“You know we won't send you home. You know you don't really want to go home, too.” Now Dad donned patience like a suit of armor. The most annoying thing was, he was right. She wanted the year of crosstime service on her college applications, even if she didn't like coming here to get it. Dad went on,

“Sending you up to UCLA wasn't so simple, either. What we had to pay to get you a stack pass…”

Liz sighed. “What is simple?”

Her father gave her a hug. “Welcome to the world, sweetheart.”

“Groovy,'* she said, as sardonically as she could. He only laughed.

Along with the rest of Captain Kevin 's men, Dan marched back to the barracks in the Sepulveda Basin. Piles and piles of sandbags were stacked close to the halls. Most of the time, the Sepulveda Basin was as dry as the rest of the Valley. But it could flood in a hurry when the rains came down. The sandbags had saved the barracks more than once over the years.

No rain now, not in the summertime. The Valley was full of cisterns to hold the rain that had fallen the winter before. Watermasters doled it out to farms and families. In years with dry winters, everyone worried about whether there'd be enough for crops-and for people.

Back in the Old Time, irrigation had brought water from hundreds of miles away. Everybody in Los Angeles had had plenty. All the houses and apartments and factories and shops showed as much. There were far more of them than the people who lived here now could ever hope to fill. All over L.A., in all the little countries that had sprung up since the day the Fire fell, scavengers scrounged through the swarms of abandoned buildings for whatever they could find.

Something occurred to Dan. *'Hey, Sergeant!” he said. If Sergeant Chuck didn't know everything, he didn't know he didn't know it.

“What is it, kid?” The three stripes on his sleeve-genuine Old Time stripes, machine-embroidered-gave him the right to treat everybody below him the way Dan 's father treated him before he got drafted.