“Pass on,” the gate guard said, and Jeremy did.

A hawk wheeled overhead. There were rabbits in the fields. The hawks weren't the only ones to eat them. Sometimes the locals would hunt them with dogs and nets. Rabbit stew could be tasty. No matter what people in the home timeline said, it didn't taste like chicken.

Jeremy realized he hadn't been outside Polisso since coming here. The town couldn't have been even a kilometer square. He traveled several times that distance every day he went to high school. When you were on foot all the time, though, distance stretched dramatically.

A few tombstones poked up through the tall grass on either side of the road. Time had blurred the carvings on them. The locals didn't bury people inside the walls. That wasn't because they thought dead bodies left there might spread disease; they'd never heard of germs, and had no idea how disease spread. The only pollution they worried about was the religious kind.

As Jeremy reached the bend that put Polisso out of sight behind him, he stopped in the middle of the road. Except for the faintest ripple of the wind through the grass and a starling's distant, metallic call, silence was absolute. That kind of quiet was something he didn't get to know in Los Angeles. There was always a murmur of traffic noise there, of airplanes and helicopters overhead, and of the neighbors' TVs or radios or computers or stereos. There was also the sixty-cycle hum of electricity. You didn't constantly notice it, but it was around whenever you went indoors.

Not here. This was just… nothing. The starling fell silent. All Jeremy could hear was the blood rushing in his ears. He hardly ever realized it was there, but it seemed very loud now.

When he started walking again, each thump of his sandal on the paving stones might have come from a giant's heavy boots. He tried to go on tiptoe to be quieter. It didn't seem to do much good.

He concentrated so hard on being quiet, he almost walked past the cave that hid the transposition chamber. That would have been great. He looked ahead. He turned around and looked behind. No one coming either way. He left the road and went over to the mouth of the cave. He had to cast around a bit before he found the hidden trapdoor close by. Grunting with effort, he lifted it and went down the tunnel pathway that led back into the cave.

Almost everything inside the cave seemed the same as it had when his family got here. Only one thing was missing: the transposition chamber. He hadn't expected to find that there. It would have been nice, but he hadn't expected it.

He turned on the PowerBook sitting on a table in a niche farther back in the cave. The computer came to life right away. He sent a message to the Crosstime Traffic electronic monitor in the home timeline that checked this machine's output. He tried to send one, anyway.

Jeremy said several choice things, in neoLatin and in English. Again, he wasn't really surprised, but he was disappointed. Whatever had gone wrong had gone wrong here as well as at the chamber inside Polisso. He'd feared that was true. As he'd told Amanda, Dad-or somebody-would have come out of a chamber here and fixed the problem with the one under the house if it weren't.

After running out of curses, Jeremy said one thing more: “Well, I tried.” Now he and Amanda knew help wasn't right around the corner. They'd already been pretty sure of that. Finding out they were right was news they needed, not news they wanted. For the time being-however long the time being turned out to be-they were on their own.

He thought about growing old and dying in Polisso. Then he thought about not growing old but dying in Polisso. There was a lot more wear and tear here than back in Los Angeles. There were a lot fewer ways to fix anything that went wrong, too.

Filled with such gloomy thoughts, he went to the monitors to make sure he could safely leave. He got a surprise then, and not a pleasant one. An army was coming up the highway toward Polisso.

It was a Roman army. The standard-bearers carried gilded eagles above the letters SPQR. Those stood for Senatus popu-lusque Romanus: “the Senate and people of Rome” in classical Latin. The Senate, these days, was a powerless rich men's club. The people had no voice in politics, and hadn't for two thousand years. The slogan lived on.

Some cavalrymen were heavily armored lancers. Others were archers, with quivers full of arrows on their backs. The big, clumsy matchlock pistols they had here weren't practical for horsemen. Behind the cavalry squadrons marched troop after troop of foot soldiers. Some men carried tall pikes. Others shouldered matchlock muskets. They laughed and joked and sang as they tramped along.

Their being here said they were liable to see action before long. The government wouldn't reinforce Polisso if it didn't think trouble likely. That kind of trouble could come from only one place: Lietuva.

Jeremy remembered the gate guard who'd asked if he and his family were Lietuvan spies. The soldier had been kidding, but he'd been kidding on the square. Were some of the Lietuvan traders in town real spies? Jeremy would have been surprised if someone in Polisso weren't looking into that right now. He wouldn't have wanted to be a Lietuvan trader here. No one in this world had ever heard of laws against illegal search and seizure.

The army's baggage train followed the foot soldiers. Cannon rattled along on wheeled carriages. Wagons carried food and gunpowder and lead for bullets and stone or iron cannonballs. Other wagons held surgeons and their supplies, clerks to keep track of pay records and such, and farriers and blacksmiths and veterinarians to care for the horses.

Those cannon made Jeremy especially thoughtful. Polisso already had a lot of artillery. The central government wouldn't move more in unless it really worried about an attack.

Normally, Jeremy and his family wouldn't have had to fear a war. If it got bad, they could hop into a transposition chamber and leave it behind. But, at least for now, he and Amanda were stuck here. That made him take things more seriously than he would have otherwise.

He was also stuck here-in this cave-till the army marched past and went into Polisso. He couldn't come out while soldiers might spot him. They would wonder what he'd been doing there. Spying on them? The way things were, that would have to occur to them. They would ask questions. They wouldn't be polite about it-or gentle, either.

Up till then, he'd never worried about how long an army took to pass any particular place. While he was waiting, it seemed like forever. In fact, it was several hours. He kept looking down at his wrist to find out just how long. That would have worked better if he'd worn a wristwatch. In Agrippan Rome, he couldn't. Even the big mechanical pocket watches Crosstime Traffic traders sold here were way ahead of the state of the art.

At last, the coast was clear. Jeremy scooted out of the cave and made it to the road before anybody coming from Polisso spotted him. He sauntered toward the city as if he had not a care in the world. Pretending to be carefree took more acting than anything else he'd done since coming to this alternate.

Pretending to be carefree also proved the wrong role. Travelers in Polisso hadn't been allowed to leave while the army was going in. A gray-haired merchant leading a train of mules was the first man who came up to Jeremy. The merchant stared at him and said, “Boy, don't you know there's a gods-cursed army just ahead of you?”

Jeremy couldn't very well claim he didn't know. The horses and oxen of the cavalry and baggage train had left unmistakable hints an army was on the move. So he smiled and shrugged and nodded.