The Disunited States of America Read online

  Mr. Brooks knocked on the Snodgrasses’ door. Mr. Snodgrass opened it a moment later. “You didn’t need to do that,” he said when he saw the flowers.

  “I think I did,” Mr. Brooks said. “And whether I needed to or not, I wanted to. How’s she doing? Have you heard?”

  “Well, that’s right kind of you. Come on in.” Ted Snodgrass stepped aside to make room. He didn’t seem to want to answer Mr. Brooks’ question, but finally he did: “I haven’t heard anything really bad. They’ve got her in intensive care in Parkersburg, and they’re doing everything they know how to do. Heaven only knows how I’m going to pay for it all, but I’ll worry about that later. We’ll see what the insurance covers.”

  Virginia didn’t have government-paid health coverage, the way the U.S.A. in the home timeline did. You bought insurance yourself. If you couldn’t afford to, you paid up front when you got sick. If you couldn’t afford to do that, you went in hock up to your eyebrows—or you stayed away from doctors. To Justin, that wasn’t a medical system. It was more like a bad joke.

  Several other bouquets already perfumed the living room. Neighbors, Justin thought. He lived in a suburb in northern Virginia in the home timeline. If someone in his family got sick, the neighbors might not even know about it. This alternate had good points as well as bad.

  Beckie came into the front room. “How are you?” Justin asked her.

  “Worried,” she said, which was a straight answer. “You?”

  “Yeah, me, too. Still okay so far, though.” As he had once before, Justin knocked on his head, as if to knock on wood. He had more confidence in the home timeline’s immunity shots than in this alternate’s gamma globulin, but he wasn’t quite sure he ought to. “Shall we go out back and talk?” he asked.

  “Sure. Why not?” she said.

  The back yard wasn’t likely to be bugged. Of course, if his own clothes were … He didn’t think that was likely, either, but Mr. Brooks was right to worry. You never could tell. They grabbed a couple of fizzes from the refrigerator and went out. Justin laughed. “Maybe we should have stayed inside after all. It sure is nicer with the air conditioning.”

  “You grew up in Virginia, and you say that? The humidity here drives me nuts,” Beckie said. “But out here we won’t have Gran hovering around trying to listen to everything we say.”

  He laughed again. She wasn’t worried about bugging—she was worried about being bugged. “Your grandmother seems nice enough,” he said. He’d done that before, too. You had to stay polite about other people’s relatives.

  The people whose relatives they were didn’t have to stay polite. That was part of what made having relatives fun. Beckie sure didn’t bother. “Only goes to show you don’t know her very well,” she said. “She’s …” She stopped, shaking her head.

  “That bad?” Justin was thinking of an aunt of his who drank too much every once in a while. When she did, she liked to tell stories—endless stories—about him as a little boy. That made him awfully glad to have her around.

  “Worse,” Beckie said without the least hesitation. “Back home, I could put up with her—sort of, anyhow—because we could get away from each other. But we’ve been in each other’s pockets ever since this miserable trip started, and I don’t think I’m going to want to have much to do with her for the rest of my life. All she ever does is complain and blame other people. Nothing’s ever her fault. If you don’t believe me, just ask her.”

  Justin laughed. Then he realized Beckie wasn’t kidding, not even a little bit. “I’m glad you made the trip,” he said.

  “I’m not!” she exclaimed. “I wish I were in California, thirty-five hundred kilometers away from bombs and missiles and uprisings and diseases and everything else.”

  “Oh,” Justin said in a very small voice. He’d wanted to say he was glad she’d come to Virginia because he wouldn’t have met her if she hadn’t. That would have made a pretty speech. But it was also pretty selfish when you got right down to it, which he hadn’t. Coming to Virginia made it a lot more likely that she would get killed. Had he thought about that before he stuck his foot in his mouth? No, not even a little bit.

  She raised an eyebrow. He had the bad feeling she knew exactly what he was thinking. “I like you,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong. As long as I’m stuck here, it’s nice that I’ve made a friend. But I’d still rather be home. If that hurts your feelings, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” he said, which was … half true, anyway. “I understand how you feel.” He wasn’t lying there. He wished he’d thought faster.

  She changed the subject on him: “Remember how I was talking about the old United States a while ago?”

  “Uh-huh.” Justin wasn’t likely to forget that, or how much it had scared him.

  “If they hadn’t fallen apart, this kind of stuff couldn’t happen,” she said. “States wouldn’t go to war with each other whenever they felt like it, because there’d be something bigger to stop them.”

  She was right—if you ignored the Civil War. But this was one of those times when being right did no good at all. “You’re only about three hundred years too late to worry about it now,” he pointed out.

  “I know.” She nodded sadly. “Still, they should have been able to do something back then. Have you ever written a story or drawn a picture where you know exactly how you want it to turn out—you’ve got this image inside your head—but what you end up with isn’t like that because you just aren’t good enough to make it come out right?”

  “Oh, sure.” Justin nodded, too. “Who hasn’t?”

  “That’s what the United States reminds me of,” Beckie said. “It was a good idea—they were a good idea?—but the people in charge didn’t know how to put them together so they’d stick. It’s too bad.”

  “I guess.” Justin was lucky enough to come from a timeline where the Constitution took care of the problems with the Articles of Confederation. Till coming here, he took that for granted. He didn’t now.

  Beckie sighed. “But you’re right—it’s too late now. Nothing will make any of the states give up power to some bigger government. And so we’ll have lots of stupid little wars. I just hope we don’t have any big ones.”

  “Me, too,” Justin said. “How many states have atomic bombs and missiles these days?”

  “Most of them,” Beckie said, which was answer enough.

  “Well, we haven’t blown ourselves up yet. They haven’t blown themselves up in Europe yet, either,” Justin said. “They may be luckier over there than we are, because they’ve come closer.” This was an alternate where people talked about great powers, not superpowers. There were no superpowers here. But there were plenty of great powers, powers with bombs and missiles and know-how enough to ruin anyone who pushed them too far. Britain, France, Prussia, and Italy in Europe, Russia and Ukraine farther east, India, two or three Chinese states, Japan, California, Texas, New York, Brazil, Argentina, Chile … Nobody with any sense messed with them. Virginia and Ohio were down in the second rank. They could devastate each other, but couldn’t really stand up against, say, Britain or California.

  Alliances ran around this alternate like fault lines. Every so often, somebody shifted from one camp to another. When that happened, it was like an earthquake. This alternate had known about nuclear weapons almost as long as the home timeline. They’d been used a few times here, as they had there. But the Big One, the nuclear exchange with everyone throwing everything at everyone else, hadn’t happened either place. Maybe that was luck. Maybe it was simply terror.

  There were alternates where the missiles did fly. Crosstime Traffic didn’t operate in many of them. What was the point? Crosstime Traffic needed to trade to stay in business, and those shattered alternates didn’t have much worth trading. If this one blew itself to hell and gone, Crosstime Traffic would pull out of here, too. Nobody would have to worry about whether this alternate discovered crosstime travel on its own, not any more.

  “Nobody me
sses with California. We’re strong enough so nobody dares,” Beckie said, which was just what Justin was thinking. She went on, “When I came east, I never thought I’d get stuck in the middle of this dumb, pointless war.” Justin coughed. Under her California tan, Beckie turned pink. “I didn’t mean it like that,” she told him.

  “Well, I didn’t think you did.” He had to act like a Virginia patriot in spite of what he thought about racial politics here. He didn’t like that—he despised it, in fact—but he didn’t see what he could do about it. How many people like Senior Agent Jefferson and Agents Madison and Tyler did Virginia have? Lots of them.

  “Can I say something and not have you get mad?” Beckie asked. “I mean, I know I’m a foreigner and everything. Will you remember?”

  “I’ll try.” Justin thought he knew what she’d come out with. He waited to see if he was right.

  She took a deep breath and brought it out with a rush: “If you treated your Negroes the same as you treat other people, then other states couldn’t use them to give you trouble.”

  She was right. She couldn’t have been righter, as far as Justin was concerned. He wanted to sink into the ground because he couldn’t just come out and say so—it would have been too far out of character. He had to sound the way an ordinary Virginian from this alternate would, even if that meant sounding like a jerk.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “How much have they done to show they deserve to be treated like anybody else?”

  “How much of a chance have you given them?” Beckie returned.

  “Well, if we did give them a chance like that and they didn’t take it, we’d be even worse off,” Justin said. “We can’t ship them anywhere else, after all.” The trouble was, every bit of that was true. Not all problems came with neat, tidy solutions all tied up with a pink ribbon and a perky bow. When two groups hated each other and were stuck on the same land … In the home timeline, Palestine had been a disaster for a century and a half, and showed no signs of getting better.

  “We don’t have troubles like this in California,” Beckie said.

  “You don’t have very many Negroes, either,” Justin reminded her.

  “No, but we have lots of people from the Mexican states,” she said. “Some of them lived there all along. Others come over the border looking for work, because we pay better. We treat them like people. We aren’t like Texas. Anybody who isn’t white in Texas is down two goals with five minutes to play.”

  Somebody from the home timeline would probably have said, Anybody who isn’t white in Texas has two strikes against him. Rounders here, which was close enough to baseball for government work, was most popular on the East Coast.

  No matter how Beckie put it, she wasn’t wrong. Whites did rule the roost in this Texas, which was bigger than the one in the home timeline. In state after state, people who were on top clung to power, and no bigger authority could make them change their ways. People in the home timeline grumbled about the things the U.S. government did, but North America without any kind of federal rule was no paradise, either.

  Beckie probably would have agreed with Justin had he said that. After all, she was nostalgic for even the weak United States of the Articles of Confederation. But he changed the subject instead. He didn’t want her to start wondering how he knew some of the things he was saying. What he did say was, “I hope Mrs. Snodgrass pulls through. She seems like good people.”

  “She can be snippy sometimes, but she’s a lot nicer than Gran—that’s for sure,” Beckie said. “I wonder what her chances are.”

  “Don’t know,” Justin said. That sounded better than not very good. Mrs. Snodgrass wasn’t young, and, if she had the military virus, it was specially designed to kill people. This alternate’s bioengineering was thirty or forty years behind what they could do in the home timeline, but the viruses the home timeline was able to cook up thirty or forty years ago were plenty nasty. He went on, “I’m sure they’re doing everything they can.”

  She could have taken that the wrong way—she might have thought he was sneering at this alternate’s medicine. But she said, “Yeah, but how much do they know in Parkersburg? She might die there even if she’d get better in Los Angeles.”

  People from the home timeline often thought of each alternate as a unit. That was only natural. Compared to the people who’d lived in an alternate since birth, Crosstime Traffic workers couldn’t help being superficial. But every alternate was as complicated as the home timeline. The locals understood that. People like Justin had to pick it up as they went along. This California was richer than this Virginia, and likely ahead of it in a lot of ways.

  Or is that so? Justin wondered. Beckie thought it was, but she came from California. She wasn’t … what was the term? An objective witness, that was it. What would Ted Snodgrass say about the quality of medicine in Parkersburg? Would he know better than she did? He wasn’t objective, either.

  The more you looked at things, the more complicated they got. That was one of the first really adult thoughts Justin had ever had, but he didn’t even know it.

  He said, “They could probably do better in Charleston or Richmond than in Parkersburg, too.” Chances were that was true. Charleston was a real city, and Richmond was the state capital. Anybody who was anybody went there.

  “Sure.” Beckie nodded quickly. “I didn’t mean to say Virginia was backward or anything, Justin.”

  “Okay,” he said. Chances were she’d meant exactly that. This Virginia was backward in some ways. Only somebody who lived here would say anything different. Since Justin was supposed to live here, he had to act as if he did. He felt like a hypocrite a lot of the time.

  But Beckie worried about hurting his feelings. That was worth knowing.

  “I hope we don’t get it,” she said.

  “Yeah. Me, too,” Justin said. “Every time I sneeze or I itch or I … do anything, I guess, I start to wonder—Is this it? Am I coming down with it?”

  “Oh, good!” Beckie said.

  “Good?”

  “Good,” she said firmly, and nodded again. “Because I feel the same way. It’s … a little scary.” She paused, then added, “More than a little,” and nodded one more time. That took nerve, admitting how scared you really were.

  Justin gave her a hug. She hugged him back, but she still looked relieved when he didn’t hold on real tight or get too grabby. “It’ll be all right,” he said as he let her go. Then, since she’d been honest, he felt he had to do the same: “I hope it’ll be all right, anyway.”

  Every time Mr. Snodgrass’ phone rang, Beckie jumped, afraid it would be the hospital in Parkersburg with bad news. Mr. Snodgrass flinched, afraid of the same thing. Gran didn’t seem to act any different from the way she always had. Maybe that meant she was holding things inside. Maybe it meant she didn’t feel anything much. Maybe it just meant she didn’t hear the telephone ring. You never could tell with Gran.

  So far, the hospital hadn’t called with the worst news. Mrs. Snodgrass was still alive. But everybody in Elizabeth seemed to be calling to find out how she was. People from Palestine telephoned, too. Mr. Snodgrass seemed to think that was a wonder. “Most of the time, the folks down in Palestine don’t care if we live or die, and we feel the same way about them,” he said. “It’s only a couple of miles, but it might as well be the other side of the moon.”

  Beckie thought that was strange. Back in Los Angeles, a lot of her friends lived farther from her than Palestine was from Elizabeth. Nobody there thought anything of it. The city stretched for kilometer after kilometer. Things were on a different scale here. Elizabeth and Palestine were rivals, each wanting to be the boss frog in a tiny pond. Elizabeth was the county seat, but Palestine had more shops.

  She also thought she knew why people in Palestine were calling. It wasn’t just because they felt like burying the hatchet with Elizabeth. They were scared, too. Mrs. Snodgrass and Gran had gone down there to shop. Had they brought the disease with them? Nobody knew, not yet
.

  When the ambulance came back to Elizabeth two days later, no one seemed much surprised. Hearing the siren screech, Beckie worried that it was coming for Justin or his uncle. Outside of the Snodgrasses, they were the people she knew best here. And she’d needed that hug Justin gave her. If he’d tried to make it into something more than she needed … But he hadn’t, so she didn’t need to worry about that—yet, anyhow. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have plenty of other things to worry about.

  And the ambulance didn’t stop at the motel up near the county courthouse. The siren kept right on coming, and the ambulance pulled up three doors away from the Snodgrasses’ house. A middle-aged woman burst out of the house, calling, “Come quick! Fred’s got it, sure as anything!”

  The men in the biohazard suits raced into the house. When they came out a few minutes later, they had a man—presumably Fred—on a stretcher. An IV drip ran down into his arm. They put him into the ambulance and slammed the doors. The ambulance sped away, red lights flashing.

  “Fred Mathewson,” Mr. Snodgrass said glumly. “He’s hardly been sick a day in his life till now.”

  How do you know? Beckie almost asked. But in a town like this, Mr. Snodgrass would know. She offered the most hope she could now: “Maybe he isn’t sick with … this.”

  “Maybe.” But Mr. Snodgrass didn’t sound as if he believed it. “Bessie sure thinks he is, though. And why would they come out if they didn’t?” That only proved he had good reasons not to believe.

  “They could be wrong,” Beckie said. “He could have the flu or something, and his wife could be panicking.”

  “Bessie Mathewson wouldn’t panic if she found a baby rattler in her coffee cup,” Mr. Snodgrass said. He knew the woman and Beckie didn’t, so she shut up. He went on, “I just wonder why I haven’t caught it yet.”

  “So do I,” Gran said. “I thought I did a couple of times. I may yet.” She couldn’t stand having other people around who were sicker than she was. “I don’t know how much longer I can go on.”