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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 / 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.
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So had Mother, come to that. But she didn't seem to be having too bad a time.
She didn't feel the need to know why things worked, the way Father did. She
just needed to know how they worked, and she was fine.
When Lucy walked into the kitchen to see if she needed a hand, she found her
chopping green onions in the food processor and heating something in the
microwave. Till she came here, she'd never seen a food processor or a
microwave. That didn't mean she couldn't figure out what they were good for.
"Want any help?" Lucy asked her.
"Not me." Her mother shook her head. "I'm doing fine." She paused. "I heard
what you and your father were talking about in there. I think you're right. I
think we'll all do fine after a while."
The telephone rang. There were telephones in the San Francisco Lucy had left,
but there hadn't been one in the Woos' apartment there. In this San Francisco,
phones were everywhere, either in buildings or carried around. Wherever you
went, you heard snatches of other people's conversations. Paul carried a
telephone.
He'd got a couple of calls while they were at the zoo. Lucy wasn't sure she
liked that. The phone here rang again. "I'll get it," she said, and dashed off
to do just that. "Hello? . . . Oh, Paul. Hello!" Maybe carrying a phone around
wasn't so bad after all.
When Sammy Wong told Paul he'd never work for Crosstime Traffic again, Paul
had done his best to convince himself it didn't matter. The way his heart
thudded when he and his father walked into the
Crosstime Traffic San Francisco office said he'd lied to himself. He wanted to
go out to the alternates again. He wanted to make a career of it. If he
couldn't, if he was stuck in the home timeline . .. That would be pretty hard
to take.
His father looked nervous, too, though he tried to hide it. Dad had been going
out to the alternates for years.
What would he do if his bosses said he couldn't any more?
Paul sighed. When I told Lucy how good the home timeline was, this is the
stuff I didn't talk about. But it's here. It's real.
All the security procedures were real, too. They had to show their IDs. They
had to get their retinas and their fingerprints scanned. They went through
metal and explosives and biohaz-ard detectors. Terrorists were also real. They
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