Harry Turtledove: Curious Notions

Off beyond the fragrant pine trees, music started playing. Lucy remembered a band shell stood over there. By the thumping drums and blatting tuba, that was a German military band performing. "Do you want to go over and watch?" Lucy asked.

Peggy shook her head. "I'd rather stay here. If I just listen to them and don't see the uniforms, I'll enjoy the music a lot more."

"Okay." Lucy was happy enough to sit on the bench. The sun shone warm on her face, but the breeze blowing in off the ocean kept it from being too annoying. She said, "You'd think we could take care of ourselves without the Germans around, too, wouldn't you?"

"You'd think—" Peggy broke off. A policeman strolled up the path. He was plump and well fed, and twirled his nightstick by the leather thong. Tipping his hat to the two girls, he walked on.

"You'd think we could speak our minds without worrying about whether some dumb flatfoot heard us," Lucy said when he'd got out of earshot.

"He might not have done anything," Peggy said. Lucy nodded. That was true. On the other hand, the cop might have run them in if he'd heard. You never could tell. Peggy knew as much, too. Otherwise, she wouldn't have shut up when he came by.

Thinking about the police only made Lucy blue. "I wish everybody would just leave us alone," she said. She wasn't sure whether us meant her and Peggy, all the Chinese in San Francisco, all of San Francisco, or all of the United States. All those things at once, probably.

"Maybe we ought to go home," Peggy said. Seeing that cop had taken the fun out of her day, too.

"Maybe we should." Lucy scattered the last of the bread crumbs. The ducks didn't care who ran the world. All they cared about was getting fed. Up till now, Lucy had never wondered whether ducks were smarter than people. Suddenly, though, that looked like a pretty good question.

Paul wandered through Chinatown. He didn't look as if he was going anywhere in particular. Truth to tell, he wasn't. He also wasn't much impressed. Just as this San Francisco as a whole seemed a sad, shabby imitation of the one in the home timeline, this Chinatown wasn't much, either. A lot of the shops were marked with Chinese characters as well as ordinary letters, but most of the people inside them spoke only English. In this alternate, Chinese immigration had stopped a long time ago. People in this San Francisco went through the motions of being Chinese, but plenty of them had forgotten what it meant.

WOO'S ELECTRIC REPAIR, a sign said. Below it was a dragon whose tail ended in a plug. That was cute, but it wasn't much more than cute. Would somebody who really felt Chinese have used such a sign? Paul hoped not, anyway.

He went into the little cafe across the street and ordered spare ribs and fried rice. The spare ribs came slathered in a sweet pinkish purple sauce. The fried rice was greasy enough to lube a car. Paul sighed. Chinese food here wasn't what it was in the home timeline, either.

While he ate, he kept an eye on Woo's Electric Repair. It was one of the places Dad had named for Inspector Weidenreich. He'd got the names out of a city directory, but the inspector wouldn't figure that out for a while. Maybe Weidenreich wouldn't figure it out at all. He was looking for plots, after all. If these people denied doing business with Curious Notions, wouldn't he think they were lying and trying to hide something?

That would be too bad for the locals. Paul supposed he ought to feel sorry for them. He had a hard time doing it, though. They weren't from his world. That made them seem a little less real to him.

No policemen burst into Woo's shop while he ate and watched. He hadn't really expected that they would. He had hoped so, though. It would have livened up his day.

When he left the caf6, he checked to see if he was being followed. He couldn't be sure what Weidenreich might have in mind. Paul didn't spot anybody who looked out of place.

He wished for a cell phone to call Dad and make sure everything was okay back at the shop. They existed in this alternate, but they were supersecret, superfancy German military gadgets. You couldn't walk down the street with one plugged into your ear, the way people did in the home timeline.

Space travel and satellites here had got off to a much slower start than they had back home, too. There, World War II had given them an enormous boost. Here, they'd stayed toys for hobbyists for years and years. It was well into the twenty-first century before they'd got good enough to make the Kaiser's government sit up and take notice. The first man to fly to the moon in this alternate was still alive. There hadn't been a second man. The flight was nothing but an enormous stunt.

A few high-tech alternates worked hard at exploiting the Solar System. They were running out of resources on Earth, the same way the home timeline had been fifty years earlier. They didn't know about crosstime traffic, so they had to do the best they could with what they had.

Trouble was, it wasn't very good. The Solar System turned out to be a less inviting place than people had thought back in the middle of the twentieth century. No oceans full of dinosaurs on Venus. No canals on Mars, and no Martians, either. Savage radiation belts around Jupiter. No decent real estate anywhere.

One alternate was terraforming Mars: crashing huge icy asteroids from the outer Solar System into it to give it oceans and enough oxygen to breathe. But that would take years and years to finish. Even after it was done, it wouldn't solve Earth's problems. It would just give people the chance to have problems somewhere else.

"Can you spare a quarter, sir, or even a dime?" The tired, hopeless, whining voice brought Paul back to the here-and-now. A woman had her hand out. At her feet, a toddler slept on a grimy wool blanket. If not for the little girl, Paul would have walked on. You couldn't help everybody. You'd go crazy if you tried. That was one of the first lessons crosstime travel taught.

But sometimes you could help some people. A toddler didn't deserve to go hungry. Paul dug in his pocket and pulled out a quarter. In the home timeline, twenty-five cents was too small an amount to worry about. So was twenty-five dollars, come to that. Here, though, a quarter was worth five or six benjamins: enough for a meal, if not for a fancy one.

The woman's face lit up. How many people had walked by pretending she wasn't there? "God bless you, sir!" she exclaimed.

Paul nodded and walked on. He hoped other beggars wouldn't notice what he'd done. But they did, of course. They always did. He had men and women follow him along the street. When he didn't give to them the way he had to the woman with the toddler, they got angry. They shook their fists and called him names. He'd been afraid that would happen. It made him sorry he'd given anything to anybody. Then he was ashamed of feeling that way.

A policeman with a large wart on his nose pointed to the beggars with his billy club. "Break it up, you bums!" he boomed. "Leave the gentleman alone!" Still grumbling, they obeyed. They knew he would have used the club if they didn't.

"Thank you," Paul called to the cop. He knew why the beggars had come after him. He even sympathized with them. But he couldn't help them all. And he wanted the policeman to see that he was grateful. No matter what he thought of the authorities here, he had to stay on good terms with them. That helped Curious Notions stay in business.

With a tip of the cap, the policeman answered, "My pleasure, sir." Just as Paul was polite to him, so he was in return. He had no idea who Paul was—Paul didn't think he did, anyhow—but he'd seen that Paul was somebody beggars followed. That made him prosperous. Cops often figured prosperous people were the ones they should be guarding.

Prosperous people did nothing to discourage that notion, here or in any other timeline.