“Yeah, we were.” Paul reached out. She had to lean on his arm to straighten up. He still looked puzzled, and almost angry, too. “What about it? You scared me half to death there.”

  “When you disappeared—I guess that’s when Mr. Wong found you—the Triads were trying to figure out where you’d gone.” Lucy spoke carefully. Her ribs and stomach hurt from laughing too much. “Your father didn’t know, either. When he and Stanley Hsu were talking, he got rude and said he thought you were staying at the Palace. Oh, my.” She wiped her streaming eyes on her sleeve.

  Paul thought about it. Then he said, “I guess maybe you had to be there.”

  “I guess maybe you did,” Sammy Wong said. “Come on. In here.” Here was a not very fancy house in a not very fancy neighborhood. It had two bedrooms, a bathroom, a tiny living room, and an even tinier kitchen. Wong sighed. “I’ll sleep on the sofa. I didn’t expect to have more than one person along.” He sent Paul one more sour stare.

  “Life is full of surprises,” was all Paul said.

  “If you sit tight, that’ll sure be one,” Wong snapped. Paul turned a dull red.

  “We’re all on the same side here—I think,” Lucy said. “Can we try to get along till we figure out what we ought to do next?” She had no idea what that would be. She had to hope Paul and Sammy Wong did. They’d better, she thought. They can do almost anything. But when it comes to knowing what they should do, they’re no better than anybody else—worse than some people. The thought was oddly cheering.

  “You make good sense,” Paul said. “You usually do, I think.”

  “Thank you,” Lucy said. She looked toward Sammy Wong. The other man from that other Sunset District still seemed anything but happy, but he nodded. That made Lucy feel a little better. If only she’d had the faintest notion where they were going from here, she would have felt better yet.

  Somebody shook Paul awake in the middle of the night. A bright light shone in his face. Panic threatened to grab hold of him. But it wasn’t the Feldgendarmerie. It was Sammy Wong in a flannel nightshirt. In its own way, that was almost as scary a sight as a big, beefy German in a trench coat.

  “Listen, kid, we’ve got to talk,” Wong said in a voice that brooked no argument.

  “Go ahead. I’m listening,” Paul said around a yawn. His wits slowly started to work. He pointed back behind Wong. “You closed the door.”

  “You bet I did. This is Crosstime Traffic business, not stuff for the locals.”

  Paul didn’t like it when Wong talked about Lucy that way. She was a local, of course, but it made her sound like part of the background in a movie. “Well, go on,” he said.

  “You really know how to complicate things, don’t you?” Wong said.

  “Things were complicated before I got here,” Paul said. “I keep telling you that, but you don’t want to listen to me.”

  “Okay, fine. I’m listening now. Things were complicated before you got here. I even believe you, for whatever you think that’s worth.” Sammy Wong’s voice dropped to an angry growl: “But you sure haven’t done one stinking thing to make’em any simpler, have you?”

  Paul bit his lip. He couldn’t very well argue with that. If he said he’d just tried to stay out of jail and stay out of trouble, the man from Crosstime Traffic would ask him how much luck he’d had—either that or he’d just laugh himself silly. Quietly, Paul asked, “Where do we go from here?”

  Wong pointed a stubby, accusing finger at him. “You made me show some of my cards getting you out of jail. The Germans will be having kittens trying to figure out how I did that. And now we’ve got your stray kitty in the next room.” He jerked his chin toward the bedroom Lucy was using.”

  “It’s not like that,” Paul said wearily. He also thought for a moment about the marmalade cat that had started to adopt Curious Notions. He hoped it was all right, and that someone else was giving it handouts these days.

  Sammy Wong snorted. “Yeah, yeah. But even if it’s not, it’s every bit as much trouble as if it were. The Germans and the Triads and her folks will all be wondering what’s happened to her.” Paul would have put Lucy’s folks first, but he saw Wong’s point.

  “If we’d left her in jail, they’d know what was happening to her. And so would I.” He glared at Wong. “I bet you’ve broken all the mirrors in your house so you don’t have to look at them.”

  With a shrug, the older man answered, “When you’ve got a mug like mine, looking in the mirror never was much of a thrill.” That made Paul glare in a different way. Wong ignored him and went on, “You really do complicate my life. You complicate things for the company, too. Lucy knows too much.” A stab of fear shot through Paul. Sammy Wong ignored that, too. He said, “Now we’ve got to do something with her. Probably with her whole blinking family, too.”

  For a second, Paul thought he’d said do something to her. He braced himself to jump the man from Crosstime Traffic. He knew that would likely get him nothing but a set of lumps, but he was going to try it. Even if he did knock Wong cold, he’d stay stuck in this alternate forever—or till Crosstime Traffic brought in somebody else and hunted him down. All the same …

  Then he heard what Sammy Wong had really said. He gaped. “What—what can we do with them?” he stammered.

  “Get’em out of this alternate, if we can,” Wong answered. He pointed at Paul again, this time with his thumb upraised to make his hand into a gun. “Kid, you would not believe the kind of forms you’re gonna have to fill out when you get home. Would not believe. Serves you right, too. When we have to extract somebody from an alternate, and especially when we have to extract a bunch of somebodies … You miserable nuisance.”

  Paul went right on gaping. “You mean—we do that?” He shook his head in disbelief. “In all the training we got, they said we never do stuff like that. Never, with a capital N, no matter what”

  “Yeah, well, there are plenty of good reasons for that, too. I bet you can figure out most of ‘em for yourself.” Sammy Wong proceeded to spell out what he meant in spite of what he’d just said. Grownups did that too often, as far as Paul was concerned. “Biggest one is, we want people to act like we never do it. If they thought there were times they could smuggle a boyfriend or a girlfriend—’cause that’s what it’s usually about—back to the home timeline, they’d do it too often. People in the alternates would start wondering what was going on. And besides, not everybody from the alternates can fit into the home timeline. Most of the time, moving people is a lot—a lot—more trouble than it’s worth. Every once in a while …” He shrugged. “Every once in a while, you have to fill out all those stupid forms.”

  “The Woos could fit in,” Paul said eagerly. “This alternate isn’t as far along as we are, but it’s pretty well up there. They work hard. They speak English. They’re even Americans, sort of.”

  “Yeah, sort of,” Wong said. “And sort of not, too. To be real Americans, they’ll have to stop looking over their shoulders all the time. But I won’t say you’re nuts—not on account of that, anyway.” By the look on his face, not all was forgiven or forgotten. Oh, no. He went on, “Now we’ve just got to make it happen.”

  He made it sound easy. Paul wished he thought it were. “How?” he asked.

  “Way I see it, we’ve got four problems,” the man from Crosstime Traffic said. “We’ve got to get your dad away from the Triads. We’ve got to make the Woos disappear. We’ve got to get to the transposition chamber. And we’ve got to do all that so nobody—not the Feldgendarmerie , not the Triads, nobody—is any the wiser about what we really are and where we’re really from. Am I forgetting anything?”

  “I don’t think so.” Paul knew he sounded troubled. “That seems like enough all by itself.”

  “One step at a time, that’s all.” Wong reached out and clapped Paul on the shoulder. Paul would have thought he’d resent the attention. Instead, he was oddly glad to have it. The man from Crosstime Traffic went on, “Anyway, I wanted to make sure we were on the same page. Now go back to sleep.”

  “Yeah, right,” Paul said. Sammy Wong laughed. Ten minutes later, Paul was snoring.

  Mr. Wong went out early in the morning. Before he did, he sat Lucy and Paul down on the sofa. He said, “Stay here, you two, okay?” He pointed to Paul and spoke in tones of heavy menace: “This means you.”

  Lucy thought Paul would get mad. Instead, he just nodded and said, “Okay.” Lucy wanted to scratch her head. Paul didn’t usually take something like that from anybody. But she didn’t think he was lying.

  Evidently, Sammy Wong didn’t, either. He nodded back and walked out the door. When Lucy looked over at Paul, she found he was looking at her, too. “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi, yourself,” he answered. After a moment, he added, “I’m sorry we got you into this mess.”

  She started to tell him it was okay, but she didn’t. That went too far. “At least you’re trying to get us out of it,” she said. Yes, that was better.

  “Now I think we are,” he said, and glanced toward the door through which his—acquaintance? colleague? what was the right word? not friend, plainly—had just left. He hesitated again. His words came out in a rush: “How would you like to see what that other Sunset District is like?”

  “That … other Sunset District?” Lucy said slowly. She’d figured out that Paul had to come from a different world. He’d admitted it, too. Now she discovered the difference between believing it and believing it. “You really can do that? You really do do that—go back and forth, I mean?”

  “We can. We do. We have to,” he said. “We’re going to get you and your family out of here. Once you get used to things where I come from, I think you’ll like it a lot better than you like this San Francisco.”

  This San Francisco. The words brought home his strangeness all over again. She wondered if he was strange because he was crazy. She shook her head. Crazy people didn’t have the kinds of things Curious Notions sold. Crazy people didn’t get you out of the Germans’ jail, either. “Can you really do that?” she whispered.

  “I hope so. We’re working on it,” Paul answered. “Um, one other thing.” He looked a little embarrassed, or maybe more than a little.

  “What is it?” Lucy asked.

  “When you find out about other alternates—worlds where things didn’t happen the way they did in this one—act surprised, okay? You’re not supposed to know anything about that. You’re not supposed to know big time.”

  That was one more bit of slang nobody from this San Francisco would have used. Lucy didn’t have any trouble figuring out what it meant, though. “I’ll remember,” she promised.

  “Okay,” Paul said. Lucy wondered how many different worlds—alternates, he called them—there were where people said that. Then she wondered how many there were where people didn’t. And then she wondered which number was bigger. She had so many questions, so few answers. But now, if everything went right, she’d have the chance to find some of them, anyway No sooner had that thought crossed her mind than Paul said, “Ask you something?”

  Lucy laughed. “Sure. Go ahead. But I was just thinking about all the questions I want to ask you.”

  “About alternates and things?” he asked, and Lucy nodded. He managed a laugh, too, but it sounded self-conscious. “That isn’t the kind of thing I was going to ask you.”

  “Well, what is?”

  “When we get this mess straightened out—if we get it straightened out—and you’re all settled in the home timeline and everything, you still want to go to that movie with me?”

  “Yes, I would like to,” Lucy said seriously. “It will probably take a while for us to get used to how you do things there, and it would be nice to know somebody who already knows his way around.” She frowned. That hadn’t come out quite the way she wanted it to. It sounded as if his knowing his way around was the only reason she would want to go out with him. She tried again: “It would be nice to be friends with somebody who already knows his way around.” There. That was better.

  Paul tipped an imaginary cap. “Happy to play tour guide for you, ma’am. All tips gratefully accepted.”

  “You’re ridiculous,” she said. He bowed sitting down, as if she’d paid him a compliment. One of her nine million questions came to the surface: “What are movies like in the—the home timeline, did you call it?”

  “That’s right. But that’s one more thing you can forget you ever heard, too, okay?” Paul thought for a little while. “They’re mostly dumb, but they’re not dumb the same way they are here. Here they’re kind of sappy, at least to me. Boy finds out he’s really a duke’s nephew so he can marry the countess he’s in love with, that kind of thing.”

  “Sure,” Lucy said. She’d seen at least four movies with plots like that. They were a way to kill a couple of hours. Her whole family could go for eighty-five cents—three quarters, plus a dime for Michael till he turned twelve. That was a pretty good deal.

  “Well, when we make movies, what we mostly do wrong is use too many special effects—too much trick photography, you’d say,” Paul told her. “We can do more of those, and fancier ones, than you can here. And sometimes, if we see lots of things blowing up or funny-looking people from other planets or ghosts or werewolves or whatever, we don’t care if there’s any real story behind them. But what you remember is mostly the spectacular stuff, not the people.”

  “People are what matter,” Lucy said.

  “They ought to be, anyhow,” Paul agreed.

  “How much does it cost to get into a movie in the, uh, home timeline?” she asked.

  “Usually about 800 dollars,” he answered. She gave him a nasty look, sure he was pulling her leg. He held up his right hand—he might have been taking an oath. “It really does, so help me. But a dollar there isn’t like a dollar here. It isn’t even like a penny here. Dollars are teeny-tiny small change. Benjamins start to be real money. A benjamin is a hundred dollars, so a movie costs eight benjamins or so.”

  Lucy thought about that. “So one of your benjamins—what you call a hundred dollars—is worth about three cents of our money?”

  “Three cents, a nickel—something like that.” Paul sounded as if it didn’t matter much. To him, it didn’t: “What difference does it make, as long as people have the money they need to buy what they want? And they do, or most of them do. They’re better off than people are here.”

  She wondered if she ought to believe him. To try to find out, she asked, “Can they afford the things you were selling in Curious Notions?”

  Instead of answering right away, Paul broke out laughing. “Lucy, that stuff is junk in the home timeline. We make it for the export market. We don’t use it ourselves. We’ve got better—lots better—at home. You’ll see.”

  Lucy had trouble believing that. To her father, what Curious Notions sold was far ahead of the state of the art. The Triads and the Germans felt the same way. Junk? But the way Paul said it make her take him seriously. And if he and Sammy Wong and their people could travel back and forth between worlds, what could they do when they stayed at home? Maybe, before too long, she’d find out.

  The front door opened. In came Wong. He was carrying a great big sack. By the way he handled it, it was bulky but not heavy. When he dumped it on the floor, four tightly rolled sleeping bags spilled out. Lucy caught his eye. He nodded back to her. three for your family—and one for your dad, Paul.”

  “How do we get him back?” Tension tugged at Paul’s voice.

  Sammy Wong grinned. “I think I’ve got something worked out.”

  Not long before, Paul had been wild to go out on the streets of San Francisco. Now he wished he could stay in. Whenever he saw a cop, he wanted to run. He didn’t—he knew better—but he wanted to. He and Lucy had to be hotter than a two-benjamin pistol. But as long as he acted as if he belong here, knew where he was going, and knew he had a right to get there, nobody paid much attention to him. Evening twilight helped make him harder to recognize from any distance, too.

  Even though he had the address, he almost walked past Stanley Hsu’s jewelry shop. It didn’t go out of the way to call attention to itself. He paused with one foot in midair when he spotted the plain door with the right number on it. Then he opened the door and went inside.

  The jeweler was working on something—an earring, Paul thought—behind the counter. He looked up when the bell above the door rang. “Young Mr. Gomes!” he said. “It really is you. I tell you frankly, I had trouble believing it.”

  “I’m here.” Paul rubbed at his left upper arm. “Where’s Dad?” A scrabbling noise came from overhead. “And what’s that?”

  Stanley Hsu shrugged. “A repairman on the roof. My landlord warned me he would be there. Not a Feldgendarmerie man, believe me. As for your father …” He went into the back room. When he came out, Lawrence Gomes was with him.

  “Good to see you!” Paul exclaimed. A little to his surprise, he found himself meaning it. He and Dad were like cats and dogs a lot of the time. But they were still family. That counted. And, in this dangerous alternate, they were both from the home timeline. That might have counted for more.

  Stanley Hsu studied Paul. “How on earth did you get out of the Feldgendarmerie jail? Do you have any idea how upset the Germans are?”

  “I’ll tell you something, Mr. Hsu—I’m not very happy with the Germans, either,” Paul said. With luck, the jeweler wouldn’t notice that he hadn’t answered his questions.

  But Stanley Hsu did. Paul wasn’t very surprised. The jeweler didn’t miss much. He said, “And is it true that you brought Miss Woo out with you? I gather she is also among the missing from the jail?” Paul’s father stirred at that. For a wonder, though, he kept his mouth shut.