know. "Doctors here are kind of dim," he added.
Both his mother and Mr. Brooks coughed loudly. Under the dirt and stubble,
Justin turned red. He didn't take it back, though.
"Hospital's still my best bet, isn't it?" Beckie said. "I want to do
everything I can."
"Well. . ." Justin started. He got two more sharp coughs. Beckie wondered
what was going on. Whatever it was, nobody seemed to want to come out and tell
her. Justin said, "Let me see what I can do."
What was that supposed to mean? Whatever it meant, Justin's mom and Mr.
Brooks didn't like it for beans. Beckie could see as much, even if she had no
idea why they felt the way they did. "What exactly do you think that is?"
Beckie spoke as carefully as Mr. Brooks had a few minutes before.
"I don't know yet. Give me till five o'clock," Justin said, while the two
older people in the shop looked daggers at him. He went on, "If she gets
really, really sick, don't wait for me. I don't want her to die before I do
... whatever I can do."
He still wouldn't say what that was. What could a coin and stamp dealer's
nephew do that a hospital couldn't? But he sounded as if he thought he could
do something, somehow. And Beckie knew the hospitals weren't having much luck
with the disease. Would they have done better inCalifornia ? How could she
tell?
She made up her mind. "Okay, Justin. I'll see what happens, that's all. I
hope you're not just trying to impress me or something. If you're blowing
smoke on this, I never want to have anything to do with you any more. You hear
me?"
"I hear you," he said soberly.
"All right, then." Without giving him a chance to answer, she turned and
walked out of the shop and started back to the hotel. When she went past the
stinking, swollen body in the street, she was reminded you didn't need a
plague to die. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time could do the job
every bit as well.
As soon as the door closed behind Beckie, both Justin's mother and Mr. Brooks
turned on him. "What do you think you can do for her grandmother?" Mom asked,
at the same time as Mr. Brooks was saying, "What do you think you're going to
do for the old bat?" The only difference between them was that Mr. Brooks knew
Mrs. Bentley while Justin's mom didn't.
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"I don't know," he admitted. "If I talk with people back in the home
timeline, maybe I'll come up with something. I do want to try."
"Because you're sweet on Beckie, that's why," Mr. Brooks said.
"Are you?" Justin's mother demanded.
Justin didn't like getting yelled at in stereo any more than anyone else
would have. He couldn't do anything about it here. "Some," he said, because
Mr. Brooks would have made him out to be a liar if he tried to deny it. But he
went on, "Seems only fair we try to help her grandmother, though. She might
have picked up the disease from one of us."
"Not likely, not when the immunity shots seem to be working," Mr. Brooks
said.
"You didn't let me finish!" Justin said. Mr. Brooks blinked. Justin didn't
talk back a whole lot. Most of the time, he was on the easygoing side. That
seemed to make him more effective when he did lose it. He went on, "Or she
might have caught it probably did catch it when she was coming down
toCharleston with you. Any way you look at it, it's our fault. We ought to fix
it if we can."
"Would you say the same thing if you didn't like this girl?" his mother
asked.
"I hope so," Justin answered.
Mr. Brooks started to laugh. Justin stared at him. So did his mom. "Let him
try, Cyndi," the coin and stamp dealer said. "Sometimes, if you're eighteen or
so, you've got to lower your head and charge. If he can talk the people in the
home timeline into doing something about it, more power to him. And if he
can't well, he gave it his best shot, and he won't be mad at us for stopping
him."
"It won't work," Justin's mother said.
"I don't think it will, either." Mr. Brooks talked as if Justin weren't
there, which annoyed him. But they did let him try, and that was all that
really mattered.
He went down to a room in the basement he had to enter through a palm lock.
The wrong prints would have immovably locked the door and turned on
self-destruct switches behind it. He had some of the right ones.
Inside, everything came from the home timeline: plastic chairs, desk,
PowerBook. Any kind of communication between alternates was hard. You needed
enormous bandwidth to send even old-fashioned e-mail. And Justin did exactly
that.
If you have a cure for the diseaseOhio has turned loose onVirginia ready,
please send some doses as soon as you can, he typed.
He waited. And he waited. And he waited some more. After what seemed like
forever but was nine minutes by the clock on the wall (also from the home
timeline, even if local ones were just as good), he got an answer. Who isill,
and how serious is it?wrote the person on the other end of the line.
It's pretty serious, Justin answered. An old lady we stayed with inElizabeth
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is sick now. She came toCharleston with Mr. Brooks. She probably caught the
disease riding in the car with him.Only fair for us to help out if we can.
Another pause.The message crossed the timelines in an instant. Figuring out
what to do about it figuring out whether to do anything took longer. After
another eternity, this one of eleven minutes, a reply appeared on the
PowerBook's screen. Regret that the possibility of spreading disease across
the alternates makes this impossible.
Justin said something that had to do with manure. He'd had plenty of time to
think about this, and he wasn't going to take no lying down. You've got to
have a quarantine center on some alternate with no people in it, he wrote.
Send the transposition chamber there and decontaminate it before you use it
again.
There is a quarantine center, admitted whoever it was back in the home
timeline. But there is no opening for a transposition chamber at what matches
your location. The chamber cannot materialize inside solid ground, not without
an explosion.
He talked about fertilizer some more. He already knew a chamber couldn't come
out inside of something solid. The boom that followed if it tried wouldn't be
small. How far from here is the closest digging equipment?he asked. If the
person back in the home timeline said it was five hundred kilometers away, he
knew he'd have to give up.
Another pause followed. He had a pretty good idea of what was going on this
time. The person back in the home timeline was checking the answer to his
question. As time stretched, Justin started to suspect that person was also
checking to see whether to tell him the truth.
About 500 meters away, Justin knew it was crazy to think the response
appeared on the screen reluctantly, but it felt that way to him. He had to
read it twice to be sure no kilo lay in front of meters. When he was, he
whooped and did a war dance in the bare little room.
They couldn't see the war dance back in the home timeline. So the quarantine
alternate did have some kind of installation in what corresponded toCharleston
, did it? He ran back to the laptop and wrote,Then what are you waiting for?
Authorization of the effort and expense.The answer came as a dash of cold
water. It reminded him he was working for a big corporation. The people who
ran Crosstime Traffic worried about right and wrong only as much as they had [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]