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like tigers in their defense. Even if Justin thought he was right no,
especially if he thought she was right keeping quiet about it looked like a
good idea.
"Ever wonder how things might have been?" Beckie asked out of the blue.
"Huh?" Justin said. Brilliant, he thought. Now she won't think you're an
idiot. Now she'll be sure of it.
But she wasn't or it didn't show if she was, which was good enough. "If things
were different," she said again.
"What kind of things?" Justin asked. At least that was a better question.
"All kinds of things," Beckie answered. "Things from way back when. Last
night, Mr. Snodgrass showed me a coin from the United States. I asked him to,
because I was thinking about that stuff."
"Were you?" Justin said. What he was thinking now was, Uh-oh. It worried him a
lot more than Huh? had.
Beckie nodded seriously. "I sure was. I wondered what it would have been like
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if all of this were one state one country, I guess I mean and not a whole
bunch of them." She waved her arms to show all of this meant everything from
sea to shining sea. Except it didn't mean exactly that here, because nobody
ever wrote "America the Beautiful" in this alternate. It came along in 1893,
and by then this North America was chopped into more pieces than the chicken
in a Chinese chicken salad.
"I don't see how that could have happened," he said a lie he had to tell. In
the home timeline, it had happened. The big states and the little ones
compromised, and they all agreed to the Constitution, and it worked. But he
couldn't let on that he knew anything about that. He'd already talked too much
once.
Beckie didn't point her finger at him and go, Oh, yes, you do! She couldn't
know he didn't belong in this alternate. All she knew was that he made kind of
a peculiar Virginian. And even Virginians were entitled to be peculiar. It was
a free state as long as you weren't an African American, and as long as you
didn't push it too hard.
Instead of pointing a finger, Beckie said, "Mr. Snodgrass told me the same
thing. I suppose he's right I suppose you're right, too. It's interesting to
think about, though, isn't it? What might have been, I mean."
"Sure," Justin said. "There isn't any way to tell for sure what would have
happened after that, though." He knew how true that was, where Beckie didn't.
One alternate where the South won the Civil War had racial problems that made
the ones here look like a walk in the park. Another alternate U.S.A. was a
nasty tyranny that ran most of its world because it could squash anybody else.
Yet another, in a world where the Germans won World War I and all the wars
afterwards, remained under occupation by the Kaiser's soldiers even now.
Endless possibilities . . .
Beckie, who didn't know about any of those alternates or the home timeline,
was thinking along different lines. "Not being able to know makes it more
interesting, not less. It isn't like some math problem in school, where
there's only one right answer. You can just talk about it and see how it might
have gone this way, or that one, or even the other one."
Or it might have gone all those different ways only you'd need a transposition
chamber to see how they worked out. Justin couldn't talk about that, either.
He was just glad his face didn't give him away. For all practical purposes,
Beckie had figured out the crosstime secret.
He made his thumb and forefinger into a pretend gun and aimed it at her. "If
you come up with the one true answer, I'll have to kill you," he said, doing
his best to sound like a spy.
His best must have been good enough, because she giggled. "You really are out
of your mind, aren't you?"
"I try," he said modestly.
"Well, good, because it's working," she told him.
There was a low, deep rumble, like thunder far away. That was a pretty good
comparison, because this part of the continent got some ferocious
thunderstorms. Only one trouble: the sun blazed down out of a bright blue sky.
Not a cloud anywhere to be seen. But there was a cloud on Justin's hopes as he
said, "What's that?" because he feared he knew the answer. Beckie said the
same thing at the same time, and he thought he heard the same fear in her
voice.
Then she said, "That was something blowing up, wasn't it?" Sometimes naming
your fear could drive it away. Other times, naming it made it worse. This felt
like one of those.
Justin breathed in a big lungful of warm, muggy air and then sighed it out. "I
don't know of anything else it's likely to be."
Her hands folded into fists, so tight that her knuckles turned pale under her
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