“It’s fine,” Paul answered. “It’ll feel like it takes about fifteen minutes. When we get to the home timeline, though, the clocks will say the same thing as they did in the alternate we just left.”

  “That’s weird,” Michael said.

  “That’s impossible,” his father said.

  Paul only shrugged. “It’s what happens, honest.”

  “Won’t be long, any which way,” his father said, and he was right. When the door opened again, they were back in the home timeline.

  This new San Francisco endlessly fascinated Lucy. It was the city she knew, and yet it wasn’t. Most of the streets had the same names as the ones in her San Francisco. They went the same places as the ones she’d always known. She could find her way around. South of Market here was the same place as it was there.

  But finding her way around didn’t mean a thing. The streets were the same, but most of the buildings were different. A few old ones, like City Hall and some of the churches, were the same. Somehow, that only made them seem stranger, not more familiar.

  For those were the buildings that had ruled the skyline in her San Francisco. Here, they huddled in the shadows of structures she’d not only never seen but never even imagined. Paul called them skyscrapers. That word had fallen out of use in the English she knew. It seemed to fit them, though. They did leap far, far up into the sky.

  Some of them had elevators you could ride all the way to the top. One had a restaurant up there, a restaurant that revolved once an hour. She could eat a hamburger and fries and a milkshake and look out at the whole city. She knew she would remember that for the rest of her life.

  But the people in this San Francisco were even more interesting than the scenery. Men’s clothes weren’t too different from what she was used to. The things girls and women wore, though … They showed more skin, and skin in odder places, than she’d thought anybody could or would. They weren’t embarrassed about doing it, either. It was as normal to them as her clothes had been to her.

  By her standards, just about everybody was rich. That wasn’t because everyone had millions of dollars, though everyone did. A million dollars here were only ten thousand benjamins, and ten thousand benjamins were worth about what she’d made in a year at the sewing machine. But people here all had cars—those who wanted them, anyway—and radios and televisions and telephones they carried around with them and those marvelous machines called computers and all sorts of other things she hadn’t dreamt of. Paul hadn’t been kidding. The things they knew about here put Curious Notions to shame.

  She discovered supermarkets. So many things, all right there together! People filling shopping carts full of whatever they wanted. They didn’t seem to worry about the prices. That told Lucy they had plenty of money, too. If they hadn’t, they would have complained more or bought less.

  Signs above some of the vegetables said they came from one alternate or another. Lucy pointed at Paul when she noticed those. “So that’s why you dealt with those farmers from the Central Valley,” she said.

  He nodded. “That’s right.” When he was in her alternate, he’d sounded just a little funny. Here in what he called the home timeline, everyone talked the way he did. Lucy was the one with a tiny trace of accent. If she was going to stay here, she’d have to lose it to fit in. That shouldn’t be too hard.

  “What about the Central Valley here?” she asked. She hadn’t seen it yet. She hadn’t seen anything but this amazing new San Francisco.

  “It grows things, too,” Paul answered. “But this is a crowded place. We need more food than we can grow ourselves. We need more of lots of things than we can get from this world.”

  “And so you get them from other … alternates,” Lucy said. “That’s what you were doing with Curious Notions.”

  “That’s right,” Paul said again. “Crosstime Traffic does that kind of thing on lots of different alternates. We don’t take a whole lot from any one of them. That wouldn’t be fair. We interfere as little as we can, too. Doing more wouldn’t be fair, either.”

  “But you got my family and me out of there,” Lucy said.

  Paul seemed embarrassed. He was—but not, Lucy realized, on her account. No—he was embarrassed all on his own. “That’s one more thing we don’t usually do. We wouldn’t have if Dad and I hadn’t pulled you into what was really our problem. Getting away ourselves and leaving you stuck there wouldn’t have been right, either.”

  “What are the Germans and the Triads doing there?” Lucy asked. Just putting the question that way felt funny. The Germans had been the central fact in politics in her alternate since the middle of the twentieth century. The Triads had been around in her San Francisco even longer, though she hadn’t bumped up against them till she got to know the people from Curious Notions. Now both were a mile beyond the moon.

  “It’s easier to monitor the Germans,” Paul answered. “They think we were running drugs. There’s a huge price on my head, and on Dad’s. The Tongs have to be more secret. From what people have picked up, though, they’ve got a price on us, too—and on you, I’m afraid.”

  That sent a shiver through Lucy. She needed a moment to remember the Triads in her San Francisco were a mile beyond the moon. Then she thought of something else. “Are there Triads here? In this San Francisco, I mean?”

  “Well, yeah. There are.” Paul nodded. “They’re—mostly—legit, though. And I promise they don’t have thing one to do with the Tongs in your alternate.”

  “That’s good.” Lucy meant it. She also wondered whether he was right. If the Triads were anything, they were sneaky and patient. Crosstime Traffic might have people working for it who were working for them, too. But that was the company’s worry. It—probably—wasn’t hers.

  And she had trouble worrying about anything here in this amazing temple of food. She pointed to a bin of very strange fruit. They were about the size of her fist, bright yellow, and covered all over with not too pointy spikes about half an inch long. (People here would have said a little more than a centimeter long. Everybody here used the metric system, the way the Germans did in her alternate. One more thing she had to get used to.)

  That was also a worry for another time. She pointed to the yellow … whatchamacallits. “What are those things, and which alternate do they come from?”

  He laughed. “Most people call’em hand-grenade melons. As a matter of fact, they’re from here—from New Zealand, I think. They probably have’em in your alternate, too, only not for export.”

  “Oh.” Lucy had seen food from China and Chile and the Philippines and Canada and all over Europe and some places that weren’t even places in her alternate—Indonesia, for instance, wherever that was. “Everything’s for export here, isn’t it?”

  “Just about,” Paul answered. “We—the United States—export a lot ourselves—grain and meat and soybeans, mostly.”

  Lucy nodded. She believed him. In her alternate, the United States had trouble feeding itself. Maybe this USA did, too, but if it did, it was for different reasons. She wondered how many people lived here. This San Francisco was more crowded than the one she’d known. And this United States hadn’t had a lot of its biggest cities blown off the map by German atomic bombs. She gathered they’d worried about the Russians instead. That seemed ridiculous to her.

  When she and Paul left the supermarket, he asked, “What shall we do now?”

  “I don’t know.” Lucy stood in the parking lot and thought for a little while. (That the supermarket had a parking lot told how important it was.) The breeze off the ocean ruffled her hair. Even though this San Francisco was such a crowded place, exhaust fumes didn’t fill the breeze. Cars were cleaner than they were in her alternate. Lucy didn’t know how the home timeline managed that, but it did. All of a sudden, she snapped her fingers. “Yes, I do so know. Take me to the zoo!”

  “I’ll do that.” Paul grinned at her. “The bus’ll go through the Sunset District, too, so you’ll see I wasn’t fooling you about it.”

  “Okay.” She grinned back. The grin slipped a little when she found out the bus fare was $145 for each of them. Even though she was starting to know better, that still seemed like a lot of money to her. When she worked it out, though, she decided it wasn’t really a whole lot more than the nickel she was used to paying. And the buses here were much nicer than the ones in her alternate. They didn’t stink. They didn’t roar and lurch. They even had comfortable seats.

  Paul hadn’t been kidding about the Sunset District. A lot of the houses were old. Some of them might have been old enough to date from before her alternate and the home timeline split apart. All of them, though, were beautifully kept up. They had fresh paint. Their lawns were green as the emeralds in Stanley Hsu’s shop. The cars in front of them were bright and shiny and clean.

  “My house is just like one of these,” Paul said. “Too bad we’re not going down Thirty-third Avenue, or I’d show it to you. Oh, well—you’ll get over there one of these times.”

  “Yes, I guess I will,” Lucy said. “It’s not like we haven’t met each other’s parents and everything.”

  “Uh—yeah.” Paul turned red. Isn’t that interesting? Lucy thought.

  The zoo was just where it would have been in her alternate. There was still a lot of ivy, and a lot of birds flew around. They were all pretty much the same birds, too. But the zoo sure wasn’t the same. No crumbling concrete here. They’d spent a lot of dollars—a lot of benjamins—fancying this place up. The enclosures all looked as if they came from the lands where the animals inside them lived. The displays in front of the enclosures weren’t just signs. They were TV screens, and told all kinds of things about the beasts and birds on display.

  Not everything had changed, though. That was what Lucy thought, anyhow, when a boy threw peanuts to a bear. The same thing could have happened in her alternate. But this kid got in trouble. A guard came up to him and led him out of the zoo. There were DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS signs at the zoo in her alternate, but nobody paid any attention to them. Things were different here.

  “This is what a zoo is supposed to be like,” Lucy said.

  “You think this is something, you ought to see the one in San Diego,” Paul told her. “They have all kinds of animals there that are extinct in the wild. Tigers and rhinos, even.”

  The zoo in Lucy’s San Francisco had had tigers and rhinos, too. None of the signs there had said they were extinct in the wild. As far as she knew, they weren’t in her alternate. Maybe not quite all the differences in the home timeline were for the best.

  She and Paul walked past an enclosure that held slim yellow cats with black spots. “We do have cheetahs here,” he said. “None of those left in the wild, either.”

  “Cheetahs never prosper,” Lucy agreed gravely. Paul nodded. He took a step, and half of another one. Then he stopped and gave her a horrible look. She winked at him. He tried to stay disgusted, but couldn’t do it. He started to laugh.

  “You’re going to fit right in here,” he told her. “You’re out of your tree.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  They stopped and got something to eat. For reasons Lucy couldn’t figure out, people here called wieners hot dogs. No matter what people called them, they were still wieners. Lucy slathered hers with sauerkraut and mustard. Paul put onions and pickle relish on his. They wrinkled their noses at each other’s choices. Paul said, “I think you like sauerkraut because the Germans were running things in your alternate.”

  “Maybe,” Lucy said. “But plenty of people here must like it, too, or the stand wouldn’t put it out.” Paul changed the subject, which made her decide she was right.

  She frowned a little as she sipped from her Coke. The straw was made of see-through plastic. In her alternate, it would have been waxed cardboard. That wasn’t what puzzled her, though. The soda tasted almost the same as it did in her San Francisco, but not quite. It tasted almost as good, too—but, again, not quite.

  When she asked Paul if he knew what the difference was, he said, “Yeah. Here they sweeten it with corn syrup. In your alternate, I think they still use real sugar.”

  “Why don’t they here?” Lucy asked. “Is sugar extinct in the wild, too?”

  That made him laugh again while he shook his head. “No. Corn syrup’s cheaper to use, that’s all.”

  “But it’s not as good!” Lucy said.

  “That counts, but so does the other,” Paul said. “I guess the people who decide what goes into Coke figured they made more money with corn syrup than they lost flavor, and so they kept on putting it in.”

  Lucy took another sip. This Coke wasn’t bad. If you didn’t know how it was supposed to taste, you’d think it was fine. She suspected the people in the Triads would think the same way the Coke-makers here did. A little bigger profit margin did count. But so did having something really good, not just good enough. Lucy thought so, anyway.

  They rode the bus back toward the apartment Crosstime Traffic had got for her family. It was bigger than the one the Woos had had in Lucy’s San Francisco. It had a TV and a computer and a fasarta and all the other things people in the home timeline took for granted. In Lucy’s alternate, even the richest German noble couldn’t have had most of them.

  The apartment wasn’t far from the western edge of this San Francisco’s Chinatown. Lucy had been there a couple of times. It amazed and fascinated her. It was so much more Chinese than the one she’d grown up in. In her San Francisco, Chinese was a secret language only the Triads and a few other people remembered. Here, people spoke it on the street. There was a Chinese-language newspaper. There was even a Chinese-language TV station in this San Francisco, with most of the shows in Mandarin and some in Cantonese.

  Lucy wasn’t alone in being of Chinese blood but speaking only English. That came as a relief. But here she found herself wanting to learn some Chinese, too. In her alternate, that hadn’t even crossed her mind.

  Paul got off the bus with her and walked her to the apartment. He stayed on the sidewalk when she started up the stairs. She turned back to him from about halfway up. “Thanks … for everything,” she said. “I had a terrific time today.”

  “Good. That’s what you’re supposed to do,” he answered. “I’ll see you again before too long.” With an awkward little half-wave, he headed back toward the bus stop.

  “Yes. You will.” Lucy nodded. Except for her family, Paul was the only person she saw here who knew about the alternate where she’d grown up. A whole world, and it was gone forever. Part of her missed it, the part that misses an old house even after you’ve moved into a better one. Most ways, this was a better world—but it wasn’t the one she was used to.

  She slid the security cardkey into the lock in the apartment building’s front door. A light flashed green. She turned the knob. The door opened. She closed it behind her. The card was just a flat piece of plastic. She wondered how the lock knew it was supposed to go in there.

  Electronics, she thought. That meant a lot more here than it did in her alternate. Would she ever catch up with people who were born here and had had all these things their whole lives? She sometimes doubted it. Those were the times she got homesick. That other San Francisco might not have been so much, but she’d belonged there. It was hers. Here, she felt like a stranger, a tourist. But she wasn’t going home again.

  She didn’t have to walk upstairs, the way she would have in her old apartment building. The elevator here was fast and silent as a dream. When she walked down the hall to her apartment, the carpeting muffled her steps. The cardkey that had let her into the building also let her into the apartment. It wouldn’t let her into any of the others, though—she’d experimented. How did it know which was which?

  Michael was playing a game on the TV screen. Lucy had never imagined such a thing, but her little brother took to it like a duck to water. The game involved killing dragons and the evil wizards who rode on them. Had dragons been real, they would have been extinct by the time Michael got done slaughtering them.

  He’s the one who’ll do best here, Lucy thought suddenly. He has the fewest things to unlearn.

  Father sat in a chair with his back to the chaos on the television set. He looked up from the book on his lap and managed a smile for Lucy. “How was your day?”

  “It was great. We went to the zoo. It’s a lot fancier—it’s a lot cleaner—than the one in our San Francisco,” she answered. “And the bus went through the Sunset District on the way there and back. It really is a nice place here.” She pointed to the book. “What are you reading?”

  “Well, it says it’s a basic guide to repairing small appliances.” Father’s face was unhappy. “I’m following about one word in three. I think I need something more basic than basic.”

  “They’ve talked about classes for you,” Lucy said. “They aren’t born knowing this stuff here. If they can learn it, you can, too.”

  “Maybe. I hope so. But they’ve got a forty-year head start on me,” her father said.

  “It’ll be all right,” Lucy said stoutly. “Nobody expects you to understand everything all at once.”

  He looked more unhappy yet. “No, I suppose not. But I expected to. I’ve been fixing small appliances since I was younger than Michael is. How much more was there for me to know?” His laugh was harsh. “Well, I’ve found out. I don’t want to be useless here, or on charity. I want to earn my keep.” He slammed the book shut with a noise like a gunshot. “Right now, I don’t know if I ever can. I just don’t know.”

  Behind him, Michael whooped, “Die, villain!” He had no worries. Lucy wished she could say the same.

  Ignoring her little brother as best she could, she said, “You’ll do it, Father.” She meant it—she had confidence in him. “We’ll all do it, sooner or later. Things are new here, that’s all. We haven’t been here very long. We can learn.”

  “Maybe. I hope so.” Her father didn’t sound sure. That worried her. But this new San Francisco had to be harder for him to get used to than it was for her, just as it was harder for her than for Michael. He’d had longer to become a part of the San Francisco they’d left behind.