“Well, yeah.” Dad nodded. “But we've got even worse ones in the home timeline. Here, it's liable to be king of the hill. King of the pass, I mean.”

“Do you think it belongs to the Westside or the Valley?” Liz asked.

“Yes,” Dad said, deadpan.

“Thanks a lot.” She gave him a dirty look. “Which one, please?”

“Well, I didn't see it in Cal 's parade,” her father answered. “If he had one, he would have been proud to show it off, I think.”

“If the Valley has it…” Liz 's voice trailed away.

“If the Valley has it, the people here were really dumb to go to war,” Dad said. “Unless their hat has a rabbit in it, too.”

“Do you think it does?” she asked, adding, “I don't want anything to happen to UCLA.”

After some thought, Dad shrugged. “Hon, I just don't know. If they've got more stuff than they were showing, I haven't heard about it. But I don't know if I would. I'm just a tradesman, after all. If the big bosses have any brains, they'll keep secrets from people like me.”

“If the big bosses had any brains, they would've known the Valley's got a heavy machine gun, right?” Liz said.

Her father spread his hands. “Can't argue with you. I wish I could. I've never thought King Zev was real smart, but it's amazing how brilliant you look when you can shoot your enemies and they can't shoot you back.”

“Right,” Liz said.

When she went out into what had been West wood Village to shop for produce, everything seemed normal enough. People weren't paying much attention to the bangs and booms coming out of the north-or, if they were, they weren't letting on.

Apricots. Peaches. Oranges. Lemons. Avocados. Eggs. Chickens. Live baby pigs. Fish-some smoked, some salted, some you'd buy if it smelled okay. The sellers-mostly women-sat under awnings or Old Time beach umbrellas to protect themselves from the sun. Seeing what amounted to a farmers' market just south of the UCLA campus made Liz sad.