Matt ignored his own gun and pressed the alligator clip to the metal floor and pried the protective plastic dome off. “Jesus fucking”—he mashed the RESET button—

15

"—Christ!”

"Oh, my,” Martha whispered. “It really works?”

“This is New Mexico?” Matt snapped the protective plastic dome back over the RESET button and stepped through the open door onto a manicured lawn. He turned to Martha, who stood staring. “It’s supposed to be desert.”

There was a white house that looked pretty much like a suburban rambler, though it wasn’t obvious what it was made of. The lawn was enclosed in a metal fence about shoulder high. On the other side of the fence, a nearly identical house, light beige, then a pale blue one, and so on, curving away in both directions. Behind them, a forest too regular to be natural.

The back door of the house slid open, and a man and woman of about middle age stepped out and looked at them warily, hands on hips. They were both wearing only shorts and sandals and were deeply tanned or of mixed race. Matthew assumed the latter, given a couple of millennia of intermarriage.

“How you do that?” the man said. His accent was odd but clear.

“Pushed a button,” Matt said. “It’s a long story.”

“Well, you’ll have to move it,” the woman said.

“Spoils the view,” the man said. “And it isour property.”

Matt looked over his shoulder. Twenty, thirty tons of bank vault? It wasn’t going anywhere.

“Where are we?” Martha said.

“East Los Angeles,” the woman said. “You aren’t dressed for it.”

“I’ll say.” Matt was stifling. He set the time machine down and pulled the rough robe over his head. He was wearing jeans and an MIT tee shirt.

“I can’t . . .” Martha said. Her face was turning bright red.

“We’ll find you something modest,” Matt said. “How far is town?”

“Los Angeles City?” the man said. “About four hundred kays.”

“Ah.” So they had landed close to the predicted place in New Mexico. It had just been annexed to Los Angeles, and suburbanified. “But if you just wanted to buy some women’s clothing?”

“Buy?” the woman frowned.

Matt gestured at the vault. “Money is one thing we have.”

She looked at her husband. “Money?”

He smiled at her. “You didn’t pay attention in school, Em. That’s what they had before bee shits.”

“Oh, I remember. Like dollars.”

“Bee . . . shits?” Matt said.

The man rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Where you from they still use money?”

“The past. We’re from the past.”

“Oh . . . key. From like when?”

“I started in the 2050s. Picked her up a couple of hundred years later.”

They just looked at him. Then Em broke into a broad grin. “It’s a movie! We’re in a movie, Arl!”

He nodded slowly. “Not supposed to say anything about it,” he murmured sotto voce. “That’s your time-travel machine? ”

“Yes, it is,” Matt said, then realized the man was looking at the incongruous bank vault. Concrete dust was still sifting from its sides. He hoped no one had been hurt when it disappeared; it probably was holding the ceiling up.

“Mind if we take a look?”

“No, I don’t mind.” Martha took a breath as if to speak; he silenced her with a look. See how this plays out. He put the actual time machine back into the bag and shouldered it.

The man and woman walked toward the vault door with exaggerated casualness, but then hesitated at the opening. “This thing won’t take off with us in it?”

“I’m sure it won’t, no. Not a chance.” Matt followed them in, Martha behind him. The four of them stood blinking in the semidarkness.

This part of the vault was mostly deposit boxes. They would be forced open eventually, but Martha found something more interesting—money bags.

“Look at this, Professor!” They were stacked like small flour sacks in a corner, four of them stenciled $2.5K IN Q and $10K IN D. Matt took out his Swiss Army knife and figured out which blade was an actual knife.

He cut the bag on top and quarters came cascading out.

They watched it with mild interest. “That’s what money used to look like,” Arl said. “Heavy stuff to carry around.” Matt scooped up a handful of aluminum quarters. Heavy?

“Can you imagine bee shits made out of metal?” Arl shook his head and smiled.

“So what’s a bee shit?” Matt said, thinking the answer should be “honey.”

Arl pulled a roll of bills out of his pocket and fanned them. Several different denominations, different colors. They all had the word BARTER ornately printed all over both sides. “A barter chit,” Arl said.

“Can I see?” Matt reached out, and Arl jerked the roll back protectively.

“He doesn’t know,” Em said. “They’re not like your old-fashioned money. They’re coded to the owner.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s like if you had a fish and I wanted it, but all that I had that you wanted was an apple. The fish is obviously worth more, so we bargain over how many B chits you get along with the apple. Say it’s five. I hand you the five, and when we’re both touching it, it knows it belongs to you. Until you pass it on to someone else.”

“How does it know?” Martha asked.

“Everybody’s DNA is different, you know? It just reads your DNA,” she said slowly, as if speaking to a child. She winked at Arl. Part of the movie.

Martha looked totally lost. “What’s DNA, Professor?”

“It’s in most of the cells in our bodies. I’ll explain. But it’s like fingerprints; everybody has a unique pattern.” He turned to the woman. “What, it analyzes the oils on your skin, your fingers?”

“How should I know?” she said defensively. “It’s just DNA.”

Matt gave a handful of coins to Arl. “These have to be worth something. Aren’t there coin collectors?”

He laughed. “You can find someone who collects almost anything. I don’t know anybody myself. You probably have to go all the way to LA.”

“Maybe we could barter you something,” the woman said innocently. “Take a hundred or so in case some collector shows up.”

“We could take a whole bag,” Arl said. “You’re not going to be carrying them around.”

That made Matt a little suspicious. Why would he want ten thousand one-dollar coins if they were worthless? “What would you want to exchange?”

He shrugged. “Come look at our stuff?”

They stepped outside, and Arl asked whether Matt wanted to close the door. “I think it’s safe here on our property. But you know people.”

“No; I don’t have the key.” He wasn’t sure the heavy thing would close anyway. “Nothing in there but worthless old money.” Arl nodded with lips pursed, perhaps calculating.

He wiped his thumb across the door plate—interesting that they locked up to go out into the backyard—and held it open for them.

“Stuff” it was. Most of the house was one huge warehouse room. Motorcycles and bicycles seemed to be specialties. Above a neat row of parked motorcycles hung a row of bicycles dangling from hooks, all looking new and shiny. Three walls were full of paintings and holos and one was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase with hundreds of books, maybe a thousand. Martha stared at them; probably more books than she had ever seen outside of a library.

On the floor were obvious things like lawn mowers and vacuums, lamps, and fans, and many things whose functions were not obvious.

A door slid open as Arl approached it, and he stood in the doorway to let the others through.

This was a kitchen and pantry. Except for one wall with a window that looked out on the front lawn and street, every wall was covered with hanging pots and pans and utensils, and shelves of foodstuffs. There were hanging baskets of onions, potatoes, and fruit. A refrigerator and huge freezer, both with transparent doors.

Martha stared wildly around the room. “I’ve worked in the MIT kitchen, but I’ve never seen anything like this. You could feed a hundred people.”