Sorority houses and rich people's homes stood across the street from the campus in the home timeline. Some of the buildings still stood here. A couple of the old sororities even had their Greek letters on the front wall. Nobody in this alternate seemed to know what they meant any more.
They weren't sorority houses and rich people's homes any more, not here. Guards stood outside one of them-it was the Westside jail. Smoke poured from another one-it was a smithy and armory, and made a lot of the weapons the local army used. Several homes were armored with iron-some old sheet metal, some taken from dead automobiles. Members of the City Council lived in those. As far as Liz was concerned, they took A man's home is his castle too far. The rulers of the Westside didn't seem to take chances about how well loved they were.
Turning left onto the actual campus was both a relief and a bigger wound. Parts of the north end seemed hauntingly familiar. Everyone in the home timeline called Bunche Hall the Waffle because of the square windows in the south wall that stuck out from the brown stone surface. The building remained intact here, too. Only a few of the windows did, though.
There was also another difference-a subtler one- between the two versions of the same building. Down at the bottom of Bunche Hall in the home timeline, there was a bust of the diplomat, and his name, and the dates of his birth and death: 1904-1971. Everything here was the same… except the date of Ralph Bunche's death was missing. He was still alive when the war started, and after that nobody cared. The 1904- that remained seemed asymmetrical. The artisan who put it up had figured it would look fine once Bunche died. In the home timeline, he was right.
Liz wondered whether Ralph Bunche ever saw the building named for him. If he did, what did he think of the way that nameless artisan had laid things out? Wouldn't it have seemed as if the man was just waiting for him to keel over? It felt that way to Liz, anyhow.
Her goal lay beyond Bunche Hall and to the left as she came up from the south. In the home timeline, it was the Young Research Library-the YRL-named after a twentieth-century administrator. Here, it was the University Research Library, or URL. They hadn't got around to naming it for the otherwise forgotten Young before the missiles started flying.
Five stories' worth of books and periodicals… What better place to try to figure out why things went wrong in this alternate? The Westsiders had an almost superstitious respect for what they called Old Time knowledge. They took care of what the URL held as best they could. Most of it was still intact.
A guard outside the door nodded to Liz -she'd been here before. He had an Old Time.45 on his hip-that was how important the Westsiders thought the URL was. Liz had sometimes wondered if computer URLs got their name from the University Research Library. That turned out not to be true- only an interesting coincidence.
Once upon a time, the plate-glass door by the guard station had been automatic. No more. No infrared beam to cut. No electricity to power the door even if there were a beam. Nothing but muscle power and fading memories. Liz pulled the door open and went in.
Her eyes needed a few seconds to get used to the gloom in the foyer. Some of the lamp fixtures in the ceding still had fluorescent tubes in them. Maybe some of the tubes still worked. But no electricity had flowed through them since the Fire fell. The light inside the entrance hall came from the doorway and from the flickering oil lamps and candles. Soot caked thick on the walls above them said they'd burned there for a long, long time.
In the home timeline, students-and other people who needed to find things they couldn't track on the Net-would have bustled through the library and gathered in front of the elevators. Only a couple of people here wandered across the foyer. The elevators, of course, were as dead as the door and the fluorescent tubes.
If you wanted to go upstairs here, you literally had to go up the stairs. A stair dragon waited at the bottom. He called himself a librarian, but he was really a stair dragon. You had to placate him before you could go up, and he'd search you when you came down again to make sure you weren't stealing books.
“Stack pass?” he growled as Liz came up. He breathed smoke, too-he was puffing on a fat cigar. Liz thought he smelled gross. Tobacco was a popular crop and trade good here. And why not? In this alternate, other things were likely to kill you before cancer or heart disease could.
To make sure he didn't start breathing fire, Liz showed him the family stack pass. It had cost her father a pretty penny in bribes, but good whiskey and wind-up alarm clocks and other goodies from the home timeline made getting what you wanted here pretty easy.
“Thank you. Go ahead.” The stair dragon actually smiled. The stink of his smoldering cheroot chased Liz up the stairs. She coughed a couple of times, wishing she needed to go all the way up to the fifth floor so she could escape it. But the magazines she wanted lived on the second floor, and the nasty smell was bound to keep coming up after her.
Study desks and chairs and tables all stood near the south-facing windows. Sunlight was the best light by which to work here, and the library shut down after dark. The desks and the tables dated back to the Old Time. A few of the chairs-the plastic ones with metal legs-did, too. Most of those had cracked or worn out since, though. That didn't bother Liz. The wooden ones the Westsiders had made since were more comfortable anyhow.
When Liz did go back into the stacks, the musty smell of old paper filled her nostrils. It was stronger here than it would have been in the home timeline. No climate control here, so the paper aged faster. A lot of books on the top floor were damaged beyond repair because the roof leaked. Down here, that wasn't a worry, anyhow.
She pulled out a bound volume of Newsweek magazines that ran from January to March of 1967. The war had started-and ended-in the summer. Nobody at the URL had bound the issues for April to June. Or, if somebody had, the volume had disappeared before Crosstime Traffic discovered this blighted alternate.
Liz wanted those, or the equivalent from Time or Life or Look or U.S. News amp; World Report. She was stuck with what she had, though. She carried the bound volume back to a table. She was the only one there, so she could open the volume-carefully-and start scanning pages with a handheld scanner that sucked up data the way a vacuum cleaner sucked up dust.
If a local did see her doing that, he wouldn't understand it. Neither this alternate nor the home timeline had known how to make handheld scanners in 1967. Transistor radios were still pretty new. She saw an ad for one. It was bigger than an iPod, and couldn't do one percent as much. It didn't even have an FM band, only AM. And the ad said it was a technological breakthrough! The scary thing was, maybe the ad was right.
The Vietnam War dominated the news. It would have done the same thing in the home timeline. Liz didn't know exactly how what had happened here differed from what happened in the home timeline. That was why she was sucking up data. Computers could compare the text here to what the same issues said in the home timeline. Once they figured out how things had changed, they would have a better chance of nailing down where the breakpoint lay-In the meantime… In the meantime, Liz was unskilled labor. All she had to do was slide the scanner over one column after another. It did the real work. If she wanted to stare at the strange clothes and hairdos and the funky lines of the cars, she could. If she wanted to pause and read something interesting-looking, she could do that.
And, as long as the mellow sunshine poured in through the windows, if she wanted to pretend she was at the other UCLA, the right UCLA… well, she could almost do that, too.