"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.
Thirteen
Beckie watched Gran and watched the clock and worried more with every few minutes that slid past. Justin was right— hospitals couldn't do much for this disease. But could he do anything at all? And would waiting to find out cost her—and Gran—too much?
Gran wasn't even pretending to watch TV any more. She just lay on the couch, as out of it as a yam. Beckie had made a cold compress from a hand towel in the bathroom and ice from the noisy machine down the hall. She'd bought aspirins with Virginia money from Gran's purse. She'd even got her grandmother to take them, which wasn't easy. But the fever stayed high.
A hospital could give her an IV, keep her from drying up like a raisin. Once the thought came to Beckie, it didn't want to go away. She kept looking over at Gran and trying to decide when bad turned to worse. The more she brooded, the more she doubted she would wait till five o'clock.
On the other hand, would an ambulance even come if she called one? She still heard spatters of gunfire, and sometimes gunfire that wasn't spatters. A firefight seemed to last forever. It really did go on for half an hour. Even after it ended, quiet didn't come—more spatters followed on its heels.
At half past two, somebody knocked on the door. Beckie all but flew to get there. One second, she was in the chair. The next, she was looking through the little eye-level spyglass. In between? She had no idea.
It was Justin, all right. She undid the dead bolts and slid the chains out of their grooves—Virginia hotels assumed bad things could happen to you if you weren't careful. Bad things could happen to you if you weren't careful out on the streets, too, or even if you were.
"You okay?" Beckie asked Justin.
"Yeah." He nodded. "I got stopped at one checkpoint, but I showed 'em my regular ID and they let me through." He made it sound easy.
"What if they recognized you?" Beckie said.
Justin laughed. "Fat chance. I didn't have a helmet on, I shaved, my face wasn't filthy, and I didn't smell bad. Boy, was I glad to take a shower."
"I believe you." She pointed to the brown paper bag in his left hand. "What have you got in there?"
"The cure for your grandmother. I hope." Justin started over to the couch. "How is she?"
"Like you see. Not good," Beckie answered. "I wasn't going to wait a whole lot longer, no matter what you said."
He felt Gran's forehead, then jerked his hand away the way she had earlier. "I don't blame you. She's hot, isn't she?" He opened the bag and took out something that looked like a syringe with a CO2 cartridge riding shotgun.
"What's that thing?" Beckie pointed to it.
"Air-blast hypo," Justin answered. "They've been using them for a couple of years here. Don't you have 'em in California?"
"No." Beckie wouldn't have thought Virginia was ahead of her own state in anything, but you never could tell.
Justin rolled up the right sleeve of Gran's blouse and held the air-blast hypo just above her biceps. When he pressed the button, the thing made a noise between a hiss and a sneeze. He straightened up. "Let me do you, too, in case you've got it."
"All right," she said warily. She hated shots. The air-blast hypo made that funny noise again. The thing stung, but less than a needle would have.
"There," Justin said. "That ought to do it."
"Thanks—I think." Beckie looked at her arm. She saw a red mark, but no blood. "Let me see your gadget." Plainly, Justin didn't want to, but he couldn't find any excuse not to. She took it from him. It said it was a Subskin Deluxe—said so in half a dozen languages, including one that looked like Chinese. It also said it was made in Slovenia. "Where's Slovenia?" Beck-ie'd never heard of it.
"Isn't it a province in Austria-Hungary?" Justin said.
"I don't know, but if it is . . ." Beckie shrugged. Austria-Hungary had been a mess for an awfully long time. The government treated some of its minorities as badly as Southern states treated Negroes. "Why would you buy your, uh, Subskin Deluxes from Slovenia?"
"Because they're cheap, probably," Justin answered, which did make a certain basic sense.
Even so, Beckie repeated, "Slovenia," in a way that suggested she had trouble believing it—which she did. And she found another question: "Why do you have medicine that may help Gran if the hospitals here don't?"
"They will, real soon now," Justin said.
Beckie started to get mad. "That doesn't answer what I asked you."
Before he could say anything, Gran stirred on the couch.
"Get me some water, Beckie, will you?" she said. She didn't sound what you'd call strong, but that was the first time she'd made sense for hours.
"Wow," Justin said. "I didn't think it would work like that."
Beckie hurried into the bathroom. She filled a glass and brought it to her grandmother. "Here you go, Gran," she said. When she felt the old woman's forehead, she was amazed all over again. Gran still had a fever, but not the killing kind she'd been fighting a little while before.
She held out the glass when she'd emptied it. "Fetch me some more, would you? I'm mighty dry inside. And could you call down to room service for some food? Feels like I haven't eaten anything in ages." She suddenly noticed Justin was there. "Oh. The boy. Hello."
"Hello," Justin said. "I'm glad you're feeling better."
"Thank you," Beckie told him in a low voice as she went past him to get Gran another glass of water. He nodded. He really did seem as surprised as she was about how well the medicine was working. She called room service and ordered soft-boiled eggs and toast for Gran. Then she said, "Justin brought you the medicine that helped break your fever."