"All hands—abandon present!" The Navy hadn't believed Leutenant Commander Joseph Rate and the crew of the yawl Alice when they had tried to explain their absence-without-leave as a freak display of time travel—and they hadn't believed Rate's warnings about how dangerous such travel could be. Instead, they had crippled the careers of good men for almost ten years, just long enough to decide that time travel worked, and just long enough to forget Rate's warning. So now Rate and the crew of the Alice are being sent back in time again, to nursemaid a landlubber scientist and a gun-crazy Company assassin on a mission to abort one of the pivotal encounters of all time and make the world safe for democracy at last. Or else unfit to live in . . .