The second time around Black did better at hiding his surprise, but the look on his face still gave him away. He watched the film through to the end before lifting the goggles.

"I'm no foot soldier," he said, "but how in hell is anyone supposed to fight with that five-ring circus to distract him?"

Jones grinned like a hungry wolverine. "Thousands of hours of training."

Black nodded. It was just a small movement. "Admiral Kolhammer?" he said, with a slight shift in his voice indicating that he was approaching a personal Rubicon. "How'd you really get here? Assuming you are here and we're not there, wherever it is you came from."

Kolhammer sighed. "Truth be known, I can't tell you that, Commander. Not because it's restricted information, but because I don't really know. When I was last in Pearl, I attended a briefing with the captain and executive officer of the Clinton. A bunch of no-name spooks and pinheads gave us a soft sell about this research project we were to ride shotgun on. They said it was for a new weapons system, gave us a lot of bullshit about a gun that wouldn't so much fire a bullet or a missile as take it directly to the target. One of them, a Japanese man actually, talked about 'collapsing the distance' to impact. It sounded like a bunch of crap to us, but ours is not to question why."

"Some things really don't change then," Black smiled, a small gesture of genuine warmth for the first time.

"No, they don't," admitted Jones.

"Anyway," Kolhammer continued, "I don't expect you to understand the science. Even I only have a Popular Mechanics notion of how it all works. But these guys were generating enormous levels of energy, enough I guess to actually warp the structure of space itself. And one of the things we've learned is that, on a certain level, space and time are the same thing. I guess they just got their figures wrong. I promise you, as we know more, we'll fill you in."

"That's pretty fucking wacky, if you ask me," said Black.

"Any wackier than this?" said Kolhammer, holding up the goggles and then swinging them around to take in the entire chopper.

"Or me?" said Colonel Jones.

"Yeah, quite a bit, since you ask."

Lieutenant Commander Black cracked his big broken knuckles. "You know, I might look like a real palooka, but I have a master's in civil engineering. It's only from Dakota State, but I had to sit down for five years of book learning like everyone else. Just because I used to break rocks for a living doesn't make me a fuckin' rockhead. I understand progress. The way I worked a mine was a hell of a lot different from the way my granddaddy did.

"I look at this bird and it seems mighty queer to me, but Ensign Curtis, he tells me these things are already on the drawing board. You got a woman flying this thing? Fine. I'll bet Amelia Earhart could fly rings around her. And as for you, Colonel Jones, my great-great-granddaddy on my mama's side was a lieutenant with the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, a black regiment with white officers. He died with his men, charging the Confederate guns at Fort Wagner. The grapeshot cut them up so bad, you couldn't tell who was who, or who was what, if you get my drift. So the home I grew up in, you ever spoke the word nigger, you got your ass whupped good and proper. Maybe you want to bear that in mind, Colonel Jones, before you go judging the content of a man's character by the color of his skin."

Jones gave Dan Black the benefit of his hardest glare, until a sly smile cracked open his granite features.

"Well put, Commander. Touche."

"Admiral Kolhammer?"

"Yes, Ensign?"

"How can you be sure you went back in time, and we didn't come forward?"

Kolhammer shifted his weight as they banked for approach. "I'm not a hundred percent sure," he answered. "But we can't access any of our satellites. Our radar, which is a hell of a lot more powerful than yours, isn't giving us the returns that it should. We were just off the coast of East Timor, down the bottom of the Dutch East Indies, Indonesia in our day. But it's not coming up anymore. We can't find anything, TV, radio, GPS, nothing. Our equipment is fine. It's just like there's nothing out there."

The two Enterprise officers only understood about half of what he said, but the admiral's demeanor left no doubt as to what he was getting at.

"And what about this ship, the Nagoya? Where'd it get to?" asked Black.

"That's one I really can't answer." Kolhammer shrugged. "We've been looking for it, believe me. I'm hoping to God it hasn't come through and landed in Tokyo Bay. But I doubt it. We're missing a couple of other ships, but they were all some distance from the center of the group, and the simplest explanation is that they just didn't get sucked up with the rest of us. We lost a couple of nuclear submarines and some Indonesian destroyers like that. Although the destroyers weren't such a great loss. Another ship got cut in half by the event horizon.

"The Nagoya was tucked away between the Clinton and a couple of cruisers. It would have been at the epicenter of whatever went wrong. It was probably destroyed, but we'll have to invest significant assets confirming that."

"Because that's your only way home, right?" said Curtis.

"Got it in one, son," said Kolhammer. "But for now, if you'd care to look outside, you can see what the Enterprise will grow into, given eighty years or so."

They two visitors leaned over. Black swore softly. Ensign Curtis didn't bother to hide his surprise.

"Good gosh! It's as big as a city."

Captain Halabi couldn't remember ever being at such an uncomfortable gathering. There were only three of them standing in Spruance's cabin as the admiral methodically leafed through her copy of Fuchida and Okumiya's Midway. The other officer present, a Commander Beanland from his planning staff, had attempted to engage her in polite chitchat, but the conversation curled up and died on the deck after he had blundered into a morass of nonsensical questions about the hygiene difficulties of "women's troubles" on board a warship. Halabi had snapped back at him that menstruation proved itself to be much less of a problem than the standard array of sucking chest wounds, compound fractures, and deep tissue burns with which one had to deal after a missile strike.

"Fascinating," Spruance murmured, closing the book with a snap. "If it's true."

"Well, it won't be now of course," Halabi ventured. "The collision between our two forces has seen to that."

"Indeed… Captain. And so, what now? If you are what you claim to be, what do you do now? Throw the lever on the magic box that brought you here? Leaving us in the lurch? You might very well find when you get home that everyone speaks German and Japanese."

Halabi rubbed her tired eyes. "Well, to begin with, we seem to have lost our magic box. And even if we could throw it into reverse, all the currently accepted theories of time distortion posit an infinitely variform multiverse rather than a single linear universe…"

She lost them with that, and so decided to try a different tack.

"There's a field of physics called quantum mechanics. It's not specific to my own time. A chap called Max Planck kicked it off in nineteen hundred with something he called the quantum theory of light, and Albert Einstein moved it along in nineteen oh five with his work on the photoelectric effect. Basically, he theorized that light can be observed as either particles or waves, but never both at once. It's all about uncertainty, gentlemen, what we call quantum uncertainty. Long story short? It's most likely that there are an infinite number of universes, all existing alongside each other, all of them different, some subtly, some radically. I guess the fact that we're here is the first real proof of that theory."