She shook her head ruefully and returned to the present. The monument in the center of the crossroads was small and unassuming. No statue, just a round millstone base and above a granite plinth with the names of the island's Union dead. Very many names, for so small a town; men who could have stayed home in comfort, and the way the war turned out wouldn't have affected their lives one bit. Men who ended lying on bloodstained tables down from Cemetery Ridge, with their bones shattered into splinters by minie balls and the surgeon's saw ready; men shivering and puking out their lives with yellow fever in the swamps along the Chickahominy; men drowned in the blackness of Farragut's ironclad in Mobile Bay; men down in the red clay while ants marched over their tongues toward sightless eyes. They had gone a long way from home, to die among angry strangers.

The captain of the Eagle took two steps backward and came to attention. Her salute was slow, with a precise quivering snap at the end. Then she turned and walked homeward.

"Still working, Ms. Rosenthal?" Ian Arnstein asked.

Doreen Rosenthal started and looked up from her books.

The Eagle had electric light still, which was one reason why she'd moved aboard a little early. He didn't intend to move his bag of essentials and crates of references into the little cubbyhole they'd assigned him until tomorrow, the day of their departure. He sat down across from her; the officers' wardroom was empty, although there was coffee in the corner for the night watch.

"Studying, not working," she said, holding up the cover of the book. It was a physics text; the title made very little sense to him. "Trying to figure out what happened to us. That's Doreen, by the way. No sense in being formal if we're going on a cruise." She smiled shyly.

He smiled back. "Well, it beats bush-clearing detail, Doreen." Everyone on the Council was supposed to put in at least a few hours. It made sense in a political sort of way, he supposed, but his back hurt. "Most people call me Ian."

"Funny, you don't look Scottish."

They shared a laugh. "My parents were extremely assimilated. Any luck with the search for the causes of the Event?"

He went over to the urn and poured them both a cup; no more coffee soon, so make the best of it. No more cream or sugar, either-the output of the few dozen cows on the island was reserved for the sick and children. Cows could breed, but he didn't even know if sugarcane had been domesticated yet, and they certainly weren't going to be sending any expeditions to India to find out for a while. I wonder if we could get honeybees in England? he thought.

One more thing to look up. He remembered that there hadn't been any in the Americas when the settlers arrived, but not whether anyone was raising them at this early date in the Old World. Or there might be some hives on Nantucket.

"No luck," Doreen said, sticking a piece of paper in the book and closing it.

"How do you take it?"

"Black."

Paper… Ian shoved the thought into the enormous to-do file. "Do you favor the Act of God hypothesis, or the Saucer People theory?" he asked with a grin, setting down the cups. "Those are the two main schools of thought on the island, and apart from food and blisters, people don't talk about much else. Then there are the dissenting minority churches; the Satan-did-it, and the Government Secret Project slash Conspiracy. And a new eclectic faith, the Saucer People Are Part of the Conspiracy."

"I'm in the minority," she said ruefully. "I comprehend the vastness of my own ignorance. I'm morally certain that whatever caused the Event was deliberate, at least in the sense that a chemical plant blowing up is deliberate. The whole thing was too… too artificial not to be the result of intent, even if it was an accident, some machine some-when going off half cocked, or whatever, somewhere and somewhen. The precise ellipse around the island, for instance. But apart from that I've got no earthly inkling what happened. I did have a wild idea…"

"What?" he said eagerly. "Tell me."

She rubbed a hand across the cover of the book. "I thought… well, how do we know this is the same universe, exactly, as the one we left? I decided to try to remeasure the physical constants, to see if anything had changed."

"And?"

"And everything's exactly the same, as far as I can determine-I don't have much in the way of equipment, you understand. Gravity, electrical resistance, they're all the same. For that matter, solid-state electronics wouldn't work here if the constants were very different." She sighed. "As I said, I'm beginning to comprehend how much I don't know."

"Socrates thought that was the beginning of wisdom," Ian said.

Doreen's mouth twisted wryly. "It's the beginning of uselessness," she said. "I mean, you know a lot of things that are useful. History's your specialty. What earthly use is my degree here?" She propped her head on a palm. "I suppose I could teach school, or something of that nature. Maybe a self-defense course, if I can get back in the swing-I used to do that sort of thing. The only really useful thing I've done since the Event is figure out exactly when we were."

"You've come up with a number of good ideas," Ian said' stoutly, patting her hand. "Which is more than most of the selectmen. The only thing they did was manage to acquire some popularity before the Event, totally irrelevant now. You helped with the navigation tables and saved invaluable time."

"What is relevant?" Doreen said moodily, sipping at her coffee. "Certainly not my plans for an academic career. Did you know, I wanted to be a ballet dancer once?" She looked down at herself and sighed. "When I was six. But even then it was obvious I'd never have legs up to my armpits."

Ian shrugged. "I've had an academic career," he said. "Not the same field, of course. At least you don't have to worry about cutbacks now."

She looked up at him. "You don't seem as… disoriented as most of us."

"Cofflin and the captain aren't, much," Ian said. "Which is fortunate, because it's keeping us alive. As for me, well, I'm a historian, and here we are in capital-H History. I didn't have any close ties at home, so…"

He stirred the coffee and looked at the rear of the spoon. Made in Japan. Nothing much made in Japan right now except pots… Jomon? No, that was thousands of years before this. He shivered slightly. It could awe you, the sense of years before years, lives before lives, the sheer depth of history, even at the best of times. Right now…

He cast off the feeling. "I wanted to be a science fiction writer myself," he said. "I even wrote a few books-fantasy really, under a pen name. Then there was this car accident, my wife was killed…"

"I'm sorry," Doreen said. It seemed to be genuine. She patted his hand.

"Frankly, we were about to get divorced. Then I got a teaching position, which was an incredible stroke of luck when you consider the market for classical-era historians, and never had time for the writing. Not fiction, at least. But I always kept up reading it. Time travel's a fairly common theme in science fiction, and some of it's surprisingly well thought out." He shrugged. "Could have been worse; at one point, I was thinking of specializing in the Byzantine period, and there's something recondite for you."

"Ian…" she paused. "What do you think's going to happen to us?"

He spread his hands, palms out. "How should I know? We might all be turned into turnips tomorrow or carried off to Alpha Centauri, or thrown back into the Jurassic and eaten by velociraptors, or… hell, my sense of the orderly and predictable course of nature has taken a severe knock! If we're left here? We might make it. I'm more hopeful than I was right after the Event. But it'll be close. This voyage is important."