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"I'll do what I think I can, that's all," Lucy said. Her mother and father both nodded. If Michael made small,
disgusted noises . . . Well, she didn't have to pay any attention to him. She didn't have to, and she didn't.
Paul wished he'd fled back to the home timeline when he had the chance. Maybe the two hundred dollars in
his pocket had kept him from going down to the subbasement and calling for a transposition chamber.
Maybe he hoped more likely his first thought had been rescuing Dad all by himself.
If so, it only went to show that thinking twice was a good idea. When he first came back to the building that
housed Curious Notions, there weren't any Feldgendarmerie men or American police or men from the
Tongs inside. (Perhaps the people who'd taken his father thought a kid wasn't worth bothering with. In that
case, their first thoughts weren't so hot, either.)
They thought twice before Paul did. Curious Notions was shut up tight now. He couldn't get to the
subbasement even if he wanted to. There'd be traps inside, just in case he was dumb enough to try.
He'd taken a room in a grimy old hotel in the Tenderloin District: a dollar a night or five dollars a week. The
brick building was so rundown, he wondered if it dated from before the 1906 earthquake. But it wasn't quite
that ancient. One of the bricks above the front door had a date carved into it: 1927. It was so very dirty and
worn, he needed several days to notice it.
The room itself had seen endless coats of paint. The last one, a sad beige, had been a long time before. It
was faded and peeling and filthy. The room had a sink and toilet and tub, a tiny table with two chairs, and a
hot plate for cooking. The smell of cheap grease had soaked into the paint. A lot of people on the way
down who hadn't quite hit bottom yet had lived here. That fit Paul to a T right now.
There was no thermostat on the wall. Heat came from a cast-iron steam radiator in a corner. It bubbled
and clunked and, every once in a while, dripped a little rusty water on the cheap green carpet. The size of
the rust stain there said it had been doing that for a long time.
Several locks and dead bolts did their best to make sure the door stayed closed and intruders stayed out.
When the desk clerk handed Paul half a dozen keys, he'd eyed them in dismay. What dismayed him even
more was that they might not be enough. You didn't use hardware like that where it wasn't needed.
After he got a good look at some of the people who lived in the hotel, he wished the door had twice as
many locks on it. If they weren't the people his parents had warned him about, he'd never seen anybody
who was. He didn't want to think about what they did for a living. More than a few of them didn't do
anything visible for a living. They seemed proud of doing nothing, too.
And they figured Paul was in the same boat they were. He didn't do anything visible, either. If anything,
that won him respect in the Tenderloin. A ferret-faced little man with a scar on one cheek grinned as they
passed each other on the stairs in the middle of the morning. "Beats working, don't it?" he said.
"Uh-huh," Paul answered with a silly nod. He knew he should have said, Yeah, out of the side of his mouth.
But the man with the scar just nodded back and kept going up the stairs.
In this alternate, German college students still dueled with sabers. They got scars like that. Students at a
few American colleges imitated the Germans. Paul would have bet a thousand benjamins against a dollar
that this fellow hadn't been anywhere close to a college, except maybe to break into a dorm. He'd probably
got his scar in a real knife fight. Paul wondered what had happened to the man he'd been fighting. Better
not to know, maybe.
Getting away from the hotel and back to his neighborhood was a relief. Curious Notions wasn't in the best
part of town, either. Compared to where he was staying now, though, it looked like paradise.
He ducked into Louie's, the hamburger and frankfurter place where he'd bought a lot of lunches. There was
no McDonald's or Burger King or Jack in the Box in this alternate. All the hamburger joints and frankfurter
stands and pizza parlors here were mom-and-pops. Behind the counter at Louie's stood ... Louie. He was a
Greek with slicked-back hair under a white cap that looked like the one Boy Scouts wore in the home
timeline.
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