“Well, Higgins is based in New Orleans, sir,” he cried back. “And Hiller Industries work out of Berkeley in California. But I don’t know, looking at those aircraft, they’re just way too advanced. I can’t really tell you where they came from, Commander. Maybe off a Hughes program out in the desert. Maybe a Landgraf or a Piasecki PV plant. I couldn’t say, sir.”

The choppers doused their spotlights and set down just aft of the island, atop the main elevator. No landing officer waved them in because nobody knew how. Hundreds of men had crammed onto different vantage points to watch the arrival, either high up along Vulture’s Row or scattered throughout the small superstructure, crowding around the AA mounts, crouched down low on the flight deck itself, despite being warned to keep that area clear. Some noted the USN markings and Royal Navy roundel on the strange machines. Others just gaped at their sheer freakishness.

A murmur went up when a woman emerged from the smaller aircraft. No one missed the Negro who hopped down from the other one. Dressed in some sort of camouflage battle dress, he dropped to the wet wooden flight deck with the grace of a panther. The smaller man who alighted behind him wasn’t nearly so lithe, but he carried about him the same sense of self-assurance.

It was all an act.

Both Kolhammer and Jones were reeling inside. They had briefly discussed the Transition, as it had come to be called, on the flight over. Kolhammer had filled his colleague in on what he remembered of the briefing by DARPA. Neither man had any expertise in quantum foam physics but they had agreed that, given their total inability to access any satellite links or detect any kind of digital or quantum signals whatsoever, the odds favored the theory that they were the strangers here, rather than Spruance’s task force.

Still, it was a hell of a thing to ask a man to accept, that he’d been ripped right out of time itself.

As hard as they found it to come to such a preposterous conclusion, however, they at least lived in a world where such things were theoretically possible. Kolhammer clutched a document case containing about two hundred pages of printed material on Multiverse Theory, culled from Scientific American, Popular Quantum Mechanics, Esquire, GQ, and the broadsheet press. If the locals didn’t want to believe him, perhaps the New York Times might convince them. He had been surprised to discover that one of the half a dozen Times features had been written by Julia Duffy. But it had taken Kolhammer less than half a second to dismiss any thought of bringing her across to do some of the explaining—even if her article had been one of the better ones.