The Disunited States of America Read online

  Two

  Beckie Royer sat on the back porch of the Snodgrasses’ house and watched the grass grow. That was what people in Elizabeth called sitting around and doing nothing. They seemed to spend a lot of time doing it, too.

  There sure wasn’t much else to do. Beckie yawned. For her, there wasn’t anything else to do. Gran sat inside, chattering away with Ethel Snodgrass. The two cousins were trying to catch up on more than half a lifetime apart in a few days. Mrs. Snodgrass seemed nice enough, but she was a lot more interested in Gran than she was in Beckie.

  The grass in the back yard needed mowing. Maybe you really could watch it grow. It probably grew faster here than it did in Los Angeles. It rained more here—that was for sure. To Beckie, any rain in the summertime was weird. But these folks took it for granted.

  Somewhere not far away, in bushes under some trees, something made a mewing noise. In California, Beckie would have thought it was a cat. Here, it was more likely to be a catbird. Those didn’t live in Los Angeles. She thought they were handsome in their little black caps. Robins strutted across the lawn after bugs and worms. They had them in L.A., but you didn’t see them every day. You were almost tripping over them here.

  She wondered if she’d see a passenger pigeon. Three hundred years ago, just before 1800, they’d probably been the most common birds in the world. By two hundred years ago, they were hunted almost to extinction. But a lot of states banned going after them, and they pulled through. They would never form such huge flocks as they had once upon a time, but they were still around.

  Something flew into the trees above the bushes where the catbirds were squawking. Was it a passenger pigeon? For a second, Beckie got excited. Then she saw it was a plain old ordinary pigeon. So much for that.

  Little by little, she was starting to understand why places like this seemed to belong to an earlier time. They had modern conveniences. But if you weren’t watching TV or using your computer, what could you do? Go to your neighbor’s and chat. Go hunting if you were a man, cook if you were a woman. And sit around waiting for something to happen. It was usually a long wait.

  She glanced at the sun. It was heading for the horizon, but it was still a couple of hours away. Talk about long waits … Some time between now and then, she needed to go back into the house and spray on some mosquito repellent. They had that back in California, but you really needed it here. The bugs would eat you alive if you forgot. They came out when the sun went down.

  You almost had to be nuts to sit outside then, even with repellent on. The stuff wasn’t perfect. You’d get bitten anyhow. But if you did stay out, if you ignored the buzzes that sounded like tiny dentist’s drills whining through the humid air, you got to see fireflies.

  Lightning bugs, they called them here most of the time. The locals took them for granted, because they saw them every summer. Beckie didn’t—no fireflies in Los Angeles. She hadn’t known what she was missing. There you were in the evening twilight, and all at once this little light would blink on in the air. And then it would disappear, and then come back again. Or another one would go on, and another, till you’d think the stars had started to dance.

  Fireflies were just bugs. If you saw one in the daytime, when it wasn’t glowing, you’d want to swat it or step on it. But when they flew, when they lit up, they weren’t just bugs. They were marvels.

  Gran came out on the porch to watch them, too. She was tight-lipped and disapproving of most of the world, but fireflies made her smile. “I almost forgot about them,” she said. “Can you imagine that?”

  “How could you forget anything so cool?” Beckie asked.

  Her grandmother shrugged. “You just do. I haven’t seen lightning bugs for more than forty years.”

  “Wow.” That was more than twice as long as Beckie had been alive. She knew how big the number was, but she didn’t understand what it meant. She could feel herself failing whenever she tried. And what was it like to be seventy? She looked at Gran’s wrinkled face and gray hair. One day she would probably be that old herself. She knew as much, the same way she knew Saturn had rings. Both were true, but neither seemed to matter to her now.

  “I’m glad I came back, in spite of all this silly talk about the border,” Gran said.

  Beckie hadn’t paid any attention to the news since she got to Elizabeth. Nothing outside the little town seemed to matter to her while she was here. But that might not be so. “What silly talk?” she asked.

  “Virginia may close it,” Gran answered. “They say Ohio is letting too many terrorists and saboteurs across. They say Ohio is stirring up trouble, the way it always does.” Raised here, she was a Virginia patriot.

  Beckie didn’t care one way or the other. She just wanted to make sure she could get home when she needed to. And … “Terrorists and saboteurs? You mean like Uncle Luke?” She still remembered—she would never forget—the feel of assault rifles under the soles of her shoes.

  “Don’t talk silly talk,” Gran said impatiently.

  “I’m not,” Beckie answered. “He was running guns.”

  “Oh, look at that one.” Gran pointed at a firefly. She was hard of hearing. Maybe she missed what Beckie said. But she was hard of listening, too. Maybe she didn’t want to hear it.

  “How will we get out if we can’t go back into Ohio?” Beckie asked. They were supposed to fly back from Columbus.

  “Go down to Charleston, I suppose.” Gran made a sour face. “That will be expensive. Changing flight plans always is.”

  “Can we do it?” Beckie didn’t care about the money. She just wanted to make sure they could get home all right. “Or will some of the other states start shooting down airplanes from Virginia?”

  “I hope not!” Gran heard that, all right. She’d lived through—how many little wars was it? They were just history lessons to Beckie, but they seemed a lot more than that when Gran started talking about them. Now she said, “I don’t think they would do anything so terrible, especially if California stays neutral. But I reckon you never can tell.”

  “Maybe we ought to get out now, while we still can,” Beckie said. “Nobody’s shooting at anybody yet, right?”

  “Well, no,” Gran said. “But I hate to just up and leave. I haven’t been home in so long, and seeing my cousin again … . It’s almost like being young again, not that I expect you’ll know what I mean. People your age just don’t have any respect for their elders. You don’t understand what I went through. When I was young, we didn’t have it so easy, let me tell you.”

  “Sure, Gran.” Beckie stopped listening. When Gran started grumbling, she didn’t know how to stop. And she didn’t want to think about anything else while she was doing it, either.

  She might not want to do a whole lot of thinking about it anyway. How much would she mind if they got stuck in Elizabeth for however long the fighting lasted? As long as no one dropped any bombs here—and why would anybody in his right mind?—she’d be safe enough, and happy enough, too. She’d grown up here. This felt like home to her.

  It didn’t feel like home to Beckie. Every day she spent here seemed to last three weeks. If she got started, she could … I could complain as well as Gran, Beckie thought. The very idea was enough to make her clap a hand over her mouth. She couldn’t imagine anything worse.

  Justin Monroe was walking along minding his own business when he got caught in a police spot check. The cops were good at what they did. They sealed off a whole block at both ends in nothing flat. “Come forward for a paper check!” they shouted through bullhorns. To make sure people did as they were told, the Virginia State Police carried assault rifles.

  This kind of thing couldn’t happen in the United States in the home timeline. Things here seemed similar on the surface to what Justin was used to, so the differences hit him harder.

  This wasn’t a small difference. If the cops didn’t like his papers, or if they thought he was carrying a false set, they would … do what? Whatever they want to, he thought uneasily. The
papers he carried were supposed to be perfect forgeries. Had they ever been tested like this? He didn’t know. No, he didn’t know, but he was going to find out.

  Somebody who didn’t want the State Police looking at his papers ducked into a secondhand bookstore. They saw him do it, though, and dragged him out. They also dragged out the little old woman who ran the store. Her documents passed muster, and they let her go. His made red lights go off. Either he wasn’t who the papers said he was or he was somebody the cops wanted. They threw him into a paddy wagon—actually, it looked more like an armored car.

  Men and women formed two lines, one for whites, the other for blacks. There were only three or four African Americans in that line. If Justin hadn’t been briefed, he might have got into it himself because it was shorter. But that would have made him an object of suspicion here. He stayed in the longer line.

  He might not have moved any faster in the shorter one. The police questioned the Negroes much more thoroughly than they did the whites. If a white person’s papers didn’t set off their machines, they passed him or her through. The blacks weren’t so lucky.

  When Justin got to the front of the line, a burly cop looked at his papers. “Says you’re from Fredericksburg,” he remarked.

  “That’s right,” Justin said. “My mom and I are here to give Mr. Brooks a hand at his coin and stamp place. He’s my uncle.”

  “Well, I’ve known Randolph a while. He’s square clean through,” the policeman said. In this alternate, that was a compliment. The officer fed Justin’s identity card into a reader. Then he said, “Hold out your arm.”

  Justin did. The cop ran a blunt scraper across the skin of his forearm. Then he put the scraper into another window in the reader. The electronics inside compared the DNA from the few cells on the scraper to the data on the identity card. A light turned green. The reader spat out the card. “Everything okay?” Justin asked.

  “You’re you, all right.” The policeman returned the card. “Go on, now. Enjoy your stay in Charleston.”

  “Thanks.” Justin put the identity card in his wallet again. It was good enough to fool the locals, and the readings on it were from his own DNA. He hoped he didn’t sound sarcastic, even if he felt that way. In the home timeline, you needed a search warrant to go after DNA information. Not here. Here, you could just go fishing. That wasn’t the only way the Virginia State Police and the rest of the government kept people in line, either.

  Not far past the police checkpoint was a newsstand. The headline on the Charleston Courier read OHIO BANDITS MUST BE STOPPED! Every paper in Virginia would carry a headline like that today. All the TV and radio newsmen would say the same thing. Qualified representatives of opposing groups … kept their mouths shut, or had their mouths shut for them.

  Charleston was close enough to Ohio and the state of Boone—which was Kentucky and about half of Tennessee—to pick up TV and radio signals from them. But Virginia jammed those signals, and Ohio and Boone jammed the ones from Virginia. If not for cable systems (which didn’t cross borders), most people would have had no TV or radio at all.

  The Web was in the same sort of shape. There was no World Wide Web in this alternate. There were national Webs—mostly called state Webs on this side of the Atlantic. They didn’t connect with one another, and local governments kept a much closer eye on them than in the home timeline. That was probably one reason why this alternate’s technology had fallen behind the home timeline’s.

  But the Web, national, World Wide, or deep-fried, wasn’t the first thing on Justin’s mind. Getting out of the trap was. But he couldn’t even talk about it when he got to the coin and stamp shop. Mr. Brooks was dickering with a local over a threepenny Virginia green from 1851, a rare and famous stamp in this alternate.

  After going back and forth for twenty minutes, they settled on 550 pounds. The customer walked out with his tiny prize, a happy man.

  Randolph Brooks looked happy, too. “That’ll keep me eating for a while,” he said.

  “Sure,” Justin said. Money here was a lot more complicated than in the home timeline. Virginia used pounds and shillings and pence, the old kind—twelve pence to a shilling, twenty shillings to a pound. In the home timeline, even Britain’s money went decimal more than 120 years earlier.

  Pennsylvania used pounds, too, but a Pennsylvania pound was worth more than a Virginia pound, and was divided into a hundred pence. Other kinds of pounds and dollars and reals and pesos and francs were scattered across the continent. Every computer had a money-conversion program, and every one of those programs needed updating at least once a week.

  “How are you?” Mr. Brooks asked. “Am I wrong, or do you look a little green around the gills?” Nobody said anything like that in the home timeline, but old-fashioned phrases hung on here. Mr. Brooks had been here quite a while, so they fell from his lips as naturally as if he were a local.

  Justin didn’t have much trouble figuring out what this one meant. “Yeah, I guess I do,” he said. “I got caught in one of the paperwork checks the State Police are running.”

  “Oh!” Mr. Brooks said. “Well, you must have passed, or they’d have you in a back room somewhere.”

  “Uh-huh.” Justin nodded. “They scraped my arm for DNA and everything. But the stuff on the card really does come from my DNA, so I got the green light and they let me go. It was still scary. In a high-tech alternate like this one, you never know for sure if our forgeries are good enough.”

  “That’s true.” The older man didn’t look happy about admitting it. “There are a couple of alternates where we have to be even more careful than we are here, because they’re ahead of us in everything except knowing how to travel crosstime.”

  “What will we do if somebody else ever finds out?” It was on Justin’s mind. He knew he couldn’t be the only person from the home timeline who worried about stuff like that, either. If you sat down and thought about it for a little while, you had to worry … didn’t you?

  “What will we do?” The coin and stamp dealer gave him a crooked smile. “We’ll sweat, that’s what.”

  He wasn’t likely to be wrong. The home timeline had been on the point of collapse when Galbraith and Hester discovered crosstime travel. Thanks to Crosstime Traffic, there was enough to go around again, and then some. Because the home timeline didn’t take much from any one alternate, the worlds of if that it traded with weren’t much affected.

  None of the other high-tech alternates had that luxury. Some of them rigidly limited population, to make the most of what they did have. A couple took much more from the oceans than people in the home timeline ever did. And others exploited the rest of the Solar System. Nobody’d ever quite taken space travel seriously in the home timeline. Oh, weather and communications satellites were nice, but the real estate beyond Earth turned out to be much harder to use than early generations of science-fiction writers thought it would. People in the home timeline were still talking about making the first manned flight to Mars.

  A couple of alternates, though, were already terraforming it. They were talking about doing the same thing with Venus. This alternate wasn’t that far along, but even here astronauts from California and Prussia had gone to Mars and come back again. It was expensive, but people said it was worth it. Justin thought so. Riding a rocket was a lot more exciting that sitting in a transposition chamber.

  “How long do you think we’ve got before someone else does start traveling crosstime?” Justin asked. “It’s bound to happen sooner or later, isn’t it?”

  “Probably,” Mr. Brooks said. “The bigwigs at Crosstime Traffic say it won’t, but they have to say stuff like that. If they don’t, the stock will fall. One of the reasons we come to high-tech alternates even though it’s dangerous is to keep an eye on them.”

  “On the way over here, the chamber operator said we’ve messed up other alternates’ work when they were getting close,” Justin said. “Messed up their computer data or whatever, so they never found out how close they
were.”

  “I’ve heard the same thing,” Randolph Brooks said. “Ask anybody official and she’ll tell you no. But that’s just the official word, what you’ve got to say if you’re in that kind of job.”

  “Yeah? What else have you heard?” Justin asked eagerly. Sometimes—often—gossip was a lot more interesting than the official word. Sometimes—often—it was more likely to be true, too. “What do we do if they make the experiments again anyway, see if their computers were maybe wrong?”

  “I don’t know. What if they do?” Mr. Brooks said. “Either we have to sabotage them one more time—blow up their lab or something—or else we’ve got something brand new to worry about.”

  He sounded calm and collected. In a way, that made sense. If some other alternate found the crosstime secret, it wasn’t his worry, not particularly, anyhow. But it sure was the home timeline’s worry—the biggest worry anybody would have had since people found out how to travel from one alternate to another.

  “A crosstime war …” Justin murmured.

  “Bite your tongue,” Mr. Brooks said. “Bite it hard. You thought the slavery scandal was bad?”

  “It was,” Justin said. “People from the company never should have done anything like that.”

  “I know,” Mr. Brooks said patiently. “But you’ve seen pictures from some of the alternates that went through atomic wars, right?”

  “Sure. Who hasn’t?” Justin said. Those pictures reminded you why counting your blessings was always a good idea.

  But Mr. Brooks didn’t let him down easy. “Okay. Imagine things like that in the home timeline. Imagine them in the alternate that figures out how to go crosstime. And imagine them in all the alternates where we bump together.”

  Justin tried. He tried, yes, and felt himself failing. He knew how bad a war like that would be. Knowing didn’t help, because he could feel that his imagination wasn’t big enough to take in all the different disasters in that kind of war. “We can’t let it happen!” he said.