Dad said, "We need to keep an eye on them. And we need to buy produce from them. No matter what timeline you're in, the Central Valley turns out some of the best produce in the world."
"Are we smart, trading them some of our gadgets?" Paul wondered.
"If you don't give, you can't get," his father said.
"I know—but if we give them things they haven't seen, won't they want to know where that stuff comes from?" Paul asked. "And aren't they liable to come up with the right answer once they ask the right question?"
Dad only shrugged. "I don't set policy—and neither do you," he added pointedly. "But Crosstime Traffic isn't there for their health. They're there to show a profit. So we trade. We trade carefully, but we trade. Where would we be if we couldn't visit the alternates?"
Paul had no answer for that. He knew where the home timeline would be without the alternates. Up the famous creek without a paddle, that was where. Still, trade carefully reminded him of all deliberate speed, a phrase he'd run across in a history class. It wanted you to do two things at the same time, and they pulled in opposite directions. If that didn't mean trouble, what would?
"Are you ready to go crosstime?" his father asked.
"Oh, I'm ready, all right. All I have to do is put on my costume. We don't even need a new language through our implants, not for San Francisco in that alternate. They speak English there, too."
"Yes, but it's not quite our English." Dad was just full of good advice. Paul would have been more grateful if he'd heard it less often. Dad seemed convinced he was eight, not eighteen. "You have to remember. You have to be careful."
"Right," Paul said. His father sent him a sour look, but they left it there.
They changed clothes before they got into the transposition chamber. Paul put on a pair of Levi's not too different from the ones people wore in the home timeline. They were a little baggier, a little darker shade of blue. Chambray work shirts like the one he tucked into the jeans had been popular in the home timeline a hundred years ago. He'd seen pictures. Only the pointed-toed ankle boots and the wide-brimmed derby seemed really strange.
His father wore a similar outfit. He had on a double-breasted corduroy jacket with wide lapels over his shirt. In the home timeline, he would have looked like a cheap thug. The style was popular in the alternate, though. So was the wide leather belt with the big, shiny brass buckle. It said he was somebody solid and prosperous.
The woman who ran the transposition chamber snickered at them when they got in. Paul would rather have worn a toga or a burnoose or a flowing Chinese robe. Those would have been honestly weird. This way, he just looked as if he had no taste in clothes. It was embarrassing.
He and Dad got into their seats and put on their belts. He didn't know what good the belts did. Transposition chambers didn't run into things. They didn't move physically, only across timelines. The seats were like the ones in airliners, even to being too close together. That was probably why they had belts.
For that matter, he didn't know what good the operator was, either. All she did to start the chamber was push a button. Computers handled everything else. Operators were supposed to navigate the chambers if the computers went out, but what were the chances if that happened? Slim and none, as far as Paul could see.
He couldn't tell when the chamber started across the alternates toward the Kaiser's America. It would seem to take about fifteen minutes to get there. When he left the chamber, though, it would be the same time as it had been in the home timeline when he left. Duration was a funny business in transposition chambers. Even chronophysicists didn't understand all the ins and outs.
"We're here." The operator caught him by surprise. He hadn't felt the arrival, any more than he'd felt the motion across the timelines.
His father stood up and stretched. When he did, his hands brushed the ceiling of the transposition chamber. It wasn't very high. Paul got up, too. If he hadn't, Dad would have said he was dawdling. He didn't feel like banging heads over that. He and his father banged heads often enough anyway.
The operator closed the door. The subbasement here had exactly the same position as the one in the home timeline from which the chamber had left. The air smelled a little different: a little smokier, a little more full of exhaust, and a little more full of people who didn't take baths as often as they might have.
Paul and his father left the chamber. Silently and without any fuss, it disappeared. Was it going back to the home timeline or on to a different alternate San Francisco? Paul knew he would never know.
Bare bulbs lit the chamber. Iron stairs led up to a trap door in the ceiling. A plump man came through. He waved. "Hello, Lawrence," he called to Paul's father. A moment later, as an afterthought, he added, "Hello to you, too, Paul."
"Hello, Elliott," Dad answered. "How's business?"
"Tolerable," the plump man said. "This station makes a profit. The company isn't going to close it down any time soon." He laughed. "If we can't make a profit so close to the Central Valley, we'd better shut up shop."
"Shh." Dad put a forefinger in front of his mouth. "Don't let Crosstime Traffic hear you." He laughed, too. He got along fine with people his own age. He seemed to get along fine with everybody except Paul, in fact. The two of them were water and sodium. That made Paul wonder if there was something wrong with him.
Elliott said, "Come on upstairs, and you can see for yourself." Up they went. Their boot heels clanged on the iron risers. Once they got out of the subbasement, Elliott closed the trap door behind them. Then he rolled a file cabinet that didn't look as if it could roll over the door. That subbasement wasn't supposed to be easy to find. He suddenly looked worried. "You've got your Kennkarte?"
"Oh, yes." Dad reached into the back pocket of his Levi's and pulled out his identity papers. Paul did the same. Elliott nodded, obviously relieved. If you didn't have papers in this alternate, you might as well not exist. Theirs were forgeries, of course, but they were forgeries made with all the skill of the home timeline. They were at least as good as the real thing. They just happened not to be genuine.
The German word for identity papers seemed right at home in the English Elliott used, the English of this alternate. Paul had no trouble following it, but it wasn't the English he spoke at home. It was slower, the vowels flatter, some of the consonants slightly guttural. It was, in fact, an English that had had German rubbing off on it for a hundred forty years or so.
Elliott led Paul and his father into the front room of the shop, which stood on Powell Street between Union Square and Market. The name of the place was Curious Notions. From inside, it looked to be spelled out backwards in gold letters on the plate-glass window opening on the street. Toys and gadgets, most of them from the home timeline, filled the shelves.
"Nobody's wondered about any of this stuff?" Paul's father asked. He didn't hesitate to steal Paul's idea. Maybe he didn't know he was doing it. Maybe.
"Not that I've heard," Elliott answered. "And if I can't find out here, it's a good thing I'm leaving town."
Paul looked out the window. Men wore the same kind of clothes he and Dad—and Elliott—did. Women mostly had on linen blouses, sweaters, and skirts that came down below the knee. The women wore pointed-toed shoes, too. Misery loved company. White and black women wore their hair in fancy curls. Those whose ancestors came from Asia mostly didn't bother.
Cars and trucks slowly picked their way past pedestrians and people on bicycles. They looked like those from more than a hundred years earlier in the home timeline. All of them burned gasoline or diesel fuel. The Kaiser's men didn't seem to worry about global warming. Of course, they'd had to dodge a nuclear winter in this alternate. It wasn't so crowded here as in the home timeline, either.