Dan slid up the stairs and out the trap door while Dr. Saul was still talking. Nobody noticed him go. Who paid attention to common soldiers? When you needed one, you went and grabbed him. Otherwise, forget it.

By the time they might have thought about needing Dan, he was already back on the Santa Monica Freeway line with the rest of his company. He could hope they would grab somebody closer to chip concrete.

They likely did. They didn't come grab him. anyhow. That suited him fine.

Liz had seen several wagons like the one the Stoyadinoviches gave the Mendozas. It was made from an old Chevrolet, a brand still alive in the home timeline. The engine and the fenders and the roof were gone. Losing the engine saved a lot of weight. Losing the fenders saved weight, too, and let the wainwright install big wooden wheels with iron rims to replace metal wheels and rubber tires that had rotted away. And in place of the roof were iron hoops and a cloth cover that reached up much higher and let the auto body hold more.

When Liz looked at the team hitched to that contraption, she cracked up. “What's so funny?” George Stoyadinovich asked. “They're good horses-you won't find better ones this side of Santa Anita.”

“I'm sure they are,” she said. “But… It's a car, right? And what's a car? A horseless carriage, right? And so this is a horseless carriage-with horses! How crazy is that?”

Mr. Stoyadinovich thought about that for a few seconds. Then he started to laugh, too. “I never looked at it that way before.” He turned to Dad. “Keep an eye on her. She's dangerous.”

“Really? I never would have noticed,” Dad said, deadpan. Mr. Stoyadinovich laughed harder than ever. Liz stuck her nose in the air and sniffed. That only made Mrs. Stoyadinovich and Morn bust up. Liz glared at her mother; who ignored her. Sometimes you couldn't win.

““You've got a pretty good cargo there, too,” Mr. Stoyadinovich said. “People go out and party when they find Old Time Levi's in good shape. And they should, because it doesn't happen very often any more. And the ones you're taking north, they're just like new.” He winked.

Liz knew what the wink meant. The jeans in the wagon weren't just like new, from some unearthed clothing store. They were new, from the home timeline. The locals wouldn't know the difference. These were special trade Levi 's, made in a style that wouldn't have been out of place in the 1960s.

The Chevy wagon's doors and front seal were still intact. The windshield could have survived, but the driver needed to be able to use the reins when he sat behind the steering wheel.

“Is that a cool set of wheels or what?” George Stoyadinovich said, winking again.

By the standards of this alternate, the wagon was without a doubt a cool set of wheels. By the standards of the home timeline… “I think it's what,” Liz said.

For a moment, George didn't get it. Then he did, and laughed twice as hard to show he did. “You are a troublemaker,'“ he said. He aimed his right forefinger at Liz and brought his thumb down. “Bang!”

She mimed being shot, and staggered all over the place. “Too much ham in your sandwich,” Dad told her.

“Let's go.” Mom was the relentlessly practical one in the family. “The sooner we get started, the sooner we make it up to the Westside again.”

Dad sat behind the wheel. Springs creaked when Liz got in beside him. The old upholstery had long since rotted away. The new upholstery was leather, which made Liz a little queasy. People in the home timeline didn't think leather was quite so bad as fur, but they used imitations almost all the time. There were no imitations here. All the Old Time Naugahyde was long gone, and Naugas seemed to be extinct in this alternate. So the locals used the real stuff, and didn't lose any sleep about it. This couldn't have been any more real-it smelled powerfully of cow.

“Giddyap!” Dad flicked the reins. He had a whip, too, in case the horses didn't feel like moving. But they leaned into the traces and started to pull. Slowly at first, then at a more respectable speed, the wagon headed toward the Harbor Freeway. It had its southern end in Speedro.

In the home timeline, people called the Harbor Freeway the 110 as often as not. It was part of the U.S. Interstate Highway system. Here, it hadn't joined that system when the Fire fell. A sign left over from the Old Time told the world it was State Highway 11.

They had to pay a twenty-five-cent toll to get on what was still known as a freeway even if it wasn't free. Dad passed the silver coin to the toll collector without a murmur. Old as it was, beat-up as it was, the Harbor or 110 or 11 or whatever you called it was far and away the best route north.

Not far from where the Harbor Freeway joined the 405- also called the San Diego Freeway-a hot-air balloon floated five hundred meters in the air, tethered to the ground by a rope. Speedro kept it up there to watch for trouble from a long way off. Seeing it made tears sting Liz 's eyes. In the home timeline, a Goodyear blimp took off and landed right about there. She wondered if the balloon's gas-tight skin had once been part of a blimp.

The San Diego Freeway swung northwest. The Harbor Freeway went straight north. In the home timeline, it went straight north to downtown Los Angeles. In this alternate, it went straight north to… nothing. Several big bombs had taken out downtown here. The stump of City Hall still stood. It looked like a candle that had burned most of the way down and then slumped over.

In the home timeline, Los Angeles County had more people than forty-two or forty-three states. Liz couldn't remember which. Even with cars burning clean hydrogen, that Los Angeles still had smog. And so did this one, even with far less than a tenth as many people. The way the mountains and the breezes worked, air pollution always got trapped here. When the Spaniards first saw Santa Monica Bay, they called it the Bay of Smokes. So tears of sorrow weren't the only things bothering Liz 's eyes.

The horses plodded up the 405. When you lived in a world without cars, without phones, without TV and the Net, nothing happened in a hurry. Dad tried to use the steering wheel to keep the Chevy wagon's wheels from going into potholes. Sometimes he could, and sometimes he couldn't. When they did hit a bump, Liz 's teeth came together with a click. The springs were as old as the rest of the chassis.

Other wagons used the freeway. So did people on horseback, people on foot, people on bone-shaking bicycles, and one guy on a skateboard of sorts. He'd found Old Time roller skates and nailed them to the ends of a board. When he pushed himself along, he could go faster than he would have walking.

Dad eyed his style. “He's not ready for the X Games- that's for sure.”

“They have the sense to wear helmets when they do those stunts,” Mom said. “Knee pads and elbow pads, too. If he falls down, it's just him and the asphalt. I bet the asphalt wins.”

“People aren't nearly as safe here as they are in the home timeline,” Liz said. “They worry about it a lot less, though. It's funny.”

“It's crazy.” her mother said.

“But it's true,” Liz insisted.

“People here figure something's going to get them. And it usually does.” Dad said. “In the home timeline, they think they ought to stay safe, so they try more. And you know what? Sooner or later, something gets them anyway.”

“That's true. But it usually takes longer than it would here,” Mom said, and Dad couldn't very well disagree.

They pulled off the freeway at the Rosecrans ramp, which was still in decent shape. A large sign directed them to GORDON 'S GOOD EATS. Liz knew that offramp in the home timeline, because her family used it to visit cousins. A Denny's sat at that corner there. She stared at Gordon 's. “Oh my God!'“ she said. “It's the same building!”