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A moment later the bridge was back, and they both fell backwards, since the wall they’d
been leaning against had disappeared. They stood up and looked around, and there were
no buildings here at all, just seabirds and guano-spattered rocks.
“What do we do if a building appears right where we’re standing?” B said.
“Die, probably,” Marla said. “So let’s move a little closer to the edge of the island,
where that’s less likely, hmm?” They settled down on a relatively unstained stretch of
rock, near the foaming edge of the island, the water slamming against the rocks a dozen
feet below.
The bridge disappeared again, though the island didn’t change noticeably.
“The city is gone,” B said. Marla looked. He was right. There was nothing there but
trees and sand dunes.
“Maybe there are no humans in this world,” Marla said.
“Or else they never found gold and silver in California,” B said.
Marla grunted. “Maybe they all blew themselves up in the ’50s.”
“Great. Now I have to worry about radiation.”
“Could be worse,” Marla said. “There could be giant atomic ants and preying mantises.”
They sat for hours, watching the world change around them. For a while they were on
an Alcatraz still peacefully occupied by American Indian activists, with a bustling
Indian Studies center where the prison had been. They took the opportunity to steal cold
drinks of an unfamiliar brand from a cooler, and drank most of them before the bottles
disappeared from their hands. They walked around the edge of the island, B pointing
out the differences he recognized. Sometimes Treasure Island, deeper in the bay,
disappeared entirely, and B told her that it was man-made—clearly there were some
worlds where it was never made at all. For a while, the remains of a World’s Fair stood
on Treasure Island, complete with a rusting Ferris wheel and faded towers. “They tore
the fairgrounds down during one of the world wars,” B said, “to make the island into a
naval base. Guess they skipped that war here.” Many of the changes were small, just
variations in San Francisco’s skyline. Strange monuments appeared, while familiar
landmarks vanished.
Sometimes it was so foggy they couldn’t see anything at all, and once, for a tense
fifteen minutes, there was a raging naval battle in the bay, with warships flying
unfamiliar colors blasting away at one another with big guns, while San Francisco
burned. The smoke was almost as thick as the fog, and B and Marla sat huddled in the
shelter of a fallen wall, knowing that a look-away spell wouldn’t prevent a shell from
killing them and leaving their corpses in a world they could barely comprehend. That
world passed, replaced by one where the peninsula that held San Francisco was gone
entirely, just water in its place. “Guess the big earthquake hit here,” Marla said. “Glad it
didn’t take out the island.”