Harry Turtledove - Curious Notions

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Curious Notions
Crosstime Traffic—Book Two
Harry Turtledove
The Crosstime Traffic series:
Gunpowder Empires
Curious Notions
In High Places
One
Every now and then, Lucy Woo could pretend San Francisco was a great city in a great country.
Sometimes, when she hurried south toward Market Street, the fog would be just starting to lift. Through the
thick, wet, salty mist, the big buildings on Market would look as fine as if they were new and in good repair.
They loomed up like dinosaurs, grand and imposing.
And dead. When the sun came out, it pricked pretense. It showed the long-unpainted bricks, the peeling
plaster, the broken windows. Some of the buildings still had cracks from the quake of 1989, and that was
more than a hundred years ago now. Here and there, vacant lots and piles of rubble showed where
buildings had been pulled down or fallen on their own. Lucy stayed as far from the rubble as she could.
Squatters built shacks and caves from it. Some of them were harmless. Some weren't.
Traffic was a swarm of people on foot and on bicycles. You made your own path and you pushed ahead. If
you didn't, you'd never get anywhere. Trucks and rich people's cars crawled along. They couldn't go
anywhere in a hurry, either. Even ambulances got stuck. People died on the way to the hospital because
they couldn't get there soon enough.
Only one kind of car horn made everybody jam onto the sidewalk and get out of the way. That particular
shrill scream was reserved for German cars alone. If Americans didn't clear a path in a hurry, the Kaiser's
men were liable to start shooting. They didn't always, or even very often, but you never could tell.
This morning, Lucy had to move aside for the occupiers three times in the space of four blocks. She was
furious. She was also frightened. If she was late to her job at the shoe factory, they might let her go. That
would be awful. Her family really needed the money she brought in, even if it was only eight dollars a
week.
A Mercedes rolled by. Bigwigs in high-crowned caps and fancy uniforms sat inside. Bodyguards in steel
helmets with ornamental spikes rode shotgun. That was what people called it, anyhow. But they didn't carry
shotguns. Assault rifles were a lot more deadly.
The big blond man who scowled down at Lucy wasn't mad at her. "I hate those so-and-sos," he said. "They
think they own the world. Well, they do, near enough, but they don't have to act like it."
"Yes," Lucy said, and let it go at that. Her own features were almost as Chinese as her name. One of her
great-grandmothers had been Irish. That made her nose and chin a little sharper than they might have been
otherwise.
Even saying yes to the man was taking a chance. He might have belonged to the Feldgendarmerie, the
Kaiser's secret police. And if he didn't, he was taking a chance talking to her. A sixteen-year-old Chinese
girl wasn't a likely snoop. The Germans looked down their noses at what they called Orientals. Again,
though, you never could tell.
Horn still screeching, the Mercedes plowed forward. The blond man looked daggers after it. As people
unsquashed and started moving, he said, "I'm late. It's their fault. It's not mine. You think my boss will
care?"
"Not if he's like mine," Lucy said. "I've got to hurry, too." She dived into the crowd. Being short had few
advantages. Disappearing easily was one of them.
He didn't follow her. She made sure of that. And he couldn't know who she was. San Francisco was full of
Chinese faces. She hurried on to the shoe factory. If she stepped on a few toes, well, some other people
stepped on hers, too. And if she stuck an elbow in the side of a fat woman who blocked her way, she
wasn't about to let that fat woman make her late. She wouldn't let anybody make her late.
She punched in just barely on time. Punching in wasn't good enough. She had to get to her machine on time,
too. The foreman was a bald man named Hank Simmons. He was so mean and strict, he might have
thought he was a German. But Lucy didn't— quite—give him an excuse to yell at her. A couple of women
who came in right after her weren't so lucky. They got scorched.
Lucy's job was to sew instep straps onto women's shoes. That was what she did, ten hours a day, six days
a week. Other women in the big building had other jobs. Some nailed on heels. Some stitched soles to
uppers. Some sewed on decorative trim. They all did the same thing through the whole shift, over and over
and over again.
Some of them were younger than Lucy. A few couldn't have been more than eleven or twelve. Some were
gray-haired grandmothers. Some were Chinese, some white, some Japanese, some Mexican, some black.
San Francisco held a few of just about every kind of people under the sun. And the Kaiser's officials
treated them all just the same way: lousy.
When Lucy's foot hit the button, the sewing machine snarled to life. She guided the strap and the upper
through the machine. The vibration made her hands tingle. She shook them a couple of times. She always
did, first thing in the morning. After that, she forgot about it.
Other sewing machines buzzed, too. Nail guns clacked. Off in the back, electric leather cutters made what
was almost a chewing noise. Lucy wouldn't have wanted that job for anything. They had their own foreman
back there, and he screamed at you if you wasted even a scrap of leather.
"How's it going?" asked the sandy-haired woman on the machine next to Lucy's. She was twice Lucy's
age. She'd been making shoes in here since she was fourteen. She'd go right on doing it till she couldn't any
more.
"I'm okay, Mildred. How are you?" Like Mildred and most of the others in the factory, Lucy could work
without looking at what she was doing. Her hands did it whether she watched or not. She was sure she
could sew straps in her sleep.
Everybody said the same thing. Every so often, though, someone would stop paying even the little bit of
attention she needed to do the job. The shriek of pain that followed would make everyone jump. After that,
people would be careful... for a little while.
Mildred's thin face was always sour. She looked even more unhappy now. "My boy is sick with something,"
she said. "Haven't got the money for a doctor. Haven't got the time, neither." Grimly, she went on sewing.
Lucy tossed a finished upper into the bin by her station. She started to sew another one at the same time as
she asked, "Who's watching him, then?" It wouldn't be Mildred's husband. He was a longshoreman, and
worked even more hours than she did.
"My kid sister," Mildred answered. "She just had her own baby, you know, and she can't go back to work
yet."
"Sure," Lucy said. Mildred and her family were better off than some, even if she didn't realize it. At least
she and her husband were working. And her kid sister was able to stay home for a while after she had a
baby. Not that staying home with a brand-new one was any vacation—Lucy had helped her own mother
with her brother, though she'd been little then. But plenty of women in the USA couldn't afford to stay
home at all. As soon as they could stagger out of bed, back to work they went.
"It's not fair," Mildred whined. "It shouldn't ought to be like this."
Lucy only shrugged. "Tell it to the Germans," she said, which meant, You can't do anything about it, so
forget it. Life was the way it was. She couldn't do anything about it herself. Mildred couldn't do anything
about it. Nobody could do anything about it. You got by as best you could. What other choice did you have?
Whenever her bin filled up, a boy carried it off and brought her an empty. A quality inspector came by in
the middle of the morning. He spoke to a couple of women, but left Lucy alone. If he spoke to you too
often, you found yourself on the street. He hadn't bothered Lucy for weeks. She knew what she had to do,
and she did it. She didn't do any more than she had to, not one single thing. It wasn't as if she were in love
with her job. They paid her as little as they could get away with, and she worked as little as she could get
away with. That was how things went, too.
She got twenty minutes for lunch. Some women bought food at the factory cafeteria. That made the bosses
extra money, and the place never had anything good. Lucy brought rice and vegetables and a little fish from
home. She'd be hungry before she went back there for supper, but she couldn't do anything about that.
"Back to work!" Hank Simmons yelled three or four minutes before the lunch break ended. "I don't want
you dilly-dallying around, now. You hear me?"
What he wanted was to cheat them out of some of the little break they got. Lucy made sure she was
working when she was supposed to. She also made sure she didn't get busy till she was supposed to.
She would have had to if Simmons came by. But he didn't, not today, and so she didn't, either.
She hardly remembered the rest of the afternoon. That happened sometimes. Your hands would do the
work, and your brain just sort of went away. You would look up in amazement and discover hours had gone
by and you'd never even noticed. Sometimes that was nothing but a relief.
Sometimes it scared Lucy half to death. It was a little like dying. You weren't there. Where were you?
She came back to herself half an hour before her shift finally ended. She shook herself as if she were
coming out of a cold bath. The world was back. If she could get home fast, she'd be able to spend a little
time with her family before she got so tired she'd have to fall into bed. That little while was what she looked
forward to— unless she was squabbling with Michael. He had more bounce than she did. He didn't have to
work so much.
"See you tomorrow," Mildred said when they went to clock out.
"Oh, yes," Lucy said in a hollow voice. "You sure will."
"This is one of the alternates where we need to be especially careful," Paul Gomes' father warned him for
what had to be the fiftieth time.
"Yes, Dad. I know that. Thank you." Paul sounded more sarcastic than patient, though he wouldn't have
thought so. He'd graduated from high school the month before. He planned on going to UC Berkeley, but
not till he'd spent a couple of quarters in the alternate San Francisco his father had been warning him about.
However much Paul tried not to see it, the two of them were much alike. They were both of medium
height, with swarthy skin, dark hair, and dark eyes. They were both stocky, with square faces and
eyebrows that would quirk up when they thought something was funny. Lawrence Gomes wore a bushy
mustache that made him look like a bandit. Paul wouldn't have been caught dead with such a horrible thing
on his upper lip.
"We can get into real trouble here," Dad persisted. "We can get Crosstime Traffic into real trouble, too."
"I know, Dad. Jawohl." Paul hoped throwing in a little German would persuade his father he took this
seriously. "We've been over it before, you know."
He might as well have saved his breath. Dad went on as if he hadn't spoken: "This is one of those
alternates where, if they find we can travel across timelines, they can probably start building their own
transposition chambers. And if they do—if anybody does— we've got a lot of trouble on our hands."
Paul started to tell him he knew that, too. He decided not to bother. How much good would it do?
None—he could see that. He felt as if he were back in a high-school history class. Dad thought he thought
he knew more than he did. He thought Dad thought he knew less than he did.
About fifty years earlier, not long before Dad was born, the home timeline was a mess. It was running out
of food and energy at the same time. Then Galbraith and Hester figured out how to travel not through
space but across time, to visit other Earths where history had taken different turns from the way it had gone
here. There were alternates where the Roman Empire never fell. There were others where the Armada
conquered England, or where the South won the Civil War, or where the Communists won the struggle with
capitalism. There were alternates where no one from Europe discovered America, and the Native
Americans were still going through the early Bronze Age. There were others where the Chinese colonized
the New World. And there were some where man never evolved at all.
The home timeline began trading with the inhabited alternates. It began taking what it needed from some of
the empty ones. That trade probably saved the world from collapse. Inside a very few years, it made
Crosstime Traffic even bigger than Microsoft had been at the end of the twentieth century.
So far as anybody knew, the home timeline was the only one where people had figured out how to travel
from one world of if to another. But quite a few alternates with fairly recent breakpoints had the technology
to do it, if the idea occurred to them. Crosstime traders had to be doubly careful in places like those. Dad
was right about that, even if he did go on and on about it. But they couldn't stay away from worlds like
those. If they did, somebody might find the secret while they weren't looking. That wouldn't be good, either.
The alternate where Paul and his father were going was one of those. Its breakpoint was 1914, less than
two hundred years in the past. In the home timeline, Germany was stopped short of Paris in the opening
days of World War I. Four years of trench warfare followed. In the end, the Germans lost. A generation
later, Hitler and the Nazis tried again—and lost again, even worse than before.
Things were different in this alternate. The Russians had moved against eastern Germany more slowly than
in the home timeline. The Germans had been able to put a few more divisions into the attack on France.
Their Schlieffen plan had worked here, where it failed in the home timeline. They'd wheeled around beyond
Paris, not in front of it, and they'd knocked the French Army and the British Expeditionary Force clean out
of the war. Then a lot of them had climbed onto trains and headed east. When they met the Russians, they
smashed them, too.
After that, everything looked different. The Kaiser ended up sitting on top of the world. France and England
were humbled— France more so, because it took a worse beating. When they tried to get their own back at
the end of the 1930s, Germany beat them again. It didn't need to worry about Russia this time around.
Russia had fallen to pieces in a long civil war, and a lot of the pieces— Poland, Finland, Courland, the
Ukraine—were German puppets.
Once Germany won that second war, it dominated Europe the way no one had since the days of the Roman
Empire. It looked west across the Atlantic. The United States looked east— nervously. It hadn't fought in
either European war. It didn't believe in getting tangled up in the affairs of foreign powers. It paid for its
mistake.
In the home timeline, the USA got the atomic bomb first. One of the reasons it did was that a lot of
scientists had fled Hitler's Germany. Quite a few of them, like Einstein, were Jews. Others couldn't stand
what the Nazis were doing.
Again, things were different in this alternate. The Kaiser didn't persecute Jews. Those talented scientists
stayed in Germany. They were happy to work for the German Empire, because it wanted them. And, here,
the Germans got the bomb first.
They got it—and they used it. War between Germany and the United States broke out in 1956. The
Germans had the bomb, and they had airplanes to deliver it. A dozen American cities went up in smoke the
first day (the only reason San Francisco didn't was that both bombers aimed at it got shot down). The war
lasted a couple of months, but most of it was just mopping up for the Kaiser's men.
In this alternate, imperial Germany had run things ever since, for close to a century and a half now. The
United States was a second-rate power now, and had to do what the Kaiser's officials said. Technology
wasn't as far along here as it was in the home timeline. It wasn't that far behind, though. If the locals ever
got their hands on a transposition chamber, for instance, they might be able to build one of their own.
Dad said, "We need to keep an eye on them. And we need to buy produce from them. No matter what
timeline you're in, the Central Valley turns out some of the best produce in the world."
"Are we smart, trading them some of our gadgets?" Paul wondered.
"If you don't give, you can't get," his father said.
"I know—but if we give them things they haven't seen, won't they want to know where that stuff comes
from?" Paul asked. "And aren't they liable to come up with the right answer once they ask the right
question?"
Dad only shrugged. "I don't set policy—and neither do you," he added pointedly. "But Crosstime Traffic
isn't there for their health. They're there to show a profit. So we trade. We trade carefully, but we trade.
Where would we be if we couldn't visit the alternates?"
Paul had no answer for that. He knew where the home timeline would be without the alternates. Up the
famous creek without a paddle, that was where. Still, trade carefully reminded him of all deliberate speed, a
phrase he'd run across in a history class. It wanted you to do two things at the same time, and they pulled in
opposite directions. If that didn't mean trouble, what would?
"Are you ready to go crosstime?" his father asked.
"Oh, I'm ready, all right. All I have to do is put on my costume. We don't even need a new language
through our implants, not for San Francisco in that alternate. They speak English there, too."
"Yes, but it's not quite our English." Dad was just full of good advice. Paul would have been more grateful if
he'd heard it less often. Dad seemed convinced he was eight, not eighteen. "You have to remember. You
have to be careful."
"Right," Paul said. His father sent him a sour look, but they left it there.
They changed clothes before they got into the transposition chamber. Paul put on a pair of Levi's not too
different from the ones people wore in the home timeline. They were a little baggier, a little darker shade of
blue. Chambray work shirts like the one he tucked into the jeans had been popular in the home timeline a
hundred years ago. He'd seen pictures. Only the pointed-toed ankle boots and the wide-brimmed derby
seemed really strange.
His father wore a similar outfit. He had on a double-breasted corduroy jacket with wide lapels over his
shirt. In the home timeline, he would have looked like a cheap thug. The style was popular in the alternate,
though. So was the wide leather belt with the big, shiny brass buckle. It said he was somebody solid and
prosperous.
The woman who ran the transposition chamber snickered at them when they got in. Paul would rather have
worn a toga or a burnoose or a flowing Chinese robe. Those would have been honestly weird. This way, he
just looked as if he had no taste in clothes. It was embarrassing.
He and Dad got into their seats and put on their belts. He didn't know what good the belts did. Transposition
chambers didn't run into things. They didn't move physically, only across timelines. The seats were like the
ones in airliners, even to being too close together. That was probably why they had belts.
For that matter, he didn't know what good the operator was, either. All she did to start the chamber was
push a button. Computers handled everything else. Operators were supposed to navigate the chambers if
the computers went out, but what were the chances if that happened? Slim and none, as far as Paul could
see.
He couldn't tell when the chamber started across the alternates toward the Kaiser's America. It would
seem to take about fifteen minutes to get there. When he left the chamber, though, it would be the same
time as it had been in the home timeline when he left. Duration was a funny business in transposition
chambers. Even chronophysicists didn't understand all the ins and outs.
"We're here." The operator caught him by surprise. He hadn't felt the arrival, any more than he'd felt the
motion across the timelines.
His father stood up and stretched. When he did, his hands brushed the ceiling of the transposition chamber.
It wasn't very high. Paul got up, too. If he hadn't, Dad would have said he was dawdling. He didn't feel like
banging heads over that. He and his father banged heads often enough anyway.
The operator closed the door. The subbasement here had exactly the same position as the one in the home
timeline from which the chamber had left. The air smelled a little different: a little smokier, a little more full
of exhaust, and a little more full of people who didn't take baths as often as they might have.
Paul and his father left the chamber. Silently and without any fuss, it disappeared. Was it going back to the
home timeline or on to a different alternate San Francisco? Paul knew he would never know.
Bare bulbs lit the chamber. Iron stairs led up to a trap door in the ceiling. A plump man came through. He
waved. "Hello, Lawrence," he called to Paul's father. A moment later, as an afterthought, he added, "Hello
to you, too, Paul."
"Hello, Elliott," Dad answered. "How's business?"
"Tolerable," the plump man said. "This station makes a profit. The company isn't going to close it down any
time soon." He laughed. "If we can't make a profit so close to the Central Valley, we'd better shut up shop."
"Shh." Dad put a forefinger in front of his mouth. "Don't let Crosstime Traffic hear you." He laughed, too.
He got along fine with people his own age. He seemed to get along fine with everybody except Paul, in
fact. The two of them were water and sodium. That made Paul wonder if there was something wrong with
him.
Elliott said, "Come on upstairs, and you can see for yourself." Up they went. Their boot heels clanged on
the iron risers. Once they got out of the subbasement, Elliott closed the trap door behind them. Then he
rolled a file cabinet that didn't look as if it could roll over the door. That subbasement wasn't supposed to be
easy to find. He suddenly looked worried. "You've got your Kennkarte?"
"Oh, yes." Dad reached into the back pocket of his Levi's and pulled out his identity papers. Paul did the
same. Elliott nodded, obviously relieved. If you didn't have papers in this alternate, you might as well not
exist. Theirs were forgeries, of course, but they were forgeries made with all the skill of the home timeline.
They were at least as good as the real thing. They just happened not to be genuine.
The German word for identity papers seemed right at home in the English Elliott used, the English of this
alternate. Paul had no trouble following it, but it wasn't the English he spoke at home. It was slower, the
vowels flatter, some of the consonants slightly guttural. It was, in fact, an English that had had German
rubbing off on it for a hundred forty years or so.
Elliott led Paul and his father into the front room of the shop, which stood on Powell Street between Union
Square and Market. The name of the place was Curious Notions. From inside, it looked to be spelled out
backwards in gold letters on the plate-glass window opening on the street. Toys and gadgets, most of them
from the home timeline, filled the shelves.
"Nobody's wondered about any of this stuff?" Paul's father asked. He didn't hesitate to steal Paul's idea.
Maybe he didn't know he was doing it. Maybe.
"Not that I've heard," Elliott answered. "And if I can't find out here, it's a good thing I'm leaving town."
Paul looked out the window. Men wore the same kind of clothes he and Dad—and Elliott—did. Women
mostly had on linen blouses, sweaters, and skirts that came down below the knee. The women wore
pointed-toed shoes, too. Misery loved company. White and black women wore their hair in fancy curls.
Those whose ancestors came from Asia mostly didn't bother.
Cars and trucks slowly picked their way past pedestrians and people on bicycles. They looked like those
from more than a hundred years earlier in the home timeline. All of them burned gasoline or diesel fuel. The
Kaiser's men didn't seem to worry about global warming. Of course, they'd had to dodge a nuclear winter in
this alternate. It wasn't so crowded here as in the home timeline, either.
A truck driver leaned on his horn. That could have happened in the home timeline, too. Paul wished the
noisy idiot would cut it out. It did no good, and only annoyed everybody in earshot. That was probably why
the trucker did it.
Snarling motorcycles with sidecars rolled past. The sidecars had machine guns mounted on them. The
German soldiers who rode in them didn't believe in taking chances.
"You know what this is?" Dad said. "This is an alternate that never heard of Adolf Hitler. That's not bad."
"It's still not a very pretty place," Paul said.
Elliott looked from one of them to the other. "You're just a big, happy family, aren't you?" he said. "Will you
be all right here after I go back to the home timeline?"
"We'll be fine," Dad answered. "Paul's a little wet behind the ears, that's all. It's nothing to worry about."
"Thanks a lot, Dad," Paul said.
"Any time." His father seemed to think he meant that for real thanks.
Elliott plainly knew better. He also plainly knew better than to try to step into the middle of a quarrel
between father and son. The only thing that happened when you did that was, you got shot at from both
sides. The departing shopkeeper just said, "Well, you know the drill here. To the authorities, we sell these
little gadgets and we deal in produce on the side. I've told our people in the Central Valley that the two of
you would be taking over for a while."
"Sounds good," Dad said. "We'll manage. Don't you worry about a thing. We've been here before. They
know us. They know we'll treat 'em right." He nudged Paul. "Don't they?"
"Huh?" Paul said, taken by surprise, and then, "Uh, sure, Dad." He couldn't argue with his father about that.
As far as the local merchants went, Lawrence and Paul Gomes were some of the most reliable people in
the world.
Dad laughed. "Dealing here is fun, too. When I think I can get an enormous trailer full of garlic from down
in Gilroy for twenty-five dollars . . ." He laughed again, louder.
So did Paul, without any hesitation. Prices here were a joke if you came from the home timeline. A dollar
there was a little aluminum coin, worth nothing in particular.
A dollar for your thoughts, people said. Even a benjamin wasn't worth all that much. Things were different
here. You could buy more, much more, with a dollar here than with a benjamin back home. Even cents
were real money here: bronze coins, not aluminum. And the phrase this alternate used was a penny for your
thoughts.
Somewhere off in the distance, a fire engine roared through the streets, bell clanging. Police cars here used
bells, too. They were painted red, not black and white like the ones in the home timeline.
Dollars, not benjamins. Bells, not sirens. Red, not black and white. Those were the small differences, even
if they were the ones you noticed first after crossing the timelines. Occupation, not freedom. Poor people,
not prosperous ones. Those were the differences that really counted.
As things went in Chinatown, Lucy Woo's family wasn't badly off. They didn't have a television—they
weren't rich. But they did have a radio and a small refrigerator. The money she brought home from the
shoe factory helped pay for luxuries like that. Plenty of their neighbors got by with less.
"So long," her younger brother said. Michael hurried out the door. He was ten, and had a summer job as a
grocery delivery boy. He'd go back to school when fall started. He needed to learn as much as he
could—he'd take over their father's business one of these years. Lucy would have liked to stay in school,
too. It hadn't worked out. They needed the money. And sons got breaks like that more often than daughters
did.
Lucy hurried to finish her own bread and jam. She drank tea with breakfast. It helped her forget how tired
she was when she first got up in the morning. Dad was already gone, opening up the shop. He bought, sold,
and repaired anything that ran on electricity, from lamps to large adding machines. He was teaching
Michael, too, all the time. Lucy's brother was already getting pretty good with a soldering iron.
"Got to go," Lucy said, and grabbed her lunch pail. She was tempted to open it and see what was inside, but
she didn't. Mother tried to surprise her every day, at least with something. It wasn't always easy, but she
usually managed.
Mother blew Lucy a kiss when she went out the door. Lucy yawned in spite of the tea. She really wished
she could go back to bed. But no such luck. She had to head for the shoe factory.
Down the stairs. Other people in the apartment building were going to work, too. She nodded to some. With
others, she didn't bother. They were as bleary-eyed as she was. Out the front door, turn left. Down Powell
toward Market. She yawned again. If she couldn't have more sleep, she wished for more tea, or maybe
coffee. Coffee, she decided. It was stronger.
The morning was nice and clear. San Francisco wasn't foggy all the time, just often enough to be annoying.
Gulls soared overhead. They mewed like cats. On the cracked sidewalks, pigeons paraded underfoot. They
cocked wary orange eyes at passing people. Sometimes they got handouts. Sometimes they wound up in
pigeon stew. They couldn't tell which ahead of time. No wonder they were wary.
Newsboys waved papers and shouted headlines. Divers had found the skeleton of the Hindenburg where it
crashed off the coast of France almost a hundred fifty years earlier. That was interesting, but not
interesting enough to get Lucy to part with two cents for a newspaper.
Some shops were opening up as she walked by. Shopkeepers called out to passersby in English and
Chinese and Spanish—and, if the passersby looked rich, in German. People in San Francisco sold anything
that moved. If you stepped away from your shadow for a minute, they'd pry it off the sidewalk and try to
sell it back to you. Lucy heard men and women hawking pork, clothes, jewelry, watches, vegetables,
secondhand books, medicines, radios, slide rules, bicycle tires, and everything else under the sun.
She'd grown up here. She knew the "fine gold jewelry" would turn your arm green if you wore it very long.
The "Swiss watches" were cheap copies sold at not-so-cheap prices—either that or they were stolen. The
black-and-orange Seals shirts and beige ones for Missions backers would come apart at the seams sooner
than they should have. The bicycle tires were liable to be retreads. Sometimes the medicines were what
they claimed. More often, they were sugar pills. If you bought from somebody you didn't know, you took
your chances. If you came expecting wonderful things at rock-bottom prices—well, that was what people
here wanted you to do. Truth was, you got what you paid for, here as anywhere else.
A few places showed OPEN signs but didn't have people out front telling the world about how wonderful
they were. Those quiet places were the ones where you could get good stuff... if you knew what you were
looking for, and knew what you were looking at. Fine gold jewelry was for sale—for those who could
afford it. Some "antiques" hadn't been made day before yesterday in a room behind the shop where they
were for sale. Not all radios had their original innards replaced by junk that would wear out in weeks.
Because of what her father did, Lucy knew some of the tricks of that trade.
And there was Curious Notions. Lucy's father was curious about that place. She couldn't blame him. They
had phonographs smaller than anyone else's that sounded better than machines costing five times as much.
They had radios you could put in your pocket and listen to with earphones. They had battery-powered
games that were like nothing anyone else sold.
They could have been millionaires, selling what they sold. By all the signs, they weren't interested in being
millionaires. What they sold here in San Francisco was almost an afterthought. People said they did most of
their business with the grape growers and produce fanners in the Central Valley. Lucy knew how
much—or rather, how little—what people said was often worth.
As she often did, she stopped in front of the window. The stuff in Curious Notions looked different. It didn't
pretend to be wood even when it wasn't. It wasn't ornamented to pieces. Everything was just there, there to
do a job and not make a fuss about it. It wasn't stylish. It didn't have to be stylish. It worked, and worked
well.
Lucy had got used to the chubby man who bustled around inside the place. She didn't see him there this
morning. Instead, two other men, plainly father and son, stood talking behind the counter. She didn't
recognize them, but they acted as if they had every right to be there. The father, whose big mustache made
him look tough, banged the countertop with his fist to make a point. The son might have been Lucy's age, or
maybe a year or two older. He nodded in a way that said he'd heard it before and wasn't much impressed.
Though Lucy could see that, the man with the mustache couldn't. He went on talking. The younger one
started tidying things up inside the shop. Every so often, he would nod again. He was polite, but he wasn't
interested.
He looked out the window and saw Lucy. He smiled at her. She found herself smiling back. Did he know
she'd been standing here watching him for a minute or so? She couldn't tell. She couldn't stay here watching
him all day, though. She couldn't be late for work.
Down to Market she went, and then south and west along it toward the factory. She wished she weren't
going there. She wished she could do something she enjoyed instead. She didn't want to spend most of her
waking hours tending a sewing machine. Only a crazy person would.
But only a crazy person would want to go hungry, either. You couldn't always do what you wanted to do.
Sometimes it was what you had to do. Maybe, one of these days, she wouldn't have to go to the factory
every day. She could hope. She could dream. Meanwhile . . . she could work.
Some German businessmen came through the place in the middle of the shift. One of them wore a top hat,
something she'd seen only in movies before. They all looked fat and pink and rich. They paid more attention
to the machines in the factory than to the people working in it. Lucy understood that. They could always
replace the workers. The machines would be much more expensive to change.
Even Hank Simmons had to fawn all over the Germans. Seeing the petty tyrant of a foreman humble made
Lucy smile again, this time in a nasty way. She kept her head down so nobody else would notice her doing
it.
Two
The bell over the front door at Curious Notions tinkled. Paul looked up from his bowl of shrimp and rice.
He'd been eating lunch as fast as he could, hoping to finish before another customer came in. No such luck.
He shoved the bowl under the counter and put what he hoped was a businesslike smile on his face. "Hello.
How can I help you?"
"I am Inspector Weidenreich," said the customer, who turned out not to be a customer after all. "You will
show me your Kennkarte and your permit for doing business here. At once." I'll close you down if you
don't, his manner declared. His German accent wasn't thick, but you could hear it. That made him an
imperial official, not just one who worked for San Francisco or California. It also made him more
dangerous.
But papers were not a problem, or Paul hoped they weren't. "Certainly, sir," he said. He took his identity
papers from his hip pocket and laid them on the counter. "Here is the Kennkarte." The permit was framed,
and hung on the back wall. He set it beside his papers.
Weidenreich examined the business permit first. Paul wasn't worried about that at all. The permit was
genuine. The tall, somber-looking inspector—his expression said someone in his family might have died not
long before—took the permit out of the frame. He held it in front of a light so he could see the watermark.
Finding it was there only made him grunt.
Then he looked at Paul's Kennkarte. He took a jeweler's loupe out of one of his jacket pockets and peered
at the papers through it. The forgery was supposed to be perfect. Paul hoped it was.
With another grunt, Inspector Weidenreich shoved the identity papers back at Paul. He gnawed on his
underlip as he stowed the loupe once more. "Everything appears to be in order." He sounded as if he hated
to admit even that much. "Appears, I say."
"What's going on?" Paul did his best to seem innocent and ordinary. And so he was—in the home timeline.
Here, he counted for neither.
"I ask the questions," the German said.
"Yes, sir." Plainly, this was no time to be rude. As plainly, Elliott hadn't known what he was talking
about—and had left town just in time. Paul went on, "We haven't done anything wrong. We have our
permit. You see that. We pay all our taxes. I can show you the receipts, if you want."
Weidenreich waved that away. "No, no. I knew as much before I came here. I know who you are. The
Kaiser's government knows who you are. What we do not know is what you are."
"I don't understand," Paul said, understanding much too well. No, Elliott hadn't known what he was talking
about, not even a little bit. Or had he covered things up on purpose? Too late to worry about that now.
Inspector Weidenreich's wave took in the whole shop. "Then I will make myself very plain, very clear.
Where do you get your goods? We have examined them. We have done this with great care, in fact. We
have never seen anything like them from any other shop. This makes us wonder. Can you blame us?"
For being nosy? Of course I can. Paul didn't suppose hearing that would make Weidenreich any happier.
He said, "We're just lucky that we've been able to set up good connections in Chinatown."
"Aha!" The inspector rubbed his long chin. China was far, far away from Germany. The Chinese said they
admitted the Kaiser ruled over them, too. In a certain sense, he and the Germans did. They could nuke
China back to the Stone Age if they ever decided to do it. The Chinese couldn't hit back. They didn't have
the bomb.
But China was too big a place to be easy to rule. It had too many people for the Germans to keep an eye on
all of them, or even very many of them. Almost anything could come out of China. No one would be
especially surprised if it did. By Weidenreich's face, he had no trouble believing these electronic gadgets
might spring from there.
He took out a small notebook and a fountain pen. "You will provide for me your sources of supply," he said.
"Immediately." If a German was going to know any five-syllable word in English, that was likely to be it.
"I'm sorry, sir, but I can't. I don't know." Paul looked as dumb as he could while still breathing. "I don't
handle any of that side of things. I just sell stuff. My dad buys it."
"Where is your father?" Weidenreich asked, scribbling.
"He went out a while ago. I don't know when he'll be back," Paul said, which was true. He knew Dad
wouldn't thank him for this, but he didn't see what else he could have said. And Dad hardly ever thanked
him for anything.
More scribbles. The inspector said, "I shall return to inquire of him. You may be sure of it. For now, good
day." He clicked his heels and marched out. Paul had never seen anyone do that before except in some
ancient and very bad movies.
Dad came in a few minutes later. He was chewing on something: he'd gone out for lunch. Seeing Paul's
expression, he swallowed. "What's up?" he said. "You look like a goose just walked over your grave."
"It wasn't a goose," Paul answered. "It was a German inspector named Weidenreich."
That got Dad's attention, all right. He said something pungent. Then he said something downright
incandescent. Paul just nodded. He felt the same way. But swearing at the Germans—and at
Elliott—wasn't going to change anything. His father needed a little while to figure that out. He finally did,
and asked, "What did he want?"
Paul shrugged. "About what you'd expect. To see if our permits and papers were in order, to start with. If
they weren't, he could have done anything he wanted. My Kennkarte passed a really good inspection. And
to find out where we were getting our stuff." He waved at Curious Notion's stock in trade, hardly any of
which came from this alternate.
Dad did a little more swearing. "What did you tell him?"
"That we got it from some Chinatown merchant or other—I didn't know who—and that he got it from
China."
"Hmm." His father gnawed at the skin by the edge of one thumbnail. "That's not bad. What did he say?"
That's not bad was about as much praise as Paul's father gave. Paul basked in it for a moment. But then he
had to say, "He didn't like it a whole lot. He was going to come back here and get all the details from you."
Dad exploded for a third time. This one made the other two seem tame. "What am I supposed to say to
him?" he howled after the Big Bang cooled down enough to allow ordinary speech once more.
Paul shrugged again. "I don't know. I couldn't very well tell him the truth, so I gave him the best lie I could
come up with. He jumped like I stuck a pin in him when I started going on about China."
"Terrific," his father said sourly. 'The problem is, we only know a few people in Chinatown, and we don't do
a whole lot of business with any of them. Inspector What's-his-name can find that out pretty quick, too."
That was part of the problem. It wasn't all of it. The other part was that the merchants in Chinatown might
be as curious about Crosstime Traffic's goods as the Germans were. What would they say if Weidenreich
started poking around there? Paul didn't know. He hoped he wouldn't have to find out.
"You'll come up with something, Dad," he said.
That could have been sarcasm. Part of it was sarcasm. Part, but not all. When Paul's father chose to use it,
he had the gift of gab. He was liable to find some way out of this fix, right there on the spur of the moment.
Paul could never do that sort of thing. He was just glad he'd survived with Weidenreich. Dad might do a lot
better than surviving.
Or he might not. The gift of gab didn't come through all the time.
"We're liable to have to get out of this alternate altogether. That would be terrible," Dad said, and then,
"What are you doing?"
"Finishing my lunch. I was halfway done when Weidenreich came in. He didn't spoil my appetite. I don't
know why, but he didn't." He dug into the shrimp and rice again. For once, he had the last word.
"Oh," Lucy Woo's father said heavily. "Those people."
"They don't look so bad," Lucy said. "They just look like . . .
people."
"Well, I suppose they are just people," Father said, and paused
for a big forkful of rice and vegetables. The family ate with fork and
knife more often than chopsticks, though Lucy could use them. Her ancestors had been in the United States
since they helped build the transcontinental railroad—almost 250 years now. They were as American as
anybody else. They thought so, anyhow. The Germans sometimes had trouble believing it. After Charlie
Woo swallowed, he went on, "But they're people who've got things nobody else has. They've got things
nobody else knows how to make. I wish I knew how they did it."
"Why? Could you do the same?" Lucy yawned. She couldn't help it. She came home from the shoe factory
beat every night.
Her father scratched at the thin, scraggly mustache he wore. "I never had a fancy education," he said, and
Lucy nodded. He took another bite of dinner. "I wish I did, but I didn't. I'm just a guy with a soldering iron
and a lot of practice taking stuff apart and putting it back together and making it work again."
"You're good at it." Lucy spoke with family pride.
Now Charlie Woo was the one who nodded. "Yeah. I am. Everybody who comes to me knows it. And so
I've seen some of the things that Curious Notions place sells."
摘要：

CuriousNotionsCrosstimeTraffic—BookTwoHarryTurtledoveTheCrosstimeTrafficseries:GunpowderEmpiresCuriousNotionsInHighPlacesOneEverynowandthen,LucyWoocouldpretendSanFranciscowasagreatcityinagreatcountry.Sometimes,whenshehurriedsouthtowardMarketStreet,thefogwouldbejuststartingtolift.Throughthethick,wet,...

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