But some had performed acts of extraordinary bravery—the badly injured petty officer who’d held off six Messerschmitts with a machine gun while the troops boarded; the accountant who’d ferried load after load of soldiers out to the Jutland under heavy fire; George Crowther, who’d given up his chance at rescue to stay and help the ship’s surgeon on the Bideford; the retired Charles Lightoller, who, not content with already having been a hero on the Titanic, had taken his weekend cruiser over and brought back 130 soldiers.
But not all of them had come back to Dover. Some had gone to Ramsgate instead; some had come back on a different boat than the one they took over—Sub-Lieutenant Chodzko had gone over on the Little Ann and come home on the Yorkshire Lass—and one fishing boat captain had had three boats shot out from under him. And some hadn’t come back at all. And for the ones who had returned to Dover, there were almost no details about which pier they’d docked at or when. Which meant he’d better have a bunch of backup heroes in case he couldn’t find the ones he wanted to interview.
It took him all night. As soon as Wardrobe opened in the morning, he took his dress whites back and had them measure him for whatever the hell it was American World War II reporters wore, and then went back to Balliol to start in on the Dover research. Charles, attired in tennis whites, was just coming out the door. “The lab phoned. You’re to ring them back.”
“Did they say if they’d found a drop site?”
“No. I’m off to prep for Singapore. The colonials spent all their time playing tennis.” He waved his racket at Michael and left.
Michael called the lab. “I can’t find anything within a five-mile radius of Dover that will open before June sixth,” Badri said. “I’m going to try London. You could take the train to Dover.”
And what if you can’t find a drop site in London either? Mike wondered. That would mean the problem wasn’t just finding a spot where nobody would see him come through—it was the evacuation itself. History was full of divergence points nobody could get anywhere near—from Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination to the battle of Trafalgar. Events so critical and so volatile that the introduction of a single variable—such as a time traveler—could change the outcome. And alter the entire course of history.
He’d known Dunkirk was one of them; Oxford had been trying and failing to get to it for years. But he hadn’t expected Dover to be one. If it was, there went one whole chunk of his assignment. On the other hand, it would mean he could go to Pearl Harbor, which he was actually ready for. And if Dover wasn’t a divergence point, this delay gave him more time to prep. And more things he needed to learn. Such as which London station the trains to Dover left from and when. And he still had the overview of the evacuation to do. And the war. And everything else. In three days. On no sleep.
He wished he wasn’t limited to a single implant. He could use half a dozen. He narrowed it down to the events of 1940, the events in Dunkirk, and a list of the small craft that had participated, decided he’d pick when he got to Research, and went over there.
The tech shook her head. “If you’re going as a reporter, you’ll need to know how to use a 1940s telephone. To file your stories,” she said. “And a typewriter.”
Michael wasn’t going to file any stories. All he was going to do was interview people, but if he did end up in a situation where he had to type something, that kind of ignorance could blow his cover, and there’d been Nazi spies in England in 1940. He didn’t want to spend the evacuation in jail.
He went over to Props and borrowed a typewriter to see if he could fake it, but he couldn’t even figure out how to get the paper in it. He went back to Research, talked the tech into putting an abridged version of typewriter skills and Dunkirk events in the same subliminal, had it, and dragged back to his rooms to get some sleep and then memorize everything else.
Charles was there, attired in a dinner jacket and practicing putts on the carpet. “Don’t tell me,” Mike said. “The colonials spent all their time playing golf.”