Harry Turtledove Crosstime Traffic 04 The Disunited States (BD) (v1.1) (lit)

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Getting it all in text, without video or even stills, made him feel he'd
fallen back in time instead of going across it. The Russians had turned a
tailored virus loose inChechnya , and hadn't immunized enough people outside
the borders to keep it from spreading. He shook hishead, People had been
wondering when the Russians would get their act together for hundreds of
years. It hadn't happened yet. It didn't look as if it would happen any time
soon, either.Russia was too big to conquer and too big to ignore, same as
always.
InIran , the Shah's secret police were executing ayatollahs again. And a
suicide bomber tried to blow up the Shah's prime minister in revenge. That was
also another verse of the same old song. So was the ecoterrorist outfit
claiming responsibility for poisoning fifty kilometers of the Amazon to
protest logging policies inBrazil. And the Scottish nationalists had blown up
another British mail truck. It was as if Justin had never left the home
timeline.
But getting his news like this left him strangely distant from it. He
couldn't see and hear what was happening. All he could do was read about it.
He had to make the pictures in his own mind, the way he would if he were
reading a history book. He didn't even have any pictures to help, as he would
in a book. He might have fallen back from the end of the twenty-first century
to the end of the nineteenth.
Along with the usual hotel supplies were special soap and shampoo marked
PLEASE USE ON YOUR FIRST DAY HERE. When Justin did, he found they smelled
strongly medicinal. They probably killed a lot of the germs he'd brought from
the alternate where he was staying. The shampoo wasn't easy on his hair that
was for sure.
Later, he wondered how Crosstime Traffic would know whether he used that soap
and shampoo. Did transmitters in the packaging record that it was opened? Had
he washed away a microchip on the surface of the soap that reacted when it got
wet? Or did a camera in the shower stall send his image back to the main
station in this alternate, wherever that was?
He didn't like the idea, not one bit. Probably no humans were involved only a
computer program that wouldn't squeal to a real, live person unless it caught
him breaking the rules. He didn't like it anyway.
Mom squawked when he mentioned it at dinner that night. Mr. Brooks only
shrugged. "With all the computer technology we've got these days, something or
somebody is watching you all the time anyway. Either you get used to it or you
go nuts."
"That's how it works, all right," Lonnie agreed. "I know they monitor
transposition chambers." He shrugged. "What can you do?"
"There's a difference between monitoring a chamber and a shower." Justin's
mother sounded like a cat with its dignity ruffled.
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"To you, maybe.Not to Crosstime Traffic, especially not in a quarantine
station," Lonnie said. "If you kick up a fuss, they'd say they had an interest
in making sure you followed instructions. How would you convince a court they
were wrong?"
What Mom said then didn't have much to do with convincing a court. It came
from the heart, though. Mr. Brooks laughed. "That's telling 'em," he said.
He'd been through the army. You didn't have much privacy there. Sometimes you
didn't have any. Justin had found that out himself, the hard way, when he put
onAdrian 's uniform. His mother had never had to do anything like that. She
didn't know how lucky she was, which might be literally true.
The mattress on the bed was softer than Justin liked. That kept him awake . .
. oh, an extra fifteen seconds or so. He was still catching up on sleep from
his hectic couple of days of carrying a gun. He didn't have any nightmares
about shooting the African-American kid. That was progress, too.
Sunshine sliding between slats of the Venetian blinds poked him in the eye
and woke him up the next morning. He heated up some waffles and slathered them
with syrup.
Mr. Brooks came into the kitchen as Justin was fixing himself seconds. The
older man made a beeline for the espresso machine. He waited impatiently while
it made rude noises. "Couldn't get a decent cup of coffee in that alternate,
either," he grumbled, and then, "Waffles, eh? That doesn't look too bad."
"They're okay." Justin wouldn't give them any more than that.
Mr. Brooks laughed. "You can't expectTrumpCity food and service here." Justin
nodded. The original Trump was manyyears dead, but his name remained a byword
for extravagant luxury. Justin had seen pictures of him on the Net. He wore
stiff, old-fashioned, uncomfortable-looking clothes, but he always had one
very pretty girl or another on his arm. The girls probably didn't think the
clothes were funny.
Justin and Lonnie spottedCarolina parakeets the next day. They heard them
before they saw them. To Justin's ear, the squawks and chirps belonged to a
tropical jungle, not these ordinary Eastern woods. But there they were: green
birds with yellow heads and, some of them, reddish faces.
Lonnie was in seventh heaven. "They've been extinct in the home timeline
about as long as passenger pigeons have," he said. "They never were as common,
though. Of course, nothing was as common as passenger pigeons before the white
man came. But Audubon, back in the first part of the nineteenth century, talks
aboutCarolina parakeets all the way out past theMississippi . We don't know
what we're missing."
"We've got starlings instead," Justin said.
He wanted to hit a nerve with that, and he got what he wanted. Lonnie said
some things about starlings that would have shocked the Audubon Society and
the SPCA. Then he said something even less polite. Justin laughed, but he knew
Lonnie was kidding on the square. Starlings were nothing but pests.
Lonnie went into the woods looking for ivory-bill woodpeckers. As far as
Justin was concerned, the chamber operator was welcome to that kind of
exploring. No cell-phone net here, wild animals that had never learned to fear
people ... He shook his head. If an ivory-bill happened to show up where he
could seeit, that would be great. And if not, he wouldn't lose any sleep over
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it.
But when Lonnie came back that night, he was even happier than he had been
when he set out. He waved his video camera. "I've got 'em!" he said, as if
he'd gone hunting with a shotgun instead of a lens and a flash drive.
"Way to go," Mr. Brooks said. "But now that you've seen the birds you wanted
to see most, what will you do for the rest of the time you're here?"
The question didn't faze Lonnie. "Keep on watching them," he answered. "When
will I have another chance?"
"Well, you've got me there," Mr. Brooks admitted.
They stayed in quarantine for three weeks. Once a week, a computerized lab
system drew blood from their fingers and analyzed it for any trace of genetic
material from the plague virus. The system did the same for breath they
exhaled into plastic bags. After three negative readings in a row, the powers
that be were . . . almost satisfied. More bars of the disinfectant soap and
tubes of the disinfectant shampoo appeared, with instructions to use them as
on the first day in quarantine.
As Justin washed, he wondered again if he was under surveillance. He went on
washing. What else could he do? Maybe, when he got back to the home timeline, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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