“Show him your passports, too,” Jack Solters said. Mom and Amanda and Jeremy got out the documents. They handed them to Dad, who gave them to the guard. He looked them over, then returned them. He nodded again. He and his partner stepped back and waved toward the office.

“Looks like we're okay,” Mom said. She opened the car door. As she got out and stretched, the second guard said something.

Dad translated: “Our luggage will have to go through the sniffer. He knows we are who we say we are, but they aren't making any exceptions.”

“I don't mind,” Amanda said. “Have they had trouble here?”

After some back-and-forth with the guards in Romanian, Dad shook his head. “He says they haven't, and they don't want any, either. They've got some hotheads, some big talkers, and they aren't taking any chances.”

“Don't people realize what a mess we'd be in without the alternates?” Amanda said.

“In a word,” Dad answered, “no.”

Two

Going from the home timeline to an alternate should have been dramatic. It should have been exciting. Jeremy had seen video of a Saturn rocket blasting off for the moon. This should have been something like that, all noise and flame. Why not? He and his family were traveling between worlds, too.

No drama here, though. They sat in the same kind of seats as they had for the suborbital hop from Los Angeles to Bucharest. They got even less leg room here than they'd had in the shuttlecraft. They couldn't see out. Jeremy had always wished you could see things change as you passed from one alternate to the next. Things didn't work out that way, though. When you traveled between alternates, you weren't properly in any of them till you stopped. That meant there was nothing to see, and no point to a window.

One by one, the family changed into clothes that wouldn't look out of place in Polisso. Tank tops and shorts wouldn't do. Sandals would, but not sandals of bright blue-and-red plastic.