"Yeah, yeah." Justin had heard that a million times. "Wouldn't we be smarter to stay away from alternates like that? If they do catch us, they can really use what they squeeze out of us."
"For one thing, we do good business with them," his mother said. He snorted and rolled his eyes. Crosstime Traffic worshiped the bottom line. He didn't, or not so much. Mom went on, "Another reason we're there is to make sure they don't find the crosstime secret."
"What do we do? Screw up their computer data?" Justin asked sarcastically.
To his surprise, the operator spoke up: "That's happened in some other alternates. Not in this one, I don't think."
"Oh," he said, some of the wind gone from his sails.
"And another reason we're here is to do what we can to make race relations go better," Mom said. "Things aren't perfect in the home timeline even now. You know that as well as I do.
They're a lot better than they used to be, but they sure aren't perfect. Even so, they look like heaven compared to Virginia and the other Southern states in that alternate."
"The other Southern states except Mississippi," Justin said.
Mom shook her head. "No, Mississippi, too. Blacks have no more business lording it over whites than whites do lording it over blacks. Nobody has any business lording it over anybody. It happens, but that doesn't make it right. Right?"
"I guess." Justin hadn't really worried about it one way or the other. His first thought was that the whites in Mississippi had it coming. But the black revolution there was 120 years old now. None of the whites in the miserable state now had ever persecuted anybody black. Why should they be on the receiving end for something they hadn't done themselves?
Before he could find an answer—if there was a good answer to find—the operator said, "We're there."
It felt as if about fifteen minutes had gone by. This alternate's breakpoint wasn't very far from the present, so getting there didn't seem to take very long. But when Justin looked at his watch, it was twenty past four—the same time as it was when he and Mom got into the transposition chamber. He'd seen that before. He still thought it was weird.
Chronophysicists talked about the difference between time and duration. Without the fancy math to back it up, the talk was just talk. Justin accepted it. He believed it because he saw it worked. But he didn't pretend to understand it. He wondered if the chronophysicists did, or if they just parroted what the computers told them.
The door to the transposition chamber slid open. Justin and his mother might not have moved in any physical sense, but they weren't where they had been, either. This concrete box of an underground room had a few bare bulbs glaring down from the ceiling, and that was it.
Mom laughed as she looked around. "Be it ever so humble . . ." she started.
But this wasn't home, even if they'd be living here for a while. This was a different and dangerous place. People here didn't like foreigners, and no one could be more foreign than the Monroes. The locals were racists. They were sexists. And they had a technology not very far behind the home timeline's. If they ever learned the crosstime secret, they could build transposition chambers. Instead of trading, they could go conquering across the alternates. They could—if people from the home timeline didn't stop them.
Even worse, they didn't have to get the crosstime secret from the home timeline. Even if everybody in Crosstime Traffic did everything right, these people might figure out how to travel between alternates all by themselves. Galbraith and Hester had, back in the home timeline. Otherwise, there would be no crosstime travel. . . and the home timeline, with too many people and not enough resources, would be in a lot of trouble.
Justin didn't want to think about that. Behind him, silently and without any fuss, the transposition chamber disappeared. He followed his mother toward the stairs that led up to the business Crosstime Traffic used for cover here.
"Mom," he said, "what do we do if they figure out crosstime travel for themselves?"
"Well, it hasn't happened yet," his mother answered. "Not here, not in any of the other high-tech alternates. We've had it for more than fifty years now. Maybe there's something about the home timelines that the alternates can't match for a long time, if they ever do."
"Like what?" Justin asked.
"I don't know." Mom laughed. "Maybe I'm talking through my hat, too. Maybe they're working on it right now in a lab in Richmond or New Orleans or Los Angeles or Fremont." Fremont was an important town here, not far from where Kansas City lay in the home timeline. "Maybe they'll find it tomorrow, and we'll all start going nuts."
"That would be great, wouldn't it?" Justin waited for Mom to climb the stairs so he could take them two at a time. Then he swarmed up after her.
"Hello, hello." That was Randolph Brooks, who ran the Charleston Coin and Stamp Company. Collecting North American stamps and coins was a lot more complicated here than it was in the home timeline. Every state issued its own. Some states had merged with neighbors over the years—there was only one Carolina these days, for instance. Some had broken apart—thanks to the Florida Intervention, that state was divided into three parts, one of which belonged to Cuba.
"How are you?" Mom asked. As far as the locals knew, she was Mr. Brooks' sister, which made Justin his nephew.
"Never a dull moment." Mr. Brooks was in his early middle years, plump, balding, with thick glasses that sat too far down on his nose. He looked like a man who bought and sold coins and stamps, in other words. "You wouldn't believe some of the counterfeits people try to palm off on you."
"I don't think there's ever been an alternate without thieves," Mom said.
"But these are dumb thieves." Randolph Brooks sounded annoyed at the stupidity of mankind. "They scan something, they print it on an inkjet, and they bring it in and expect me to believe it's two hundred years old. Ha!"
"How often do you get fooled?" Justin asked.
Mr. Brooks started to answer, then stopped. He tried again: "Well, I don't exactly know. How can I, when getting fooled means I didn't suspect when I should have?"
"Well, did you ever sell something to somebody who brought it back and said it was a fake?" Justin asked.
"No, I never did." Mr. Brooks looked over toward Justin's mother. "He likes to get to the bottom of things, doesn't he?"
"Oh, you might say so." Mom's voice was dry. Justin had an itch to know that he scratched whenever he could.
Right now, he was looking out the window. The buildings across the street looked like . . . buildings. They were made of brick, so they looked like old-fashioned buildings, but plenty of brick buildings still went up every year in the home timeline, too. One was a copy shop, one a shoe-repair place, one a donut house—only they always spelled it doughnut in this alternate.
The cars, though—the cars were something else. Quite a few of them still burned gasoline, which was obsolete in the home timeline. Their lines were strange. They looked faster than cars from the home timeline. They weren't, but they looked that way. Some of the makes were familiar: Honda, Mercedes, Renault. But Pegasus and Hupmobile and Lancelot and Vance rang no bell for Justin. You saw Vances everywhere. They were the Chevies of this alternate.
And the people seemed different, too. Hardly anybody here had piercings or tattoos. Women didn't wear pants. Their dresses looked like explosions in a florist's shop. Almost all of them were cut below the knee. More men wore suits than in the home timeline, and the four-button jackets with tiny lapels gave them the look of the 1890s. It was only a look, and Justin knew as much. Their technology was a lot closer to the home time-line's than that. The men who weren't in suits mostly had on brown jeans like Justin's.