The Disunited States of America

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.

She looked over toward Jephany Knob. There it was: a knob. In California, it wouldn't have been tall enough to deserve a name. Maybe she would climb it, or go over to the fish hatchery Mrs. Springer had talked about. Or maybe . . . she would just sit here and watch the grass grow.

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 . . . / 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.

"Of course not," Mr. Brooks said. "But what if we can't stop it, either?"

The fish hatchery down by Palestine was less exciting than Beckie hoped it would be. There was the Kanawha River. There were ponds next to the river where they raised the baby fish. They had nets that lifted the fish from the ponds and put them into the river. The people who worked with the fish were excited about what they did. They wouldn't have done it if they weren't. Beckie could see that.

But she didn't care if they were excited. So they were going to put trout and bluegills and crappies—she didn't bust up at the name, but keeping her face straight wasn't easy—into the Kanawha? Big deal. They were doing it so people farther downstream could catch them and eat them. Beckie wasn't a vegetarian, but the idea of catching her own fish didn't thrill her.

So she listened to the enthusiastic people in the tan uniforms, and then she started back to Elizabeth. Maybe the uniforms were part of what turned her off, too. Lots of people in Virginia wore them. You didn't have to work for the government, though the fishery people did. The man who fixed the Snod-grasses' air conditioner wore a uniform. So did the servers who sold stuff at Elizabeth's one diner. If you came from California, it was pretty funny.

In California, nobody but soldiers and sailors and cops wore uniforms. In California, a uniform meant somebody else got to tell you what to do. Californians liked that no more than anyone else, and less than most people. In Virginia, though, a uniform seemed to mean you got to tell other people what to do. It was weird.

It's not weird. It's just foreign, Beckie thought as she followed the loop of the Kanawha back toward Elizabeth. The river was foreign, too. You couldn't walk alongside a rippling river in Los Angeles. Most of the time, there wasn't enough water in L.A. Every few winters, there was too much.

Down by the stream, under the trees a lot of the time, it didn't seem so hot and sticky. The fishery people didn't just have uniforms. They had bow ties! Back in California, her father said he wore ties at weddings, funerals, and gunpoint. He was kidding, but he was kidding on the square. And most men in California felt the same way. Oh, the prime minister would put on a tie when a foreign dignitary showed up. A few conservative businessmen still wore them, and the jackets that went with them, but that only proved how conservative they were. Why be uncomfortable when you didn't have to?

That was how people in California looked at things, anyway. Here in the eastern part of the continent, they had different ideas. They dressed up for the sake of dressing up, the way people out West had up into the middle of the twentieth century. Beckie wondered what had made them change their minds there. Whatever it was, she liked it.

Up in a tree, a little gray bird with a black cap hung upside down from a branch and said, "Chickadee-dee-dee!" in between pecks at bugs. Beckie had already found she liked chickadees. They didn't live around Los Angeles. Too bad.

A highway ran right by the Kanawha. In California, the road would have leaped over the river so it could go straight. People did things differently here. Where the river looped, the road looped, too. You needed more time to get where you were going, but the highway didn't take such a big bite out of the landscape.

Oh, people here did what they had to do. Beckie had looked at the Charleston airport on the Virginia computer network. If she and Gran needed to fly out of here, she wanted to know what it would be like. The Virginians had had to hack the tops off a couple of mountains so planes could take off and land there. Flat space in this part of the state was mighty hard to come by.

A car roared past on the highway. Signs warned drivers to slow down and be careful. Nobody paid much attention to those signs. People drove as if the roads were as wide and straight as the ones in California. They drove that way—and they paid for it. On the way to the fish hatchery, Beckie had walked past a couple of wrecks. She was coming up to one of them now. She shook her head. The car hadn't made a curve. It went off the road and straight into a tree. The flat tires and the rust on the fenders said it had been there a long time.

She wondered what had happened to the driver. By the way the windshield was scarred, nothing good. She hoped he'd lived, anyhow.

Why do I think it was a he? she wondered. Women could also crash cars. But guys were more likely to, here or in California or, for that matter, in Europe. Testosterone poisoning, Beckie thought with a scornful sniff. Women didn't usually do things like tromp on the gas to see how fast the car would go. She'd been in a car with a guy who did that, just for the fun of it. Nothing bad happened that time—it didn't always, or even most of the time. But she tried not to ride with him any more.

There was Jephany Knob, now due north of her and about as close as she could get unless she felt like crossing the highway and picking her way to it through the woods. She didn't. It stuck up and it had a funny name, and that was about it.

Or so she thought, till she noticed a couple of people up near the top of the knob. What were they doing up there? Why would you want to climb the knob, anyhow? To watch birds? People here didn't seem to do that, or not so much as they did in California.

But they did hunt. Hunting struck her as even stranger than fishing. Wild turkeys and grouse and squirrels and deer were a lot smarter than fish. Maybe that was why she felt wronger—was that a word?—about killing them.

Here, though, people didn't hunt just for the sport of it, if there was such a thing. They hunted for the pot. Beckie'd liked Brunswick stew till Mrs. Snodgrass told her the meat in it was squirrel. Then she almost lost dinner. Gran never turned a hair. All she said was, "Goodness, I don't remember the last time I ate squirrel."

It wasn't bad, if you didn't think about what it was. It didn't taste like rabbit, which Beckie had had before. It didn't taste like anything but itself, not really. If she and Gran stayed at the Snodgrasses' a while longer, they would probably have it again. I can eat it, Beckie thought. I guess I can, anyway.

One of the people on Jephany Knob saw her, too. He pointed her way. His friend stopped whatever he was doing and looked at her, too. The first man raised a rifle to his shoulder. He fired—once, twice. The bullets cracked past Beckie's head, much too close for comfort.

With a small shriek, she scurried behind a tree. He was trying to kill me, she thought. He was. What's he doing? Did he think I was a deer? Or did he know I was a person? Is that why he aimed at me? She had no answers. She wished she had no questions. Now she knew what was worse than being bored: being scared to death.

No more shots came. Peering out ever so cautiously, she saw that the other man was yelling at the one with the gun. It wasn't aimed her way any more. She hoped it was all just a crazy mistake. Even so, she crawled away from there and stayed under cover as much as she could all the way back to Elizabeth.

When Justin heard that Virginia and Ohio really had declared war on each other, he waited for missiles to start flying or guns to start going off or computers to start catching viruses or... something. When nothing happened—and when nothing went right on happening—he almost felt cheated.

"Chances are not much will happen," his mother said. "Virginia declared war on Ohio to make a lot of people farther east happy."

"But those aren't the people who border Ohio," Justin said.

"I know," Mom answered. "But they're the white people in the parts of Virginia with lots of African Americans. They're the ones who think Ohio is giving African Americans guns. So they're the ones who want to do something about their neighbors." She set a bone down on her plate. "This is good chicken, Randy."

"Thanks," Mr. Brooks answered. "I'd take more credit for it if I didn't buy it around the corner."

"It's good anyhow," Justin said. It was hot and greasy and salty—what more could you want from fried chicken? His plate already held enough bones to build a fair-sized dinosaur. But he didn't want to talk chicken—he wanted to talk politics. "Why did Ohio declare war on Virginia, then?"

"If somebody pokes you, won't you poke him back?" Mom answered. That made the two squabbling states sound like a couple of six-year-olds.

"Besides, Ohio really is running guns," Mr. Brooks added.

"It is?" That wasn't Justin—it was his mother. She sounded astonished.

"Sure," Mr. Brooks said calmly. "The more trouble Virginia has, the better off Ohio is. The folks in Ohio can see that as well as anybody."

"How long have you been running this shop?" Mom asked slowly.

For a second, Justin thought Mom was changing the subject. Then he realized she wasn't. She'd found a polite way to ask, Have you been here so long, you're starting to think like a Virginian?

Mr. Brooks understood her. "It's a fact, Cyndi," he said. "I don't have anything good to say about segregation. Who could? Black people here . . . Well, who'd blame them for feeling the way they do about whites? But a race war won't make things better. Besides, they're bound to lose—a lot more whites here than blacks. And even if they win, what do they get? Another Mississippi." He grimaced. "That's no good, either."

"But why would Ohio want to touch off a civil war in Virginia?" Justin asked.

"A lot of it has to do with the coal trade," Mr. Brooks answered. "There's coal on both sides of the border here, but Ohio started mining it before Virginia did. Virginia works cheaper than Ohio, and she's taking away some of the markets Ohio's had for a while. Ohio doesn't like that."

"It would be nice if Ohio were giving the African Americans guns because it wanted them to get their rights," Justin said.

Mr. Brooks nodded. "Yeah, it would be nice, but don't hold your breath. The people in Ohio don't like Negroes much better than the people in Virginia do. Oh, they don't have laws holding them down in Ohio, but that's mostly because Ohio hasn't got enough Negroes to make laws like that worth bothering about. There aren't a lot of Negroes in this alternate except in the old South."

"How come?" That wasn't Justin—he knew the answer. It was Mom.

"In the home timeline, blacks moved north and west in the twentieth century. They did factory work in the World Wars, things like that," Randolph Brooks said. "That didn't happen here. They would have had to cross state lines, and the states that didn't have many didn't want any more."

Justin decided to show off a little: "And a lot of states were on the Prussian side in the First World War—the Great War, they still call it here. They had lots of German settlers, and they didn't like the way England was pushing them around. So here they fought the war on both sides of the Atlantic, and it was almost twice as bad as it was in the home timeline."

"That's how it worked, all right." Mr. Brooks eyed him for a minute, then glanced over at Mom. "He's a smart fellow."

"He must get it from his father." Mom's voice had a brittle edge. She and Justin's dad were divorced a couple of years earlier. Mom wasn't over it yet, and neither was Justin. Neither was Dad, come to that. Whenever Justin saw him, he said things like, / sure wish your mother and I could have got along.

Every time Justin heard that, he wanted to scream, Then why didn't you? He'd asked Dad once (carefully not screaming). All he got back was a shrug and, Sometimes things don't work out the way you want them to. Mom said almost the same thing in different words. What it boiled down to was that they couldn't stand each other any more, even if they both wished they still could. That didn't do Justin any good. He'd needed a long time to see that, no matter how hard he wished they would, they weren't going to get back together again.

"Wherever he gets it from, it's a good thing to have." Mr. Brooks didn't notice how Mom sounded. Or maybe he did, and just didn't let on. A lot of politeness boiled down to not saying anything you could be sorry for later.

Mom said something along those lines: "Brains are like anything else. What you do with them matters more than how many you've got."

"That's a fact," Mr. Brooks agreed. Grown-ups always said stuff like that. They could afford to. They'd already gone through college and got themselves settled in life. When you were getting ready for SATs and wishing you hadn't ended up with a B— in sophomore English, you wanted all the brains in the world. But then Mr. Brooks added, "I will say one thing for being smart—it lasts longer than being strong or being good-looking . . . most of the time, anyway."

He was looking at Mom when he tacked on the last few words. She kind of snorted, but Justin could see she was pleased. As for Justin, he found himself nodding. Oh, a handful, a tiny handful, of guys got rich playing sports. But even the very best of them were washed up at forty—and wasn't that a sorry fate, with the rest of your life still ahead of you? And time turned the homecoming queen and her court ordinary, too.

If you were sharp, though, you stayed sharp your whole life long. Sooner or later, you'd pass a lot of people who got off to faster starts than you did. If you could stand being the tortoise and not the hare . . .

There was the rub. Shakespeare was almost five hundred years dead now, but he still had a word for it. Who wanted to wait for a payoff if there was a chance of getting a big one right away? Justin knew he wasn't good-looking enough for that to matter to him. Oh, he wasn't bad, but you had to be better than not bad if you were going to make it on looks.

He was big and he was strong. He was a backup tight end on his high-school football team, a backup guard on the basketball team, and the right-handed half of a platoon at first base on the baseball team. He did okay at all his sports, no more than okay at any. He wasn't in line for an athletic scholarship, let alone a pro career.

It would have to be brains, then. When he got back to the home timeline after this stretch at Crosstime Traffic, he was heading for Stanford. Comparative history was a subject that hadn't existed before transposition chambers were invented. These days, you could either use it for the company or teach once you got your degree. You weren't likely to get movie-star rich, but you were pretty sure to do all right.

Mr. Brooks said something. Woolgathering the way Justin was, he missed it. "I'm sorry?" he said.

"I said, how would you like to go out into the boonies with me tomorrow?" Mr. Brooks repeated. "I've got a customer for an 1861 Oregon goldpiece, only he's got car trouble and he can't get down to Charleston. We've been doing business ever since I opened up here, so I don't mind getting in the car for him.

There's always a lot of handselling in coins and stamps, even in the home timeline."

"Sure, I'll come. Why not?" Justin said. "Be nice to see a little more of this alternate than what's across the street from the shop."

"Okay, then—we'll do that," Mr. Brooks said. To Justin's mother, he added, "Most of the trip's on the state highway. Hardly any on the little back roads."

"The state highway is bad enough," Mom said. Roads in this part of Virginia had to wiggle and twist and double back on themselves. Otherwise, the mountain country wouldn't have any roads at all. From what Justin had seen in West Virginia in the home timeline, the roads there were all twisty, too. Mom looked at him. "I don't know. . . ."

"It'll be all right," Justin said.

"Should be," Mr. Brooks agreed. "I've made the trip a few times. As long as you pay attention, there's nothing to worry about."

"I always worry," Mom said. "That's what mothers are for." But she didn't tell them no.