“Oh, no!” Liz said.

What Liz 's father said meant about the same thing as Oh, dear! and Oh, no! Still, it was a good thing the wagon that had been a car carried no more gasoline. What Dad said would have made the stuff explode.

Then he said something a little calmer but no less disgusted: “Timing is everything, isn't it?”

“How are we supposed to get through that?” Mom asked.

“Carefully?” Dad suggested. Mom and Liz both gave him the same kind of look, the look you gave somebody being difficult on purpose. He sounded hurt as he went on. “Well, I don't see how else we can make it through that unless we feel like getting filled full of holes. Which isn't what I had in mind.”

“Let me put it another way,” Liz said. When Dad was being difficult, sometimes the best thing to do was be difficult right back. “How do we go around that? Or how do we get to West-wood without getting shot?” Those were two other ways, as a matter of fact. And the second one let Dad keep on being difficult if he felt like it.

Mom's warning cough worked as well as a lion's warning growl would have. “Did I say anything?” Dad asked plaintively.

“Not yet,” Mom said. “I suggest you don't, unless it helps.”

“Okay. The only way to get to Westwood by going around the fighting is probably by going through one of the dead zones.”

Liz wasn't sure that helped, even if she was pretty sure her father was right. Dead zones were the places where bombs had landed. They were the reason the Harbor Freeway didn't make it up to downtown Los Angeles in this alternate. They were the reason the Santa Monica Freeway didn't make it all the way into Santa Monica. They weren't radioactive any more, not after 130 years. But they were still so battered that hardly anybody lived in them.

“Can we get the wagon through?” Mom asked.

“Won't we stand out like bugs on a plate?” Liz said at the same time.

“'I don't know,” Dad told Mom. To Liz, he said, “No, we won't stand out that bad. Things are flat in the dead zones, but not flat flat, if you know what I mean. That's not what worries me about the whole thing.”

“And what worries you about the whole thing is…?” Mom prompted.

“Whether the Westside and Speedro will try to sneak soldiers through the dead zone and get into Westwood that way,” Dad said. “Does the Valley have troops looking west? If they don't, the other side will turn their flank just like that.” He snapped his fingers.

A split second later, so did Liz. “I bet that's what Luke was trying to find out!”

“I bet you're right,” her father said. “One thing we can be pretty sure of, though-if he did find out, he didn't pass it on to the people farther south. Of course, we don't know if he was the only spy they had. If they were smart, he wouldn't have been.”

“I don't like the idea of maybe needing to leave the wagon behind,” Mom said. “How can we be traders if we don't have trade goods? And does the Valley have soldiers posted at the edge of the Santa Monica dead zone?”

“Good question,” Dad said. “If there are no other questions, class is dismissed.”

“You say that when you mean you don't know,” Liz said.

“I never worried about it. Did you?” Dad said. Liz had to shake her head. He added, “Besides, they could have sent them out after we, uh, disappeared from this alternate. What it all boils down to is-”

“Which stupid chance do we want to take?” Mom finished for him.

He nodded. “Couldn't have put it better myself.”

The Santa Monica Freeway line held through the first day of fighting. Valley riflemen and musketeers kept Westside and Speedro soldiers from breaking through for a couple of hours. Then the heavy machine gun arrived. It fired off a burst-pock! pock! pock! pock! Those big, heavy booms couldn't be mistaken for anything else. Neither could the way the big, heavy bullets chewed through wood and bricks-and flesh-out to a mile and beyond. As soon as the machine gun opened up. the enemy lost his enthusiasm for advancing.

“Ha!” Sergeant Chuck yelled. “Thought we forgot about it, did you? Well, let's see how you like it!”

The Westsiders didn't like it a bit. One of their cannon thundered. The ball flew over the machine-gun crew's heads. You couldn't hide a cannon, not with all the smoke it spat. The machine gunners started banging away at it as soon as it fired.

If Dan had served the cannon, he would have run for cover as soon as it fired. But what did you do then? You couldn't shoot once and vanish, not if you wanted to win. And so the cannoneers had to come out again and try to reload their piece. One of the men in the machine-gun crew had binoculars much like the Tascos Dan used on sentry duty. As soon as he saw the artillerymen stirring, he let out a yell. The machine gun fired several more bursts.

Another cannon fired, and another. One cannonball cut a Valley soldier in half about six feet from the machine gun. Dan tried not to look at that, but it had a sick fascination to it. The poor man’s top half didn't die fast enough to suit Dan -or, probably, the fellow himself.

But the near miss was also just one of those things to the machine-gun crew. They went on shooting as if nothing had happened. Before Dan went into battle himself, he wouldn't have understood that. He did now. If the machine gunners had the shakes, they didn't have time to indulge them. Doing your job, doing what you could for your friends, came first.

That was also true for the Westsiders and the soldiers from Speedro who seemed to be their allies. They pushed forward again and again, even though the terrible machine gun and the Valley riflemen and musketeers-and, once or twice, even the archers-punished them when they tried. Medics with red crosses on their smocks dragged the wounded to cover. You weren't supposed to shoot at medics-it wasn't sporting. Accidents did happen. For the most part, they were real accidents, not cheating.

Dan glanced at the sun, which was sliding down toward the Pacific. That was how he thought about it. He didn't worry about the earth turning. He worried about… “What'll we do when it gets dark?”

“Depends on what those sweet and charming people do,” Sergeant Chuck said, or words more or less to that effect.

“Okay, cool. Far out, even, man,” Dan said. “What'll they do? What do we do if they try a night attack?”

“Gotta have fires,” Chuck answered. “We get some big fires going, they'll show us anybody who tries sneaking up.'“ He went on, thinking out loud: “Gotta get fuel together, then. We should have done that already, but I don't think we have, or not enough.” He eyed Dan in a… sweet and charming way.

“Hey!” Dan squawked. He didn't like shooting at people. He really didn't like people shooting at him. But he didn't want to chop wood and carry it, either. “C'mon, man-cut me some slack. I was the one who made you think of this!”

“Well… yeah,” the sergeant admitted. He wasn't even slightly used to backing down. After a moment, he reached over and thumped Dan on the arm. “Anybody who'd sooner stay and fight than get out of it's okay in my book.”

“Mm.” All of a sudden, Dan wondered whether squawking had been such a good idea. But once you chose something, you didn't get to take it over. If you got to try again, to do things differently, wouldn't you have another world alter a while? Maybe better, maybe worse, but for sure not the same.

Sergeant Chuck went to talk to Captain Kevin. Maybe Kevin had to talk with higher-ups, too. Any which way, some of Kevin 's company and some of the reinforcements came down off the freeway line. Before long, Dan heard them hacking away with axes. He heard them cussing, too. They liked their newduty no more than he would have.

Like it or not, they got the job done. The.50-caliber machine gun laid down covering fire so they could move the wood out in front of the freeway line-out to the south. A couple of soldiers got wounded doing that, but only a couple. At sunset, the Valley men lit the bonfires.