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that we won’t have to worry about the pressure.”
    Mitchell huffed sarcastically, the tone itself refuting Reinheiser’s assertions.
    “Look around you!” Reinheiser fumed, fed up with being ridiculed by his inferiors. “Do I have to spell it out to the letter? Why wasn’t the hull of the
Wasp
crushed under the pressure of twenty-seven thousand feet of water? That corpse still had its top hat and cane!” His voice mellowed as he perceived that the puzzled expressions of the others no longer held any hint of protest, only intrigue. “The only possible explanation is that the electromagnetic storms which brought these ships and planes here, somehow shielded them from the ocean pressure.”
    “But we didn’t have anything protecting us when we went through,” Del pointed out.
    “We didn’t get caught in the storm,” Reinheiser explained. “We got hit by the storm, outside its bubble, merely in the way of devastation’s chosen path.”
    The men looked around to each other with hopeful shrugs. Perhaps they didn’t believe Reinheiser on a rational level, but they had a desperate need for some sliver of hope.
    “But we don’t have the supplies to just float around and wait for a storm,” Del said. His voice wasn’t hostile; he was asking, not arguing.
    “We shan’t wait long,” Reinheiser replied. “That portal is the barrier between two very different magnetic fields. The interaction of those fields constantly produces violent electrical storms.”
    “But how often?” Mitchell argued, disgruntled at the second apparent flaw in Reinheiser’s plans. “Every couple of months? Or years apart? We don’t have that much time.”
    “Again you are looking at things from the wrong point of view, Captain,” the physicist said with a superior smile, truly enjoying having an answer for every doubt. “The storms occur every few weeks or so on the other side of the barrier, the other frame of reference. Down here that translates to hours or even minutes.”
    The physicist looked around at the others, noting theslight, hesitant glimmer of hope on their faces. Give them what they need to hear, he reminded himself, and he looked straight into each set of pleading eyes.
    “We can escape.”

Chapter 4

Eulogy
    W ONDERMENT OVERWHELMED HIM . Every escapist instinct within Del told him to swim away from the
Unicorn
and lose himself in history. He had thrust himself into the heart of an untainted legacy. So much more than a museum, this place held unfabricated, unbiased testimony to the world’s past in ways and with a purity that books, models, even exacting restorations could not begin to approach. He could spend a lifetime swimming among these snapshots of different times; he thought of the many history classes he’d taken in college, of the dry lectures, or even the good ones from the rare, animated professor with a passion for the subject. Yet even those superb teachers and their impassioned recounting could not begin to approach the sense of marvelous reality that Del felt out here. He wanted to stay and to swim and to learn.
    His first order of business was a bit more grim, though. He had to remove the bodies of his dead shipmates who’d been drowned in the sub and select one for Brady’s test of Reinheiser’s time theory. He moved to the jagged tear in the
Unicorn’s
hull and peeked inside.
    The destruction was total. Splintered bunks, shredded blankets, and blasted footlockers floated about and lay jumbled in uneven heaps.
    And scattered all about the mounds, meshed in like just so much more debris, were Del’s shipmates.
    Del set a determined visage and squeezed in through the hole. Working methodically and with as much detachment as he could muster, he brought each man out and released him to his watery grave, saving the last body for the experiment, bringing it back to the air lock, where those inside the sub could retrieve it.
    Del’s second mission was to retrieve a body from the
Bella
. This task