“Where did you come up with that?” Dad said. “My grandmother had some of those books. She read them to me when I was little. Her mother used to read them to her, she said.”
“Oh, wow,” Liz said-in the home timeline, a phrase even more old-fashioned than Clifford books. People still used it here, and it did come in handy now and then. She went on, “Will the Westside win?”
“They sure think so,” her father replied. “But the Valley thinks it'll win, too, or it wouldn't have started the war in the first place. I haven't been up there. I don't know what all they've got. I don't know how serious they are about the fighting, either. That's one of the reasons people fight wars-to find out how serious both sides are.”
“If the Westside weren't serious, it wouldn't have built that wall across the 405,” Liz said.
“Or maybe it just didn't think the Valley would think the wall was worth fighting about.” Dad shrugged. “'If it didn't, it was wrong. And it looks like a lot of people will get hurt because of that.”
If the fighting came all the way down into Westwood, the Mendozas could escape back to the home timeline. A transposition chamber would whisk them away in nothing flat. The locals weren't so lucky. They were stuck here. They had to hope the struggle stayed far away. Liz hoped for the same thing. She didn't want anything bad to happen to the locals, and she really didn't want anything bad to happen to UCLA.
Dan watched a couple of officers load an impressive-looking piece of ordnance onto a horse's back. “Wow,” he said. “What's that?” The cartridges gleamed in the sunshine. Each one looked as big as his thumb. The weapon had to come from the Old Time. Nobody nowadays could make anything like that.
“Machine gun-.50-caliber,” one of them answered proudly. “We test-fired it, and it shoots great.”
“That is so cool!”' Dan said. “I didn't know anything like that was left in the armory.”
“It didn't come from the armory,” the captain said. “Scrounger found it in a house.”
“No kidding?” Dan said, and the officer nodded. Dan went on, “Ordinary people could have a piece like that in their houses? Wow! Old Time must've been something else.” That gun might beat the Westside all by itself now.
“Old Time was something else,” the other officer said.
“Oh, yes, sir.” Dan knew better than to show he disagreed with any officer, even when he did. But he didn't disagree with this one. “Ordinary people had guns like this, the way folks have belt knives now. Makes you wonder what all the kings- no, they called them presidents-had. though.”
“They had the Fire,” the first captain said grimly. “They had it, and they used it. And that's how come we don't have so much anymore.”
He was right about that. The Russians threw the Fire at America, and then the Americans threw it back. That was what the schoolbooks said, and why would they lie? Dan didn't know exactly where Russia was. Somewhere far away-he was sure of that, anyhow. Farther than TJ, farther than Vegas, farther than Frisco. You went a whole lot farther than that, you probably fell off the edge of the world. Schoolbooks also insisted the world was round. Again, why would they lie? But Dan had his doubts. The world sure looked flat to him. Well, bumpy in spots, but basically flat.
The officers with the machine gun looked at him, then at each other. The second one spoke up: “I bet you've got something you need to do, don't you, soldier? If you have time to rubberneck, we'll find you something to do.”
“Oh, no, sir. I've got plenty. It was just seeing the fancy gun that made me stop, that's all.” Dan saluted and beat a hasty retreat. You didn't always have to be busy in the army. But you always had to look busy. If you didn't look busy, somebody would make sure you were.
He hustled over to the barracks. He had a whetstone in his kit. He started using it to sharpen the points on his arrows. He'd sharpened them just the other day. They couldn't very well have got dull between then and now. Anybody who saw him, though, would think he had plenty of work and didn't need anything more. That was the point, all right.
Had officers and sergeants been so silly back in the Old Time? Dan didn't want to believe it. They'd known so much. They'd been able to do so many things. They wouldn't have wanted soldiers to waste time for the sake of wasting time… would they?
Of course, in the end the Old Time folks, the Americans and the Russians, had blown themselves up. They'd thrown away all their marvels, thrown them into the Fire. In school, the books and the teachers said they'd been about to fly to the moon before they went to war instead. The moon! There were still pictures of airplanes, and nobody doubted that the Fire Hew before it fell. But the moon! Could people really have gone there?
If they could have… If the people of Old Time could have gone to the moon but chose to blow themselves up instead… If they chose to do that, were they as smart as everybody always said they were? Or were they amazingly, unbelievably, dumb?
Dan stopped sharpening. He just stood there, file in one hand, arrow in the other. It wasn't against the law to think the people of Old Time were dumb-not quite. It wasn't against any religion to think they were dumb, either-not quite. But if you had a thought like that, you probably didn't want to admit it to anybody, either. People would call you a weirdo or a fruitcake or even a nonconformist. You didn't want to get hung with a label like that. It could stick to you for the rest of your life.
“What's happening, Dan?” Sergeant Chuck appeared behind him at just the wrong moment. Sergeants had a knack for doing that.
“Nothing, Sergeant.” Dan started scraping the point against the file again. “I just saw our machine gun. It's too much!” That should be safe.
And it was. “Wait till the Westsiders see it. Wait till they meet it up close and personal. They'll freak out, man-you better believe it.” Chuck smiled as if he could hardly wait. That was part of what made him a sergeant.
Dan was ready to go to war, but he wasn't in any big hurry about it. King Zev and his officers were. The next morning, right at sunup, Dan set his helmet on his head. He was just an archer-not a fancy kind of soldier at all. And yet he still wore a genuine U.S. Army steel helmet from the Old Time. If that didn't prove what a rich and powerful kingdom the Valley was. he didn't know what would.
The metal facing on his shield came from an Old Time car door. You could see where, once upon a time, it had said Falcon. Falcons were swift, fierce birds, so he thought that was a good omen. His shirt and trousers and boots were modern, but he thought his belt buckle came from the days before the Fire fell, too.
Captain Kevin made a little speech before his company set out. “When we march today, we're going to start marching up Victory Boulevard,” he said. “And every step we take till this war is done, we're going to stay on the road to victory. The Westsiders can't stop us, because we're right and they're wrong. We're tougher than they are, too. If they don't know that yet, they'll find out.”
Up Victory Boulevard they went, along with the rest of King Zev 's soldiers. There had to be two or three thousand men in that army, maybe even more. They sang as they marched, alternating old songs like “Satisfaction” and “Hound Dog” with new ones like “A Mighty Fortress Is Our King.” Dan couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, but he enjoyed making noise.
Some of the companies marched south on the 405 when they got to the old freeway. They were going to attack the wall. Dan 's unit-and, he was excited to see, the machine gun as well-went south along Sepulveda Boulevard instead. They could support the troops on the 405, because the road and the freeway ran close together.
Still other Valley soldiers kept heading east. From what Dan heard, they would go south by way of Laurel Canyon. The thinking was that the Westsiders wouldn't be looking for a three-pronged attack. The City Council down there didn't know how strong and how determined the Valley was. Captain Kevin had said it best-they'd find out.