to be covered with blackout curtains. The contemps had complained about how dangerous it had been to get around in the blackout, and now he could see—or, rather, not see—why. His first instinct was to put his hands out in front of him and feel his way forward, but this was the southeastern coast of England. He could be on the edge of a chalk cliff, and one step could send him plummeting to his death.
He stood still, listening. He could hear the faint sound of waves lapping the shore off to his right. From the twenty-third on, the fires of the burning town of Dunkirk had been visible from parts of the coast, but he couldn’t see any red on the horizon. Or any horizon, for that matter. Which meant either this wasn’t one of those parts or he’d come through earlier than the twenty-third, even though the whole point of picking this site was that it didn’t have temporal slippage.
You can figure out the time later, he thought. Right now you need to find out where you are. The waves sounded level with him, not somewhere below. Good. He slid one foot slightly forward. Gravel. The shingle of a beach. Or a road down which someone would presently come driving with the shuttered headlights that only let the driver see a few feet ahead, in which case he needed to get off said road right away. But he couldn’t hear any sound of an engine, and the road north of Dover wound along the tops of the cliffs, not down along the beaches.
He stooped and patted the gravel. It was damp. He swept his hand in a semicircle and could feel a patch of wet sand and what felt like a shell. Definitely a beach—though in 1940, an English beach was probably more dangerous than a road. It was likely to be mined or covered with barbed wire—or both—and in the dark he could easily trip and impale himself on a tank trap.
Props had sent a book of safety matches through with him. He debated lighting one to give him an idea of where he was. It should be all right. The beach had to be deserted. The drop wouldn’t have opened if there’d been anyone to see its shimmer. But that had been several minutes ago. A soldier might be patrolling or there might be a ship out there in the Channel. He couldn’t see anything, but some vessels had run without lights to keep from being spotted by the Germans. And the shimmer would be visible for a long way over water. Even a match’s tiny flame could be seen for miles. More than one World War II convoy had been sunk by submarines because a careless sailor had lit a cigarette.
So, no light. And unless he wanted to be blown up by a land mine, no wandering around in the dark. Which meant his only option was to stay put and hope dawn wasn’t too far off. He lowered himself carefully down onto the sand and settled in to wait for dawn.
I could have been spending this time prepping in Oxford instead of sitting here in the dark, he thought. He could be memorizing that list of naval ships that had participated in the evacuation he hadn’t had time to, or finding out exactly where the returning troops had docked and how he was going to get access to the dock when the press wasn’t allowed.
Damn Dunworthy and his schedule changes, he thought. The damp sand was soaking through his pants. He stood up, took his jacket off, folded it, sat down again, and resumed staring into the darkness. And shivering.
It was growing steadily chillier. It’s much too cold for May twenty-fourth, he thought, and suddenly remembered every horror story he’d ever heard—the medieval historian they’d sent through to the wrong year who’d ended up smack in the middle of the Black Death; the one back in the early days of the net, when they’d still thought historians could affect events, who’d gone through to 1935 to shoot Hitler and found himself in East Berlin in 1970. And the historian who’d tried to go through to Waterloo—which was a divergence point just like Dunkirk—and ended up in America in the wilds of Sioux territory.
What if he wasn’t in 1940 at all? Or what if, rather than being on an English beach, he was on one in the South Pacific, and the Japanese were about to