“Don’t sweat it. You’re a smart kid. You’ll pick it up quickly. Where’d you say you were from? Chicago, right? Okay. Type that in.”

Wally was actually quite an accomplished typist. He’d taken lessons at his mother’s insistence. But the combination of the very busy screen in front of him, and the strangely shaped keyboard beneath his wrists, proved so unsettling that he retreated into a slow, two-fingered, hunt-and-peck style.

“Jesus, kid, you’re gonna have to speed it up if you want a job at the Trib. Okay, click the mouse . . . this thing here.”

The picture on the big screen changed instantly. While Wally squinted at the flood of information, Natoli explained that Fleetnet had more than four thousand CNN references to Chicago stored in its lattice memory. Beginning to get the picture, Curtis stared in awe.

“All right,” Natoli said. “A big cheer for the Windy City. Now, let’s refine the search. Whereabouts you from in Chicago?”

While Rosanna played nursemaid to the ensign, at the other end of the room Julia Duffy was just beginning to feel the need for another chill pill. She’d been chewing through her supply of Prozac like fucking M&M’s, ever since they’d arrived. As she listened to Lieutenant Commander Black describe the raid on Pearl Harbor, she began to feel again as if the floor of the world was dropping out from beneath her feet. Like, here’s this guy, completely sane, kinda cute even, and he’s talking about something happened way back in the last century—as though it was just yesterday, she mused, hoping it didn’t show on her face.

“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.