“Right. You can know the location of a subatomic particle or its spin, but not both.” Max made it sound like a question, and when he got a pair of nods from the resident geniuses, he went on. “This came out decades after the time frame we’re talking about. Tesla didn’t know the uncertainty principle, so he wouldn’t have been constrained in his thinking.”

“But Max,” Juan said, “the principle still stands, whether it had been discovered or not. For example, no one went faster than light before Einstein proved you couldn’t do it, and no one’s done it since.”

Hanley had laid a logic trap, and Cabrillo had walked right into it. Max pounced, “A couple months ago you got a telephone call from a computer based on quantum entanglement that relies on subatomic particles communicating with one another at a speed faster than light. Impossible, you just said, and yet your call happened. All I’m saying is that when it comes to technology, yesterday’s impossibility is tomorrow’s IPO. Go to Vermont, keep an open mind, and Murph, Stoney, and I will come up with an alternative theory that fits your gestalt.”

“Gestalt?” Cabrillo smirked.

“Word-of-the-day toilet paper,” Max chuckled, “don’t mock it. Just to keep things in perspective, your cell phone has more computing capacity than the lunar lander that put men on the moon. And both of those things were considered impossible less than ten years before they were invented.”

“Fine, consider my mind open. Getting back to my original question, when is the ship’s provisioning over?”

“Ten tonight. We’re waiting for a shipment from a liquor wholesaler, and the flight from Anchorage with our king crab legs lands at Newark at eight thirty.”

“An army travels on its stomach,” Linc said.

“And liver, apparently,” Eddie Seng added. “It will be nice to have real bourbon again. Max, that African swill you bought in Madagascar was beyond rotgut.”

“What do you expect for a dollar a bottle?”

“I’m just grateful that stuff didn’t blind us all.”

“If you go blind, it’ll be for other reasons,” Hanley shot back. He looked to the Chairman. “We’ve got a pilot scheduled to take us out at eleven.”

“So you meet Linda and the Emir in Bermuda the day after tomorrow?”

“Actually, they’ve made good time. We’re going to have to kick the old girl into high gear and reach Bermuda in twenty hours in order to meet them.”