For just a second or two after that first moment of clarity, Lieutenant Rachel Nguyen had actually been relieved that, for the time being at least, she wouldn't have to write a doctoral thesis. Moment of clarity-also known as the "Oh, no" moment-was the term Margie Francois had coined for those few seconds of dizzying intellectual free fall that came on when you realized deep down in your bones that you had fallen through a hole in the universe. If you were going to check out for good, they said, you were mostly likely to do so within thirty minutes of your own moment of clarity.

After her momentary spurt of guilty glee, Rachel's reaction had shifted back toward the average, a mix of bewilderment and grief. Her first rational thought had been for her mother and father, who'd alternated between pride and alarm when confronted by their daughter's choice of a career in the navy. She was the only Nguyen daughter, and they'd been aghast at the possibility of losing her. Well, she thought ruefully, they've lost me now. She wasn't dead, but she felt so utterly lost it seemed as if she might as well be.

Such was her mood when the two reporters knocked on the door of her temporary office aboard the Clinton where she'd been transferred to work with a small group of history graduates. There was no escaping her damn degree.

"Hey, are you Rachel?" asked one of them. "I'm Julia Duffy, and this is Rosanna Natoli. The Hammer said we should come down and help you out."

"Cool," Nguyen said, though without much enthusiasm.

"Hey," Natoli said, "you an Aussie?"

Rachel glanced down at the shoulder patch displaying her national flag.

"Apparently."

"My cousin Stella married an Aussie. They moved to Melbourne. You from there? You might know them."

"Yeah, Stella from Melbourne. Everyone knows her."

"Jeez," said Duffy, "you're a bright beam of sunshine aren't you, Lieutenant."

"I'm sorry," said Rachel. "I was just thinking about my oldies. You know, my parents."

Natoli pulled a chair out, patted Rachel on the arm, and launched into a therapeutic routine that consisted of endless, labyrinthine tales of her five sisters' weddings and her own plans to get to New York as soon as possible to find her grandparents and tell them to invest in IBM. Julia Duffy drifted about the small office, which was fitted out with half a dozen workstations and a large whiteboard Nguyen had been filling up with a local time line of the last month and the next two.

"Are you the only one working on this, Rachel? Do you mind us calling you Rachel?" Duffy asked during a lull in the Natoli family saga.

"No. It's my name. And there's another three of us on this project. I'm just the only one who's here right now. There's two Yanks and a Brit. We've all got doctoral qualifications in history, or were going for them when this shit went down."

"You don't look old enough," said Duffy.

"I was still going for mine. Had a thesis due in a few months. It was killing me."

"There you go!" said Natoli. "A silver lining."

"And look," said Duffy, jerking her thumb at the board as she sat down, "you can do field research for your PhD. Talk about winning the lottery."

"You guys, don't seem overly upset," said Nguyen, intrigued by their chirpiness.

"Antidepressants," Duffy said, smiling sweetly. "Come and see us when they run out. That'll be a dark fucking day."

"So why are you guys here?" asked Nguyen. "Kolhammer promised us more hands, but nobody said anything about civilians."

Duffy shrugged. "They won't let us talk to our offices. Well, I guess most of us don't have offices now…"

Natoli rolled her eyes.

"So we volunteered to help. It's that, or stay locked in our cabins. I guess they figured this is where we'd do the least amount of damage. We're supposed to be writing some puff piece for the local yokels, explaining how the hell we got here. That took all of two hours. So now we got nothing to do, and I really don't want to go back to watching Rosanna's undies dry in our cabin."

"Okay," said Nguyen. "You guys do any history at uni… sorry, in college?"

"Not a scrap," said Duffy.

"I majored in Olde Icelandic legends." Natoli grinned.

"Super," said Rachel. She cleared a pile of paper from the keyboard in front of her and brought up the Fleetnet search window.

"What we're doing," she explained, "is looking at things that are supposed to happen during the next few weeks in all the theaters of this war. We'll start with the Web cache first, because it's much quicker and we have a lot of full-text stuff stored anyway-"

"Like war histories and so on?" asked Natoli.

"Yeah, occupational hazard. When we've exhausted that, we'll get into the hard copy." She indicated a pile of cardboard boxes pushed into the far corner of the office. They were packed tightly with books. "But the net's keeping us busy for now. You get ten thousand people, they're going to build up a lot of data over time."

"You know any of the guys in the physics group?" asked Duffy. "Maybe we could speak to them to pad out our story."

Lieutenant Nguyen nodded. "A friend of mine got seconded to that. They got no hope. The basics are easy. The simultaneous existence of all possible times has been accepted, at least theoretically, since Einstein. And quantum foam engineering is mundane enough to have been written up in Popular Science. Even I've read some stuff about it."

"I wrote a weekend feature about it once," said Duffy. "But I thought all the lab work was really unsophisticated, a bit like nanotech during the eighties. I wouldn't have thought we had enough quantum muscle to push a cold fucking taco back through eight decades, let alone a carrier battle group."

"Guess you were wrong," said Natoli.

"That'll be another correction for the Times then," Duffy joked.

"But you don't think we can find or rebuild whatever sent us here?" Natoli asked. Her voice said she was searching for a glimmer of hope.

"Not a chance. Not for fifty, sixty years at best," said Nguyen.

"You know what this means, don't you?" said Duffy. "We're living in the dark ages, ladies. They haven't even heard of feminism here, let alone the female orgasm."

"You don't think we'll ever get back?" asked Natoli.

"I'd like to hope so," said Rachel. "My parents, they really worry about me."

"So you joined the navy to put their fears at ease?" Duffy asked.

"I like to surf." Rachel shrugged. "I figured if I had to join up, I might as well get some tube time in. I guess I was kind of an idiot."

"So, what you got for us, Lieutenant?" said Natoli, clapping her hands to draw a line under the maudlin atmosphere.

Rachel gathered herself together, stood up, and moved over to the whiteboard.

"Okay. Today is the ninth of June. A Czechoslovakian village by the name of Lidice will be destroyed today in reprisal for the assassination of an SS guy called Heydrich, by a couple of Czech soldiers flown out of Britain. The occupants will be massacred and thousands of other Czechs will be shipped off to concentration camps over the next few weeks."

"Jesus," breathed Natoli. "Can't we do anything about it?"

"Like what? Broadcast a warning on CNN? Fly a bunch of marines in from Germany? It's a different world here."

"Couldn't we warn off the Nazis?" asked Duffy. "Tell them we know what they're up to?"

"They'd laugh in our faces," said Nguyen. "Just forget about it. We already told the local guys. They're like, 'Too bad, it's war, get over it.' Nobody really cares about the small stuff."

"The small stuff!" cried Natoli.

"That's right. Fifty million people are going to die in this war. They couldn't care less about a little village full of peasants with alphabet soup for names. Too bad, it's war, get over it."