the wreaker sex. There were plenty of alternates more sexist than this one, which still kept memories of more nearly equal times. But there were also plenty that did better.
“We can worry about that later, too,” Mom said, and then, to Dad, “Don't you have those horses hitched yet? You said it yourself-no telling when Dan will come to. We don't want to be here when he does.”
“Were ready.” Dad got behind the wheel of the Chevy wagon to prove it. Liz and Mom jumped in behind him.
As they rolled away from the Brentwood market square, Mom said, “it's kind of a shame. For somebody from this alternate, he wasn't bad.”
“I guess,” Liz said, which was politer than Are you out of your mind? but meant the same thing. Dad lit a lantern and set it in a holder on the dashboard. You were supposed to show a light if you drove at night. He hadn't in Santa Monica, but nobody enforced traffic rules there. Here, a wagon without a light was likely to get stopped because it didn't have one. He wanted to look as normal as he could.
“You didn't tell Dan what kind of wheels we had or anything?” Mom asked.
“No way.” Liz started to laugh. “I told him all the big secrets, but none of the little ones.”
“Well, the big ones will freak him out even if he does remember them,” Dad said. He turned right on to Sunset Boulevard. Sunset ran all the way to the ocean here, the same as it did in the home timeline. The resemblance ended there.
“I was thinking the same thing,” Liz said. “'Let him tell whoever he wants. Nobody'll believe him. And even if somebody does, what can they do about it?”
“Be more alert for people from the home timeline,” Dad answered, which was something Liz hadn't thought of. “We need to warn the Stoyadinovich.es about that.”
A squad of Valley foot soldiers came east on Sunset toward them. Liz tensed. One of the soldiers called, “You folks are out late.” The men kept marching. Liz tried not to be too noisy with her sigh of relief. She must have done well enough-none of the Valley men stopped and looked back at her.
When they got to the 405 and Sepulveda Boulevard, Dad turned right again and went down onto Sepulveda. “What are you doing?” Mom asked with exaggerated patience. “Speedro's the other way.”
“I know,” Dad said. “If they're looking for us anywhere, they'll be looking at the Santa Monica Freeway line and at the edge of things between Westwood and Santa Monica. If we go north instead-“
“We go up into the Valley,” Mom broke in. “Is that where we want to be?”
Good question, Liz thought.
But Dad said, “Sure. Why not? It's the last place the soldiers down here will look for us. And we can go east from there, go around the dead zone in downtown L.A., and get back to Speedro. That's better than trying to sneak south through Santa Monica, don't you think? What else would they be looking for?”
That was also a good question-a better one than Liz wished it were. Dad liked to take a backwards slant on things. Sometimes that worked really well. Sometimes it didn't work at all. But Santa Monica, especially after the latest fire, wasn't any place Liz wanted to be.
“How much can they learn from what they find in our house?” Mom asked.
“Not enough.” Dad sounded confident as he guided the wagon up the onramp to the 405. “They'll see that electric lights shine, that refrigerators keep things cold, and that Coke tastes good. And what can they do with any of that?”
A horse-drawn wagon plodding along a freeway built for speeding cars seemed almost unbearably sad to Liz. It also went a long way toward proving Dad's point.
Thirteen
When Dan woke up, he felt as bad as if somebody had kicked him in the head. “Oh, yeah,” he said, and then. “Oh, wow!” Somebody had kicked him in the head-he remembered that much. And now he wished his head would fall off so he didn't have to put up with the pounding, throbbing ache in there.
Somebody… Who? That didn't come back right away. But he hadn't decided to lie down here on the ground in the gloom by himself. No. He'd been talking with someone, and they'd had an argument, and then a fight.
“I lost,”' he said sadly. “I must have lost.” That didn't make him feel like much of a soldier. He looked around, though turning his head hurl. too. Come to that, almost everything hurt. Twilight hadn't altogether faded. The sun had been setting when whatever happened, happened. So he hadn't been out too long.
Whoever'd licked him hadn't taken his matchlock. That was good. He imagined trying to tell Sergeant Chuck how he'd lost it. That would have hurt worse than the thumping he'd taken. Hard to believe, but it would have. What would Chuck have done to him for losing his gun to a Westside rebel? Nothing pretty.
Or was it a Westside rebel? “ Liz!” he exclaimed, and with the name things started flooding back. He hadn't just lost- he'd lost to a girl!
And what were they talking about before she tried using his poor aching skull for a football? He had trouble coming up with that. It made him mad-it was important. He was sure it was. It was even more important than his humiliating defeat. Where did she learn to fight like that?
“Must have been in the home timeline,” Dan muttered. For a second, the words didn't mean anything to him-they were only words. Then he remembered what lay behind them. A whole world where the Fire didn't fall! A whole world where they still had electricity and refrigerators and Coca-Cola! A whole world… that didn't give two cents for this one. A whole world… that just wanted to find out what had gone wrong in this one, that didn't care anything about fixing it up.
Rage filled him. Was that fair? Not even close! If they could catch Liz and her folks, maybe they could… Do what? Dan wondered. Something, anyhow. They had to be able to do something. He heaved himself to his feet and started dogtrotting back to the house where the traders-the traders from that other world-had lived.
He was in good hard shape, the way a soldier needed to be. He should have made it back to that house without even breathing hard-it wasn't much more than a mile. He took about three strides and then stopped, fighting not to be sick. He'd never got kicked in the head before, not by a girl, not by a horse, not by anybody or anything. He didn't know how very badly that kind of injury could mess someone up-adventure stories didn't talk about such things. He might not have known, but he found out in a hurry. Trying to do anything fast left him dizzy and wondering if his skull would split in two. As a matter of fact, he hoped it would.