I looked up, and she beckoned me toward her. "Mr. Martin needs you," shesaid."Well, of course he does. He's just too much in love with his wife toreal...ze it."She looked at me oddly, blinking behind her thick glasses like an owl.Legal secretaries are not big into humor."A joke, Roseanne," I said. "Just a joke. Everyone knows I love Annie."She turned without comment and went into the big office in the corner. Ifollowed her. "Go right in," she said.I walked into Chuck's office, large and elegant.. In fact, I didn't even have to leave my room. I had discovered that I didn't actually have to be in the physical presence of the person I was trying to influence, so long as I knew they were there. I was systematically testing the range of my talent. I knew I could influence anyone in the house. Also, I had discovered that when I had the feeling of "reaching out" with my will, I could somehow sense the presence of other people. So far, this sense was very crude, little more than a feeling that. "Great! Glad you made it!" Chris replied.Chris was Sam's best friend, but both would admit that he was a little off his rocker. Sam was a rocker; spending every waking hour listening to or playing music on his guitar. Chris spent every night down in the lab, trying to find the answer to the meaning of life. That's what made them such great friends. Chris walked out from behind one of the computer consoles and shook Sam's hand."You know Jamie." Sam finished as he pointed to a young girl standing. By early 1944, the Allies had won the Battle of the Atlantic, and there was no longer a need for unsinkable aircraft carriers. The Habakkuks never sailed. But what if they had?At a stately six knots, the H.M.S. Indefeasible plowed through the rolling swells of the Arctic Sea off the coast of Norway. She was an experimental ship, one of the first of the new Habakkuk-class aircraft carriers carved out of chunks of the Greenland icecap. She was an iceberg shaped into the semblance of a ship's hull.