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me.”
    Cities never changed in some respects. They were always crowded. In Downtime, they also always stank. Nonetheless, Ericsson had an open window. One of the advantages of Downtime is that break-in's are a lot easier before air conditioning becomes common. I used an aerosol to painlessly inject my sleeping subject with a carefully configured cocktail of designer drugs, waited until they’d had time to take effect, then hauled him into a nearby chair and sat opposite. Ericsson stared back, drugged into a half-hallucinatory state of receptiveness which would pass easily as an inspired dream come the morning. The technique worked for ‘inspiring’ lots of things, even poetry, in unsuspecting Downtimers.
    “Hi. I’m your subconscious.” I hauled out some drawings I’d been working on during the trip with Jeannie guiding my hand, displaying various inventions appropriate to current technology, explaining how they worked, and implanting a sense of urgency as I did so. Ericsson soaked it all up, mustering a few smiles with the goofy delight an engineer gets when he sees a really neat machine. “You’ve got to put a lot of this together to build a new kind of ship,” I finished up. “You’ll be famous. You’ll do a great service for your adopted country.” He nodded back, the gesture sort of wobbly from the drugs, then subsided back into receptiveness. I took him back to bed, settled him in, then injected a second dose to counteract the first set of drugs so Ericsson wouldn’t accept any unwanted inspirations from background noise or events before morning, then left as dawn was graying the sky.
    I really wanted to get on to the next stage of my Intervention, but had to wait to ensure Ericsson hadn’t reacted to my dream-sequence by trying to start a new religion or something. The process isn’t foolproof, but then nothing is. After staying in the city for several days and almost getting used to the smell, I made another midnight visit to Ericsson’s place, this time just sedating him so I could search his house at leisure. Sure enough, the diagrams scattered around revealed he’d taken on board everything I’d shown him. I stared at the result, skeptical despite myself. “Will this thing float?”
    Jeannie ran a quick analysis. Yes, Michael .
    “Will it work? I didn’t expect Ericsson to toss everything I showed him into one plan.”
    It appears workable given the current state of technology .
    “Okay. Let’s go make sure it gets built.”
    Temporal Interventionists specifically and historians in general know there are basically two obstacles to any technological innovation. The first is whether or not they’re feasible given the current state-of-the-art. The second is getting establishments wedded to older technologies to accept the new concepts. I knew Ericsson’s design would pass muster on the first count, but for the second I was going up against the institutional inertia of one of the most conservative mind-sets in human experience, that of Naval Officers. Not that I entirely blamed them for that conservatism. If some land invention doesn’t work, you just walk away. If a ship design is bad, you get to practice inhaling water.
    While waiting to check on Ericsson I’d pondered the problem, finally concluding no here-and-now Admiral busy fighting a war would ever voluntarily agree to build a new kind of ship, and even if I convinced one by induced-dreaming the rest of the establishment would negate his efforts. That meant I had to convince someone who couldn’t be overruled.
    Washington, D.C. had the same wartime look Richmond had, only more so since the North was bigger and richer. More generals, more kids in uniform, more money. Abraham Lincoln wasn't hard to spot, being both taller and homelier than most of his fellow Downtimers. The hard part turned out to be getting close enough to him to pass a message. I'd figured security for a public figure would be pretty minimal in this period, but I