Curious Notions ct-2 Read online

  "Yes, but it's not quite our English." Dad was just full of good advice. Paul would have been more grateful if he'd heard it less often. Dad seemed convinced he was eight, not eighteen. "You have to remember. You have to be careful."

  "Right," Paul said. His father sent him a sour look, but they left it there.

  They changed clothes before they got into the transposition chamber. Paul put on a pair of Levi's not too different from the ones people wore in the home timeline. They were a little baggier, a little darker shade of blue. Chambray work shirts like the one he tucked into the jeans had been popular in the home timeline a hundred years ago. He'd seen pictures. Only the pointed-toed ankle boots and the wide-brimmed derby seemed really strange.

  His father wore a similar outfit. He had on a double-breasted corduroy jacket with wide lapels over his shirt. In the home timeline, he would have looked like a cheap thug. The style was popular in the alternate, though. So was the wide leather belt with the big, shiny brass buckle. It said he was somebody solid and prosperous.

  The woman who ran the transposition chamber snickered at them when they got in. Paul would rather have worn a toga or a burnoose or a flowing Chinese robe. Those would have been honestly weird. This way, he just looked as if he had no taste in clothes. It was embarrassing.

  He and Dad got into their seats and put on their belts. He didn't know what good the belts did. Transposition chambers didn't run into things. They didn't move physically, only across timelines. The seats were like the ones in airliners, even to being too close together. That was probably why they had belts.

  For that matter, he didn't know what good the operator was, either. All she did to start the chamber was push a button. Computers handled everything else. Operators were supposed to navigate the chambers if the computers went out, but what were the chances if that happened? Slim and none, as far as Paul could see.

  He couldn't tell when the chamber started across the alternates toward the Kaiser's America. It would seem to take about fifteen minutes to get there. When he left the chamber, though, it would be the same time as it had been in the home timeline when he left. Duration was a funny business in transposition chambers. Even chronophysicists didn't understand all the ins and outs.

  "We're here." The operator caught him by surprise. He hadn't felt the arrival, any more than he'd felt the motion across the timelines.

  His father stood up and stretched. When he did, his hands brushed the ceiling of the transposition chamber. It wasn't very high. Paul got up, too. If he hadn't, Dad would have said he was dawdling. He didn't feel like banging heads over that. He and his father banged heads often enough anyway.

  The operator closed the door. The subbasement here had exactly the same position as the one in the home timeline from which the chamber had left. The air smelled a little different: a little smokier, a little more full of exhaust, and a little more full of people who didn't take baths as often as they might have.

  Paul and his father left the chamber. Silently and without any fuss, it disappeared. Was it going back to the home timeline or on to a different alternate San Francisco? Paul knew he would never know.

  Bare bulbs lit the chamber. Iron stairs led up to a trap door in the ceiling. A plump man came through. He waved. "Hello, Lawrence," he called to Paul's father. A moment later, as an afterthought, he added, "Hello to you, too, Paul."

  "Hello, Elliott," Dad answered. "How's business?"

  "Tolerable," the plump man said. "This station makes a profit. The company isn't going to close it down any time soon." He laughed. "If we can't make a profit so close to the Central Valley, we'd better shut up shop."

  "Shh." Dad put a forefinger in front of his mouth. "Don't let Crosstime Traffic hear you." He laughed, too. He got along fine with people his own age. He seemed to get along fine with everybody except Paul, in fact. The two of them were water and sodium. That made Paul wonder if there was something wrong with him.

  Elliott said, "Come on upstairs, and you can see for yourself." Up they went. Their boot heels clanged on the iron risers. Once they got out of the subbasement, Elliott closed the trap door behind them. Then he rolled a file cabinet that didn't look as if it could roll over the door. That subbasement wasn't supposed to be easy to find. He suddenly looked worried. "You've got your Kennkarte?"

  "Oh, yes." Dad reached into the back pocket of his Levi's and pulled out his identity papers. Paul did the same. Elliott nodded, obviously relieved. If you didn't have papers in this alternate, you might as well not exist. Theirs were forgeries, of course, but they were forgeries made with all the skill of the home timeline. They were at least as good as the real thing. They just happened not to be genuine.

  The German word for identity papers seemed right at home in the English Elliott used, the English of this alternate. Paul had no trouble following it, but it wasn't the English he spoke at home. It was slower, the vowels flatter, some of the consonants slightly guttural. It was, in fact, an English that had had German rubbing off on it for a hundred forty years or so.

  Elliott led Paul and his father into the front room of the shop, which stood on Powell Street between Union Square and Market. The name of the place was Curious Notions. From inside, it looked to be spelled out backwards in gold letters on the plate-glass window opening on the street. Toys and gadgets, most of them from the home timeline, filled the shelves.

  "Nobody's wondered about any of this stuff?" Paul's father asked. He didn't hesitate to steal Paul's idea. Maybe he didn't know he was doing it. Maybe.

  "Not that I've heard," Elliott answered. "And if I can't find out here, it's a good thing I'm leaving town."

  Paul looked out the window. Men wore the same kind of clothes he and Dad—and Elliott—did. Women mostly had on linen blouses, sweaters, and skirts that came down below the knee. The women wore pointed-toed shoes, too. Misery loved company. White and black women wore their hair in fancy curls. Those whose ancestors came from Asia mostly didn't bother.

  Cars and trucks slowly picked their way past pedestrians and people on bicycles. They looked like those from more than a hundred years earlier in the home timeline. All of them burned gasoline or diesel fuel. The Kaiser's men didn't seem to worry about global warming. Of course, they'd had to dodge a nuclear winter in this alternate. It wasn't so crowded here as in the home timeline, either.

  A truck driver leaned on his horn. That could have happened in the home timeline, too. Paul wished the noisy idiot would cut it out. It did no good, and only annoyed everybody in earshot. That was probably why the trucker did it.

  Snarling motorcycles with sidecars rolled past. The sidecars had machine guns mounted on them. The German soldiers who rode in them didn't believe in taking chances.

  "You know what this is?" Dad said. "This is an alternate that never heard of Adolf Hitler. That's not bad."

  "It's still not a very pretty place," Paul said.

  Elliott looked from one of them to the other. "You're just a big, happy family, aren't you?" he said. "Will you be all right here after I go back to the home timeline?"

  "We'll be fine," Dad answered. "Paul's a little wet behind the ears, that's all. It's nothing to worry about."

  "Thanks a lot, Dad," Paul said.

  "Any time." His father seemed to think he meant that for real thanks.

  Elliott plainly knew better. He also plainly knew better than to try to step into the middle of a quarrel between father and son. The only thing that happened when you did that was, you got shot at from both sides. The departing shopkeeper just said, "Well, you know the drill here. To the authorities, we sell these little gadgets and we deal in produce on the side. I've told our people in the Central Valley that the two of you would be taking over for a while."

  "Sounds good," Dad said. "We'll manage. Don't you worry about a thing. We've been here before. They know us. They know we'll treat 'em right." He nudged Paul. "Don't they?"

  "Huh?" Paul said, taken by surprise, and then, "Uh, sure, Dad." He couldn't arg
ue with his father about that. As far as the local merchants went, Lawrence and Paul Gomes were some of the most reliable people in the world.

  Dad laughed. "Dealing here is fun, too. When I think I can get an enormous trailer full of garlic from down in Gilroy for twenty-five dollars . . ." He laughed again, louder.

  So did Paul, without any hesitation. Prices here were a joke if you came from the home timeline. A dollar there was a little aluminum coin, worth nothing in particular.

  A dollar for your thoughts, people said. Even a benjamin wasn't worth all that much. Things were different here. You could buy more, much more, with a dollar here than with a benjamin back home. Even cents were real money here: bronze coins, not aluminum. And the phrase this alternate used was a penny for your thoughts.

  Somewhere off in the distance, a fire engine roared through the streets, bell clanging. Police cars here used bells, too. They were painted red, not black and white like the ones in the home timeline.

  Dollars, not benjamins. Bells, not sirens. Red, not black and white. Those were the small differences, even if they were the ones you noticed first after crossing the timelines. Occupation, not freedom. Poor people, not prosperous ones. Those were the differences that really counted.

  As things went in Chinatown, Lucy Woo's family wasn't badly off. They didn't have a television—they weren't rich. But they did have a radio and a small refrigerator. The money she brought home from the shoe factory helped pay for luxuries like that. Plenty of their neighbors got by with less.

  "So long," her younger brother said. Michael hurried out the door. He was ten, and had a summer job as a grocery delivery boy. He'd go back to school when fall started. He needed to learn as much as he could—he'd take over their father's business one of these years. Lucy would have liked to stay in school, too. It hadn't worked out. They needed the money. And sons got breaks like that more often than daughters did.

  Lucy hurried to finish her own bread and jam. She drank tea with breakfast. It helped her forget how tired she was when she first got up in the morning. Dad was already gone, opening up the shop. He bought, sold, and repaired anything that ran on electricity, from lamps to large adding machines. He was teaching Michael, too, all the time. Lucy's brother was already getting pretty good with a soldering iron.

  "Got to go," Lucy said, and grabbed her lunch pail. She was tempted to open it and see what was inside, but she didn't. Mother tried to surprise her every day, at least with something. It wasn't always easy, but she usually managed.

  Mother blew Lucy a kiss when she went out the door. Lucy yawned in spite of the tea. She really wished she could go back to bed. But no such luck. She had to head for the shoe factory.

  Down the stairs. Other people in the apartment building were going to work, too. She nodded to some. With others, she didn't bother. They were as bleary-eyed as she was. Out the front door, turn left. Down Powell toward Market. She yawned again. If she couldn't have more sleep, she wished for more tea, or maybe coffee. Coffee, she decided. It was stronger.

  The morning was nice and clear. San Francisco wasn't foggy all the time, just often enough to be annoying. Gulls soared overhead. They mewed like cats. On the cracked sidewalks, pigeons paraded underfoot. They cocked wary orange eyes at passing people. Sometimes they got handouts. Sometimes they wound up in pigeon stew. They couldn't tell which ahead of time. No wonder they were wary.

  Newsboys waved papers and shouted headlines. Divers had found the skeleton of the Hindenburg where it crashed off the coast of France almost a hundred fifty years earlier. That was interesting, but not interesting enough to get Lucy to part with two cents for a newspaper.

  Some shops were opening up as she walked by. Shopkeepers called out to passersby in English and Chinese and Spanish—and, if the passersby looked rich, in German. People in San Francisco sold anything that moved. If you stepped away from your shadow for a minute, they'd pry it off the sidewalk and try to sell it back to you. Lucy heard men and women hawking pork, clothes, jewelry, watches, vegetables, secondhand books, medicines, radios, slide rules, bicycle tires, and everything else under the sun.

  She'd grown up here. She knew the "fine gold jewelry" would turn your arm green if you wore it very long. The "Swiss watches" were cheap copies sold at not-so-cheap prices—either that or they were stolen. The black-and-orange Seals shirts and beige ones for Missions backers would come apart at the seams sooner than they should have. The bicycle tires were liable to be retreads. Sometimes the medicines were what they claimed. More often, they were sugar pills. If you bought from somebody you didn't know, you took your chances. If you came expecting wonderful things at rock-bottom prices—well, that was what people here wanted you to do. Truth was, you got what you paid for, here as anywhere else.

  A few places showed OPEN signs but didn't have people out front telling the world about how wonderful they were. Those quiet places were the ones where you could get good stuff... if you knew what you were looking for, and knew what you were looking at. Fine gold jewelry was for sale—for those who could afford it. Some "antiques" hadn't been made day before yesterday in a room behind the shop where they were for sale. Not all radios had their original innards replaced by junk that would wear out in weeks. Because of what her father did, Lucy knew some of the tricks of that trade.

  And there was Curious Notions. Lucy's father was curious about that place. She couldn't blame him. They had phonographs smaller than anyone else's that sounded better than machines costing five times as much. They had radios you could put in your pocket and listen to with earphones. They had battery-powered games that were like nothing anyone else sold.

  They could have been millionaires, selling what they sold. By all the signs, they weren't interested in being millionaires. What they sold here in San Francisco was almost an afterthought. People said they did most of their business with the grape growers and produce fanners in the Central Valley. Lucy knew how much—or rather, how little—what people said was often worth.

  As she often did, she stopped in front of the window. The stuff in Curious Notions looked different. It didn't pretend to be wood even when it wasn't. It wasn't ornamented to pieces. Everything was just there, there to do a job and not make a fuss about it. It wasn't stylish. It didn't have to be stylish. It worked, and worked well.

  Lucy had got used to the chubby man who bustled around inside the place. She didn't see him there this morning. Instead, two other men, plainly father and son, stood talking behind the counter. She didn't recognize them, but they acted as if they had every right to be there. The father, whose big mustache made him look tough, banged the countertop with his fist to make a point. The son might have been Lucy's age, or maybe a year or two older. He nodded in a way that said he'd heard it before and wasn't much impressed.

  Though Lucy could see that, the man with the mustache couldn't. He went on talking. The younger one started tidying things up inside the shop. Every so often, he would nod again. He was polite, but he wasn't interested.

  He looked out the window and saw Lucy. He smiled at her. She found herself smiling back. Did he know she'd been standing here watching him for a minute or so? She couldn't tell. She couldn't stay here watching him all day, though. She couldn't be late for work.

  Down to Market she went, and then south and west along it toward the factory. She wished she weren't going there. She wished she could do something she enjoyed instead. She didn't want to spend most of her waking hours tending a sewing machine. Only a crazy person would.

  But only a crazy person would want to go hungry, either. You couldn't always do what you wanted to do. Sometimes it was what you had to do. Maybe, one of these days, she wouldn't have to go to the factory every day. She could hope. She could dream. Meanwhile . . . she could work.

  Some German businessmen came through the place in the middle of the shift. One of them wore a top hat, something she'd seen only in movies before. They all looked fat and pink and rich. They paid more attention to the machines in the
factory than to the people working in it. Lucy understood that. They could always replace the workers. The machines would be much more expensive to change.

  Even Hank Simmons had to fawn all over the Germans. Seeing the petty tyrant of a foreman humble made Lucy smile again, this time in a nasty way. She kept her head down so nobody else would notice her doing it.

  Two

  The bell over the front door at Curious Notions tinkled. Paul looked up from his bowl of shrimp and rice. He'd been eating lunch as fast as he could, hoping to finish before another customer came in. No such luck. He shoved the bowl under the counter and put what he hoped was a businesslike smile on his face. "Hello. How can I help you?"

  "I am Inspector Weidenreich," said the customer, who turned out not to be a customer after all. "You will show me your Kennkarte and your permit for doing business here. At once." I'll close you down if you don't, his manner declared. His German accent wasn't thick, but you could hear it. That made him an imperial official, not just one who worked for San Francisco or California. It also made him more dangerous.

  But papers were not a problem, or Paul hoped they weren't. "Certainly, sir," he said. He took his identity papers from his hip pocket and laid them on the counter. "Here is the Kennkarte." The permit was framed, and hung on the back wall. He set it beside his papers.

  Weidenreich examined the business permit first. Paul wasn't worried about that at all. The permit was genuine. The tall, somber-looking inspector—his expression said someone in his family might have died not long before—took the permit out of the frame. He held it in front of a light so he could see the watermark. Finding it was there only made him grunt.

  Then he looked at Paul's Kennkarte. He took a jeweler's loupe out of one of his jacket pockets and peered at the papers through it. The forgery was supposed to be perfect. Paul hoped it was.