"Aloha, Jimmy," the 240-pound criminal rumbled from the chair that sat astride his fortune. "You're alive. That's good. The war over yet?"

"No, the war's got a way to run yet."

"Fat times then."

"Getting fatter by the day."

Slim Jim undid the top button of his shirt. There were six men in the room watching him-Itchy, Tui, and four silent toughs. Big Itchy was unusual for his times, being an equal opportunity employer. As the bastard son of a white plantation owner and a lei girl, he had no truck with discrimination. As long as a man could throw a punch or shoot a gun, and keep his mouth shut, he had a future with Big Itchy Enterprises. The men who stood, without speaking, as Slim Jim stripped off his shirt, were a mix of Kanaks, one local Japanese, and two white men. As Davidson's shirt came off they all saw the bandages he had strapped around his torso.

"Somebody's husband catch you?" asked Tui.

Slim Jim just smiled. The wrapping bulged under his left armpit. He gritted his teeth and ripped off the plaster. A flexipad came away, stuck to it.

"That's a lot of effort for a cigar box, Jimmy," said Big Itchy. "What's it made of, gold or something?"

"Nope," said the sailor as he removed the last of the bandages. "Worth its weight in gold, though. Watch this."

He was familiar enough with the device to power up and load an mpeg of Casablanca in just a few seconds. Handing the device to a quizzical Big Itchy, he put his shirt back on as the film's soundtrack filled the room. It was surprisingly loud and rich. A few of the men jumped slightly, and all quickly gathered around Big Itchy.

"Damn! I heard of this," one of the white men said. "It's a Bogart movie, supposed to be great."

"Yeah, but we won't see it here for ten fucking years," said the Japanese.

The screen was relatively small, but the picture was crisp, drawing a few childlike noises of appreciation from the huddled gangsters.

"You got any Edward G. Robinson?" asked one. "I love his stuff. You dirty rats."

The hoodlum did his best Robinson, with a tommy gun, cutting down a room full of rivals.

"So it's true," said Tui. "They came back in time."

"Sideways, they tell me," said Slim Jim.

"I don't understand," said Tui.

"I don't think anyone does," Slim Jim said. "And what the fuck does it matter anyway? They're here. They brought a shitload of dough with them, and all of this stuff, too. Stuff you can't even imagine, that people are going to pay a fortune for. And information, too. Goddamn, the things these guys know." Slim Jim smiled, breaking into a laugh when it all got too much. "The possibilities Itchy. Just think of them."

Reluctantly, the corpulent gangster dragged his eyes away from the screen. The others, except for Tui, kept watching.

"What do you mean?"

"That machine there, they call it a flexipad. It's not just a little movie screen. It's a telephone, although it doesn't work so well now they don't have their satellite cover-"

He was careful to say the word properly.

"-and it's like an automatic bookkeeper. You could do your taxes for the whole year in a two minutes." He grinned, eliciting a chuckle from both men. "Their doctors, they've got flexipads they just wave over your body and they can tell all sorts of shit about you, whether you're sick or not. They've got these games on them, I'd have to show you them, you just wouldn't believe me otherwise. But most of all, they got information."

"Again with the information, Jimmy. What the fuck are you talking about? You think I want to know how to build a death ray? My old shotgun works just fine for now."

"No," said Davidson, "that's not what I mean at all. Although, that stuff you can get, too, and I'm thinking that maybe some of the syndicate boys would like to know. But no, I'm talking about the real inside dope, Itchy. Like, would you want to know every winner of the Kentucky Derby for the next fifty years?"

Everyone stopped still. A few stopped breathing.

Slim Jim held out his hand for the pad. He shut down the Bogart vid and brought up a Web page he'd downloaded from Fleetnet himself. He'd never been so proud as the moment he successfully called up that site. It had taken every one of his sneaky, underhanded tricks to get unsupervised access to a workstation. And then it had required real intelligence to work the search interface to find something like this. Originally, he'd been looking for scores of football games, but had found nothing. Betting there had to be at least one fan of the track among ten or twelve thousand sailors and marines, he went looking for the Derby instead. And bingo! Here he was with the inside running.

"The thing is, Itchy, we gotta move quickly. Some other smart guy's gonna figure this out real quick, probably in the next couple of days. I grabbed as many results as I could and stored them in here. You'll find them in the folder called WINNERS. I can't get to a bookie, but I figure you can. We got to get as much dough down as quick as we can. Because pretty soon the future's gonna start changing."

Big Itchy nodded slowly. "Right. Who's gonna run a race where everyone knows the result?"

"The mob," said Slim Jim. "But of course, they don't mean everyone, everyone."

"You want to take down the mob?" said Big Itchy. "I'm incredulous, Jimmy. Flabbergasted even. I never took you for no suicide case. As soon as they found out what you'd done, they'd come back for their money, and take your nuts as interest."

"They would, they really would," Davidson admitted. "And there's no cutting them in, because they're not going to believe you. Not yet. So no, I was just joking about the mob. But if you can lay off twenty, thirty big bets around the whole country, we can clean up. Get a nice float for some other things I got in mind."

"Like what?" asked Big Itchy, sounding more interested with every passing minute.

"Big man, I'd have to sit down and split that fifth with you while I filled you in on these characters and what they're like. Things are going to change, Itchy. Even more than because of the war, I can feel it in my guts, man. And every time things change, there's always some guy smart enough to cash in. I want to be that guy. You should, too. You all should," he said broadening out his appeal to the other men in the room.

"Okay," said Itchy, "we'll talk. Talking's for smart guys and I like to think I'm smarter than the average guy." He paused for a moment, then said, "You tell me these guys got a lot of money."

Slim Jim leaned forward, looking at each of the men before he said quietly, "A Marine Corps private starts out on a salary of thirty-five grand a year. That's more than ten times what I make."

A chorus of soft hoots and wolf whistles played homage to such an impressive figure. Even Big Itchy had to respect a wad of dough like that.

"So how do we get our hands on it? These guys, they like a drink, all guys like a fucking drink, don't they? And getting laid, too, everyone loves to get laid."

For the first time, Slim Jim looked a little less sure of himself.

"You know, Itchy, they're kind of uptight, if you want to know. A lot of them, they don't seem the type to be lining up outside some shanky whorehouse for two hours just to stick their thing into a dame's been getting things stuck in her all day."

"What, are they queer or something?"

"I don't know man. Maybe it's all the dames they got on the ships. Maybe they don't need to. I haven't been around them along enough to know. But I'm guessing you'll make more of a buck getting them hammered than laid."

Slim Jim could almost see the gears and wheels cranking over slowly in Big Itchy's mind. It made him wish he had a classier connection out here in the islands, but this wasn't his home turf. He'd have to make do with the shoddy materials he had at hand.