The Disunited States of America

Twelve

Justin had been wondering how to get away from his squad. Once he decided to risk it, it turned out to be the easiest thing in the world. He just walked off, looking as if he knew where he was going and what he was doing.

He'd come a couple of blocks when he got to a checkpoint. "What's up?" one of the soldiers there asked him.

He pointed ahead. "I'm supposed to patrol down that way."

"Okay." The soldier didn't ask any more questions. Justin was white and he was in uniform, so the fellow figured he had to be all right. He'd counted on that. The soldier at the checkpoint did say, "Keep your eyes peeled. Still may be a few holdouts running around loose."

"Thanks. I will." That was the last thing Justin wanted to hear. He tramped on. Other soldiers went here and there, sometimes singly, sometimes in groups. Except for that one sentry, nobody challenged him. If you seemed legit, people assumed you were. Most of the time, they were right. Every once in a while, you could take advantage of them.

He heard scattered gunshots, but none very close. The civilians on the street were all white. African Americans were lying low. How much good would that do them? Sooner or later—likely sooner—the white Virginians would take their revenge for the uprising. That would make the Negroes hate them even more, and would light some sparks to help kindle the next revolt.

How could Virginia break the cycle? The only way Justin saw was for whites to treat blacks the same way they treated each other. He also saw that that was something no local whites wanted to do. They feared, and with some justice, equality wouldn't seem like enough. They looked fearfully toward black-ruled Mississippi, the way slaveowners in the home timeline once looked fearfully toward black-ruled Haiti.

That wasn't his worry, for which he thanked heaven. It might be Crosstime Traffic's worry one of these days. The company would have to figure out what to do here, and whether it could do anything. Sometimes slipping the right idea to the right people at the right moment made all the difference in the world. Sometimes it didn't change a thing. You never could tell till you tried.

He turned on to the street on which Mr. Brooks' coin and stamp shop lay. His heart pounded in his chest. Was everything all right? Was anything left? He didn't want to think anything bad could happen to his mother. But he'd seen enough horror the past couple of days to know anything could happen to anybody.

There'd been fighting here. Several buildings had bites taken out of them. Bullets pocked walls and shattered windows. The donut house across the street from the shop, the one where he'd seen the car pull up when he first got into Charleston, was nothing but a pile of rubble. Did somebody make a point of knocking it flat, or was it just unlucky? He'd probably never know.

But the coin and stamp shop was still standing. Even if it weren't, the room in the subbasement where the transposition chamber came and went wouldn't be damaged. But could Mom have got down there fast enough? Even if she could have, would Crosstime Traffic have let her leave this alternate with a genetically engineered disease on the loose? It seemed unlikely.

Justin hoped that was all wasted worry. He looked up and down the street. No other soldiers in sight. Nobody to notice if he went in here. He pulled at the door. It was locked. He muttered—he should have known it would be. He still had a key. He put it in the lock and turned, then tried the door. It opened.

Nobody stood behind the counter. Justin took a couple of steps forward into the shop, letting the door click shut behind him. The sharp little noise brought his mother out from the back room. She looked alarmed—she looked terrified—at seeing a large soldier with an assault rifle in the shop. But her voice was brisk and didn't wobble as she asked, "What do you want, Private?"

She didn't recognize him. He was wearing a grimy uniform she didn't expect, a helmet that changed the shape of his face, and a couple of days' worth of filth and stubble. He grinned. "Hi, Mom," he said.

Her jaw dropped. "Justin?" she whispered. Then she said, "Justin!" at something not far from a scream and threw her arms around him. When she finally let go, she said, "I never thought I'd hug anybody carrying a gun."

That reminded him of what he'd seen and done while he wore the uniform and the helmet and the dirt and stubble. With a shudder, he set the rifle down and said, "If I never see this . . . this thing again, it'll be too soon."

"Oh." She looked at him again—for real this time. "You weren't just carrying ME! You used it, didn't you?"

"Yeah." He grimaced. "If I didn't, one of the rebels would have used one on me. I lost my lunch right after that."

"I believe you," his mother said. "How come you had it in the first place?"

"It was the only way I saw to get back here from Elizabeth," Justin answered. "It worked, too." He wasn't exactly thrilled that it had. People said you could buy something at too high a price. He'd understood that with money before, but no other way. He did now.

Mom must have seen as much on his face. "Well, you are here," she said. "That may not be the only thing that matters, but I'm awful glad to see you—now that I'm not scared to death any more, I mean. Is Randy all right?"

"He was fine the last time I saw him, a couple of days ago," Justin said. "But how have you been? You were in the middle of everything."

"More like on the edges," Mom said. "If this place were in the middle, it wouldn't still be standing."

She was right about that. "Can they cure the disease the Ohioans turned loose?" he asked. "Can they get us out of here?"

"They already have a vaccine. They're getting close to a cure," his mother answered.

"A vaccine's just as good," Justin said, and then, remembering Irma and Mrs. Snodgrass, "Well, unless you've already got it, anyway."

"Unless," his mother agreed. "The problem now, the way I understand it, is getting the vaccine to the Virginians without making them suspicious. Last I heard, we were thinking of mailing it to Richmond as if it came from a lab in Pennsylvania or Wabash." The state of Wabash wasn't too different from Indiana in the home timeline. "The hope is they'll be so glad to get it, they won't ask many questions."

"What about getting us back to the home timeline?" Justin asked. That was the thing that was uppermost in his mind.

"They . . . aren't quite ready yet," Mom said. "We've been exposed to the virus. The air the transposition chamber picks up when it opens for us may have the bug floating around in it, too. They don't want to bring it back to the home timeline."

"But they've got the vaccine! You said they're close to a cure!" Justin had come back to Charleston wanting to get home. If he couldn't, if he was still stuck in this alternate, he might almost have stayed in Elizabeth—though it was nice to be sure Mom was okay.

"They've got 'em, and they don't want to have to use 'em," she said. "That would be expensive, and if they start having cases anyway. . . . Well, can you imagine the lawsuits? They really—I mean really—don't want another black eye so soon after the slavery scandal."

Justin could see that. It made good sense in terms of what Crosstime Traffic needed. In terms of what he and his mother and Mr. Brooks needed, though, it wasn't so great. "They can't just strand us here . . . can they?"

"I don't think they'll do that," Mom said.

"If they do, well sue them," Justin said fiercely.

"Well, no." His mother shook his head. "We signed liability waivers before we came here. This isn't company negligence or anything. This is part of the risk we take when we come to a high-tech alternate. No lawyer will touch this one, and we'd get thrown out of court if we found one who would."

"Oh." Justin didn't think he'd ever made a gloomier noise.

"They're working on it," Mom said. "I don't know the details—they haven't told me. But they don't want to leave us here. That wouldn't look good, either."

"Well, hooray." Getting saved because it helped Crosstime Traffic's image wasn't exactly what Justin had in mind, either.

"You ought to be glad they've got some reason to want to bring us back," Mom said. "Otherwise, they wouldn't try so hard."

"How hard are they trying now?"

"I think something is happening. I hope so, anyway."

"It had better be," Justin said, though he had no idea what he could do if it weren't.

A car pulled up in front of the shop. Justin wasn't very surprised when Mr. Brooks got out. If he'd managed to get down to Charleston himself, that had to be the boot in the behind the coin and stamp dealer needed. Justin opened the door for him. Mr. Brooks greeted him with, "You dummy."

"I made it," Justin said.

"Oh, boy." He didn't impress the older man. Mr. Brooks pointed to the assault rifle leaning against the wall. "Did you have to use that?"

"Yeah," Justin admitted in a small voice.

"How did you like it?"

Justin didn't say anything. His face must have said it all, though, because Mr. Brooks set a hand on his shoulder. Justin managed a shaky nod. "Thanks," he muttered.

"It's okay," Mr. Brooks answered. "If you did like it, that would worry me. It's not a game out there. Whoever you shot, he was real. You always need to remember that. Sometimes it happens. If he's gonna shoot you, you take care of yourself and worry about it later. But you always have to take it seriously, because the other fellow wants to live just as much as you do."

"I... found that out." Justin wondered if finding it out would set him apart from everybody he knew back in the home timeline. Knowing things your friends didn't couldn't help but isolate you from them . . . could it?

"You've joined a club nobody wants to belong to." Mr. Brooks was scarily good at thinking along with him. The older man went on, "Chances are you'll meet more members than you know about, because the others won't talk about it any more than you will." He turned to Justin's mother. "What's going on here?"

"I'm still alive. Nobody's robbed the place," she answered. Then she filled him in on the bigger picture, the way she had with Justin.

He nodded. "Okay. Thanks. It could be worse. It could be better, too, but it could always be better."

He was asking Mom more questions when Justin went into the back room. He got out of Adrian's uniform as fast as he could and put on the clothes he had in the pack. They were wrinkled as anything, but he didn't care. He didn't care about going upstairs for a different outfit, either. He wanted to turn into himself again, as fast as he could, not a Virginia soldier any more. Anything but a Virginia soldier, in fact.

When he came out again, Mr. Brooks nodded to him. "Took the whammy off, did you?"

"Yeah!" Justin said.

"Don't blame you a bit."

Justin nodded now. He was glad the coin and stamp dealer didn't blame him. But, all things considered, how much difference did that make? He'd blame himself for the rest of his life. If he hadn't put on the uniform . . . what?

He started to think, That African-American kid would still be alive then. But was that true? Was it even likely? Wouldn't Smitty or one of the other real Virginia soldiers have shot him instead? Or, if they hadn't, wouldn't the self-propelled guns have killed him? How could you know? You couldn't, not for sure. He wondered if he was looking for an excuse to feel less guilty. He hoped not. He would stay a member of Mr. Brooks' unhappy club no matter what. He'd just have to figure out how to live with it, and that wouldn't happen overnight, either.

He had the rest of his life to worry about it. The kid he'd shot didn't, not anymore. And that was exactly the point.

"I don't feel good." Gran said it in a surprisingly matter-of-fact way. Most of the time, she was proud of her aches and pains. She used them to outdo other people around her who might have the nerve not to be well. But coming out and announcing something like this wasn't her usual style.

Because it wasn't, Beckie paid more attention than she would have otherwise. "What's the matter?" she asked.

"The light seems too bright. And I'm warm, even though I know the air conditioner is running," Gran said.

Beckie walked over to her and put a hand on her forehead. She almost jerked it back in alarm. Her grandmother wasn't just warm. She was hot, much too hot. It could have been a lot of things. Beckie feared she knew what it was.

"Can you get me some water?" Gran usually milked her symptoms for all they were worth, too.

This time, Beckie didn't mind. As she went to the sink, she wondered what to do. Call the local emergency number? With fighting still going on in the city, would anybody pay attention? A long burst of machine-gun fire underscored her fears. Somebody screamed—not a short, frightened scream like the ones in the movies, but a shriek that went on and on and on. Anybody who screamed that way was dying as fast as he could, but not fast enough.

But with people in Charleston making noises like that, how long would the emergency people take to get here if they came at all? What would they do when they did? Will they stick me in quarantine somewhere? Will I ever get out again? She and Gran were foreigners here. Did California even have a consulate in Charleston? She looked in the phone book and didn't find one. Especially during a rebellion, the Virginians could do anything they wanted.

"Let me have some more," Gran said, so Beckie did.

Then she looked in the phone book again. Sure enough, there it was: CHARLESTON COINS AND STAMP COMPANY. It gave an address along with the phone number. Beckie didn't know where that address was. She'd never expected to come to Charleston. But the room had a computer terminal. It was slow and clunky by California standards, but it worked.

As she'd hoped, the coin and stamp shop was just a few blocks away. She'd figured Mr. Brooks would put her and Gran somewhere close to his shop. He and Justin were the only people she knew here. They could tell her what to do.

Whatever it was, she needed to do it in a hurry. Gran was sitting there, sort of staring at the TV. She often watched without really knowing what was going on, but this was different. Her brain wasn't working right. She would have stared the same way if she were pointed in some other direction.

Beckie tried using her cell phone to call the coin and stamp shop. No luck—all she got was static. The hotel room had no phone, any more than one in California would have. Land lines were dead, dead, dead. She wished she were in some backward part of the world where they still used them—Russia, maybe, or central Africa. She'd never imagined low tech could be better than high, but she'd never been in a war before, either. Phone service was probably out all over western Virginia and eastern Ohio. What a mess.

If she couldn't call, she had to go. She didn't like leaving Gran by herself, but she couldn't see that she had much choice. Gran wasn't likely to wander off. If she got sicker . . . Beckie gnawed on the inside of her lower lip. She didn't like to think about that.

I'm going to get help, she told herself. / won't be gone long. I hope I won't, anyway.

Then she told Gran the same thing. Gran nodded vaguely. "I think the muffins are spoiled," she said, which meant she didn't hear or she was out of her head with fever or all of the above.

Three blocks over and two blocks down toward the river. That was what the terminal said. It didn't say anything about what might be going on between here and there. Beckie wished it would have. She wasn't brave—not even close. But she knew she had to go, and so she left the hotel room before she gave herself much of a chance to think about it.

The bellhops and porters were Negroes. So were the waiters and, she presumed, the cooks. In California, she wouldn't have paid much attention—and there would have been all kinds of people doing those jobs. Here, seeing black faces made her nervous. She knew it shouldn't have ... or should it? How much did they hate whites? How many good reasons for hating whites did they have?

When a bellhop tipped his cap to her as she went out, she almost screamed. What was he thinking? How much did he despise himself—and her—because he had to make that servile gesture? How much did he wish he had a rifle in his hands and were fighting the soldiers from Virginia? Wouldn't paying them back almost be worth getting shot?

A lot of Negroes in Charleston sure seemed to think so.

Going out on the street, getting away from those people who wouldn't have been polite if they weren't getting paid, came as a relief. . . for a little while. Then she found out how much the hotel's soundproofing muffled the noise of gunfire. It was much louder, and much closer, than she'd thought.

"Let's see your papers!" a soldier barked at the first checkpoint she came to. She handed them over. His eyebrows jumped in surprise, almost disappearing under the brim of his helmet. "California passport! What in blazes are you doing here?"

"Visiting friends," Beckie said, which wasn't even a lie. "I didn't know I'd get stuck when the war started." That was also true.

"Who are these friends?" the soldier asked.

"Justin Monroe and his uncle, Randolph Brooks," Beckie answered. "Mr. Brooks runs a coin shop not far from here."

"He does, Everett," another soldier said. "I remember seeing the place."

"Okay." Everett looked at the passport again, shook his head, and gave the document back to Beckie. "You can go, I guess. But be careful. Things aren't exactly safe around here yet."

She found out what he meant when she walked around the corner. Two bodies lay there—one white, one black. Flies buzzed over them and settled in the blood that had pooled on the sidewalk. A mockingbird—a cheerful, sweet-voiced mockingbird— pecked at one of the corpses and swallowed . . . something. Stomach knotting, Beckie waved her arms. The bird screeched but flew away.

Those bodies were fresh. Something in the air told Beckie of others she couldn't see. The ones she smelled had been dead longer. How long would that stench last? How could anyone stand to live here till it went away?

People were on the streets. Some moved warily, as if afraid of what might happen next. Beckie moved that way herself. Who could tell when a wacko of any color might pop out of a doorway and start shooting? But others walked along as if things were normal. A man in his twenties smiled at Beckie the way he might have on any street in the world. She nodded, but couldn't make herself smile back.

Three blocks over then a left turn, then downhill toward the Kanawha. Lots of Charleston—lots of western Virginia— seemed to be uphill or downhill or sidehill or somethinghill. California had country more rugged than this, but hardly anybody lived in it. There were no towns in the Sierras with a couple of hundred thousand people in them.

On the way down toward the river, she had to go by one of the bodies she'd been smelling. There it lay, all bloated and stinking, a monument to ... what? To stupidity. To man's inhumanity to man. But the Virginians wouldn't see it, neither the whites nor the blacks. Why not? It sure looked obvious to her.

Not even Justin and Mr. Brooks would admit it, and they seemed different from the other Virginians she'd met. The Snodgrasses couldn't even see the problem. Beckie had the feeling Justin and his uncle could, but they didn't want to look.

She wondered if she was imagining things. She didn't think so. That was probably a big part of why she was on her way to the coin and stamp shop. They were unusual people, and they might have unusual ways to help.

And there was the shop, across the street. Actually, first she saw the car in which Mr. Brooks drove her and Gran to Charleston. But COINS AND STAMPS was neatly lettered in gold on the plate-glass window closest to it. So was the street number. In Los Angeles, odd numbers were on the western and northern sides of the street, evens to the south and east. She hadn't needed long to see they didn't do things that way in Ohio and Virginia. The stamp and coin shop was on the west side of the street, but its address was 696. Close to the number of the beast, but not quite, Beckie thought.

There wasn't much traffic. Beckie didn't feel the least bit guilty about jaywalking. In Charleston right now, she was more likely to get hit by a sniper than by an oncoming car. She wished she hadn't thought of it like that. She especially wished she hadn't when a burst of automatic-weapons fire only a couple of blocks away made her jump in the air. A woman screamed, and went on screaming. She shuddered. One more noise you never wanted to hear.

She tried the door to the coin and stamp shop. It was locked, which wasn't the biggest surprise in the world. But she could see people in there, even if the sun film on the window kept her from telling who they were. She knocked. When nobody came to the door right away, she went on knocking.

Justin opened up. "Come on in," he said. "You're no looter."

An assault rifle leaned against the far wall. He was dirty and needed a shave. "What's up?" he asked.

Beckie was glad to see him no matter how he looked. "Gran's got it," she said baldly.

"Ohhh." It was almost the noise Justin would have made if someone hit him in the belly. Behind the counter, Mr. Brooks made an almost identical sound. A tall woman Beckie hadn't met winced. Justin said, "This is my mom. Mom, this is Beckie Royer, who I've been telling you about."

"I'm glad to meet you," Mrs. Monroe said. "I'm not glad about your news, though, not even a little bit. We've already had too many cases in Charleston."

Picking his words with obvious care, Mr. Brooks asked, "What do you want us to do, Beckie?"

"Whatever you can," she said. "I'm a stranger here. I don't have any money, not on my own. The credit cards are all in Gran's name, and she's . . . not with it right now." She told him about the muffins, whatever that was supposed to mean. Then she took a deep breath and went on, "I don't know that I'll ever be able to stand her after spending all this time with her. You've seen what a pain she is. But that doesn't mean I want her to up and die on me." Tears stung her eyes. No, it didn't mean that at all.

"We could get her to a hospital for you," Justin's mother said slowly.

"They aren't having a whole lot of luck with this in hospitals," Justin said. "Either you get better on your own or you don't. Mostly you don't." He sent Beckie an apologetic look, but he wasn't saying anything she didn't already know. "Doctors here are kind of dim," he added.

Both his mother and Mr. Brooks coughed loudly. Under the dirt and stubble, Justin turned red. He didn't take it back, though.

"Hospital's still my best bet, isn't it?" Beckie said. "I want to do everything I can."

"Well. . ." Justin started. He got two more sharp coughs. Beckie wondered what was going on. Whatever it was, nobody seemed to want to come out and tell her. Justin said, "Let me see what I can do."

What was that supposed to mean? Whatever it meant, Justin's mom and Mr. Brooks didn't like it for beans. Beckie could see as much, even if she had no idea why they felt the way they did. "What exactly do you think that is?" Beckie spoke as carefully as Mr. Brooks had a few minutes before.

"I don't know yet. Give me till five o'clock," Justin said, while the two older people in the shop looked daggers at him. He went on, "If she gets really, really sick, don't wait for me. I don't want her to die before I do ... whatever I can do."

He still wouldn't say what that was. What could a coin and stamp dealer's nephew do that a hospital couldn't? But he sounded as if he thought he could do something, somehow. And Beckie knew the hospitals weren't having much luck with the disease. Would they have done better in California? How could she tell?

She made up her mind. "Okay, Justin. I'll see what happens, that's all. I hope you're not just trying to impress me or something. If you're blowing smoke on this, I never want to have anything to do with you any more. You hear me?"

"I hear you," he said soberly.

"All right, then." Without giving him a chance to answer, she turned and walked out of the shop and started back to the hotel. When she went past the stinking, swollen body in the street, she was reminded you didn't need a plague to die. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time could do the job every bit as well.

As soon as the door closed behind Beckie, both Justin's mother and Mr. Brooks turned on him. "What do you think you can do for her grandmother?" Mom asked, at the same time as Mr. Brooks was saying, "What do you think you're going to do for the old bat?" The only difference between them was that Mr. Brooks knew Mrs. Bentley while Justin's mom didn't.

"I don't know," he admitted. "If I talk with people back in the home timeline, maybe I'll come up with something. I do want to try."

"Because you're sweet on Beckie, that's why," Mr. Brooks said.

"Are you?" Justin's mother demanded.

Justin didn't like getting yelled at in stereo any more than anyone else would have. He couldn't do anything about it here. "Some," he said, because Mr. Brooks would have made him out to be a liar if he tried to deny it. But he went on, "Seems only fair we try to help her grandmother, though. She might have picked up the disease from one of us."

"Not likely, not when the immunity shots seem to be working," Mr. Brooks said.

"You didn't let me finish!" Justin said. Mr. Brooks blinked. Justin didn't talk back a whole lot. Most of the time, he was on the easygoing side. That seemed to make him more effective when he did lose it. He went on, "Or she might have caught it— probably did catch it—when she was coming down to Charleston with you. Any way you look at it, it's our fault. We ought to fix it if we can."

"Would you say the same thing if you didn't like this girl?" his mother asked.

"I hope so," Justin answered.

Mr. Brooks started to laugh. Justin stared at him. So did his mom. "Let him try, Cyndi," the coin and stamp dealer said. "Sometimes, if you're eighteen or so, you've got to lower your head and charge. If he can talk the people in the home timeline into doing something about it, more power to him. And if he can't—well, he gave it his best shot, and he won't be mad at us for stopping him."

"It won't work," Justin's mother said.

"I don't think it will, either." Mr. Brooks talked as if Justin weren't there, which annoyed him. But they did let him try, and that was all that really mattered.

He went down to a room in the basement he had to enter through a palm lock. The wrong prints would have immovably locked the door and turned on self-destruct switches behind it. He had some of the right ones.

Inside, everything came from the home timeline: plastic chairs, desk, PowerBook. Any kind of communication between alternates was hard. You needed enormous bandwidth to send even old-fashioned e-mail. And Justin did exactly that.

If you have a cure for the disease Ohio has turned loose on Virginia ready, please send some doses as soon as you can, he typed.

He waited. And he waited. And he waited some more. After what seemed like forever but was nine minutes by the clock on the wall (also from the home timeline, even if local ones were just as good), he got an answer. Who is ill, and how serious is it? wrote the person on the other end of the line.

It's pretty serious, Justin answered. An old lady we stayed with in Elizabeth is sick now. She came to Charleston with Mr. Brooks. She probably caught the disease riding in the car with him. Only fair for us to help out if we can.

Another pause. The message crossed the timelines in an instant. Figuring out what to do about it—figuring out whether to do anything—took longer. After another eternity, this one of eleven minutes, a reply appeared on the PowerBook's screen. Regret that the possibility of spreading disease across the alternates makes this impossible.

Justin said something that had to do with manure. He'd had plenty of time to think about this, and he wasn't going to take no lying down. You've got to have a quarantine center on some alternate with no people in it, he wrote. Send the transposition chamber there and decontaminate it before you use it again.

There is a quarantine center, admitted whoever it was back in the home timeline. But there is no opening for a transposition chamber at what matches your location. The chamber cannot materialize inside solid ground, not without an explosion.

He talked about fertilizer some more. He already knew a chamber couldn't come out inside of something solid. The boom that followed if it tried wouldn't be small. How far from here is the closest digging equipment? he asked. If the person back in the home timeline said it was five hundred kilometers away, he knew he'd have to give up.

Another pause followed. He had a pretty good idea of what was going on this time. The person back in the home timeline was checking the answer to his question. As time stretched, Justin started to suspect that person was also checking to see whether to tell him the truth.

About 500 meters away, Justin knew it was crazy to think the response appeared on the screen reluctantly, but it felt that way to him. He had to read it twice to be sure no kilo lay in front of meters. When he was, he whooped and did a war dance in the bare little room.

They couldn't see the war dance back in the home timeline. So the quarantine alternate did have some kind of installation in what corresponded to Charleston, did it? He ran back to the laptop and wrote, Then what are you waiting for?

Authorization of the effort and expense. The answer came as a dash of cold water. It reminded him he was working for a big corporation. The people who ran Crosstime Traffic worried about right and wrong only as much as they had to. They thought about cost and trouble first.

We would be fixing a problem we helped cause, Justin typed. We're not supposed to interfere here. Curing Mrs. Bentley would be fixing our interference.

And would be an interference of its own, came the coldblooded reply. It was followed by, Wait. I'll get back to you.

Justin wondered where the person back in the home timeline thought he would go. Out of the basement here? Not likely! He wanted that answer. And he wanted it to be what he wanted it to be. He tried to sort that out inside his head. He didn't have much luck, but he knew what he meant.

He waited, and kept on waiting. This time, a good half-hour went by before new words appeared on the PowerBook's screen. Okay, it said. They're digging. As soon as the GPS says they're in just the right place, we'll send a transposition chamber from the home timeline to you. Go in, take what you find inside, and get out. The chamber will head for the quarantine alternate. Don't hang around, or you'll go with it. Do you understand?

Oh, yes. I understand, Justin wrote. Thank you!

Don't thank me. It wasn't my idea, and I don't think it's a good one, said the person on the other end of the connection. But they're going to do it anyway. This Mrs. Bentley will let them make sure the antiviral is as good as they think it is, and one more connection to the quarantine alternate may come in handy. Out. The dismissal looked very final.

He didn't care how it looked. He punched his fist in the air and shouted, "Yes!" The secret basement room echoed with it. He had wrestled with the powers that be, and had prevailed.

He went back upstairs, first carefully closing the door behind him. As soon as he walked into the shop, his mother started, "Justin, honey, I'm sorry they wouldn't give you. . . ." Then she got a look at his face. She stared. "They didn't?" Behind his spectacle lenses, Mr. Brooks' eyes were enormous, too.

"They sure did!" Justin said.

"But how? Why?" His mother shook her head in disbelief. "They told me—they told me over and over—they wouldn't, they couldn't, get me out even if I came down sick. They meant it, too. I was sure they meant it."

"Maybe that's it," Randolph Brooks said. "You believed them, so you didn't argue very hard. Justin wouldn't take no for an answer. He kept looking for angles, and I guess he found one. Congrats, kid." He stuck out his hand. Justin gravely shook it.

He pictured a bulldozer in the quarantine alternate, an alternate where men never evolved at all. He pictured a virgin forest full of passenger pigeons and other birds extinct for centuries in the home timeline. He pictured one humongous hole in the ground. When it was deep enough, they'd be able to send a transposition chamber there.

"What exactly is going on?" His mother's voice had something in it he'd never heard there before, not directed at him. She was asking the question the way she would have to another grown-up—and wasn't that something, as long as we were on the subject?

He explained. Then he said, "I'm going down to the sub-basement to wait for the chamber to come through."

"Or for the Robert E. Lee," Mr. Brooks said, which didn't mean anything to Justin. The older man added, "You may have a long wait if they're digging."

"That's okay. I don't care." Justin all but flew down the stairs. He got past another palm lock to go down to the lowest level below the shop. Yellow lines showed where the chamber would materialize. He stayed behind them. He knew the drill.

An hour went by, then another one. Some of his enthusiasm disappeared. But he was too stubborn to go back up for a sandwich or a fizz or whatever. At last, after close to four hours, the transposition chamber appeared. It had no human backup operator. Under the circumstances, that made sense. A package sat on one of the front seats. Justin grabbed it, then got out as fast as he could. Half a minute later, the chamber softly and silently vanished away.

He didn't care. He had the package. That was all that really mattered.