Liz sighed. “What is simple?”
Her father gave her a hug. “Welcome to the world, sweetheart.”
“Groovy,'* she said, as sardonically as she could. He only laughed.
Along with the rest of Captain Kevin 's men, Dan marched back to the barracks in the Sepulveda Basin. Piles and piles of sandbags were stacked close to the halls. Most of the time, the Sepulveda Basin was as dry as the rest of the Valley. But it could flood in a hurry when the rains came down. The sandbags had saved the barracks more than once over the years.
No rain now, not in the summertime. The Valley was full of cisterns to hold the rain that had fallen the winter before. Watermasters doled it out to farms and families. In years with dry winters, everyone worried about whether there'd be enough for crops-and for people.
Back in the Old Time, irrigation had brought water from hundreds of miles away. Everybody in Los Angeles had had plenty. All the houses and apartments and factories and shops showed as much. There were far more of them than the people who lived here now could ever hope to fill. All over L.A., in all the little countries that had sprung up since the day the Fire fell, scavengers scrounged through the swarms of abandoned buildings for whatever they could find.
Something occurred to Dan. "Hey, Sergeant!” he said. If Sergeant Chuck didn't know everything, he didn't know he didn't know it.
“What is it, kid?” The three stripes on his sleeve-genuine Old Time stripes, machine-embroidered-gave him the right to treat everybody below him the way Dan's father treated him before he got drafted.
“Is it true what they say about swimming pools?”
“You mean, did the Old Time people really fill those cement holes in the ground with water and swim in them? They didn't just use 'em for cisterns or put dirt back in 'em?”
“Yes, Sergeant. That's what I mean.” Dan nodded.
“Oh, it's true, all right.” Sergeant Chuck nodded, too, solemnly. “I've seen pictures in Old Time magazines.”
That proved it, all right, unless… “Were they for-true magazines?”
“Well, I sure think so,” the sergeant answered. “They had other things that sure are real-cars and things, you know.”
“Oh, yeah.” Dan nodded. You couldn't not know about cars. Their rusting corpses filled the streets. To this day, they were the main source of iron for blacksmiths. Their wheels-with tires of wood, not the rubber that had rotted away-still turned on carts and wagons. Glass from their windows gave homes light to this day. “I wonder how they moved so fast all by themselves, though.”
“Well, who doesn't?” Chuck said. “Must've been something like a steam engine, I expect.”
Big, puffing steam engines pumped water. A few of them moved engines along railroads. But so many rail lines were broken, and so many bandits prowled the routes, that railroads often seemed more trouble than they were worth. “How did Old Time people keep railroads from getting raided?” Dan asked.
“I don't think they did,” the sergeant told him. “'You know the story of Jesse James and Annie Oakley, don't you?”
“Little Orphan Annie? I hope I do!” Dan said.
“Well, they were train robbers, right?”
“They were,” Dan admitted. “But they got caught and paid the price. Jesse did, anyway. Annie married Judge Warbucks and got off. Too many robbers these days never even get caught.”
“Too many places for bad guys to slip through the cracks,” Sergeant Chuck said. “What you've got to remember is, back in Old Time days this was all one country-the Valley and the Westside and Burbank and Speedro. All the way from Sandago to Frisco. Even Vegas. All one country. Bad guys couldn't just skip over a border and disappear, like.”
“Uh-huh.” Dan had learned that in school. And there were big stretches of land now that didn't belong to anybody- except bandits and brigands, anyhow. “If people other places would just admit Zev was their rightful king…”
Chuck laughed. “Don't hold your breath. The Westside wants the City Council to run everything. Burbank 's got a Director and a Producer. All the other countries think they ought to be top dog, too.”
“But they don't know what they're talking about. We're the only really civilized one.” Dan had learned that in school, too.
“Well, sure.” Chuck had probably also learned it in school. Most people in the Valley had four years of education. Quite a few had six or even eight. Dan did. He could read and write and add and subtract and even multiply and do long division. Adding and subtracting always came in handy. He didn't know if he'd ever use the fancier stuff, but he had it if he needed it.
And reading… Nothing killed time better than reading.
Back in the Old Time, they'd had TV and the movies and radio and records to make time go by. A few records still played on wind-up phonographs. The other things weren't even memories anymore, because nobody still alive recalled using them. But old people remembered their grandparents talking about them, and Old Time books and magazines mentioned them all the time. They had to be for-true.
Sergeant Chuck broke into his thoughts: “If I were you. Dan, I'd start practicing hard. A good archer's worth about as much as a musketeer.”
“Do you think there'll be a war, honest?” Dan asked.
“Sure do,” the sergeant answered. “ King Zev won't let the Westside close the pass. That's too big a slap in the face to put up with. If those snooty so-and-so's get away with it, next thing you know Burbank'll start pushing us around, too.”
“It's a good thing they put these barracks on Victory Boulevard,” Dan said.
“Yeah, that's heavy, all right,” Chuck agreed. “Talk about your good omens.”
“Can't hardly get a better one,” Dan said. Some Old Time books seemed to laugh at the idea that anyone could foretell the future. But the Bible didn't. Whether you were Christian or Jewish, you had to believe in prophets. And plenty of decks of tarot cards floated around, some printed before the Fire came down and others, cruder, afterwards. Dan snapped his fingers. “Talking about omens-can I ask you one more thing?”
“Go ahead.” Sergeant Chuck was in a good mood-maybe he looked forward to a war with the Westside.
“Does King Zev really have a Magic Eight Ball to help tell him what to do?”
“He doesn't have just one-he's got two,” Chuck declared. “My cousin's a preacher's assistant, and he knows stuff like that.”
“Two? Wow! Oh, wow!” Dan hadn't dreamt the Valley was so rich.
“You better believe it,” Chuck said. “And what he does is, he asks both of them the same question and then he sees how each one answers. If that's not scientific, I don't know what is.”
“Scientific.” Dan's voice went all dreamy-there was a word to conjure with. And plenty of wizards and fortune-tellers did just that. “Well, if we don't have the vitamins to beat the Westside with two Magic Eight Balls, I don't know what else we'd need.”
“Soldiers,” Sergeant Chuck told him. “Whatever else you've got, you always need soldiers.”
Walking up Hilgard to the UCLA campus made Liz want to cry. It was like walking past the skeleton of a good friend. You knew who it was. If you tried, you could picture what the person-or the place-had looked like alive. But all you saw was death.
The asphalt was so old, it was nearer white than black. Here and there, it had washed out altogether. Cobblestones replaced a few stretches. Others were just dirt. Cracks seamed even intact asphalt, like the wrinkles on a great-grandmother's face.
Cracks also marred the concrete of the sidewalk. Back in the home timeline, Liz would have gone past the botanical gardens and some nicely watered lawns across the street. Here, most of the imported plants in the gardens were dead, killed off by L.A.'s summer droughts. No one here had a lawn that was green in the summertime. There was no water to spare for such luxury. From November to March-in a wet year, to May- things were green. Any other time? Brown.