Lieutenant Nguyen nodded. “A friend of mine got seconded to that. They got no hope. The basics are easy. The simultaneous existence of all possible times has been accepted, at least theoretically, since Einstein. And quantum foam engineering is mundane enough to have been written up in Popular Science. Even I’ve read some stuff about it.”

“I wrote a weekend feature about it once,” said Duffy. “But I thought all the lab work was really unsophisticated, a bit like nanotech during the eighties. I wouldn’t have thought we had enough quantum muscle to push a cold fucking taco back through eight decades, let alone a carrier battle group.”

“Guess you were wrong,” said Natoli.

“That’ll be another correction for the Times then,” Duffy joked.

“But you don’t think we can find or rebuild whatever sent us here?” Natoli asked. Her voice said she was searching for a glimmer of hope.

“Not a chance. Not for fifty, sixty years at best,” said Nguyen.

“You know what this means, don’t you?” said Duffy. “We’re living in the dark ages, ladies. They haven’t even heard of feminism here, let alone the female orgasm.”

“You don’t think we’ll ever get back?” asked Natoli.

“I’d like to hope so,” said Rachel. “My parents, they really worry about me.”

“So you joined the navy to put their fears at ease?” Duffy asked.

“I like to surf.” Rachel shrugged. “I figured if I had to join up, I might as well get some tube time in. I guess I was kind of an idiot.”

“So, what you got for us, Lieutenant?” said Natoli, clapping her hands to draw a line under the maudlin atmosphere.

Rachel gathered herself together, stood up, and moved over to the whiteboard.

“Okay. Today is the ninth of June. A Czechoslovakian village by the name of Lidice will be destroyed today in reprisal for the assassination of an SS guy called Heydrich, by a couple of Czech soldiers flown out of Britain. The occupants will be massacred and thousands of other Czechs will be shipped off to concentration camps over the next few weeks.”

“Jesus,” breathed Natoli. “Can’t we do anything about it?”

“Like what? Broadcast a warning on CNN? Fly a bunch of marines in from Germany? It’s a different world here.”

“Couldn’t we warn off the Nazis?” asked Duffy. “Tell them we know what they’re up to?”

“They’d laugh in our faces,” said Nguyen. “Just forget about it. We already told the local guys. They’re like, ‘Too bad, it’s war, get over it.’ Nobody really cares about the small stuff.”

“The small stuff!” cried Natoli.

“That’s right. Fifty million people are going to die in this war. They couldn’t care less about a little village full of peasants with alphabet soup for names. Too bad, it’s war, get over it.”

Rachel turned back to the board.