“Well, you’ll have to take my word for it,” Iphwin said. “Because if you try to check by net or phone you’ll be leaving suddenly. But this is one of a relatively small family of event sequences where there was a coup in the United States in 1972, over the withdrawal from a war in Vietnam—Indochina to some of you. Military junta took over to restore order and honor, which basically meant to suppress political expression at home and use nuclear weapons to win in Vietnam. They got into an arms race with Communist Germany, which was the other big power in that event sequence, and eventually bankrupted the Germans. Then they stayed in power indefinitely, getting less and less repressive with time; they enforced a huge, complicated array of rules governing every aspect of daily behavior to make the country look as much as possible like it had in the 1950s of that event sequence, which was pretty dull and conformist. Not the best of worlds, not the worst. The rest of the world is mostly in small nations; devolution went pretty far. There are hundreds of prosperous small states—imagine a world full of Switzerlands. You could live here pretty nicely.”
“But good luck explaining why you wouldn’t talk on a phone or use a self-driving vehicle, eh?” Kelly said. “I guess I’d have to hope there was an American Theater in Ciudad de Mexico, or maybe start one. I don’t have too many good alternatives, since all I’ve got is travelers’ Spanish. Can you tell me what happens if I do go along?”
“If I knew what would happen, no one would have to go, and I’d never have disturbed any of you,” Iphwin pointed out. “And I do have considerable resources, so if you truly don’t want to go on the expedition, I can find you a job in my organization, probably in some office where you won’t have to expose yourself to accidental transfer. If that is what you would genuinely prefer.”
“Aren’t you worried that we’ll all take that offer?” Helen asked.
“I am, now that you mention it. But it seems like the decent thing to do, given the things you have pointed out about my having so disrupted your lives. And I already have some volunteers, anyway. As you point out, I’m really not good at working with people. This is the best I can do while improvising.”
As I listened to all the arguments, I had been thinking about my own position. This Helen didn’t much resemble the quiet historian that I liked; and if I couldn’t find the exact one I thought I knew... well, really a composite, since I must have interacted with thousands of very slightly different Helens, each of whom knew thousands of versions of me ... all the same, I could find a more comfortable connection than this one. The odds even seemed reasonably good if I just started making a lot of phone calls.
On the other hand, what had happened to the United States of America, and how had I—who had been raised as an expat patriot, proud of my heritage—never even noticed that the country itself was gone? Clearly the net extending across all of the worlds had a great deal of editing ability, and both it and the human cultures that depended on it for communication had evolved an immense and sophisticated system for suppressing excessive questions about the inconsistencies that were generated, so it was possible for whole families and complexes of facts to disappear or at least become unspoken.
But a whole nation?
I had to admit, it was an interesting problem. And if I started working that phone, I might or might not ever know the answer. Besides, I could just as easily work the phone trick, to find a more compatible Helen, after the expedition—assuming I survived—as before it.
For that matter, if there was going to be shooting, this Helen had advantages.
The room had gotten very quiet as everyone who hadn’t committed to the expedition tried to figure out what was best for them. With an effort I drew a breath and said, “Well, then, I guess I’ll go. No reasons I care to talk about.”
Helen seemed very startled, and then said, “What the hell. Me too.”
“And me,” Ulrike said. “It makes more sense than trying to do anything else; at least this might lead to something, and everything else just leads to being stranded or picking up a phone and trying for a new world at random.”
Kelly and Terri looked around the room as if we had all betrayed them, which I guess in a sense we had. With a sigh, Terri said, “You all are the only people I know in this world, you know? If you all go, I kind of have to go. ’Cause I’d rather not lose the only people I have, and I don’t have any real strong reason to not go, except maybe that I’m kind of afraid—which is a bad reason for not doing anything, I think. Am I making sense? Anyway, I guess, me too, but I’m not happy.” She looked down into her lap where her hands curled and twisted against each other.
Kelly seemed to be almost in tears, and I don’t suppose I could blame her. “I feel so forced into this.”
Helen grunted. “You should. That’s what’s happening, you know, no matter how rational it is to do what you’re doing. It’s perfectly rational to give a man with a gun your wallet, and it’s your decision to give it to him, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t forced. You might decide to have your leg amputated if it was badly enough injured and infected, but that doesn’t make it a free choice.”
Kelly swallowed hard and brushed tears away from her blue eyes, smearing her mascara and making her look messy. “Well, it’s a pretty bad deal, but I do think you’re right—it’s the only one I’ve got going. I guess what I’d better do is come along. Am I required to have a positive attitude?”
“Not at all,” Iphwin said. “I don’t.”
The vehicle that the ten of us moved into the next day was an ugly old museum-piece of military hardware, but with Iphwin’s resources applied to getting it, it also happened to be the perfect thing for the job.
It was a hideous old American Army Model 2018 Squad Transporter, which Roger, Esmé, and Paula all groaned at the sight of. They informed us that it was most commonly known as an “esty” and that “although officially it was a device whose whole purpose was to carry up to a dozen people into harm’s way in a way that protected them and allowed them to do some harming back, its actual role was to maximize human discomfort as part of a sadistic and pointless research experiment,” as Roger Sykes put it.
This particular esty had apparently been used as a bus by someone with an odd idea of what colors went together, so it had had to be repainted, but the lines and cracks of previous paint jobs showed through the new charcoal-gray paint everywhere. Windows were small and thick with a self-closing gunport beneath each one; the windshield was in two layers spaced about a handwidth apart. Heavy flat rectangular boxes of metal, filled with something to stop projectiles, were placed all over it in a not-too-symmetric way, hanging all around the engine compartment, off the doors and side panels, and so forth. The roof had an unlikely number of roll bars, some of the metal boxes, and just enough thickness to make me pretty sure it was armored all over. The one real weak spot was the rear window, which had clearly been replaced, long ago, with ordinary glass. Roger and Paula fretted about it a little, and rather upset the rest of us with the concern, but since we had no way, in any timely manner, to replace the rear window with any real armored glass, the upset was all they accomplished.
Naturally it was hand-steered and without any sort of net-based navigation.
“Must have spent a few years in the American Army,” Paula commented as she ran a series of checkouts and I looked over her shoulder, “and then come to Mexico to be modified for use in one of the many dustups down here, and then gone civilian, oh, I don’t know, twenty years ago, probably in the early ’40s. After all these years, it’s finally going home—even if it has to go armed.”