It was a hot day, like almost any summer day in the Valley. Wearing a steel hat sure didn't make it any cooler. Sweat ran down Dan 's face. “Drink plenty of water!” Captain Kevin called to his men. “'Eat some salt, too. But remember to drink. Nobody keels over before we go into action, right?”

“Yes, sir!” Dan shouted along with the rest of the men. He swigged from his canteen and crunched sea salt between his teeth. Sweat was wet and salty. It only stood to reason that salt and water put back what you sweated away.

For a while, stores and apartment buildings lined Sepulveda Boulevard. After the men passed the 101. though, those petered out. There were some houses on either side of the road. Their windows, empty now of glass, looked on the marching men like the eye sockets of so many skulls. Dan wished that hadn't crossed his mind. It gave him the creeps. His free hand twisted in a sign to hold evil away.

His shield and the helmet and his quiver and the long knife he wore on his belt and the pack with his rations in it all started to feel heavy as lead. Do I really need all this stuff? he wondered. Can Ithrow some of it away?

He tried to imagine what Sergeant Chuck would say if he did. Then he tried to imagine what the sergeant would do to him if he did. Whatever it was, it wouldn't be pretty. He hung on to his stuff.

Soldiers lined up to fill their canteens at a cistern. Without those, the Valley would have been in trouble. So would the Westside and all the other little countries that made up Greater LA. You had to save all the winter water you could, or else you'd run low in the summertime.

A medic poured brandy into each canteen-not too much. It kept down the runs. Anybody who improved the water too much caught it from his sergeant. After the men drank, they pressed on.

Along with her father and mother, Liz watched the Westside's soldiers march toward battle. They tramped west along Sunset toward the 405 and Sepulveda. Here as in the home timeline's Southern California, the very richest of the rich lived north of Sunset.

There were differences, though. In the home timeline, hardly any of those super-rich people had children who joined the army. Lots of young officers came from that group here. They were willing to put their lives on the line for what they believed in.

In other words, they were willing to put their lives on the line for the sake of a wall across the top of Sepulveda Pass. The more Liz thought about it, the crazier it seemed. She wondered what would happen if she said so to one of the soldiers in the muddy green, not-too-uniform uniforms. No, actually, she didn't wonder. She had a pretty good idea. She'd get arrested for being unpatriotic, and things would go downhill from there.

So, leeling like a hypocrite, she cheered and clapped her hands. One of the standard-bearers grinned at her. Why not? She was a pretty girl not far from his age. The Westside flag had a bear on it. Part of the bear seemed to come from the one on the old California state flag, part from the UCLA Bruin. That left it looking fierce and friendly at the same time, but the Westsiders didn't care.

“How big is this army?” Liz asked her father.

“I don't know.” He shrugged. “A couple of thousand men? Something like that.”

“Are they enough?”

Her father shrugged again. “We'll find out,” he said, which wasn't what she wanted to hear.

The cheering got louder. Here came Cal and his dog Pots. The beast looked as if it could eat half the Valley's army all by itself. Behind Cal came a horse that carried armor for Pots. The chunks of iron looked like the ones that had protected horses back in the days when knights were bold and life was nasty, brutish, and short. (Hobbes, Liz thought, remembering AP Euro.)

Cal waved his big white Stetson. “We'll get 'em!” he shouted to the people. “They won't come past us!”

“Ils ne passeront pas,” Dad murmured. “That goes back a couple of hundred years. I wonder if he knows.”

“Ask not what the Westside can do for you,” Cal added. “Ask what you can do for the Westside!”

Liz 's father stirred again. That one rang a bell with her, too. She remembered grainy black-and-white video from the middle of the twentieth century. Even across almost a century and a half of changing hair and clothes styles, she remembered thinking how handsome John Kennedy was. Maybe he hadn't been the greatest President. Nobody'd cared much, then or later. An aura of glamour surrounded him to this day.

It did here, too. Kennedy half-dollars weren't just coins in this alternate. They were amulets. Only rich men had them, and mostly wore them on chains around their necks. The coins were credited with everything from magically stopping bullets-more irony, when you thought about it-to curing smallpox.

Smallpox… Liz rubbed at her left arm. In the home timeline, the disease was extinct. But she'd had to get vaccinated before she came to this alternate. People here vaccinated, too-they remembered that much. Not everybody got vaccinated, though, and the disease still broke out every now and then. The pocked faces of survivors were… appalling.

And people from the home timeline did a brisk business selling perfect copies of Kennedy halves. Yes, it was taking advantage of superstition. But the superstition would have been there whether they took advantage of it or not. In other alternates, Crosstime Traffic sold religious relics of several different kinds. What was the difference, really? Liz had trouble seeing any.

For that matter, what was the difference between superstition and religion generally? Lots of people had spilled lots of ink and killed lots of trees and pushed around lots of electrons trying to define the answer. So far, most of what they said boiled down to What I believe is religion, and what those foolish people over there believe is superstition.

There was no evidence that knocking on wood made the world less likely to go wrong. There was no evidence that praying in a church or synagogue or mosque made the world less likely to go wrong, either. That didn't stop people from doing both kinds of things. When it first became plain that science explained how things happened-not necessarily why, but how-better than religion did, lots of “experts,” from Karl Marx on down, predicted that religion would wither up and die.

It hadn't happened in the home timeline. It also hadn't happened in any high-tech alternate Crosstime Traffic had found. Most people weren't rational enough, or weren't rational often enough, to be satisfied believing this was all there was. By now, the “experts” doubted they ever would. That might prove as wrong as the earlier experts' certainty that religion would fail.

In low-tech alternates, religion was the only game in town. More and more, that was how things worked in this one. Liz had a hard time blaming the locals for feeling that way. What had science done for them here? Dropped them in the frying pan and turned up the heat, and that was about it.

Oh. the Westsiders still called themselves scientific. But they still called themselves democratic, too. That was another joke, except it wasn't funny.

A priest and a rabbi and a minister marched with the West-side army. No doubt a priest and a rabbi and a minister marched with the Valley's army, too. And no doubt both sides were sure God meant them to win. Some things didn't change no matter what alternate you were in-and no matter how much you wished they would.

Supply wagons made a dull close to a military parade, but no army was much good without them. Mules and horses twitched their ears as they trudged along. It wasn't their war, but people made the work anyway. They didn't like it, not that the teamsters cared. The draft animals got even less vote than the people had at the City Council meeting.