Some of the musketeers groaned-but none of the men at whom Chuck was looking directly. He would have blistered them if they'd tried getting away with that. Dan didn't want to fire another volley, either. But he wanted to do the shooting and not get shot if he had to fight some more, so he kept practicing without making any noise.

Several volleys later, the smoke was making tears run down his face from eyes that felt as if they had ground glass in them. “Well, that'll probably do for today,” the underofficer said. He grinned a crooked grin. “If I told you to load for another one, chances are you'd aim it at me. And you might even hit what you were aiming at. I don't think it’s real likely, but I don't want to take the chance, either. So we'll knock off for the day.”

He stood only a few feet from his weary students, not a hundred yards down the range. If they turned their matchlocks on him, he would have more holes than a colander, and he had to know it. But he didn't want to admit, to himself or to the musketeers, that they were getting the hang of it.

They were plenty glad to knock off for the day. The sun was sliding down the western sky toward the nuclear glass and rubble of Santa Monica and toward the Pacific beyond it. Supper soon, and then sleep, except for the ones unlucky enough to draw evening sentry duty.

Dan always looked forward to sleep. He did enough on any day of soldiering to leave him tired. Garrisoning Westwood wasn't so bad as the strike through the Sepulveda Pass, though. Then he'd always wanted to curl up and grab what rest he could. He'd always wanted to, and never been able to. He didn't know how much sleep he'd got in that mad dash south. He did know it wasn't enough.

Fowls were roasting on spits above cookfires. Cooks basted them with chilies and cilantro and other spices in olive oil. The delicious smell made Dan 's stomach growl. He could hardly wait till the savory birds got done.

Sergeant Chuck reacted differently. Pointing to the birds, he said. “I wonder whose goose they're cooking.”

“Oh, wow!” Dan groaned. “After a joke like that, Sergeant, it ought to be yours.” You could be rude to a superior as long as you used proper military courtesy when you did it… and as long as you picked your spot with care.

Chuck grinned at Dan. “I've got no shame. How's your girl, and what's she really pulling out of the UCLA library?”

“She's not my girl,” Dan said regretfully. Liz was polite, but he could tell she liked him less than he liked her. He didn't know what he could do about that. So far, he hadn't been able to do anything. Sighing, he went on, “you know what we talked about the last time I was over there?”

“Tell me,” Chuck said.

“You're gonna laugh,” Dan said. The sergeant shook his head and held up his right hand, as if to swear he wouldn't. Thus encouraged, Dan went on, “'Whether the earth really does go around the sun like you learn in school.”

Chuck stared at him, then threw back his head and let loose. He didn't just laugh-he howled. “I'm sorry,” he said at last, not sounding sorry at all. “You go visit a pretty girl, and you talk about that? The moon and the stars and how pretty they are, sure. But the sun and the earth? C'mon, man! You can do better than that.”

“See? I told you you would.” Dull embarrassment made Dan 's ears burn. It also heated his defiance. “And you know what else? It was interesting, too.” So there, he thought.

“Okay, okay. Don't get all uptight about it. I said I was sorry,” Chuck replied. Dan realized you didn't get an apology out of a sergeant every day, not if you were a common soldier. “So what does she think about that? Me, I don't know if the teachers are as smart as they think they are.”

“I'm with you,” Dan said. “If the people in the Old Time were all that smart, would they have let the Fire fall? So they didn't know everything there was to know-you can bet your sweet hippy on that.”

“There you go,” Chuck said. “That sure makes sense to me. How'd Liz like it?”

“Not even a little bit,” Dan answered. “You hear her talk, the earth spins around to make days, and it goes around the sun to make years.”

“You know what?” Sergeant Chuck said as they lined up to get their pieces of chicken or duck or whatever the cook dished out. “The real deal is, so what? I mean, who cares? It doesn't make a penny's worth of difference in your life or mine. It wouldn't matter if the earth was shaped like a.50-caliber bullet. We're just going to see this little bil of it, and that's all.”

“Yeah,” Dan said. Back in the Old Time, you could fly all over the world. Those people might not have been all that smart-must have been human, in other words-but they knew more than their modern descendants. That seemed unfair to Dan. He wondered what Liz thought about it. She knew a lot. Did she miss not knowing even more?

Seven

Luke was a ginger-bearded trader up from Speedro. Liz didn't know whether the Valley soldiers knew he'd come up to deal with her folks. She would have bet against it. Luke had the air of a man who dodged authority whenever he could. And Speedro and the Valley weren't the best of friends anyhow.

“Got me some of the things you said you were looking for,” he said now, puffing on a nasty pipe and sipping from a glass of raw corn whiskey Dad had given him.

Dad had a drink of his own, though he didn't smoke. There was such a thing as taking authenticity too far. Wrecking your lungs crossed the line. “Well, let's have a look,”' he said.

“Sure enough.” Luke had a knapsack on his back and two stout flintlock pistols and a Bowie knife on his belt. Ignoring the guns, he slid off the knapsack. “Don't quite know why you want these, but I found 'em.”

“Oh, come on,” Liz 's father said. “You never ask that question. Maybe I'll make a profit selling them to somebody with more money than sense. Maybe I want 'em for myself, just because of how' far out they are. Long as you make money selling them to me, what's your worry?”

The other trader gave him a crooked grin. “Well, I knowhow that works, all right. One fellow's trash is another guy's treasure.' The grin grew more crooked yet. “And we're all living in the middle of the trash from the Old Time, and I expect we will be from now till doomsday, or maybe twenty minutes longer.”

“Wouldn't be surprised,” Dad said, and then, “Well, well. How about that?”'

Luke displayed a dozen popular-science and science-fiction magazines from 1965, 1966, and 1967. The UCLA library's files on those were less complete than they might have been. Sometimes the library's holdings were less complete than the card catalogue said they should be. Sometime between the fall of the Fire and now. people had made things disappear.

To Liz. stealing from a library wasn't just a crime. It was a sin. And this library's card catalogue fascinated her. All the equivalents in the home timeline were electronic, of course. The idea of a room full of actual, physical files you could shuffle through struck her as extremely slick. And. surprisingly, once you got the hang of it, it was almost as fast as accessing a database.

Thai wasn't lair. Using the card catalogue was accessing a database. You couldn't do il with just a computer and a keyboard or a mike, but you could do it. Some of the things you could do without electricity startled her. They still had working wind up phonographs here. In the home timeline, vinyl was a teeny-tiny niche market. Liz didn't think she'd ever heard a real record there. It was nearly all downloads. Here, records were all they'd known about when things went boom. Hearing a classic like the Doors first album coming out of a tinny speaker that looked like a giant ear trumpet, and hearing it all full of scratches and hisses because it was so ancient, was almost enough to make her cry.