He'd tried to grab a few hours' sleep on the bed, but the uncomfortably dense and inflexible mattress felt wrong, and the air in the room tasted dead in his mouth.

A wardrobe full of civilian clothes awaited him, but Kolhammer had found them to be too heavy and prickly. He'd feel like he was in costume, wearing the dark, double-breasted woolen suits. Instead he'd showered and changed into a clean uniform that he'd brought in a travel case, stored in the small luggage bay on the in-flight refueler. LA was full of uniforms. And not just Americans. Contingents of Canadian, British, Australian, New Zealand, Free French, and even Dutch officers were quartered on the West Coast. He wouldn't stand out.

Kolhammer thought of his own people stuck at Edwards AFB-or Muroc as it was currently known. He hoped they were being treated well. You had to figure that facilities were pretty primitive out there.

He checked his watch. Two hours until he was to meet with Roosevelt again. He was supposed to rest, but instead he picked up the heavy handset of the phone on his bedside table. It wasn't even an old dial phone. The face was completely blank.

A male voice answered. "Yes, sir."

"I'd like to go for a walk, clear my head."

"We'll be right there."

He waited. The door wasn't locked, and he could have left anytime he wanted to, but he accepted the need to maintain strict security. The papers were already full of rumors out of Hawaii. A copy of the old Examiner that had been pushed under his door had a lead story about the Japanese being driven away from Midway by a secret navy superweapon.

The real story was going to break soon. Everybody could feel it. The embedded journalists were screeching like caged baboons back in Pearl, demanding to be let off the leash. Personally, he would have let them go well before now. He was used to working with the embeds. They'd generally do the story you wanted, as long as you spoon-fed it to them. But the locals were still trying to get their heads around the reality of the Transition and the destruction of the Pacific Fleet. They wanted to keep the lid on a little longer. And Kolhammer could feel the pressure building.

Somebody rapped on the door, twice, softly. "Admiral?"

"Come in."

The special agent who'd led him up to the room entered with another man. From the generic cut of their clothes, and a common air of high-tone thuggery, Kolhammer took the new guy to be another special agent.

"Agent Stirling will secure your room and equipment, Admiral," said the first man, confirming the assumption.

"You mind if we call on Professor Einstein?" Kolhammer asked. "I'd like to talk to him before the meeting."

The agent shrugged. Clearly it meant nothing to him.

They padded along the thickly carpeted corridor to a room six doors down. The whole place put Kolhammer in mind of an expensive bordello. The thin squeal of a violin behind the door told him that Einstein was up and about.

"I'm sorry, Agent," Kolhammer said quietly. "I've forgotten your name."

"Agent Flint, sir," the Secret Service officer replied as he rapped on the door, twice, firmly, to be heard over the violin.

The sound of the instrument ceased with an abrupt, atonal note.

The door opened and the sight of that famous shock of hair greeted them. Standing there in his boxer shorts, Einstein looked a little ticked off, until he saw Kolhammer.

"Ah! Come in, come in. Good morning to you, Admiral."

"Actually, I was wondering if you'd like to come out for a short stroll, Professor. Maybe we could grab a coffee."

Einstein laughed, a short sharp bark.

"Not much caffe to be had in Los Angeles, I'm afraid, Admiral. Not that you'd want to drink what they do have, anyway. But, yes, a stroll would be nice. And I'm a little hungry, too. Just let me get my pants on. With pants comes dignity, yes?"

The old man shuffled back into the room, which Kolhammer could see was fogged up with smoke from his pipe. He and Agent Flint stared at the walls while Einstein wrestled himself into a pair of brown corduroy trousers and pulled on a pair of slippers before joining them in the hallway. "I have been using your superb electric book, Admiral. Amazing. Simply amazing."

"We thought you'd like it. Did you see yourself in the movie we saved on there, Insignificance?"

Einstein roared with laughter. "I did! I did! Who would have imagined, me with Joe DiMaggio's wife? An actress, yes, this Marilyn?"

"She will be, I suppose."

Einstein's mood sobered as they reached the elevators.

"But with such a long face, that's not what you wanted to talk about, was it?"

"No, sir. It's not. You saw the other movies?"

"From the concentration camps," said Einstein as all happiness washed out of him.

"We call them death camps," said Kolhammer.

The scientist sighed heavily. A chime sounded, and the elevator door opened. Agent Flint's eyes, which never stopped moving, swept over the man seated at the controls. Otherwise the lift was empty. He ushered in his two charges.

"Yes, I saw them," said Einstein, as they stepped in. "That's why I was playing when you knocked. I play to relax, to forget about the world."

Flint told the operator to take them to the ground floor.

"Sometimes," said Kolhammer, "it's best not to forget."

They walked in silence for a while, each man lost in his own thoughts, until the dead neon signs out on Wilshire Boulevard gave Kolhammer a split second of dizzying dislocation. In his day, the city had funded the restoration of nearly 150 neon signs along this strip in mid-Wilshire. The very same hoardings, unplugged now because of the wartime blackout, greeted him under a hot blue sky as they stepped out through the Ambassador's grand, gated entrance. Jarring the moment of deja vu, however, a yellow streetcar went rattling by, full of Angelenos on their way downtown. Gone were the Koreans and Taiwanese. Replacing them was a homogenous population of middle-class whites. Gone, too, he noticed, was the brown sky and the close, sticky feel of heavily polluted air on his face.

"Are you okay, sir?" asked Agent Flint, taking Kolhammer lightly by the elbow.

"I'm sorry," he apologized. "It's just a shock, that's all."

The three men came to a halt on the side of the road. Einstein managed to appear simultaneously amused and moved by Kolhammer's obvious plight.

"You know, Admiral, your world is still here," said the scientist. He rubbed the tips of his fingers together. "It is this close, right here and now. You came here. You can get back. You have family, yes?"

Another streetcar clattered past. Old car horns blared. Wilshire looked like the venue for a vintage auto festival.

"My wife lives over in Santa Monica. Or she… well, you know."

"Are you going to be okay, sir?" asked Flint. "Would you like to go back to the lobby and sit down?"

Kolhammer drew in a long, deep breath. He could smell gasoline and exhaust fumes, but they stood out against a clear background. To his twenty-first-century sinuses, the air was mountain fresh. He gathered himself together and nodded across the street to the bizarre dome of the Brown Derby Restaurant.

"Is that the original Brown Derby?" he asked.

Neither Flint nor Einstein knew.

"Is it supposed to be a hat?" asked Einstein.

"Well, the sign says EAT IN THE HAT. If you're hungry, Professor, we could get a light lunch over there. They might've invented the Cobb salad by now. They're the guys who came up with it in the first place."

As they crossed the street, Kolhammer could have sworn he caught sight of a young Ronald Reagan taking a seat in the restaurant's tree-shaded courtyard fronting on the street. He suddenly worried that this was going to be a Hollywood place, where they stood no chance of gaining entry. Einstein might even suffer from some egregious episode of discrimination-being Jewish, and wearing slippers as he was.