Beckie hadn't paid any attention to the news since she got to Elizabeth. Nothing outside the little town seemed to matter to her while she was here. But that might not be so. "What silly talk?" she asked.
"Virginia may close it," Gran answered. "They say Ohio is letting too many terrorists and saboteurs across. They say Ohio is stirring up trouble, the way it always does." Raised here, she was a Virginia patriot.
Beckie didn't care one way or the other. She just wanted to make sure she could get home when she needed to. And. . . "Terrorists and saboteurs? You mean like Uncle Luke?" She still remembered—she would never forget—the feel of assault rifles under the soles of her shoes.
"Don't talk silly talk," Gran said impatiently.
"I'm not," Beckie answered. "He was running guns."
"Oh, look at that one." Gran pointed at a firefly. She was hard of hearing. Maybe she missed what Beckie said. But she was hard of listening, too. Maybe she didn't want to hear it.
"How will we get out if we can't go back into Ohio?" Beckie asked. They were supposed to fly back from Columbus.
"Go down to Charleston, I suppose." Gran made a sour face. "That will be expensive. Changing flight plans always is."
"Can we do it?" Beckie didn't care about the money. She just wanted to make sure they could get home all right. "Or will some of the other states start shooting down airplanes from Virginia?"
"I hope not!" Gran heard that, all right. She'd lived through—how many little wars was it? They were just history lessons to Beckie, but they seemed a lot more than that when Gran started talking about them. Now she said, "I don't think they would do anything so terrible, especially if California stays neutral. But I reckon you never can tell."
"Maybe we ought to get out now, while we still can," Beckie said. "Nobody's shooting at anybody yet, right?"
"Well, no," Gran said. "But I hate to just up and leave. I haven't been home in so long, and seeing my cousin again. . . . It's almost like being young again, not that I expect you'll know what I mean. People your age just don't have any respect for their elders. You don't understand what I went through. When I was young, we didn't have it so easy, let me tell you."
"Sure, Gran." Beckie stopped listening. When Gran started grumbling, she didn't know how to stop. And she didn't want to think about anything else while she was doing it, either.
She might not want to do a whole lot of thinking about it anyway. How much would she mind if they got stuck in Elizabeth for however long the fighting lasted? As long as no one dropped any bombs here—and why would anybody in his right mind?—she'd be safe enough, and happy enough, too. She'd grown up here. This felt like home to her.
It didn't feel like home to Beckie. Every day she spent here seemed to last three weeks. If she got started, she could . . . / could complain as well as Gran, Beckie thought. The very idea was enough to make her clap a hand over her mouth. She couldn't imagine anything worse.
Justin Monroe was walking along minding his own business when he got caught in a police spot check. The cops were good at what they did. They sealed off a whole block at both ends in nothing flat. "Come forward for a paper check!" they shouted through bullhorns. To make sure people did as they were told, the Virginia State Police carried assault rifles.
This kind of thing couldn't happen in the United States in the home timeline. Things here seemed similar on the surface to what Justin was used to, so the differences hit him harder.
This wasn't a small difference. If the cops didn't like his papers, or if they thought he was carrying a false set, they would ... do what? Whatever they want to, he thought uneasily. The papers he carried were supposed to be perfect forgeries. Had they ever been tested like this? He didn't know. No, he didn't know, but he was going to find out.
Somebody who didn't want the State Police looking at his papers ducked into a secondhand bookstore. They saw him do it, though, and dragged him out. They also dragged out the little old woman who ran the store. Her documents passed muster, and they let her go. His made red lights go off. Either he wasn't who the papers said he was or he was somebody the cops wanted. They threw him into a paddy wagon—actually, it looked more like an armored car.
Men and women formed two lines, one for whites, the other for blacks. There were only three or four African Americans in that line. If Justin hadn't been briefed, he might have got into it himself because it was shorter. But that would have made him an object of suspicion here. He stayed in the longer line.
He might not have moved any faster in the shorter one. The police questioned the Negroes much more thoroughly than they did the whites. If a white person's papers didn't set off their machines, they passed him or her through. The blacks weren't so lucky.
When Justin got to the front of the line, a burly cop looked at his papers. "Says you're from Fredericksburg," he remarked.
"That's right," Justin said. "My mom and I are here to give Mr. Brooks a hand at his coin and stamp place. He's my uncle."
"Well, I've known Randolph a while. He's square clean through," the policeman said. In this alternate, that was a compliment. The officer fed Justin's identity card into a reader. Then he said, "Hold out your arm."
Justin did. The cop ran a blunt scraper across the skin of his forearm. Then he put the scraper into another window in the reader. The electronics inside compared the DNA from the few cells on the scraper to the data on the identity card. A light turned green. The reader spat out the card. "Everything okay?" Justin asked.
"You're you, all right." The policeman returned the card. "Go on, now. Enjoy your stay in Charleston."
"Thanks." Justin put the identity card in his wallet again. It was good enough to fool the locals, and the readings on it were from his own DNA. He hoped he didn't sound sarcastic, even if he felt that way. In the home timeline, you needed a search warrant to go after DNA information. Not here. Here, you could just go fishing. That wasn't the only way the Virginia State Police and the rest of the government kept people in line, either.
Not far past the police checkpoint was a newsstand. The headline on the Charleston Courier read OHIO BANDITS MUST BE STOPPED! Every paper in Virginia would carry a headline like that today. All the TV and radio newsmen would say the same thing. Qualified representatives of opposing groups . . . kept their mouths shut, or had their mouths shut for them.
Charleston was close enough to Ohio and the state of Boone—which was Kentucky and about half of Tennessee—to pick up TV and radio signals from them. But Virginia jammed those signals, and Ohio and Boone jammed the ones from Virginia. If not for cable systems (which didn't cross borders), most people would have had no TV or radio at all.
The Web was in the same sort of shape. There was no World Wide Web in this alternate. There were national Webs—mostly called state Webs on this side of the Atlantic. They didn't connect with one another, and local governments kept a much closer eye on them than in the home timeline. That was probably one reason why this alternate's technology had fallen behind the home timeline's.
But the Web, national, World Wide, or deep-fried, wasn't the first thing on Justin's mind. Getting out of the trap was. But he couldn't even talk about it when he got to the coin and stamp shop. Mr. Brooks was dickering with a local over a threepenny Virginia green from 1851, a rare and famous stamp in this alternate.
After going back and forth for twenty minutes, they settled on 550 pounds. The customer walked out with his tiny prize, a happy man.
Randolph Brooks looked happy, too. "That'll keep me eating for a while," he said.
"Sure," Justin said. Money here was a lot more complicated than in the home timeline. Virginia used pounds and shillings and pence, the old kind—twelve pence to a shilling, twenty shillings to a pound. In the home timeline, even Britain's money went decimal more than 120 years earlier.