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.