“Nope,” said the sailor as he removed the last of the bandages. “Worth its weight in gold, though. Watch this.”

He was familiar enough with the device to power up and load an mpeg of Casablanca in just a few seconds. Handing the device to a quizzical Big Itchy, he put his shirt back on as the film’s soundtrack filled the room. It was surprisingly loud and rich. A few of the men jumped slightly, and all quickly gathered around Big Itchy.

“Damn! I heard of this,” one of the white men said. “It’s a Bogart movie, supposed to be great.”

“Yeah, but we won’t see it here for ten fucking years,” said the Japanese.

The screen was relatively small, but the picture was crisp, drawing a few childlike noises of appreciation from the huddled gangsters.

“You got any Edward G. Robinson?” asked one. “I love his stuff. You dirty rats.”

The hoodlum did his best Robinson, with a tommy gun, cutting down a room full of rivals.

“So it’s true,” said Tui. “They came back in time.”

“Sideways, they tell me,” said Slim Jim.

“I don’t understand,” said Tui.

“I don’t think anyone does,” Slim Jim said. “And what the fuck does it matter anyway? They’re here. They brought a shitload of dough with them, and all of this stuff, too. Stuff you can’t even imagine, that people are going to pay a fortune for. And information, too. Goddamn, the things these guys know.” Slim Jim smiled, breaking into a laugh when it all got too much. “The possibilities Itchy. Just think of them.”

Reluctantly, the corpulent gangster dragged his eyes away from the screen. The others, except for Tui, kept watching.

“What do you mean?”

“That machine there, they call it a flexipad. It’s not just a little movie screen. It’s a telephone, although it doesn’t work so well now they don’t have their satellite cover—”

He was careful to say the word properly.

“—and it’s like an automatic bookkeeper. You could do your taxes for the whole year in a two minutes.” He grinned, eliciting a chuckle from both men. “Their doctors, they’ve got flexipads they just wave over your body and they can tell all sorts of shit about you, whether you’re sick or not. They’ve got these games on them, I’d have to show you them, you just wouldn’t believe me otherwise. But most of all, they got information.”

“Again with the information, Jimmy. What the fuck are you talking about? You think I want to know how to build a death ray? My old shotgun works just fine for now.”