"What does it do?" I asked, touching with great respect the metal disk on the nape of my neck.

"Has a recording of your memory that it keeps feeding back to your brain every three milliseconds. Telling you you are you, you see, rebuilding any personality changes that time line alterations in the past may have shifted. Purely a defensive mechanism, but it is all we have." Out of the corner of my eye I saw another man wink out of sight, and the professor's voice grew grim. "We must attack if we are to save the Corps."

"Attack? How?"

"Send someone back in time to uncover the forces waging this time war and destroy them before they destroy us. We have a machine."

"I volunteer. Sounds like my kind of job."

"There is no way to return. It is a one-way mission."

"I withdraw the last statement. I like it here." Sudden memory—restored no doubt three milliseconds earlier—grabbed me and a prod of fear pumped a number of interesting chemical substances into my blood.

"Angelina, my Angelina! I must speak to her…"

"She is not the only one!"

"The only one for me, Prof. Now stand aside or I'll go through you."

He stepped back, frowning and mumbling and tapping his teeth with his fingernails, and I jabbed the code into the phone. The screen beeped twice, and the few seconds crawled by like lead snails before she answered the call.

"You're there!" I gasped.

"Where did you expect me to be?" A frown crossed her perfect features, and she sniffed as though to get the aroma of booze from the screen. "You've been drinking, and so early too."

"Just a drop, but that's not why I called. How are you? You look good, great, not transparent at all."