Weapons of choice

"You all right, Miss Duffy?" Black asked.

Julia placed her coffee cup on the table and saw that her hand was shaking.

She didn't know whether it had been such a good idea after all, agreeing to help Kolhammer out by writing this layman's account of the Transition. The more she looked into it, the more obvious it became that they were trapped here. Without the Nagoya, which everyone agreed had been destroyed, they were fucked. You just don't build a time machine out of box tops and vacuum tubes, which was roughly the level of technology available in forties America.

Then again, she didn't feel like being confined to quarters like the other reporters-about half of them-who hadn't signed up for the program.

"I'm sorry," she said. "It just hits me sometimes. That we're really here. Our whole world has gone."

Dan Black cracked his knuckles, a sound like small rocks breaking. He could see that the reporter was growing gloomy. He didn't know what to say, but felt as if he had to try to cheer her up.

Truth to tell, he liked her. She was odd but intriguing. And pretty as all get-out, of course. She was interested in him, as well. He knew that much. Black had been with a few women in his time, but it had never worked out for the long run. He wasn't sure why, but he had a feeling, half formed and little understood, that he lost interest in them when they began to lose themselves in the courtship. He shook his head. That sounded screwy. He went back to copping a look at the reporter's legs. She'd caught him once, but didn't seem to mind.

"Anyhow," he said, "Ensign Curtis doesn't think it works that way."

"What way?"

"That your coming here affects what happens in your own time. It's still there, where you left it. He's been reading things on those computers, reckons you might have made a whole new world of time by coming here, or something like that. I don't know. I'm just a copper miner, and lady, I'm all at sea."

She brightened a little at the weak joke.

"I think you've got more to you than that, Dan. You're not just the sum of what you've done, you know. There's what you can be, as well. That's just as important."

"Guess I won't argue with that," he said, taking a pull at his cold coffee. "Fact is, I haven't worked a mine in nearly twelve years. The Depression killed my daddy's business. Damn near killed him, too. I had to hit the road, look for work. My parents, they couldn't afford to have me in the house. I eat too much."

"But you still call yourself a copper miner, even though you've been in the navy how long?"

"Eight years," he confessed. "I only got in because of my pilot's training. I did some crop dusting in 'thirty-one. Then that dried up. I scratched around, did some roadwork under the Roosevelt program. That dried up, too. I was picking fruit in California when I heard the navy was looking for fliers. Seemed kind of screwy but I was getting real tired of eating figs three times a day."

"And you don't think you're in denial, just a little bit, putting yourself out as a miner, when most of your working life has been spent in uniform?"

"Tell me, are all the dames from your time so damn thinky and sure of themselves?"

"Dan Black," she smiled, all slow and warm, "the dames from my time, they'd eat you up."

He wasn't sure why, but he liked the sound of that.

Before he could enjoy the idea any more, a beep sounded from within his shirt pocket.

"You've got mail, future boy," Duffy smiled.

He carefully pulled out the flexipad they'd given him and pressed a fingertip to the envelope that had appeared on screen.

"I've gotta go, Julia," he said, after reading the message. "The boss wants to see me."

"Don't be a stranger," she called out to him as he left.

Black had grown accustomed to the quality coffee on the Clinton. It was a rude shock, then, having to force down Ray Spruance's green, unpleasant brew again.

They sat in an office a short walk from the docks where the surviving destroyers had tied up, and a few minutes ride from the hospital where the less serious casualties had been taken. They couldn't see Kolhammer's task force. It had dropped anchor on the other side of Ford Island, where it kept watch over the skies out to a distance of eight hundred miles. The British ship Trident remained on station near Midway, watching for surface threats.

Spruance sipped at his coffee as though it tasted just fine.

"It's a bad business, this killing, Dan. Kolhammer is going to go nuts when he finds out."

Black stared out the window. Three nurses walked by, one of them with her arm in a sling.

"They haven't told him yet, sir?"

"Haven't been able to raise him. Their communications aren't so good without those space satellites they've got, or rather, haven't. They're trying to get him, but we're not sending anything about them by radio or cablegram for the moment. It's all hand-to-hand courier, for security."

"Were they an item?" he asked.