Millikan, the director of the California Polytechnic Institute’s physics lab, merely grunted at Kolhammer. He appeared actively hostile to most of the other fliers. Eisenhower knew him to be a bit of a nut on racial issues, so perhaps that had something do with it. By way of contrast, Theodore von Karman, the top man at Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, and Leo Szilard from Columbia University, had to be dragged away from the fliers. Robert Oppenheimer, Linus Pauling, and a relatively young man called Robert Dicke from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology restricted themselves to nods and perfunctory smiles.

“And this is Professor Albert Einstein,” said Eisenhower. “He’s probably done more than anyone here to help us adjust to your arrival.”

All the time travelers reacted as Einstein shuffled forward to shake hands with Kolhammer. They treated him like some kind of big-league ballplayer or radio star, suddenly crowding around to take his hand or just touch him on the arm or the shoulder. It was odd. One of the fliers produced a thin black briefcase and handed it to Kolhammer.

“We thought you might appreciate this, Professor,” said the admiral. “It’s a computer. It’ll help you in your work.”

The physicist thanked him and carefully unzipped the bag. Eisenhower had been told about their electrical books, the flexipads as they called them. This would have fit the description, except that it seemed to be too large. Perhaps it was a more powerful flexipad?

“It’s called a data slate,” said Kolhammer as Einstein turned it over in his hands. “The sort of calculations that’d take months to do by hand, you can do in a split second on this baby.”

Eisenhower suppressed a smirk. He could see the other scientists eyeing it covetously.

“Does it play movies and music?” asked Einstein. “I’ve heard that it does.”

“Do you mind?” Kolhammer asked, taking the slate back and looking inquiringly at both Einstein and Roosevelt. Neither objected.

The admiral brushed a corner of the slate’s glass screen and it lit up, throwing out considerably more light than the single gas lamp in the room. Eisenhower could see that most of the illuminated page appeared to be a blank blue rectangle. Half a dozen or so small objects, about the size of a postage stamps, were clustered down the right-hand side of the—what would you call it, the screen? The page?

Kolhammer brushed one with the tip of his finger and it suddenly whooshed outward to fill the entire space with a moving picture of people in evening dress. Violinists, he realized as the first sweet notes of a Paganini concerto stole into the room. A murmur arose from the scientists and even from some of the military officers. The recording sounded as real as if they were in the front row of a concert hall.