Roosevelt gripped the wheels of his chair and spun himself around with some difficulty on the thick carpet. General Marshall helped him with the last part of the turn, until he finished up facing King and Kolhammer directly.

“Ike’s right. It looks like you’re here for good, Admiral Kolhammer. I don’t imagine for a second that it’s going to be easy. I can already think of dozens of problems, and those are just the ones on the political side. The military implications of scattering your technology all over the globe . . . well, I don’t even want to think about that right now. But I suggest you and Admiral King quit sniping at each other and come up with some plan to smooth your transition here, and get us back on the front foot.”

Kolhammer gave King the benefit of a very long stare before slowly turning away.

“I’ve been thinking about that, Mr. President,” he said. “I need to get back to Pearl right away. I have an idea I’d like to discuss with my people.”

Part Four

PART FOUR

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IMPACT

Chapter 36

36

USS HILLARY CLINTON, 0815 HOURS, 12 JUNE 1942

Apart from the gray metal bulkheads and exposed piping overhead, the main conference room in the USS Hillary Clinton looked like the meeting space at a business convention center. A semicircle of Ikea workbenches curved around in front of a video wall. When Kolhammer walked in, all his surviving commanders were present; the captains and executive officers of the Multinational Force had gathered in person, a rare occurrence, to discuss their options and settle on a course of action.

No ’42 personnel were present.

Kolhammer thanked Captain Halabi for filling his seat while he’d been gone, and then launched straight into the meeting.

“Right. You’ve all read the condensed report from the Physics Research Group. Anybody still think there’s a chance we can get home?”

He waited for somebody to put up their hand, but this was a room full of professional realists. They’d all studied the video of the Nagoya crumpling down into a singularity. They’d read the classified material about the sort of research Manning Pope’s team was supposed to be carrying out. And they’d read the report of the Physics Group, explaining why that experiment had probably gone wrong. Having adjusted to the miracle of their arrival in 1942, nobody was holding out any hope for a second miracle to carry them home.

Kolhammer gave it ten seconds. He could see individuals searching within themselves, counting up their personal tally of loss and pondering the consequence of their bizarre fate. But no one seemed as if they were about to jump up and demand that a new time machine be constructed.

It just wasn’t possible, and they knew it.

Finally Kolhammer broke the spell.

“Okay,” he said. “Options. We fight or we don’t.”