Curious Notions

Three

Curious Notions stayed open on Sundays. It did a lot of its business then. People who were too busy the rest of the week came in to spend their money. Paul wondered if he would have enough game sets and portable stereo players to last till the next shipment from the home timeline came in.

Not everybody who walked through the door could afford to buy. Merchandise stayed in cases or firmly fastened to walls till customers showed cash. Things got stolen every now and again even so. That annoyed Paul, but less than it would have had the store been his personal source of income. As things were, theft was Crosstime Traffic's worry, not his.

An Asian girl not far from his own age walked up and down the aisles. She paused now here, now there. Her clothes were neat but shabby. Paul didn't think she could afford to get anything, but she didn't seem to want to leave. She kept looking around at the other customers. He began to wonder if she was there to pick pockets, not to look at fancy electronics. But she didn't get near anybody else. In fact, she shied away from other people.

After a while, Paul discovered she was watching them hoping they would go away. That took some time. Finally, though, she was the only person in the place besides him. Even then, she needed a moment to get up the nerve to come to the counter.

Maybe she wanted to buy something after all. "What can I help you with today?" Paul asked in his smoothest tones.

The answer he got was not what he expected. The Asian girl glared at him as if she'd just found him on the bottom of her shoe. In a fierce whisper, she said, "What have you done to my father?"

Paul blinked. Was she nuts? Did she think he was somebody else? "Miss, I haven't done anything to your father," he said carefully. "Why do you think I have? No offense, but I don't even know who he is."

"He's Charlie Woo, that's who," she said, as if he ought to know who Charlie Woo was. His expression must have shown he didn't. That only made her angrier. She pointed a forefinger. "Don't try to pretend you don't know about him, either. You can't fool me. When the Feldgendarmerie arrested him, they said you people said you got your stuff from him. That's a lie, and you know it!" She was quivering with fury.

And then the name did ring a bell. He'd had his lunch across from Charlie Woo's little shop. Yes, Woo was one of the men Dad had fingered for Inspector Weidenreich. He'd been nothing but a name in the phone book to Paul. But names in the phone book didn't have angry teenage daughters. Charlie Woo, on the other hand . . .

"You do know something!" the girl exclaimed. "Don't try to tell me different, either. I can see it in your face."

Paul had never been a very good poker player. "I—" he began, and stopped. He didn't know where to go from there.

"Why did you do it? Why?" Charlie Woo's daughter demanded. "The Germans have him in jail, and they won't let him go. What are we going to do? I've got a little brother. How are we supposed to make ends meet without Father? What can we do?" She looked ready to burst into tears—either that or take a gun from her purse and start shooting.

And the strange thing was, he didn't see how he could blame her. Right before his eyes, she stopped being somebody from an alternate, somebody who mattered to him no more than a character in a video game, and turned into a human being. He still understood why his father had done what he did. Now, though, he also understood what that had done to Charlie Woo's family. Till this girl came in, he hadn't cared. Curious Notions' troubles with the Germans had counted for more. Things suddenly looked different.

"I'll do what I can," Paul said. "I don't know how much that will be, but we'll find out."

Now she stared at him as if she couldn't believe her ears. "You will?" She sounded astonished, too.

"I said so, didn't I?" Paul answered, and wondered how much trouble he'd just let himself in for. "Uh, I'm Paul. What's your name?"

"Lucy," she said, and then, "Why did you get my father in so much trouble if you're willing to help him now?"

That was a good question. He wished he had a good answer for it. Since he didn't, he said, "It was a mistake, that's all. I'll see if I can fix it." That seemed better than telling her, My dad and I didn't think of your father as a human being at all. We just needed to get Inspector Weidenreich out of our hair for a while.

"What will you do?" Lucy asked. She wasn't quite giving him a my-hero look, but she wasn't measuring him for a coffin, either.

There was another question for which he wished he had a good answer. Again, he did the best he could: "I don't think the Germans will listen to me all by myself. But I've got some pretty good connections with American policeman and officials, people the Germans will pay attention to."

He waited to see if that would surprise her. It didn't. She just nodded. "You'd have to, to stay in business, wouldn't you? If you need bribe money, we can give you . . . some." By the way she bit her lip, the Woos didn't have a lot.

"I think it'll be all right," Paul said gently. The home timeline could give him as much of this America's money, real or counterfeit, as he wanted. He couldn't tell that to Lucy. He couldn't tell her anything about the home timeline. He was just glad small-time—and sometimes not so small-time—corruption was a way of life here. When he said he had connections, she believed him.

"When will I know if you've done anything?" she asked. "When will I know you aren't stringing me along?"

She had a good notion of the way the world could work, all right. "Meet me in the Japanese garden in Golden Gate Park day after tomorrow, about three o'clock," he said.

"I'll be at my job," Lucy said bleakly. "I can't get away. I especially can't get away with Father locked up."

She looked too young to have a full-time job. In the home timeline, she would have been. Things were different here. Paul said, "What time do you get off?"

"Six o'clock," she answered.

"Can you meet me there at six-thirty, then?" he asked. She nodded. He held out his hand. She shook it. They had a bargain— what sort of bargain, Paul didn't know yet.

Lucy thought her shift at the shoe factory would never end. She often felt that way, but it was especially bad tonight. At last, the whistle blew. She got to her feet, stretched, and headed for the clock to time out. She stuck the card in the slot, got it stamped, put it back in its place on the wall, and left the building.

When she waited at the bus stop down at the corner instead of just walking home, Mildred asked her, "Where are you going?" Any time you broke routine, people noticed. They wondered why.

"I've got to meet somebody about Father," Lucy answered. That satisfied the older woman. She probably thought Lucy meant a lawyer or somebody like that, but what she thought wasn't Lucy's worry.

The nickel that went into the fare box was. She hated to spend money. Her family never had enough of it. She didn't know anybody who did, either. But she couldn't walk to the park, not if she wanted to get there by half past six.

The Japanese garden there was one of her favorite spots. Gardeners kept it beautifully landscaped. When it wasn't too crowded with tourists, it was one of the most peaceful places she knew. The big bronze Buddha, green with age, stared out tranquilly over the flowers and ferns and shrubs. And there was the bridge across the stream. It was no ordinary bridge, but a great arc of a circle. You had to climb it to get to the top.

Lucy climbed it for a reason, not just for the fun of it. She could see farther from there than from any other spot in the garden, and Paul Gomes hadn't told her exactly where he wanted to meet. The Japanese garden didn't seem very big . . . till you were in it.

She met him, all right—he was climbing up the other side. She reached the top before he did. "Hello, there," she said.

"Hello, yourself," he answered, scrambling up to stand beside her on the brown-painted planking. "I came up here to look for you."

"I did the same thing," Lucy said. In a strange way, that pleased her. But such pleasures were just that—small. She stabbed out a forefinger. "What do you know about Father?"

"I don't know anything," Paul said. Lucy wanted to hit him, or to push him over the rail into the stream. That would surprise the colorful carp swimming down below. He went on, "I do know I've got an American police captain and an assistant district attorney asking the Germans questions about him."

"Talk is cheap," Lucy said. "We want him back. We miss him. We need him." Had Paul really done anything at all? Or was he just talking to make her feel better? She couldn't tell, and not knowing was a torture in itself.

He said, "I did find out your father's okay. They're holding him, yeah, but they haven't hurt him or anything."

"That's good," Lucy said. Again, she wondered if she could believe him. She wanted to. She wanted to very badly. That only made her more suspicious. Angrily, she demanded, "How do you know?"

"Captain Horvath found out for me," Paul answered. Now Lucy took him seriously. Everybody in Chinatown knew, or knew of, Fatty Horvath. Paul Gomes went on, "It's about even money whether the Germans come after my father and me next."

"You?" Lucy stared. Up there on top of that funny bridge, the idea seemed even more ridiculous than it would have somewhere else. "Why would they want to come after you? With the stuff Curious Notions has, you must be the goose that laid the golden eggs for them."

"Yeah, right," Paul said tightly. Lucy hadn't heard that slang phrase before, but she had no trouble figuring out what it meant. Her cheeks got hot. Paul added, "You remember what happened to the goose that laid the golden eggs, don't you?"

Till Paul reminded her, Lucy hadn't remembered. Now she did. They'd killed the goose, trying to figure out where the eggs came from. She said, "Is that why you people named my father? To get the Feldgendarmerie off your own necks?"

Paul nodded. He looked out across the garden, not at her. "That's right," he said, and then, after a small but noticeable pause, "I'm sorry."

By the way he said those last two words, they were an enormous gift to Lucy—a gift she probably didn't deserve. But he had said them. And, by the look on his face, he knew he couldn't take them back. Lucy said, "Sorry doesn't do anything. You talked to this lawyer fellow, and you talked to Fatty Horvath. But what happens if they can't get Father loose?"

"What do you want us to do then?" Paul asked. "Bust him out of jail?"

He plainly meant it for a joke. But Lucy found herself nodding. "Yes. That seems fair, doesn't it? He's in there on account of you." She studied him carefully. She didn't think she'd ever looked at anyone like that before. And she found herself nodding again. "I think maybe you can, too. With all those strange things you sell in that shop, who knows what else you've got in there?"

Now Paul's eyes snapped back to her. What was on his face was shock—shock and maybe fear to go with it. "You don't know what you're talking about," he said slowly.

The way he said it convinced Lucy he was lying. "Oh, don't I? What would happen if the Germans really tore that place apart? What would they find? How much trouble would you people be in?"

Paul turned white. Lucy had heard people talk about that, but she'd never seen it herself till now. She knew she'd made a hit. She just didn't know where. He hung on to the rail for a moment to steady himself. "We wouldn't be," he answered. "We'd jump in a hole and pull it in after us."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Lucy asked. "There's nowhere in the world the Germans can't come after you. Well, maybe the middle of China, but you wouldn't fit in there very well."

He only shrugged. He didn't say anything more. By his sour, unhappy smile, he'd already said too much. Somehow, though, Lucy didn't think he'd been bragging or just plain lying. If he said he had a way to get free of the Germans, he probably did. But she couldn't imagine what it was.

"Who are you, Paul Gomes?" But that wasn't the right question. Lucy realized as much as soon as she asked it. What she really wanted to know was, What are you? On the other hand, she didn't get an answer even to the question she asked.

"You know what you are, Paul?" his father said. "You're an idiot." Paul gave back a sour smile. "I love you, too, Dad." "An idiot," his father repeated, relishing the word. "You think this local girl is cute, so you're ready to move heaven and earth to get her out of a scrape. If that doesn't make you an idiot, kindly tell me what would."

Do I think Lucy Woo is cute? Paul wondered. He shrugged. He probably did. She wasn't gorgeous or anything, but she wasn't bad. Is that why I'm trying to help her, though? That was a different question. He shook his head. Not a chance. He said, "You're the one who got her into this scrape, remember. You can't just treat the locals like a bunch of movie characters. If something bad happens to them, it happens. They're people, too, same as we are."

"Very pretty," his father said. "You'd win points for your high-school debating team. But I need to remind you of something. This alternate is also full of people who want to nail our hides to the wall. It's full of people who want to squeeze our secrets out of us. Keeping them from doing that is more important than anything else we do here. If we don't, if we mess up, we could ruin Crosstime Traffic and put the home timeline in a lot of danger. Next to keeping our secrets, what happens to the locals doesn't matter, not for beans. Have you got that?"

If Paul didn't have it, that wasn't because they'd ignored it in training. They'd hammered away at it, in fact. The home timeline came first. Nothing else counted next to keeping the home timeline safe and secret. In the training sessions, that seemed to make a lot of sense. Here in this alternate, this might-have-been San Francisco, the differences between us and them felt a lot smaller.

"It's not as simple as you make it sound, Dad," Paul said.

His father rolled his eyes. "The devil it's not," he said. "You're behind the counter. That Weidenreich comes in and starts grilling you. If you don't give him some kind of answer, what's he going to do? Haul you off to jail and start ripping answers out of you, that's what. So, Mr. Not-As-Simple, what do you tell him?" He folded his arms across his chest and waited.

Paul opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. He didn't know what to say. He knew what the Feldgendarmerie often did to people who didn't care to talk. The Germans in this alternate had the same sort of attitude as Crosstime Traffic wanted its people to show. They came first, and everybody else could look out for himself.

"Well?" Dad wasn't shy about rubbing it in. Dad wasn't shy about anything. That made him good at running this operation. But there were too many times when it made him a real pain to be around.

"Well, all right, we had to tell the inspector something. I can see that," Paul said at last. "But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to fix the damage. If we do it so we don't get noticed, where's the harm?"

His father looked at him—looked through him, really. "Okay," he said. "If we don't tip our hand, it's not so bad. But that's not the way you were acting. You sounded more like you wanted to charge right out there, slay the dragon, and rescue the fair maiden. And that's not a good idea—not, you hear me?"

"I hear you, Dad. I always hear you," Paul said wearily.

"Yeah, you hear me. But do you listen?"

Instead of answering, Paul turned away. Neither one of them was going to change the other's mind. Paul already knew the only way to reach his father was to hit him over the head with a two-by-four. Dad still hadn't quite figured out that Paul was just as stubborn. It didn't show so much in Paul, because he was quieter about it. But if he saw something he thought needed doing, he'd do it, and he wouldn't let anything or anybody—his father included—get in his way.

Or maybe Dad had figured out more than Paul thought. He said, "Look, son, what you do on your own is fine, as long as nobody can trace it back to Crosstime Traffic. This is one of those alternates we want to keep quarantined. The Germans here hold down everybody else's technology. We have to hold theirs down. We don't want them thinking about transposition chambers."

He wasn't wrong about that. An Imperial Germany that could rampage across the alternates was the last thing Paul wanted to see. But Imperial Germany already oppressed the Americans in this world. For people from the home timeline to oppress them, too, added insult to injury.

When Paul said as much, his father only shrugged. "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs," he said. He seemed to think answering one cliche' with another meant winning the argument. Paul gave it up. He would do what he would do. If Dad turned out not to like it, he was welcome to try to do something better.

Lucy waited for several days to see if her father would come home. When he didn't, she decided to visit Curious Notions again. She was tired after a long day at the shoe factory. She didn't even know if the shop would be open when she got there. She only knew she had to try.

Curious Notions hadn't closed. But when Lucy looked in the front window, she saw Paul Gomes wasn't there. That was his father writing something behind the counter. The big, black, bushy mustache he wore did nothing to cut the resemblance.

A bell rang when Lucy opened the door. The man who looked like Paul put down his pen and nodded to her. "Hello. How can I help you today?" He sounded pleasant enough. "We have some things here you won't find anywhere else, at prices most people can afford."

Maybe the people he usually dealt with could afford those prices. Lucy couldn't come close. She said, "I'm Lucy Woo. Do you have my father? What kind of price do I have to pay to get him back?"

The man's face changed. Not even that big mustache could hide his frown. "I think maybe you'd better come back another time," he said, and all of a sudden he didn't sound nearly so pleasant.

"Why? So you can have the Feldgendarmerie waiting for me?" Lucy pronounced the hard g and the guttural r's without a bobble. Feldgendarmerie was a German word most Americans used too often to get it wrong.

"No." The man shook his head. "So you can talk to my son. He's the one who's taking care of that."

Taking care of it how? Lucy wondered. Really trying to get Father out? Or just pretending till I give up and go away? She said, "I've already talked with Paul. He said he'd help. He hasn't yet."

Paul's father shook his head. "That isn't true. He's done stuff, all right. He's done more than I would have, as a matter of fact. It just hasn't paid off yet. Do you see the difference?"

Lucy would have expected to think he was lying. Oddly, though, she found herself believing him. She wondered why. Probably because he looked so disgusted when he talked about what Paul had done. She would have bet anything she owned that he wouldn't have done it himself.

She said, "When do you think it will pay off?"

"I don't know." Paul's father sounded disgusted, too. No, he wouldn't have lifted a finger to help Charlie Woo. When he saw his answer didn't satisfy Lucy, he let out a long, put-upon sigh. "If I had to make a guess, I'd say things would start happening in maybe another week or so. But I'm only guessing. I'm not promising."

"Another week?" Lucy said in dismay.

"It's not such a long time," Paul's father said.

He wasn't sixteen. He didn't have a father locked up in a German jail. But, again, Lucy didn't think he was trying to pull the wool over her eyes with his guess. He meant it, even if he didn't have the faintest idea how hard it was on her. Reluctantly, she nodded. "A week," she said. "But if he's not out by then . . ."

Paul's father leaned across the counter toward her. His face didn't change. His voice didn't change, either, unless it got a little softer. But when he said, "You don't want to threaten me, Miss Woo. You really don't want to threaten me. Have you got that?" she nodded before she even thought about it. She'd always known the Germans could do dreadful things. What American didn't know that? Could Paul Gomes' father be just as dreadful, or maybe worse? Right then, she didn't doubt it. He smiled, seeing that he'd made her afraid. "Anything else?"

"No, I don't think so." Lucy gathered herself. She couldn't just slink out of the shop, no matter how much her feet wanted to do exactly that. She made herself look Paul's father straight in the face. "I wasn't kidding about what I said. If my father doesn't come home, there will be trouble."

She'd surprised him. She could tell he hadn't thought she'd have the nerve to answer back. He said, "Go on. Get out. It's closing time here."

Now she did leave. She left with her back straight, and she didn't look behind her. She thought about slamming the door as she went out, but she didn't do that, either. She wouldn't let Paul's father see he'd upset her. He had to know he had, but she refused to let him see it. That felt very important to her just then.

An American cop in a baggy uniform of cheap blue cloth nodded to her. He looked tired—maybe a little hungover, too. His shoes needed shining. He had bad teeth. He was just a man doing a job, trying to get along as best he could. Lucy didn't have anything against that. She was trying to do the same thing herself.

She walked on. A couple of blocks closer to her home, she saw a German officer. His field-gray uniform fit perfectly. His jackboots were polished black mirrors. He strode along as if he owned the sidewalk—and didn't he? People scrambled to get out of his way. If they hadn't, he made you think, he would have walked right through them. He was proud to be what he was. How many Americans were proud these days? What did Americans have to be proud of? Not bloody much.

From behind the German, someone yelled, "Go home, you stinking—!" He finished with great sincerity and even greater fury.

The officer whirled. His Luger was in his hand even before the motion stopped. But dozens of people were walking along back there. Who'd cursed him? How was he supposed to tell?

And now, with his back turned in a different direction, somebody else told him where to go and how to get there. He spun again—he was quick as a cat. That quickness did him no good at all. As soon as he faced a new direction, another American in back of him called him a vile name.

Most people would have figured that out faster than he did. He kept jerking this way and that, like a puppet with four or five people fighting over the strings. He finally got the idea. He threw his hands in the air and stuck the pistol back in its holster. "Have your sport, American pigdogs!" he shouted in accented English. "You think you are iurmy, ja? See how funny you are when it comes time to pay taxes! Until then, bark as you please!" He tramped on.

It was a good comeback. Even Lucy, who despised him, knew as much. It would have been better if he'd thought of it sooner, but how much could you expect from an officer? The Germans had got where they were at least as much by being stubborn as by being quick.

I’ll be stubborn, too, Lucy thought. If it works for them, it can work for me. She sighed. The Germans also had money and soldiers and scientists going for them. What did she have? Stubbornness, and that was about it.

When she got home, her brother set up a chant: "Lucy's back! Lucy's back! Lucy's back!"

Her mother came running out of the kitchen to give her a hug. "Thank heavens!" she exclaimed. "I was afraid the Feldgendarmerie had taken you away, too."

Lucy shook her head. "It didn't have anything to do with the Feldgendarmerie. I stopped at Curious Notions to see if they were doing what Paul Gomes said they would." She made an unhappy face. "I still don't know if they are or not. His father told me to wait another week, and I guess I will. But I'm not going to wait any more than that, and you'd better believe it."

"You'd better be careful, so you don't end up in trouble," Mother said. "What can you do, anyway? You're only a girl."

"I don't know what I can do," Lucy said. "Get them in trouble, maybe, or more trouble than they're already in, because I think they're in some. But I think they are trying to do something for Father, too, and nobody else is, and they're doing it on account of me even if I am just a girl." She took a deep breath. She hadn't quite expected all of that to come out at once, but there it was.

Her mother looked startled, too. She didn't say anything, not right away. She just squeezed Lucy again, harder than ever. She didn't seem to want to let her go. When she did, Lucy was amazed to see tears gleaming in her eyes. "At your age, you think you can do anything," she said. "And sometimes you're right—and sometimes you're not. But you won't believe you're not, not yet you won't."

That Lucy didn't believe it went a long way toward proving her mother right. She didn't think of it that way, though. But she didn't feel like arguing with Mother, either. All she said was, "I'm home, and I'm fine. What needs doing now?"

She helped her mother with dinner. It wasn't very exciting: noodles and cottage cheese. But enough noodles made hunger go away, and there were enough. Then she did the dishes. After that, she yawned and listened to music on the radio while she darned socks. Pretty soon, she'd go to bed.

At the top of the hour, the radio played five minutes of news. Lucy would have got up to change the station to find more music, but she was too tired. She wondered what her brother did to socks. Did Michael have little hole-eating animals inside his shoes? She wouldn't have been surprised.

"Today, the Imperial German government announced a new campaign against terror and subversion," the newsman said. "Suspicious persons will be questioned and punished. Disloyalty will not be tolerated. Examples will be made of those foolish enough to resist the rightful authority of the German government."

Lucy's mother was sewing a patch onto one knee of Michael's jeans. She looked up at that. Her eyes met Lucy's. They shared a silent moment of worry. What would happen to Father if the Germans were talking tough like that?

"There are reports of new scientific advances in Berlin," the announcer went on. "Details are not available. The Kaiser's officials know how important it is to keep scientific progress secret."

That kind of story just made Lucy yawn. She heard one like it about every other week. The Germans always wanted to prove they were smarter than anybody else. Lucy thought that made them dumber than anybody else, but nobody cared about her opinion.

The radio played a commercial for a local bakery. Lucy's mind went back to the first piece the newsman had read. Slowly, she nodded to herself. If she had to, if Paul Gomes and his father didn't do what they'd said they would, she had a chance to make them pay. Would I use it? she wondered, but she didn't wonder long.

A truck pulled up in the alley behind Curious Notions. Two big, burly, suntanned men got out of the cab. They both wore overalls. One had on a shapeless, low-crowned cloth cap, the other a straw hat with a wide brim. Neither had taken a bath any time lately. But the odor of garlic wafting out of the crates in the back of the truck did a good job of covering that up.

Paul Gomes opened the back door to the shop. "Let's bring it in," he said, and pointed to the waiting storage room. The farmers up from Gilroy had dollies with them. That made moving their fragrant cargo easier. Paul counted off the loads. If they'd brought a third dolly for him, he would have pitched in. He'd done it before.

Panting at the end, the fellow in the cloth cap said, "That's all of it, kid."

That kid grated on Paul. He didn't let it show, though. "Here you are," he said, and handed the man a twenty-dollar bill and a five.

"Thank you kindly," the farmer said. 'That's a... real good price." It was at least five dollars more than he could have got at the city markets. Curious Notions didn't worry about money so much, and aimed to keep the people they dealt with happy.

"My pleasure, Mr. Mouradian," Paul said. "You've got good garlic. We're glad to get it from you."

"I expect you must sell to just about every Italian and Greek restaurant in the whole Bay Area, the way you buy," Mouradian said. Paul only smiled. The garlic here traveled a lot farther than the local could imagine. The farmer went on, "Well, you know your own business best, and I'm no snoop. I do want to tell you, though—that movie player your dad sold me works great."

They had CDs and DVDs here—not quite the same as the ones in the home timeline, but pretty close. They weren't on the civilian market, though. Anything that had anything to do with lasers was an Imperial German military secret. Even VCRs that played tapes were fairly new here. In the home timeline, VCRs were as obsolete as typewriters. But, before they'd gone obsolete, they'd grown a lot more bells and whistles than the local machines had. Local video-cassettes weren't the same size as the ones in the home timeline. Except for that, nobody'd had to change a thing to start making the players again.

"I'm glad you like it," Paul said. "We want satisfied customers."

"Well, you've sure got one." Mouradian turned to his helper. "Come on, Dave. Let's head on back home."

"Okay," Dave said—the first word out of his mouth since he'd got there. They climbed into the truck. The windows rattled in their frames when they slammed the doors. Mouradian started the motor and put the truck in gear. It rolled away. The harsh diesel exhaust fumes made Paul cough. They didn't have hydrogen-burners and electrics in this alternate the way they did back home.

Dad was out front dealing with customers. That meant Paul got to lug the garlic down to the subbasement by himself. He could have done without the honor. By the time he got the last of it down there, he hoped he would never see another set of stairs as long as he lived. It all but surrounded the place where the transposition chamber would materialize. The operator would have to make several trips to get it all back to the home timeline. The biggest complication in buying produce here was making sure they didn't buy too much to fit in the basement.

Wearily, Paul went up and pushed the filing cabinet over the trapdoor again. Then he trudged all the way upstairs—not just to the back room, but up to the apartment over the shop where he and his father lived. He jumped in the shower. Till he did that, he wasn't fit to be around anybody. He made the water as hot as he could stand. It felt good on his back and shoulders and legs. He knew he'd still be sore in the morning. He didn't do that kind of hauling often enough to get hardened to it.

He laughed as he dried off his hair. His dad grumbled about aches and pains a lot more than he did. Paul didn't think it was because Dad enjoyed complaining, either. He's past forty, he thought. No wonder he's wearing out.

He'd never come out and said that to his father. They already argued about enough other things. Calling his old man an old man wouldn't help.

When he went downstairs and out into the shop, Dad was selling a clock radio to a fat woman with a mink stole draped over her shoulders. Paul's stomach lurched. In the home timeline, wearing furs wasn't illegal, but it was disgusting—sickening, even.

There, if not in more important things, he and his father agreed.

But no matter how sick Dad felt inside, he didn't show it at all. Part of growing up was learning to put up with stuff you wouldn't think you could stand. Paul, who'd never heard his dentist say root canal, didn't understand that as well as someone twice his age might have. But, at eighteen, he was starting to get the idea.

"You'll like that one, Mrs. Pastrano," Dad was saying. "It's got terrific sound, and it'll pull in stations from a long way away."

"Well, I sure liked the record player I bought from you," Mrs. Pastrano said. In the home timeline, records were even more outdated than videocassettes. If a few fanatics hadn't kept playing them and even making them, Crosstime Traffic would have had a lot harder time turning out players for alternates where people still used them. The local woman paused and sniffed. "I smell garlic."

I'll bet you do, Paul thought. His father only shrugged and said, "I've got a bit of a cold. I can't smell a thing."

"It's there," Mrs. Pastrano declared, and she wasn't wrong. She wrapped the stole around herself more tightly. The flying end almost hit Dad. Paul thought he would have lost his lunch if it had got him. Dad never turned a hair. Mrs. Pastrano said, "So how much do you want for this?"

The price tag was attached to the clock radio. The red numbers had to be five centimeters high. Again, Dad acted as if everything were ordinary. He said, "It's $199.95."

Mrs. Pastrano squawked, but she paid. If she could afford a mink stole, she could afford a fancy radio that cost eight truckloads' worth of garlic, too.