Pennsylvania used pounds, too, but a Pennsylvania pound was worth more than a Virginia pound, and was divided into a hundred pence. Other kinds of pounds and dollars and reals and pesos and francs were scattered across the continent. Every computer had a money-conversion program, and every one of those programs needed updating at least once a week.
"How are you?" Mr. Brooks asked. "Am I wrong, or do you look a little green around the gills?" Nobody said anything like that in the home timeline, but old-fashioned phrases hung on here. Mr. Brooks had been here quite a while, so they fell from his lips as naturally as if he were a local.
Justin didn't have much trouble figuring out what this one meant. "Yeah, I guess I do," he said. "I got caught in one of the paperwork checks the State Police are running."
"Oh!" Mr. Brooks said. "Well, you must have passed, or they'd have you in a back room somewhere."
"Uh-huh." Justin nodded. "They scraped my arm for DNA and everything. But the stuff on the card really does come from my DNA, so I got the green light and they let me go. It was still scary. In a high-tech alternate like this one, you never know for sure if our forgeries are good enough."
"That's true." The older man didn't look happy about admitting it. "There are a couple of alternates where we have to be even more careful than we are here, because they're ahead of us in everything except knowing how to travel crosstime."
"What will we do if somebody else ever finds out?" It was on Justin's mind. He knew he couldn't be the only person from the home timeline who worried about stuff like that, either. If you sat down and thought about it for a little while, you had to worry . . . didn't you?
"What will we do?" The coin and stamp dealer gave him a crooked smile. "We'll sweat, that's what."
He wasn't likely to be wrong. The home timeline had been on the point of collapse when Galbraith and Hester discovered crosstime travel. Thanks to Crosstime Traffic, there was enough to go around again, and then some. Because the home timeline didn't take much from any one alternate, the worlds of if that it traded with weren't much affected.
None of the other high-tech alternates had that luxury. Some of them rigidly limited population, to make the most of what they did have. A couple took much more from the oceans than people in the home timeline ever did. And others exploited the rest of the Solar System. Nobody'd ever quite taken space travel seriously in the home timeline. Oh, weather and communications satellites were nice, but the real estate beyond Earth turned out to be much harder to use than early generations of science-fiction writers thought it would. People in the home timeline were still talking about making the first manned flight to Mars.
A couple of alternates, though, were already terraforming it. They were talking about doing the same thing with Venus. This alternate wasn't that far along, but even here astronauts from California and Prussia had gone to Mars and come back again. It was expensive, but people said it was worth it. Justin thought so. Riding a rocket was a lot more exciting that sitting in a transposition chamber.
"How long do you think we've got before someone else does start traveling crosstime?" Justin asked. "It's bound to happen sooner or later, isn't it?"
"Probably," Mr. Brooks said. 'The bigwigs at Crosstime Traffic say it won't, but they have to say stuff like that. If they don't, the stock will fall. One of the reasons we come to high-tech alternates even though it's dangerous is to keep an eye on them."
"On the way over here, the chamber operator said we've messed up other alternates' work when they were getting close,"
Justin said. "Messed up their computer data or whatever, so they never found out how close they were."
"I've heard the same thing," Randolph Brooks said. "Ask anybody official and she'll tell you no. But that's just the official word, what you've got to say if you're in that kind of job."
"Yeah? What else have you heard?" Justin asked eagerly. Sometimes—often—gossip was a lot more interesting than the official word. Sometimes—often—it was more likely to be true, too. "What do we do if they make the experiments again anyway, see if their computers were maybe wrong?"
"I don't know. What if they do?" Mr. Brooks said. "Either we have to sabotage them one more time—blow up their lab or something—or else we've got something brand new to worry about."
He sounded calm and collected. In a way, that made sense. If some other alternate found the crosstime secret, it wasn't his worry, not particularly, anyhow. But it sure was the home timeline's worry—the biggest worry anybody would have had since people found out how to travel from one alternate to another.
"A crosstime war . . ." Justin murmured.
"Bite your tongue," Mr. Brooks said. "Bite it hard. You thought the slavery scandal was bad?"
"It was," Justin said. "People from the company never should have done anything like that."
"I know," Mr. Brooks said patiently. "But you've seen pictures from some of the alternates that went through atomic wars, right?"
"Sure. Who hasn't?" Justin said. Those pictures reminded you why counting your blessings was always a good idea.
But Mr. Brooks didn't let him down easy. "Okay. Imagine things like that in the home timeline. Imagine them in the alternate that figures out how to go crosstime. And imagine them in all the alternates where we bump together."
Justin tried. He tried, yes, and felt himself failing. He knew how bad a war like that would be. Knowing didn't help, because he could feel that his imagination wasn't big enough to take in all the different disasters in that kind of war. "We can't let it happen!" he said.
"Of course not," Mr. Brooks said. "But what if we can't stop it, either?"
The fish hatchery down by Palestine was less exciting than Beckie hoped it would be. There was the Kanawha River. There were ponds next to the river where they raised the baby fish. They had nets that lifted the fish from the ponds and put them into the river. The people who worked with the fish were excited about what they did. They wouldn't have done it if they weren't. Beckie could see that.
But she didn't care if they were excited. So they were going to put trout and bluegills and crappies—she didn't bust up at the name, but keeping her face straight wasn't easy—into the Kanawha? Big deal. They were doing it so people farther downstream could catch them and eat them. Beckie wasn't a vegetarian, but the idea of catching her own fish didn't thrill her.
So she listened to the enthusiastic people in the tan uniforms, and then she started back to Elizabeth. Maybe the uniforms were part of what turned her off, too. Lots of people in Virginia wore them. You didn't have to work for the government, though the fishery people did. The man who fixed the Snod-grasses' air conditioner wore a uniform. So did the servers who sold stuff at Elizabeth's one diner. If you came from California, it was pretty funny.
In California, nobody but soldiers and sailors and cops wore uniforms. In California, a uniform meant somebody else got to tell you what to do. Californians liked that no more than anyone else, and less than most people. In Virginia, though, a uniform seemed to mean you got to tell other people what to do. It was weird.
It's not weird. It's just foreign, Beckie thought as she followed the loop of the Kanawha back toward Elizabeth. The river was foreign, too. You couldn't walk alongside a rippling river in Los Angeles. Most of the time, there wasn't enough water in L.A. Every few winters, there was too much.
Down by the stream, under the trees a lot of the time, it didn't seem so hot and sticky. The fishery people didn't just have uniforms. They had bow ties! Back in California, her father said he wore ties at weddings, funerals, and gunpoint. He was kidding, but he was kidding on the square. And most men in California felt the same way. Oh, the prime minister would put on a tie when a foreign dignitary showed up. A few conservative businessmen still wore them, and the jackets that went with them, but that only proved how conservative they were. Why be uncomfortable when you didn't have to?