Harry Turtledove - The Disunited States of America

"It would be nice if Ohio were giving the African Americans guns because it wanted them to get their rights," Justin said.

Mr. Brooks nodded. "Yeah, it would be nice, but don't hold your breath. The people in Ohio don't like Negroes much better than the people in Virginia do. Oh, they don't have laws holding them down in Ohio, but that's mostly because Ohio hasn't got enough Negroes to make laws like that worth bothering about. There aren't a lot of Negroes in this alternate except in the old South."

"How come?" That wasn't Justin—he knew the answer. It was Mom.

"In the home timeline, blacks moved north and west in the twentieth century. They did factory work in the World Wars, things like that," Randolph Brooks said. "That didn't happen here. They would have had to cross state lines, and the states that didn't have many didn't want any more."

Justin decided to show off a little: "And a lot of states were on the Prussian side in the First World War—the Great War, they still call it here. They had lots of German settlers, and they didn't like the way England was pushing them around. So here they fought the war on both sides of the Atlantic, and it was almost twice as bad as it was in the home timeline."

"That's how it worked, all right." Mr. Brooks eyed him for a minute, then glanced over at Mom. "He's a smart fellow."

"He must get it from his father." Mom's voice had a brittle edge. She and Justin's dad were divorced a couple of years earlier. Mom wasn't over it yet, and neither was Justin. Neither was Dad, come to that. Whenever Justin saw him, he said things like, / sure wish your mother and I could have got along.

Every time Justin heard that, he wanted to scream, Then why didn't you? He'd asked Dad once (carefully not screaming). All he got back was a shrug and, Sometimes things don't work out the way you want them to. Mom said almost the same thing in different words. What it boiled down to was that they couldn't stand each other any more, even if they both wished they still could. That didn't do Justin any good. He'd needed a long time to see that, no matter how hard he wished they would, they weren't going to get back together again.

"Wherever he gets it from, it's a good thing to have." Mr. Brooks didn't notice how Mom sounded. Or maybe he did, and just didn't let on. A lot of politeness boiled down to not saying anything you could be sorry for later.

Mom said something along those lines: "Brains are like anything else. What you do with them matters more than how many you've got."

"That's a fact," Mr. Brooks agreed. Grown-ups always said stuff like that. They could afford to. They'd already gone through college and got themselves settled in life. When you were getting ready for SATs and wishing you hadn't ended up with a B— in sophomore English, you wanted all the brains in the world. But then Mr. Brooks added, "I will say one thing for being smart—it lasts longer than being strong or being good-looking . . . most of the time, anyway."

He was looking at Mom when he tacked on the last few words. She kind of snorted, but Justin could see she was pleased. As for Justin, he found himself nodding. Oh, a handful, a tiny handful, of guys got rich playing sports. But even the very best of them were washed up at forty—and wasn't that a sorry fate, with the rest of your life still ahead of you? And time turned the homecoming queen and her court ordinary, too.

If you were sharp, though, you stayed sharp your whole life long. Sooner or later, you'd pass a lot of people who got off to faster starts than you did. If you could stand being the tortoise and not the hare . . .

There was the rub. Shakespeare was almost five hundred years dead now, but he still had a word for it. Who wanted to wait for a payoff if there was a chance of getting a big one right away? Justin knew he wasn't good-looking enough for that to matter to him. Oh, he wasn't bad, but you had to be better than not bad if you were going to make it on looks.

He was big and he was strong. He was a backup tight end on his high-school football team, a backup guard on the basketball team, and the right-handed half of a platoon at first base on the baseball team. He did okay at all his sports, no more than okay at any. He wasn't in line for an athletic scholarship, let alone a pro career.

It would have to be brains, then. When he got back to the home timeline after this stretch at Crosstime Traffic, he was heading for Stanford. Comparative history was a subject that hadn't existed before transposition chambers were invented. These days, you could either use it for the company or teach once you got your degree. You weren't likely to get movie-star rich, but you were pretty sure to do all right.

Mr. Brooks said something. Woolgathering the way Justin was, he missed it. "I'm sorry?" he said.

"I said, how would you like to go out into the boonies with me tomorrow?" Mr. Brooks repeated. "I've got a customer for an 1861 Oregon goldpiece, only he's got car trouble and he can't get down to Charleston. We've been doing business ever since I opened up here, so I don't mind getting in the car for him.

There's always a lot of handselling in coins and stamps, even in the home timeline."

"Sure, I'll come. Why not?" Justin said. "Be nice to see a little more of this alternate than what's across the street from the shop."

"Okay, then—we'll do that," Mr. Brooks said. To Justin's mother, he added, "Most of the trip's on the state highway. Hardly any on the little back roads."

"The state highway is bad enough," Mom said. Roads in this part of Virginia had to wiggle and twist and double back on themselves. Otherwise, the mountain country wouldn't have any roads at all. From what Justin had seen in West Virginia in the home timeline, the roads there were all twisty, too. Mom looked at him. "I don't know. . . ."

"It'll be all right," Justin said.

"Should be," Mr. Brooks agreed. "I've made the trip a few times. As long as you pay attention, there's nothing to worry about."

"I always worry," Mom said. "That's what mothers are for." But she didn't tell them no.

Beckie paced around the Snodgrasses' back yard, looking for the spot that gave her the best cell-phone reception. It wasn't good anywhere in this back-of-beyond little town, but there was one place. . . .

She found it. Her mother's voice came in loud and clear. Beckie wished it didn't, because Mom was saying, "I want you to get out of there and come home as soon as you can. The war—"

"Everything's fine, Mom," Beckie said. "Nobody's shooting, nobody's dropping bombs, nobody's doing anything but yelling."

"I never would have let you go if I'd known the trouble would blow up like this," Mom said.

"There isn't any real trouble," Beckie said again. "It's all in the papers and on TV, mostly. Nothing's going on, honest."

Her mother didn't want to listen to her. "You should head for home as soon as you can."

"Why are you telling me?" Beckie asked, starting to lose patience. "I can't do anything about it by myself—I won't be of legal age for another year. Do you want me to get Gran?"

She figured that would nip the idea in the bud, and she was right. "I can't talk to my mother! She won't pay any attention to me," Mom said. From everything Beckie had seen, that was true. Beckie wondered if, when she was all grown up herself, she would say the same kind of thing about Mom. She hoped not. She really didn't think so, either. Mom wasn't quite so bone-headed stubborn as Gran—most of the time, anyhow.

For now . . . "If I can't fix that stuff myself and you don't want to try to talk Gran into doing it, what other choices are there? Pitching a fit is silly. Why don't you settle down and relax?"

"Because you're in the middle of a war, and I'm worried about you!" Mom exclaimed.