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Lucy's father muttered. Paul didn't think he was supposed to hear that, but he did.
"Hang on for one second." Wong paused in a particularly dark stretch of street. "You need the antidote, so
the anesthetic inside the shop doesn't knock you out."
He gave everybody a shot. Lucy's little brother yipped when he saw people getting stuck. She knew how to
keep him from doing anything more than yip. "Are you going to be a baby, Michael?" she said. "/ can get a
shot without making a fuss." And she did. After that, you could have set Michael on fire and he wouldn't
have let out a peep.
"Here we are." Sammy Wong opened the front door to Curious Notions. Paul tried to smell neofentanyl in
the air. He couldn't, of course. It had no odor. That was one of the things that made it so useful. The other
was that it would stop a charging elephant in its tracks. Paul remembered yawning in the Feldgendarmerie
jail. Then he remembered waking up when Sammy Wong gave him the antidote. In between? As far as he
could prove, there was no in between.
"Down to the basement," Paul's father said briskly. "And then down to the subbasement." By the way he
said it, it might have been his plan.
Paul found one more thing to worry about. What would the German secret police think when they found the
subbasement? Nobody could put the file cabinet that hid the trap door back where it belonged. He
shrugged. After so many enormous worries, that was a small one.
Down to the basement they hurried. Michael went last so he could slide down the banister instead of
walking down the stairs. Paul didn't think he would have done that in the dark when he was eleven years
old. Lucy's kid brother was a piece of work, all right.
Sammy Wong shone a flashlight on the file cabinet. "Let's do it," he said.
Another flashlight beam stabbed out from behind Paul. "You will put your hands up at once, all of you," a
German-accented voice said. "In the Kaiser's name, you are all under arrest." Spinning, Paul saw a tall man
in Feldgendarmerie uniform wearing a pig-snouted gas mask. He had a flashlight in his left hand. His right
held a pistol aimed at Wong.
The German paid no attention to Michael Woo, who stood right beside him. Michael might have hit him or
kicked him in the shins. Instead, he did something even better. He reached up and yanked off the German's
mask.
After an outraged yelp, the Feldgendarmerie man sucked in a breath of air. That was all he needed to do.
His eyes rolled up in his head. He didn't even yawn, the way Paul had. He just crumpled to the floor. The
pistol fell from his hand and skittered away, luckily without going off.
Lucy ran over to Michael. She gave him a big, smacking kiss. He yelped louder than the German had, and
did kick her. She yelped, too.
"Come on," Paul said. "Let's get out of here as fast as we can, before anything else happens."
Not even his father argued with him. Dad went over to the file cabinet and shoved it out of the way. By
then, Sammy Wong had his little automatic out. "I'll go first," he said. "The stuff wouldn't have got into the
subbasement till now. If they've found it and they've got somebody waiting down there . . ."
But they didn't. It was empty. Plainly, no one had been in there since the Feldgendarmerie seized Curious
Notions. Paul hurried to the computer set off to one side from where the transposition chamber would
appear. "Wake up," he told it, and the screen came to life. Lucy exclaimed at that. So did her father.
"Voice signature recognized," the computer said. "Go ahead." Lucy and her father did some more
exclaiming. Paul only half heard them. He spoke the code phrase that meant everything was okay and
nobody was holding a gun to his head. Then he called for a chamber as fast as the home timeline could
send one. His words showed up on the screen as he said them. Even Michael Woo exclaimed at that.
Again, Paul hardly noticed. He hoped the Crosstime Traffic people were monitoring this chamber's
equivalent in the home timeline.
Wong scattered a little bit of white powder on the floor in one corner of the room. He dropped a gold coin
near it. "What's that for?" Paul asked.
"Let the Germans think we were smuggling," the older man answered. "That's a normal kind of thing, just
like stealing jewelry is a normal kind of thing. If they think it's smuggling, they won't think about alternates. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]