This journey felt longer than the one from the home timeline to the alternate where the Constitution never replaced the Articles of Confederation. That meant the quarantine alternate had a much more distant breakpoint... if it meant anything at all. Chronophysicists were still writing papers about that in the learned journals, too.
Nothing to do but wait. Justin didn't like it. He wondered if he would go stir-crazy in the quarantine alternate. It wouldn't be very exciting there. He hoped they'd have game boxes and video players. Or maybe he could go birding with the chamber operator. Normally, he wouldn't have thought that was interesting. Seeing birds he couldn't find in the home timeline gave it a special kick, though.
More lights on the instrument panel went green. "We're here!" The operator sure sounded excited.
The doors slid open. "Passengers, please disembark," said a recorded voice coming out of a ceiling speaker.
Out Justin went. He expected to smell fresh air—not much pollution here. What he did smell was freshly dug earth. This hole in the ground hadn't been here very long. A hastily made set of wooden stairs offered a way up out of it.
Spoil from the digging ruined the look of the meadow by the Kanawha. The slab-sided prefab buildings a few hundred meters away did nothing to improve things. A Red Cross flag floated over them. Maybe that was meant to be reassuring. If it was, it didn't work, not for Justin. It struck him as wasted effort. People who showed up here would know this was a quarantine station, and the passenger pigeons and whatever else lived here wouldn't care.
Something fluttered in a tree a couple of hundred meters away, at the edge of the woods. The chamber operator—his name was Lonnie something—aimed his binoculars at it. "That's a passenger pigeon, all right!" he said. "There'll be billions of 'em in this alternate, and you can only seem 'em stuffed in a few museums back home." He held out the binoculars to Justin. "Want a look?"
"Okay." There were passenger pigeons in the alternate Justin had just left, too, but not billions of them. He couldn't remember seeing any. He pointed the binoculars at the tree. Not one but dozens of birds perched there. They were slimmer than the ordinary pigeons that scrounged for handouts in cities around the world—built more like mourning doves. They had salmon-pink bellies, gray backs, and eyes of a startling red. Justin handed the binoculars back. "Passenger pigeons, all right."
A noise came from deeper in the woods—a bear? a fox? a falling branch? Whatever it was, it spooked the birds. They erupted, not just from that oak but from all the oaks and elms and chestnuts and maples and hickories and other trees close by. As the flock zoomed past overhead, it was big enough to darken the sky. How many birds were in it? Not billions, not in this one group, but surely many, many thousands. The din of their wings was like the roar of the surf.
"Whoa!" Justin said.
"Whoa is right," Mr. Brooks said. "I've seen starlings in our Midwest and queleas in Africa, but I've never seen anything like this." He sent a wary glance up at the sky, where stragglers still whizzed past. "If you go anywhere around here, you'd better carry an umbrella."
"Let's see what kind of quarters we've got," Mom said.
They put Justin in mind of the motel room where he'd stayed in Elizabeth. They had all the basic conveniences: bed, sink, shower, soap, shampoo, computer, even a bare-bones fasarta. But they wouldn't make a home, not in a million years. Everything about them screamed, People pen! Well, he could put up with it till they decided he wouldn't come down sick and let him go back to the home timeline.
Food came out of a freezer and went into a microwave. There was also canned fruit, and plenty of soda. "The beer is Bud," Mr. Brooks said. He and Lonnie exchanged identical sighs. Justin thought any beer tasted nasty, so he wasn't as sympathetic as he might have been.
He let the fasarta pamper him for a little while—as much as it could, anyhow. Then he fired up the computer to find out what had gone on in the home timeline while he was stuck in Elizabeth. He hadn't had much of a chance to do that in Charleston—too many other things going on.
Getting it all in text, without video or even stills, made him feel he'd fallen back in time instead of going across it. The Russians had turned a tailored virus loose in Chechnya, and hadn't immunized enough people outside the borders to keep it from spreading. He shook his head, People had been wondering when the Russians would get their act together for hundreds of years. It hadn't happened yet. It didn't look as if it would happen any time soon, either. Russia was too big to conquer and too big to ignore, same as always.
In Iran, the Shah's secret police were executing ayatollahs again. And a suicide bomber tried to blow up the Shah's prime minister in revenge. That was also another verse of the same old song. So was the ecoterrorist outfit claiming responsibility for poisoning fifty kilometers of the Amazon to protest logging policies in Brazil. And the Scottish nationalists had blown up another British mail truck. It was as if Justin had never left the home timeline.
But getting his news like this left him strangely distant from it. He couldn't see and hear what was happening. All he could do was read about it. He had to make the pictures in his own mind, the way he would if he were reading a history book. He didn't even have any pictures to help, as he would in a book. He might have fallen back from the end of the twenty-first century to the end of the nineteenth.
Along with the usual hotel supplies were special soap and shampoo marked PLEASE USE ON YOUR FIRST DAY HERE. When Justin did, he found they smelled strongly medicinal. They probably killed a lot of the germs he'd brought from the alternate where he was staying. The shampoo wasn't easy on his hair—that was for sure.
Later, he wondered how Crosstime Traffic would know whether he used that soap and shampoo. Did transmitters in the packaging record that it was opened? Had he washed away a microchip on the surface of the soap that reacted when it got wet? Or did a camera in the shower stall send his image back to the main station in this alternate, wherever that was?
He didn't like the idea, not one bit. Probably no humans were involved—only a computer program that wouldn't squeal to a real, live person unless it caught him breaking the rules. He didn't like it anyway.
Mom squawked when he mentioned it at dinner that night. Mr. Brooks only shrugged. "With all the computer technology we've got these days, something or somebody is watching you all the time anyway. Either you get used to it or you go nuts."
"That's how it works, all right," Lonnie agreed. "I know they monitor transposition chambers." He shrugged. "What can you do?"
"There's a difference between monitoring a chamber and a shower." Justin's mother sounded like a cat with its dignity ruffled.
"To you, maybe. Not to Crosstime Traffic, especially not in a quarantine station," Lonnie said. "If you kick up a fuss, they'd say they had an interest in making sure you followed instructions. How would you convince a court they were wrong?"
What Mom said then didn't have much to do with convincing a court. It came from the heart, though. Mr. Brooks laughed. "That's telling 'em," he said.
He'd been through the army. You didn't have much privacy there. Sometimes you didn't have any. Justin had found that out himself, the hard way, when he put on Adrian's uniform. His mother had never had to do anything like that. She didn't know how lucky she was, which might be literally true.
The mattress on the bed was softer than Justin liked. That kept him awake . . . oh, an extra fifteen seconds or so. He was still catching up on sleep from his hectic couple of days of carrying a gun. He didn't have any nightmares about shooting the African-American kid. That was progress, too.