When they got to the sidewalk, the rest of the young men from the Tongs fell in with them. The one who did most of the talking for them said, “Your old man’s just about sprung, I hear.”

  “Good.” Paul tried not to get too excited at the news—or at any news he just heard. Seeing was believing. Until he saw, he wasn’t going to start jumping up and down. It was too easy for people to lie to him to get him to do what they wanted.

  For that matter, even after his father got out of jail—if he did—their troubles weren’t over. How were they going to get back into Curious Notions? How were they going to get back to the home timeline? How were they going to keep the Chinese and the Germans from figuring out at least the basics of the crosstime secret?

  Good questions were so much easier to find than good answers. He’d noticed that before.

  A San Francisco policeman walked by on the other side of the street. He was swinging his nightstick by the leather thong and whistling at the same time. He paid no attention to Paul—he was too busy showing off and having a good time.

  “Dumb flatfoot,” one of Paul’s escorts said.

  “Would you rather run into a smart one?” Paul asked.

  The young Chinese man didn’t bother to answer, not in words. By the way he threw back his shoulders and stuck out his chin, he didn’t think there were any smart San Francisco cops. Paul’s guess was that he was wrong. Paul also guessed his escort wouldn’t listen if he pointed that out. One of these days, the fellow from the Tongs would probably find out the hard way.

  “Find out the hard way,” Paul muttered. He’d found out too many things about this alternate like that. How many more would he have to bang his nose into before he got back to the home timeline? That led straight back to the even more basic question he’d asked himself before—would he get back to the home timeline?

  Up the street toward him came a middle-aged Asian man who reminded him of Bob Lee. It was dislike at first sight, as far as he was concerned. The man strode along as if he owned the sidewalk. He didn’t get out of the way for Paul’s escorts, and they didn’t get out of the way for him.

  That was liable to mean trouble. Such faceoffs could end up as badly here as in the home timeline or almost any other world. That Asian man was asking for a trip to the hospital if he thought he could take on so many by himself.

  Then, just before he would have bumped into Paul and his escorts, the man spat out a sentence in harsh Chinese. The young men around Paul stopped as if they’d run into a brick wall. Paul took one more step forward, and found himself out in front of the pack.

  The man pointed to him. “You,” he said in tones that put Paul’s back up right away. “You come along with me.”

  “What? Why?” Paul yelped.

  “Triad business, that’s why.” The man added another sentence in Chinese. Paul understood not a word of it, but it kept his escorts frozen in their tracks.

  Hesitantly, the one who did most of the talking for them said, “But we haven’t seen you around here before, sir.” It was one of the politest protests Paul had ever heard—a lot politer than he would have expected from the young men who led him around.

  It didn’t impress the stranger. With a sniff, he said, “Well, of course you haven’t. I just got here from Hong Kong—he’s that important.” He jerked a thumb toward Paul.

  “Oh,” the escort said, his eyes wide. “Do you want us to come with you, then, make sure nothing happens to him?”

  An impatient shake of the head answered him. The middle-aged man said, “He’s not going anywhere I don’t want him to.” He slapped his vest pocket. He didn’t come right out and say he had a gun in there, but Paul believed it. So did the young men from the Tongs. They didn’t argue any more. The man pointed at Paul again, then jerked his thumb back over his shoulder. “Get moving, kid. We don’t have all day.”

  Paul got moving. As he went, he said, “Will somebody for once tell me what the devil’s going on?”

  “Haven’t you figured it out?” The Chinese man steered him around a corner. The fellow paused for a moment before following—he wanted to make sure the escorts weren’t coming along in spite of what he’d said. They must not have been, for he caught up to Paul with a smile on his face. It made him look younger and not nearly so unpleasant. “It took me long enough to get here from Berlin—and from Crosstime Traffic.”

  Now Paul was the one who stopped dead. “From … Crosstime Traffic?” he whispered.

  “Yup,” the Chinese man said cheerfully. “I’m Sam Wong, by the way. Call me Sammy—everybody else does. A dollar for your thoughts.” He paused to take a longer look at Paul. “You okay, kid? You’re a little green around the gills.”

  “I don’t know.” Paul felt dizzy. He wasn’t surprised Sammy Wong could see it in his face. Too much was happening too fast “Wait a minute.” He tried to gather himself. “You’re from—”

  “The home timeline? You better believe it,” Wong answered.

  He knew the right things to say. Nobody in the home timeline said a penny for your thoughts the way they did here. Nobody in the home timeline had even seen a penny since Paul’s great-grandfather was a boy. Sammy Wong knew there was a home timeline, which gave him a head start right there. And he knew there was such a thing as Crosstime Traffic.

  All of which proved … what? If the Feldgendarmerie had squeezed Dad, or if somebody else form the home timeline had goofed and got caught, who could guess what the locals knew?

  “I’d better believe it?” Paul said. “How can I? How can I be sure, I mean?”

  “Oh.” Sammy Wong winked at him. “I get it. You don’t think I’m the genuine article. Well, you can find out. Ask me anything.”

  “Like what?”

  Wong shook his head. “No. If I tell you what to ask me, you’ll figure I told you to ask that because somebody briefed me on it. You pick the questions.”

  That made sense. Paul thought. What were some things nobody from this alternate was likely to know? “Who won the Super Bowl last year?”

  “The Bengals. Second year in a row,” Sammy Wong answered at once.

  He was right. But that was the sort of thing clever people might brief an agent about. Paul needed something else. He snapped his fingers. “How much does a Whopper combo cost, and who sells it?”

  “You get’em at Burger King, and they run about five benjamins.”

  Paul grinned with relief. “Okay. I’m convinced. And I’m mighty glad to see you, too.”

  “Yeah, well, somebody had to come pick up the pieces. Happens they stuck me with it,” Wong said. “What did go wrong here? You guys vanished off the face of the earth.”

  “They decided our electronics were too good to be true,” Paul said bitterly. “I was afraid that would happen, and I was right. They got Dad. Only reason they didn’t get me, too, is that I wasn’t home when they came.”

  “That would have made things harder,” Wong said. “More complicated, anyhow. For now, it looks like the Chinese are going to be able to get your father out of jail.”

  “Great!” Paul said—the escort hadn’t been lying, then. The older man didn’t seem so delighted. After a moment, Paul saw why: “Oh. Then they’ll have him instead.”

  “Right the first time,” Sammy Wong said. “And maybe they’ll play nice if you sing for them … . I suppose that was the deal?” He waited. Paul nodded. So did Wong. “Okay. Figured as much—it was the only card you had. Can’t blame you for playing it. But they might decide to hang on to you and your old man once you do sing. This is their big chance, or they hope it is.”

  “Uh-huh,” Paul said. “Wouldn’t do them as much good as they think.”

  Wong shrugged. “I don’t mind giving them some help, as long as I can do it without giving away the crosstime secret.”

  Paul almost said the secret was already lost. Lucy had it, sure enough. But if he told that to this fellow who’d never met her, what was Wong liable to do? Get rid of her. Crosstime Traffic people could be ruthless when they had to. That was part of their job. Paul didn’t care about their job. He didn’t want anything happening to Lucy.

  He did say, “The Tongs are close. I’m not sure how close the Germans are.” Sammy Wong needed to know that. Paul went on, “Don’t bet that the Germans aren’t, especially now that they’ve got their hands on Dad. But it was what we were selling that made people sit up and take notice. Like I said, it was too good. People knew it couldn’t be from here.”

  Frowning, Wong said, “I don’t know what to do about that. If we just sell ordinary junk, who’ll buy from us? Where will we get the money we need to buy produce? The home timeline has to eat, you know.” He was smooth. He didn’t say anything like Crosstime Traffic has to turn a profit. That was there, but he didn’t come out and hit Paul over the head with it.

  As a matter fact, Dad had used exactly the same argument. Paul hadn’t been able to tell him he was wrong, either. Nor could he tell Wong he was wrong. All he could do was ask, “So what happens next?”

  “I think we put you on ice for a while,” the Crosstime Traffic man answered. “We’ve still got to work out how we’re going to set all this to rights.” He muttered something to himself, then spoke out loud: “It’s not going to be as easy as anybody back at the home timeline thought.”

  His idea of how to put Paul on ice was … different. After the Feldgendarmerie raid, Paul had tried to find the most obscure hidey-hole he could. Sammy Wong, by contrast, walked over to the Palace Hotel on Market Street and booked him in there. It was the fanciest, most expensive hotel this San Francisco boasted.

  Sammy Wong turned out to have the room next door. Grinning, he said, “When somebody goes missing, the cops’ll turn the Tenderloin upside down. Nobody’d think to look here.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Paul answered. “I couldn’t have afforded this for a week, not with the money I had.”

  “That does make a difference,” Wong admitted. “You’re here now, though. Enjoy it. Call room service. Order yourself prime rib or a lobster. Why not? It’s on the company.”

  The bed was big enough to get lost in. The bathtub was big enough to swim in (though nobody here had ever heard of a Jacuzzi). Room service seemed wonderful. Paul decided that, if he had to hide out somewhere, this knocked the socks off the miserable joint where he had been staying.

  Whenever Lucy was out on the street, she looked for Paul. She knew the Triads had lots of people doing the same thing. So did the San Francisco police. And so did the Feldgendarmerie. Her odds of finding him first—of finding him at all—weren’t good. She looked anyhow.

  It’s for his own good, she told himself. Anyone else who caught him would want to pull information out of him. Whoever did wouldn’t be gentle about it, either. Lucy wondered what she’d do if she spotted him first. Tell him to run away and hide, she supposed. But how could he have disappeared so completely?

  Had he somehow gone back to his own world? How? He’d said the only way there was through Curious Notions. He couldn’t have got back in the shop … could he? She didn’t see how. The Feldgendarmerie hadn’t forgotten about it. They weren’t that dumb. Germany wouldn’t have stayed top dog for as long as she had if the people in her secret police were fools.

  Lucy wondered if Stanley Hsu and his friends had figured out that Paul might have vanished from this world altogether—and that his father might do the same. She didn’t say anything to the jeweler about that. She wondered if Lawrence Gomes would mention it. She didn’t think so. If that possibility wasn’t his ace in the hole, she would have been amazed.

  One evening, she was washing dishes and her little brother was drying them. Michael hated drying dishes, which meant he did a lousy job of it. It also meant he looked for any excuse not to dry them. Even talking with his sister was better than doing what he was supposed to do—especially if he could annoy her. He did his best, saying, “You haven’t heard from your boyfriend lately.”

  Lucy was washing a big serving platter. Mother would get upset if she smashed it over Michael’s head. Too bad, she thought. She looked down her nose at him instead. “I haven’t got a boyfriend,” she said loftily.

  “You know the one I mean—the guy from that place with the neat electronics.” Michael was going to take over Father’s shop one of these days (if I don’t strangle him first, Lucy thought). He’d already learned a lot about the things Father repaired.

  What he’d learned about people, on the other hand, would fit on a pinhead, and a little pinhead at that. Lucy sometimes thought he was a little pinhead. She said, “Paul’s not my boyfriend. You’d better remember that. And you’d better remember he got Father out of jail, so you don’t want to make rude remarks about him. You do want to dry that platter. Don’t just stick it in the drainer.”

  Michael made a face at her. He dried the platter, but wanting to was a different story. Then he made another face, not the same one this time. “If he’s not your boyfriend, what is he?”

  “He’s none of your business, that’s what,” Lucy snapped. Michael grinned. He’d made her angry, which won him a point. For a little while, Lucy was hotter than the water in the sink. Then she said, “He’s just a friend. That’s not the same as a boyfriend. You’ll find out what the difference is when you get bigger.”

  Her brother made yet another face, one both disgusting and disgusted. At ten, he was sure girls were poisonous. He was sure he’d feel that way forever, too. He wasn’t as smart as he thought he was. He wasn’t smart enough to realize he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was, either.

  When he stopped making gagging and choking noises to go with the horrible face, he said, “If he’s just a friend, how come he never comes over here?”

  Because it might bring the Feldgendarmerie down on him. Because it might bring the Feldgendarmerie down on us, too. Lucy smiled sweetly. “Because then he might meet you, and he’d never want anything to do with me again after that.”

  “You’re mean!” Michael could dish it out better than he could take it. He fired the big gun: “Mommy!”

  “What’s going on?” Mother called from the living room. A warning note rang in her voice.

  Michael’s explanation differed from Lucy’s by about 180 degrees. They both got louder and louder, trying to shout each other down. Michael snapped the towel at Lucy. That could have hurt, but he missed. She splashed him with dishwater. He screeched so shrilly, even dogs would have had trouble hearing him.

  “What’s going on?” Mother said again, this time from the doorway. Again, the stories she heard might have happened on two different planets. She set her hands on her hips. “That will be enough from both of you. One more peep from this kitchen out of either one of you and you’ll both be sorry.”

  Lucy finished washing the dishes. Michael finished drying them. They made faces and sent rude gestures at each other till they were done. Neither said a thing. They got their messages across just the same.

  When Lucy came out of the kitchen, her father looked out from behind his newspaper. That was enough to make her stop in surprise. Once he started looking at the paper, he was usually gone till he got done. Then he surprised her again by saying her name.

  “What is it, Father?” she asked.

  “What do you know about Curious Notions?” Charlie Woo asked in turn. “Will they be opening up again? I want more of a chance to find out how they do what they do.”

  I know how they do what they do. They bring things in somehow from another world. No wonder you couldn’t figure out how their gadgets work. But Lucy didn’t think she could tell him that. He might believe it. He knew those gadgets weren’t like any this world made. They hit him the same way Paul’s claim to come from Thirty-third Avenue in the Sunset District hit her. They didn’t fit. They didn’t fit. But the reason they didn’t fit was Paul’s secret. And he’d made it very plain that he wished she didn’t know it, let alone anyone else.

  She might have told her father anyway, except for one other thing. Paul had also made it very plain that knowing his secret was dangerous. If he hadn’t, what had happened to him and to his father and to Curious Notions would have. Lucy didn’t want her father to know the secret because it might be dangerous to him. The Germans had already jailed him once just for being near the edges of it.

  So all she said was, “I don’t think they’re going to be opening up again any time soon. The Feldgendarmerie let Mr. Gomes go, but they haven’t let him get back to work.”

  “I wonder why not,” her father said. “If they want to catch him doing something, they should give him the chance to do it. If they leave the place closed, they’ll never find out what he was up to.”

  Lucy blinked. She hadn’t thought of it like that. Most of the time, it would have made good sense. But one of the things Mr. Gomes could do—or she supposed he could—was disappear from this world and go back to his own. And if he did, how could the Feldgendarmerie go after him?

  “I didn’t know you could think like a Feldgendarmerie man,” she said.

  Her father made a face nastier than any of the ones Michael had aimed at her. “You say the sweetest things,” he muttered.

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” Lucy told him.

  That horrible face melted into a tired smile. “I know you didn’t, sweetheart,” he said. “But I’ve met the Germans up close, and you haven’t. I don’t want to think like them, believe you me I don’t.”

  She started to say she’d met the Feldgendarmerie, too, when they let him out of jail and brought him back here. Something in his eyes told her that would be worse than just wasting her breath. It would be saying something not only stupid but naive. No one could know the German secret police who hadn’t been in jail, who hadn’t been grilled. Father had. She hadn’t. It was as simple as that.

  He went back to his newspaper. She went to her room. He hadn’t rubbed her nose in the mistake she almost made. That wasn’t his style. But he’d made sure she knew about it. And she did. She didn’t think she’d ever be foolish that particular way again.