"Wow," she says, genuinely awed by all of this. "It almost sounds too good to be true. Must cause at least twenty times the trouble oil does in my place and time, but ... that's remarkable."

She leads him through the winding stalls, shops, and narrow, busy alleys of the market district where she and Tommy had recently haggled over chest freezers and other appliances for the diner as though she'd walked them for years, instead of only once the other day, easily able to focus on the conversation without getting them lost.

"If anything else catches your eye, let me know, we can stop, I'm just taking the path of least resistance. ... Also: hold up, when you say 'energy weapons', is that ... honest-to-God scientific talk for 'real life ray guns'?"