The Valley-Westside War ct-6 Read online

  “They're pretty lousy, all right,” Chuck agreed. Sergeants complained about cooks, too. Sergeants complained about everything. It was part of their job.

  Here and there, Valley soldiers started standing along the freeway line. When nobody fired at the first few, more men did the same. Dan and Chuck stood up at the same time: not soon enough to take a big chance, and not late enough to seem yellow. Getting shot wasn't part of anybody's job… except when it was.

  “ Dan! Musketeer Dan!” somebody farther down the freeway called.

  “I'm here!” Dan sang out. “What's happening, man?”

  “They want you back at the traders' house, so step on it,” the messenger answered.

  “May I go, Sergeant?” Dan asked.

  “How can I say no?” Chuck replied. “If the Westsiders attack, we'll just have to try and fight the war without you. I don't know that we've got much of a chance then, but we'll do our best.”

  Propelled by such pungent sarcasm, Dan was glad to get away. He let the messenger lead him down to the level of the ordinary streets and take him back to the house where Liz had lived. (Of course, her parents had lived there, too, but he didn't think about them very much.)

  With electric lights down there in the bottom basement, could they have had TV and a telephone, too? A moment's thought made Dan decide that was silly. What would they watch? Whom would they call?

  He couldn't ask the messenger. You weren't supposed to gossip about what was in that house. He would be violating an order if he did, and he'd be making the other soldier violate one, too. He kept quiet.

  When he got to the house, he asked Captain Horace, “What's up. sir?”

  “You know the way you found the door down into the room with the electric lights?” the Valley officer said.

  “Yes. sir.”

  “Well, we found another door like that,” Horace said.

  “Under the basement, sir?” Dan asked. “What's in it?” He could imagine all kinds of things, each more marvelous than the last. A TV set that worked? An auto that worked? Why think small? What about an airplane that worked? If only you could fly!

  But Captain Horace shook his head. “No, not under there. It's set into the wall in the regular basement, the room above the one with the lights.”

  “Oh.” Dan knew he sounded disappointed. A room there wouldn't be so big. You couldn't put a car into it. let alone an airplane. But maybe you could put other cool stuff in there. “How do we get in?”

  “I hope you can help us figure that out,” Horace said. “So far, we haven't had much luck.”

  As if to show what he meant, somebody started banging on the wall with what had to be a sledgehammer. Boom! Boom! Boom! The racket made Dan 's head ache. “Got to be a better way than that,” he said.

  “It'd be nice if there were,” the captain agreed. “What can you come up with? If you can get us in there without tearing the place apart. I’ll make you a sergeant on the spot.”

  Dan imagined three stripes on his sleeve. He imagined the look on Sergeant Chuck 's face when the underofficer saw him with three stripes on his sleeve. That look would be worth ten dollars-no, twenty. And twenty dollars was a lot of money. “I'll do what I can,” he said.

  “See what you come up with, that's all. We don't expect miracles.” Horace 's mouth twisted in a crooked grin. “I sure wouldn't mind one, though.” He went to the top of the stairs and shouted down to the basement: “Knock it off!… Knock it off!” Mercifully, the banging stopped. Horace breathed a sigh of relief. “That's better. Now the top of ray head doesn't want to fall off.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dan said again. He'd had the same idea. He thought like a captain-or the captain thought like him! What would Sergeant Chuck say about that if he were ever rash enough to mention it out loud? Something interesting and memorable-he was sure of that.

  He went downstairs. A burly Valley common soldier was leaning on the handle of his sledgehammer. The musclebound man didn't look sorry to take a break. Nodding to Dan, he said, “You're the guy with smart ideas, huh?”

  “I don't know. We'll see,” Dan said. “Where's this door at. anyway?”

  “In the wall there. If you look real close, you can just see the crack,” the other soldier answered, pointing. “I sure hope you psych something out, man. This wall's gotta be reinforced concrete, or else whatever's tougher than that. I could keep banging away at it from now till everything turns blue, and I don't know if I'd ever bust in.”

  “Okay.” Dan peered at the wall the way he’d peered at the floor when he found the trap door. He wasn't sure he would have spotted this hairline crack if the muscular man hadn't pointed it out. He wondered how anybody'd found it in the dim light down here.

  When he said as much, the guy with the sledgehammer said, “ Dr. Saul went over the whole wall with a magnifying glass. That's how.”

  “Oh,” Dan said. “How… scientific of him.” You had to be thorough to do something like that. You also had to be a little bit crazy, or more than a little bit. Except if it paid off. the way it had here, you weren't really crazy, were you? Or maybe you were, and lucky, too.

  “What are you gonna do?” The other soldier didn't sound as if he thought Dan could do anything. A moment later, he explained why: '“ Dr. Saul tried everything under the sun. He sure couldn't get in.”

  “Groovy.” Dan had just been thinking how lucky Dr. Saul was. Well, so much for that. He eyed the almost invisible door. He eyed the sledgehammer, and the broad-shouldered, sweaty soldier who'd been swinging it. He eyed the tiny handful of concrete chips on the floor. No. brute force didn't seem to be the way to go.

  What then? If you couldn't break down a door, how did you go about tricking one? He remembered a story he'd read, one that seemed to have been all the rage right around the time the Fire fell. It wasn't a true story-or people nowadays didn't think so. anyhow. But the wizard and his followers had got stuck outside a door into a mountainside that didn't want to open.

  Dan pointed at this one. “Friend!” he said. Nothing happened. He laughed at himself. He might have known. Then another idea struck him. What was that word?

  Before he could remember it, the guy with the sledgehammer started laughing at him. “f know what you're doing,” he said. “My folks read me that story, too. But it's only, like, a story, man.”

  Never argue with somebody with a sledgehammer, especially when his shoulders are twice as wide as yours. That was an old rule Dan had just made up. Instead of arguing, he said, “Yeah, it's only a story. What have I got to lose, though? I mean, do you want to pound reinforced concrete for however long it takes?”

  The other soldier looked at the pitifully small bits of concrete he'd managed to break loose. He looked at Dan. His wave of invitation was almost a bow. “Go for it, man.”

  “I will, as soon as I…” Dan snapped his fingers. The Elvish word did come back to him! He pointed at the doorway, even though he had no idea whether that made any difference. “ Mellon!” he said.

  Silently and without any fuss, the door swung open.

  Valley soldiers did guard the west-facing approaches to West-wood. Liz supposed that made sense. With all the fighting the day before, the Westsiders might have tried to sneak a column through the dead zone. But she'd hope she and her folks would be able to get into Westwood and start selling their jeans before the occupiers noticed they were around.

  No such luck. The soldier who seemed to pop up out of nowhere didn't have a matchlock. He carried an Old Time rifle. His U.S. Army helmet was two lifetimes old. “Halt!” he called, and his voice said they'd belter do it. “Who are you people, and what are you doing here?”

  “Whoa!” Dad called to the horses. He pulled back on the reins. The animals stopped. Then he said, “We were coming up here with a load of denim pants-genuine Old Time Levi's, fresh like they were made yesterday-when all the shooting started. We couldn't go through, so we went around. And here we are.”

  “ Levi 's fresh like yesterday,
huh?” The rifleman laughed.

  “I've heard traders sling it before, but you've got more nerve than anybody. How about telling me one I'll believe?”

  “Pull out a pair, Liz,” Dad said, cool as a superconductor. “Let Doubting Thomas here see for himself.”

  “Sure.” Liz scrambled over the seat and into the back of the wagon. She grabbed a pair of jeans and showed them to the soldier. “See? With a zipper and everything.” The only trousers in this alternate that didn't close with buttons used zippers recycled from Old Time clothes. But not many zippers still worked, and not many tailors bothered with them. Buttons did the job. Zippers were mostly for show, the way cuff buttons on suit jackets were in the home timeline.

  Before asking for a closer look, the Valley soldier called. “Hey, Harvey!”

  “Yo!” A voice came from nowhere. “What's happening, man?”

  “Cover me. I need to check something out.”

  “You got it.” Harvey still didn't show himself.

  “Now let me see those jeans,” the soldier who'd challenged the wagon told Liz. She didn't make any sudden moves when she handed them to him. Maybe his father was a tailor, or maybe he was when he didn't carry a gun. He felt the fabric. He held the pants up against the sun to see if they had any thin spots. He worked the zipper several times and peered at the way it was sewn to the rest of the fly. The more he examined them, the more surprised he looked.

  “See?” Liz said.

  “Yeah.” The Valley rifleman seemed to nod in spite of himself. “Unless this is just one supercool pair to show people… You've got a whole bunch of these in the back there?”

  Liz nodded. “You better believe it. Look for yourself if you want to. We're no ripoff artists.” She made herself sound angry, the way a trader who'd been unfairly challenged naturally would.

  “I'll do that.” the soldier said. His expression said a lot of the people who protested hardest were the biggest thieves. That only made Liz mad for real. Nobody liked getting called a liar, even if just by a raised eyebrow.

  And she wasn't lying. She walked around to the back of the wagon and pointed to the big old stack of Levi 's. “Go ahead. Pick any pair you want.”

  The rifleman trusted her far enough to sling his weapon for a moment, anyhow. He leaned forward and pulled a pair out of the middle of the stack. He gave them the same once-over he had with the ones Liz offered him. When he finished, he said, “Well, I take my hat off to you.” And he really did lift the old-fashioned steel pot off his head. “These are the real McCoy. I don't know where you found 'em, but I bet we'll want to buy 'em. Pass on, Miss. Pass on.”

  They didn't go to the market square just south of the UCLA campus. Thai was too close to their old house. There was another market square, a ritzier one, north of Sunset Boulevard in Brentwood. The only reason that square was ritzier was that the neighborhood had been ritzier before the Fire fell-and still was.

  As Dad guided the horses towards it, he said, “If we were proper traders, we'd go to the other market. It's bigger, and there are more Valley soldiers around.”

  “All the more reason for staying away,” Mom said.

  “That's what I was thinking,” Dad agreed. “The people who do buy from us may think we're kind of dumb for setting up there, but they won't think we're anything more than kind of dumb.”

  “You hope,” Mom said.

  Dad nodded. “You bet I do.”

  “It's not too bad,” Liz said. “The library's up near the north end of campus. We won't be any farther from it than we were before… as long as the librarians don't tip off the Valley soldiers as soon as I go in there.”

  “I know it can happen. I hope it won't,” Dad said. “They're all people who've been there since the City Council ran things. Maybe there's a quisling or two, but we can hope not, anyhow. With a little luck, we'll get the job done yet.”

  “That would be good,” Liz said.

  “That would be wonderful,” Mom said. “Not seeing this alternate again wouldn't break my heart.”

  “Get used to it, hon. If we land another grant, we'll be back one of these days,” Dad said. By the look on her face, Mom had no trouble curbing her enthusiasm. Ignoring her expression, or at least pretending to, Dad went on, “That's what happens when you have an academic specialty: you keep coming back to it. I'll be coming back here when the beard I'm not wearing right now is all white-if I can keep getting grant money.”

  “And if you don't have WANTED posters with your face on them in every little kingdom from Frisco all the way down to Teejay,” Mom added.

  “Well, yes, there is that.” By the look on his face. Dad kind of liked the idea. He glanced over at Liz. “Of course, by then we won't have Liz to help get us in trouble.”

  “Hey, what are you blaming me for? You were the one who decided to hide Luke,” Liz said.

  “Yeah, but if Dan didn't think you were cute, none of the other Valley soldiers would have paid any special attention to us,” Dad said.

  “I can't help that!” Liz knew her voice went higher and shriller than she would have liked.

  “I didn't say you could,” Dad answered, which was… sort of true. “But you won't come to this alternate to stir up the boys here by the time my beard's all white. You'll be through with school by then, and you'll find some other alternate to be especially interested in-or maybe something in the home timeline: who knows?-and then you'll-”

  “If you say I'll stir up the boys there-well, don't say it, that's all,” Liz broke in.

  '“You can't prove I was going to,” Dad said.

  “You're lucky she can't, too,” Mom told him. “If she could, you'd be in even more trouble than you've already got yourself into.”

  “And they said it couldn't be done!” Dad sounded proud of himself for being such a pest. He probably was. He's not the stuffy kind of professor, anyway, Liz thought. That would be worse… I think.

  Dad sure wasn't stuffy after they got set up in the Brent-wood market square. He put some Levi 's out on a card table with folding legs that could have come from the Old Time. (Like the jeans, it really came from the home timeline.) Then he started yelling and carrying on about how wonderful they were. He even pulled out a bugle. Heaven only knew where he'd got that. Maybe from the Stoyadinoviches? Wherever, he blew a long, tuneless blast on it. He couldn't have been hokier if he tried. And he was trying… all kinds of ways.

  And it worked. The people who lived in Brentwood put down silver for the Levi 's. Pair after pair disappeared. Before too long, a Valley sergeant strode over to inspect the goods. He wasn't a warrior. He was at least fifty, with a pot belly and shrewd eyes. He was a quartermaster sergeant: somebody who got fighting men what they needed to fight with. Mo army in the world kept going without people like that, and they won exactly zero glory.

  This one didn't seem to care. He examined the jeans even more carefully than the Valley rifleman had. He carried a magnifying glass to help his aging eyes look at them up close. Once he was satisfied, he said, “How many pairs have you got left?” Dad told him. He nodded and asked, “What's your price?” Again, Dad told him. Liz waited for the sergeant to pitch a fit. He just said. “Okay. I'll take fifty pairs, assorted sizes.”

  It was as simple as that.

  Twelve

  When Dan stepped into the room he'd found with a word from The Lord of the Rings, lights in the ceiling came on. They were just like the ones in the room under the basement, so they had to be electric lights. Somehow, he wasn't much surprised. And then, a moment later, not being surprised… surprised him.

  The room was full of strange, mostly plastic furniture. A rectangular metal box sat against the far wall. The front had hinges and a handle, which made it likely to be a door.

  “Oh, wow, man.” The guy with the sledgehammer pointed to it. “Like, what is that thing?”

  “It's one of those refrigerators, isn't it?” Dan said. You found them in houses every now and then. They could be dangerous. Little
kids sometimes got them open and went inside. For some dumb reason, refrigerator doors didn't work from the inside out. Too often, kids playing games suffocated before anybody found them.

  “Yeah. I guess you're right. They kept stuff cold in the Old Time, right?” the other soldier said.

  “I think so. I wonder if this one still works.” Dan looked up at the bright ceiling. “The lights do.”

  “Oh, wow.” the muscular soldier said again.

  “Go get Captain Horace,” Dan said. “He needs to see this.”

  “Okay.” The other guy let the sledgehammer fall over with a clatter. Dan was half surprised he didn't carry it with him.

  Horace came down the stairs on the double. He walked through the newly opened door. He looked at the furniture, at the refrigerator, and then at Dan. “Congratulations, Sergeant,” he said.

  Now Dan was the one who said, “Oh, wow!” Then he said, “Thank you, sir!” And then he walked over to the refrigerator. “Could this thing work?”

  “Beats me,” Captain Horace said, which struck Dan as a pretty honest answer. The officer continued, “Why don't you open it and find out?”

  Why don't you…sir? Dan thought. What if it didn't work? What if it blew up instead? The captain would say. Well, so what? He was a captain, while Dan was only a just-promoted sergeant. Everybody in the whole Kingdom of the Valley would agree with him. Well, everybody but Dan. And nobody would care what he thought.

  He reached out, grabbed the door handle, and pulled. Obviously, that was what you were supposed to do. The door wasn't real easy to open, but it sure wasn't hard, either.

  As soon as it swung open about three inches, a light came on inside the refrigerator. Where does it go when the door closes? Dan wondered. But he had other things to worry about by then.

  He felt chilly air on his legs. “It does keep stuff cold!” he exclaimed.