“The one and only,” smiled Jones.

“Excuse me,” Black interjected. “No offense, Colonel. But a colored president? A lady president? A B-grade cowboy in the White House? What are you, using the funny pages for your history books? You gotta be yanking my chain. I’m looking around your whirligig here and I’ll admit I can see a lot of change, a lot of advances. But some things, they just don’t change.”

Instead of replying, Jones pulled a satchel out from under his seat and then a pair of powered combat goggles from within the bag.

“Pilot?” he asked, over the chopper’s comm channel. “Can you raise Fleetnet for me? I need to access my personal archive.

“Put these on,” he ordered Black.

The former copper miner eyed the goggles suspiciously. He gave Jones a hard, inquiring look, but the marine simply shrugged in reply. After a moment’s consideration, Black reached across and took the device. It reminded him a little of antique flying goggles from the Great War. But only a little. These things were lightweight and sleek, with a curious feeling of density to them. Like they were packed tight with impossibly small machinery or wiring.

He needed no help settling them over his eyes. Indeed, they seemed to mold themselves to his face. The sensation wasn’t entirely pleasant.

The first thing he noticed was the night vision. It was startling.

“Okay,” he said. “That’s a good trick. But what have they got to . . . whoa!”

Without warning his entire range of view turned black for a split second, before it was slammed by countless shimmering filaments of light. Sometimes they seemed as delicate as a single thread of spider’s web. In other places energy poured through this strange negative space in torrents and floods. As Jones worked a flexipad, Black rocked in his seat, overwhelmed by the visual effect of flying through this self-contained cosmos of fire and light. He found that he could catch a glimmer of something every now and then, a glimmer of recognition as something vaguely familiar flashed by; the Globe and Anchor of the USMC, the roaring lion from the beginning of an MGM movie. The images flickered in and out of range so quickly that he could never quite identify any one impression.

In a few seconds Jones seemed to find what he wanted. Lieutenant Commander Black let his head fell back slightly, like a man in the front row of a movie theater. He was in Washington, hovering above a huge crowd, perhaps a million strong. He could see the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial and then he was right up close to a black man. His rounded cheeks and pencil-thin mustache filled the—what, the whole screen?—as he punched out a speech, or perhaps a sermon. It certainly rang with the powerful cadence of the fire-and-brimstone revival meetings Black’s daddy had favored.