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calmed her.
    The plastic box on the counter rang. Gwen reached out and pulled the cord from the wall. It was early in the morning, long before dawn, but that ring meant she couldn't stay here even a few hours.
    Somebody might come and look if there was no answer, and she couldn't stop and fight battles with the ferals.
    Damn. It would be several days before she had to sleep, but she was tired already. She finished off the bowl of noodles and started in on a boxed cake, revoltingly sweet but useful calories. Her fingers cracked open the plastic sheeting and exposed the insides of the telephone. She peeled back the insulation on the cord with a thumbnail.
    Braided copper wire. They might or might not use opticals here, then. Magnetic coil bell inside the phone. Some sort of integrated control circuit. Relays for the control buttons. Primitive, and not a technology that had ever been used in the history she learned. She disassembled the hand unit with the microphone and speaker. More magnetic resonance. That gave her an idea. Gwen bent, stuck a hand beneath the cooling unit and lifted it around. S-curves of tubing ran up the back; an electrically powered compressor unit beneath them. She snapped one of the coils, and sniffed. Freon. A compression-expansion heat pump system, second-century B.F.S. stuff—nineteenth century, using the old system. Not very efficient insulation, either. Her eyes narrowed, moving around the apartment.
    It was small, very shabby, and she could hear the scuttle of cockroaches around the baseboards.
    Her hand snapped out and caught one between thumb and forefinger. Exactly the same as ours. Not surprising; cockroaches were a very stable species. So; this was how this society's, this United States', poor lived. It must be a fully industrialized economy; there was a video entertainment unit, plenty of food in the cooler, running water. The living standard was comparable to what most of the Domination's subject-races had had at this date in her history. Less hygienic than her ancestors would have tolerated, and the food would be violently unhealthy from what she remembered of Homo sapiens's nutritional needs, too much fat and sodium, but there were more durable goods than you'd expect. Thoughtfully, she pulled the video unit's cable out of the wall and skinned it.
    Ah, optical fiber. Quite new, too, much more recent than the building. She pulled the back panel out. Cathode ray tube. Another machine produced audio from hand-sized disks. She disassembled it.
    Optical storage but in digital form. Another technology not used in her world's past in precisely that way. And they have coherent-light emitters. Her history had developed those as weapons first. She traced its controls and put a disk on for an instant, then shut it off with a wince; that was noise, not music.
    A continuous rumble of traffic noise came from the streets outside the five-story brick building. She walked to the windows, feeling the numbness fading a little from her mind as she went from flight to investigation. Much taller buildings showed in the middle distance, glittering through the darkness, casting pillars of wavy-looking heat into the night. The stink of burnt petroleum was heavy; these people used internal-combustion engines for surface vehicles. Very odd. Lights went by overhead; she leaned out and filtered sound to catch the engines.
    Turbines. Combustion engines again, but that type was part of her past. She looked up. None of the habitats, satellites, innumerable artificial lights that would have shown; just stars, through light-haze heavy enough to hide most of them from human eyes. The new moon showed only darkness on its shadowed side, none of the jewel-lights of domed crater-cities.
    Strange, Gwen thought. They have optical fibers and coherent-light, but not enough space activity to notice.

    "Well."
    The apartment yielded little more of use; the owner's wallet confirmed that identity documents were many and evidently