Acknowledgements: Many thanks to the people of Nantucket, and none of the characters in this book are intended to represent any individuals living or dead! Thanks also to United States Coast Guard, which responded nobly to the ignorant inquisitiveness of the author. All errors, mistakes, lapses of taste and infelicities of expression are purely mine. Admiration and thanks also to the archaeologists and historians who piece together the past of our species from shards and the equivalent of landfill.

Particular thanks on-island to Tracy and Swede Plaut; to Randy Lee of Windshadow Engineering; to Wendy and Randy Hudson of Cisco Brewers (who make a great pale ale); to Harvey Young, the friendly (common) native Nantucketer (less common) at Young’s Bicycles; to the Bartletts of Ocean View Farm; to Mimi Beman of Mitchell’s Book Corner, and to many, many others.

Thanks also to Chief Petty Officer James for the tour and answering an afternoon of questions on his lovely ship!

And to John Barnes for dialectical (in both senses of the word) help; to Poul Anderson for some catching a couple of embarassing errors. To Heather Alexander for the use of her beautiful Harvest Season.

Dedications:

To Jan, as always, forever. And to Harry -- for setting a good example.

Chapter One:

March, 1998 AD

Ian Arnstein stepped off the ferry gangway and hefted his bags. Nantucket on a foggy March evening was chilly enough to make him thankful he’d worn the heavier overcoat; Southern Californian habits could betray you, here on the east coast of New England. Thirty-odd miles off the east coast. The summer houses built out over the water on the piers were still shuttered, and most of the shops were closed -- tourist season wouldn’t really start until Daffodil Weekend in late April, when the the population went from seven thousand to sixty. He was a tourist of sorts himself, even though he came here for a few weeks most years; to the locals he was still a ‘coof’, of course, or ‘from away’ to use a less old-fashioned term. Everybody whose ancestors hadn’t arrived in the seventeenth century was a coof, to the core of old-time inhabitants, a wash-ashore even if they’d lived here for years. This was the sort of place where they talked about ‘going to America’ when they took the ferry to the mainland.

He trudged past Easy Street, which wasn’t, and turned onto Broad, which wasn’t either, up to the whaling magnate’s mansion that he stayed in every year. It had been converted to an inn back in the 1850’s, when the magnate’s wife insisted on moving to Boston for the social life. Few buildings downtown were much more recent than that. The collapse of the whaling industry during the Civil War era had frozen Nantucket in time, down to the huge American elms along Main Street and the cobblestone alleys. The British travel writer Jan Morris had called it the most beautiful small town in the world, mellow brick and shingle in Federal or Neoclassical styles. A ferociously restrictive building code kept it that way, a doorway into Currier and Ives’ America, a place where Longfellow and Whittier would have felt at home and Melville would have taken a few minutes to notice the differences.

Mind you, it probably smells a lot better these days. Must have reeked something fierce when the harborfront was lined with whale-oil renderies. It had its own memories for him, now. Still painful, but life was like that. People died, marriages too, and you went on.

He hurried up Broad Street and hefted his bags up the brick stairs to the white Neoclassical doors with their overhead fanlights flanked by white wooden pillars. The desk was just within, but the tantalizing smells came from downstairs. The whalers were long gone, but they still served a mean seafood dinner in the basement restaurant at the John Cofflin House.

Doreen Rosenthal pecked at her computer and sneezed; there was a dry tickle in her throat she was dolorously certain was another spring cold. Behind her the motors whined, turning the telescope towards the sky. It wasn’t a very big reflector, just above the amateur level, but it was an instrument of sorts, and you could massage information out of the results. Sort of like 0.01% of Mount Palomar. Astronomy posts weren’t that easy to find for student interns, and the Margaret Milson Association had given her this one. It meant living on Nantucket, but that wasn’t so bad, she was the quiet sort even at U. Mass. She’d finally managed to lose some weight, having nothing better to do with her spare time than exercise and try to get back into shape. Well, a little weight, and it’s going to be more. Even in winter, the island was a good place to bike, or you could find somewhere private to do kata. When it wasn’t storming, of course; and there was a wild excitement to that, when the waves came crashing into the docks, spray flying highter than the roofs of the houses.

And always, there were the stars. The rooms below the observatory held decades of observation, all stored in digital form now. Endless fascination.

She took a bite out of a shrimp salad sandwich and frowned as the computer screen flickered. Not another glitch! She leaned forward, fingers unconciously twisting a lock of her long black hair. No, the digital CCD camera was running continuous exposures...

Stargazers didn’t actually look at the stars through an eyepiece any more. It was ten minutes before she realized what was happening in the sky.

Jared Cofflin sighed and leaned back in his office chair. There really wasn’t much for a police chief to do on Nantucket in the winter. An occasional drunk-and-disorderly, maybe some kids going on a joy-ride, now and then a domestic dispute; they’d gone seven straight years without a homicide. But April came ‘round again, and pretty soon the Summer People would be flooding in. Summer was busy. Coofs were a rowdy lot. Not that the island could do without them, although sometimes he very much wished they could. Once it had been islanders who travelled, and not as tourists. Nantucket skippers and seamen had been known from Kamchatka to Greenland, from the Antarctic to Hawaii. That was a very long time ago, now.

With a wry grin, he thought of a slogan someone had suggested to the Chamber of Commerce once as a joke: We used to kill a lot of whales. Come to Nantucket!

The little police station was in a building that had once housed the fire department, and across a narrow road from a restaurant-come-nightspot. The buildings on both sides were two stories of gray shingle with white trim, like virtually everything on the island that wasn’t red brick with white trim. About time for supper, he thought. No point in going home; he hadn't gotten any better at serious cooking since Betty passed on five years ago. Better to step over and get a burger.

He sighed, stood, hitched at his gunbelt and reached for his hat, looking around at the white-painted concrete blocks, the boxes of documents piled in corners and bursting out of their cardboard prisons. Hell of a life.. And he’d had to let the belt out another notch recently; it seemed unfair, when the rest of him was the same lanky beanpole it’d been when he graduated from High School back around LBJ’s inauguration.

The lights flickered. Nantucket was just about to switch over to mainland power, via an underwater cable. For the next few months they had to soldier along on the old diesel generators, though.

“Christ,” he said. “Not another power out.”

He walked out into the street and stopped, jarred as if he’d walked into a wall. Stock-still, he stood for a full four minutes staring upward. It was the screams from people around him that brought him back to himself.

Nor’easter at 20 knots. Just what we needed, Captain Marian Alston thought with satisfaction. She kept a critical eye and ear on the mast-captains' work as the royals and topgallants were doused and struck.

"Clew up! Rise tacks and sheets!"

"Ease the royal sheets!"

The pinrail supervisor bellowed into the wind: "Haul around on the clewlines, buntlines, and bunt-leechlines!"

The upper sails thuttered and cracked as the clewlines hauled them up to the yards, spilling wind and letting the ship come a little more upright, although the deck still sloped like the roof of a house.

"Lay them to aloft," Alston said to the sailing master. "Sea furl."

The crew swarmed up the ratlines and out along the yards that bore the sails, hauling up armfuls of canvas as they bent over the yards; doll-tiny shapes a hundred feet and more above her head as they fought the mad flailing of the wet Dacron.

No sense in leaving that much sail up, on a night as dirty as this looks to be. Too easy for the ship to be knocked down or taken aback in the dark by a sudden shift of wind. The chill bit through the thick yellow waterproof fabric of her foul-weather gear like cold damp fingers poking and prodding.

She stood with legs braced against the roll and hands locked behind her back by the ship’s triple wheel, a tall slim woman from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, ebony-black, a little gray at the temples of her close-cropped wiry hair; her face was handsome in a high-cheeked fashion like a Benin bronze. Spray came over the quarterdeck railing like drops of salt rain, cold on her face and down her neck. The sun was setting westward over a heaving landscape of gray-black water streaked with foam, and the ship plunged across the wind with the yards sharp-braced. Her prow threw rooster-tails every time the sharp cutwater plowed into a swell, twin spouts jetting up over the forecastle from the hawseholes where the anchor-chains ran down through the deck. Then the ship would heave free as if shrugging her shoulders, water foaming across the forecastle deck and swirling out the scuppers.

Alston smiled behind the expressionless mask of her face. Now this, this is real sailing, she thought.

The Coast Guard training ship Eagle was a three-masted steel-hulled windjammer. It had been built in 1936, and the original incarnation was called the Horst Wessel before the United States took it as war reparations shortly after the Fuhrer died in his Berlin bunker. There were still embarassing swastikas buried under the layers of paint here and there, but it was sound engineering, solid work from Blohm & Voss, the firm that built the Bismarck. Three hundred feet from prow to stern, a hundred and fifty to the tops of the main and foremasts, eighteen hundred tons of splendid, lovely anachronism. Good for another fifty years hard sailing, if the Powers-That-Be didn’t decide to scrap her.

“Secure the foreward lookout,” she said. It was getting a little dangerous for someone to perch up in the bows.

“Come about, ma’am?” the sailing master asked.

“In a minute or two, Mr. Hiller,” she said.

Nantucket was off to the northeast, fairly close, and it paid to be careful in the dark; the sea between the island and Hyannis on the mainland was shoal water, full of sandbars, and southeast was worse. She’d been tacking into the teeth of the wind for practice sake; fairly soon she’d turn and let the Eagle run southwestward. Cadets and crewpeople were swarming up the rigging; more stood by on deck, poised to haul on ropes. Archaic, but the best training for sea duty there was -- the Coast Guard still taught stellar navigation, too, despite the fact that you could push a button on a GPS unit and get your exact location from the satellites. Lieutenant William Walker was taking a sight on Arcturus from the edge of the quarterdeck, and Victor Ortiz was running one of his pupils through the same proceedure. Usually they did the first cruise of the season without cadets, but this year the Powers in their ineffable wisdom had changed the schedules a little. Completely rearranged them, in fact, causing everybody endless bother and inconvenience. It was a considerable relief to get out to sea, where a captain was her own master.

Even better if there wasn’t someone on the other end of the radiophone, she fantasized, and smiled to herself at the daydream.

“The wind’s southing, ma’am,” Thomas Hiller, the sailing master, hinted.

“Brace them sharp, then.”

The centuries-old litany of repeated orders echoed across the deck; Eagle had been built to operate the old-fashioned way, no high-geared winches or powered haulage. It ended with a boatswain’s mate bellowing: “Ease starboard, haul port, lively port!”

“Heave!” shouted the line leader in a trained scream that cut through the moan of the wind.

“Ho!” chorused the twenty young men and women on the line, surging back in unison.

“Heave!”

“Ho!”

“Ma’am.” Alston looked up. Hiller looked a little lost, which was a first. He’d been on the Eagle for eight years. “Ma’am... there’s something odd about the compass reading.”

An old-fashioned magnetic card compass binnacle stood before the wheels. She took a step and looked down into it; the card was whirling, spinning in complete circles. Captain Alston blinked in surprise. What on earth could cause that? The sky was clear to the horizon, only a little high cloud boiling in on the wind -- unusually good weather for this time of year and these latitudes, although there might be a storm riding in on the nor’easter. No lightning, certainly. Then she noticed that the gyro repeater compass was quivering too.

Marian Alston had been in the Coast Guard much of her thirty-eight years, commanded the Eagle for four, and served on search-and-rescue craft and armed cutters before that; she’d joined up the year sea duty was opened to women.

You learned to trust your gut. And never, never to trust the sea.

“Finish up and get them down,” she said.

Cadets and crew poured down the ratlines, the latter sometimes helping the former along; for the first few weeks out, there would always be the odd officer-cadet who froze a hundred and fifty feet up on a swaying rope.

A fat blue spark jumped from her hand to the metal housing between the ship’s three wheels. Alston bit back a startled obscenity -- you had to set an example -- and shook her hand. Something white-hot stretched for an instant from sky to sea off to her left. More sparks flew; people were leaping and cursing all across the deck. Not the four hands standing on the bench-like platforms either side of the wheels, she noted with satisfaction. They flinched, their eyes went wide, but they kept her steady on the heading they’d been given.

Light flickered dazzling from left to right behind her, curving ahead of the ship in a line only a few hundred yards away -- curving from east to west, in a line her navigator’s eye could see was the cord of a huge circle. St. Elmo’s fire ran along the Eagle’s rigging, blue witch-flame. The curses were turning to screams as the lightning reared up into a crawling dome of orange and white overhead. Like being under the biggest, gaudiest salad bowl in the world, ran through her mind as she stood paralyzed for a moment. Then the noise on deck penetrated.

Easily. The roaring wind had dropped away to nothing in the space of a few seconds, and the drumhead-taut sails slackened and thuttered limp. The motion of the ship lost its purposeful rolling plunge, changed to a shuddering as the waves turned into a formless chop, and then to a slow sway as they subsided. Shouts and screams echoed through an eerie silence as the rigging’s moaning song of cloven air died.

“Silence there!” she snapped, quiet but carrying. “Mr. Roysins, let’s get some order here. Whatever’s happening, panic won’t help.”

But it would feel so good, part of her mind gibbered, looking up at the dome of lights that turned night into shadowless day.

“On with engines,” she said. Max the diesel thuttered into life and steerage way came on the ship. “Strike all sails. Give me a depth-finder reading.”

She clenched her hands behind her back and rose slightly on her toes, ignoring the blasting arch of fire. “We’ve got a ship to sail.”

“Got the stores covered?” Chief Cofflin asked, as he pushed through the crowd on Main Street.

“Right, liquor, grocery, and jewellry -- just in case. We’re stretched pretty thin.”

His assistant hesitated; he was a short thin young man named George Swain, and a fourth cousin. Everyone on the island was a cousin, unless they were a wash-ashore. It made for a certain lack of formality. So did the fact that there were only twenty-five officers on the force.

“Some of our own people are a mite shaky, Chief.”

“Ayup. Don’t blame ‘em, George. Still, we’ve got a job to do.” He stopped to think for a moment, running through a list of names in his head. “Get everyone who’s off-duty back on. And call Ed Geary, Dave Smith, Johnnie Scott, and Sean Mahoney. Tell them to each pick six friends they can trust and come down to the station. Deputize ‘em. If they’ve got something to do, it’ll keep them quiet at least.”

George missed a step. “Chief, we can’t do that on our own say-so!”

“I can and I just did,” Cofflin said. “Ed’s a good man and he knows an emergency when he sees one, and so are the rest. You call them and get them posted. Meanwhile, let’s see if I can talk some sense into these people here.” The selectmen or somebody should be doing it; he was a policeman, not a politician. But they were probably out there running around with the rest of the crowd.

He mounted the steps of the bank at the head of main street and looked down the cobbles towards the big planter at the foot of the street. Behind him the road split in an irregular Y-fork, shops and small hotels in converted houses to his left, big mansions mostly owned by rich coofs to his right and rear -- the Three Bricks and the Two Greeks, houses built across the street from each other by rival whaler captains back in the 1840's. The lights on the cast iron lamp-posts shone on a sea of faces, on a street that should be mostly clear this time of night. Overhead the ghastly, garish lights still crawled and sparked, adding a weird touch to the upturned faces; all it needed was torches and pitchforks to be something out of a movie. He raised the battery-powered megaphone to his lips.

“Now, let’s have some sense here,” he said.

“What the fuck’s going on?” someone yelled, and the crowd roared with him.

“QUIET, DAMMIT!”

The bullhorn cut through the gathering madness, stopped it feeding on itself.

“If I knew what was going on, I’d tell you,” Cofflin said bluntly, in the silence that followed. “I can tell you going hog-wild won’t help any. That --” He pointed upwards towards the shimmering dome of light “-- hasn’t hurt anyone yet. But we’ve had a dozen accidents, a suicide, and two assaults-with-intent tonight. That has hurt people.”

It wasn’t real easy to have a riot in a town of four thousand people; particularly not when most of them were old-stock Yankees and phlegmatic by inclination and raising... but everyone was coming real close about now. He looked up. If he thought it’d do any good, he’d be inclined to get out in the streets himself. Run around and shout, too. The dome of fire had been there all night, hanging over the town, over the whole island, like the face of an angry God. Every church on the island was jam-packed, but at least those people weren’t causing any harm and might be doing some good.

“The phone to the mainland’s out,” he went on. “Radio and TV are nothing but static; the airport can’t get through either. The last planes from Hyanis and Boston didn’t arrive. Now why don’t you all go home and get some sleep. If things aren’t back to normal in the morning, we’ll --”

A collective shout that was half gasp went up from the crowd. The stars were back. There was no transition this time; one minute the dome of lights was there, and the next it wasn’t. He suddenly realized that a sound had accompanied it, like very faint frying bacon, noticeable only when it was gone.

The crowd’s gasp turned to a long moan of relief.

“-- we’ll take further measures,” he went on. “And we’ll all try not to do anything that will make us feel damned silly in the morning, won’t we?”

He could feel the tension in the crowd ease, like a wave easing back from the beach. People were laughing, talking to their neighbors, slapping each other on the back, even hugging -- though he’d bet that those were coofs. A few were crying in sheer reaction. Cofflin himself breathed a silent prayer of thanks to a God he didn’t believe should be bothered with trivialities. Everything’s all right, he thought looking up at the infinitely welcome stars. His gaze sharpened. Mebbe so. Mebbe not.

“So why don’t you all go home now?” he went on to the people. “It’s --” he looked at his wrist “-- 2:30 and I’m plenty tired.”

The crowd began to break up. George came up, holding his cell phone. “Geary wants to know if we still need help,” he said.

“Ayup,” Cofflin said. The assistant blinked surprise. “Son,” Cofflin went on, “don’t say a word to anyone else, but take a gander up there.”

He nodded skywards. The younger man looked up. “Nothing but stars, Chief,” he said. “And I’m glad to see them, I’ll tell you that.”

“Ayup. But take a look at the moon, George.”

The other policeman’s face went slack, then white. The moon was a crescent a few days past new; and it ought to be right out there now, getting ready to set. Instead it was nearly full...

“And the North Star should be just about there. T’ain’t. Just be glad nobody else’s noticed yet,” Cofflin said grimly. “Now let’s see if the phones to the mainland are working again.”

Doreen Rosenthal looked at the image on her screen and blinked again. One hand raised close-chewed nails towards her mouth, and she forced it down with an effort of will. The other twisted itself into her hair. She’d felt like weeping with relief when that weird... phenomenon. Let’s not get emotional here... had gone away. Now she was feeling sick to her stomach again, with a griping pain below her breastbone.

“Let’s look for the pole star,” she said.

One had to be systematic. She split the screen and called up an exposure from last night’s sequence beside the latest one for comparison. Her fingers flew over the keyboard. “This doesn’t make any sense at all,” she complained. Nothing was where it should be!

A thought struck her. Now you’re going completely nuts, she thought. Her stomach gripped, clenching. Still, it couldn’t hurt. It wouldn’t take a minute to call up the program and get the data fed.

More keystrokes. Nothing. Well, there’s one crazy idea junked. Lucky nobody would ever know she’d tried. Then she paused. “Well, it can’t hurt to be absolutely sure.”

“Search... for... all... correlations,” she typed. Now the program would run a back-and-forth search until it found a stellar pattern corresponding to the one on the latest CCG exposure.

Dawn was turning the eastern horizon pale pink before she was sure.

Gevalt, she thought. It seemed appropriate. Tears trickled down her face to drop and blotch on the keyboard.

“I should tell someone.” But who?

This can’t be happening to me! I’m an overweight Jewish graduate student from Hoboken, New Jersey! Things like this didn’t happen to anyone, and if they did it was to some blond in a movie, meeting Bruce Willis or something. Her arms hugged her middle, feeling a cramping like a bad period.

Mother, help! That calmed her a little. Mother would have panicked even worse, if she was here. “You’re a scientist, act like one,” she chided herself, blowing her nose and wiping the keyboard. “Let’s firm this up and get a little precision here.”

“Ma’am, still nothing,” the radio operator said.

Captain Alston had been staring up at the infinitely welcome stars. A new unease was eating at the first relief as she checked and rechecked. Either her memory had deserted her, or...

She shook her head and stepped into the small rectangular deckhouse behind the wheels, rather grandly called the Combat Information Center. She preferred to think of it as the radio shack. “Still gettin’ static?” she asked.

“No ma’am. It’s clear since those lights went away. There just isn’t anything to receive, not on any of the frequencies.”

She bit back that’s impossible. Obviously everything that had happened since sundown was impossible; nevertheless, it was happening. A thought occurred to her.

“Try a GPS reading,” she said.

That should read the ship’s location off to within a few feet. “Nothing, ma’am. Nothing. Maybe the storm scrambled all our electronics.”

Not unless it was EMP like a fusion bomb’s, Alston thought. Or maybe the elves had carried them off to fairyland and B’rer Fox would be by any minute, riding on Willy the Orca; right now one hypothesis looked about as good as another. The crewman’s voice was taking on a shrill note.

“Steady, sailor. “ She paused. “Lieutenant, you have a pocket receiver, don’t you?”

The young man nodded. It was a camper’s model, accurate to within a few hundred yards even without the military codes, looking much like a hand calculator. William Walker pulled it out and punched at the keys.

“No reading, ma’am.” His Montana twang was as expressionless as if this was a training exercise. “As far as this unit’s concerned, the satellites just aren’t there t’all.”

“Ma’am! I’ve got someone on the radiophone.”

Alston carefully did not lunge for the receiver. “Who?”

“Nantucket, ma’am.” That made sense; they were only a few miles away. As much as anything made sense this night. “It’s the harbor. They’re sort of babbling, ma’am.”

Ms. Rosenthal, I’m really rather busy.”

Cofflin’s long bony face was set in implacable politeness; he ran a hand through his thinning blond hair as he spoke, his blue eyes bloodshot with sleeplessness. Most of Nantucket had gone home and gone to sleep, but the ones still awake were slowly realizing that the island was still cut off from all communication with the outside world. Pretty soon the rest would wake up, and try to turn on the TV and find out what CNN had to say about it all. Then we will be well and truly fucked. Normally he wasn’t much of a swearing man, hadn’t been si Normally he wasn’t much of a swearing man, hadn’t been since the Navy, but now...

“Chief Cofflin, I know what happened.”

That brought him up. Doreen Rosenthal was a coof, but she wasn’t one of the flake and nut brigade, the artists and artisans and neo-hippies who were much of the other third of the island’s permenant population. She was a student of astronomy, good enough to get an internship at the MM, and Cofflin had a solid Yankee respect for learning. In person she was a round-faced young woman, eyes blinking behind thick spectacles and on the border between plump and heavyset, though she moved well. So quiet nobody saw her from one week to the next.

“What?” he said sharply.

“I was... I was taking observations. When it happened. I kept the, well, I kept the video going. I got a good shot when the... whatever it was stopped.”

Cofflin looked at her.

“I got a good shot of the stars, Chief Cofflin,” she went on, pushing her glasses back up her nose.

Cofflin took her elbow. “Look, we’ve all had a rough night --” he began.

She pulled away. “The stars are wrong.”

Her voice was shrill but not hysterical. Not by tonight’s standards, at least. He’d dealt with enough hysterical people over the past ten hours. Maybe she knew why the moon had risen in the wrong place and the wrong phase.

“How are the stars wrong?” he prompted.

“They’re in the wrong places.” She fumbled in the big canvas carrying bag beside her chair, one with University of Mass. Amherst on it, and pulled out a printout. Spreading it on the desk, she pointed out circles and lines drawn around the white dots of stars. “See, the polar orientations --”

Cofflin swallowed. “Give me the gist, please, Ms. Rosenthal.”

She looked up at him, white around the lips. “I ran a comparison, I’ve got a stellar progressions program on my computer. This is not the sky of March, 1998. It’s spring, but not that year.”

“Why haven’t the morning planes arrived?” someone said plantively. “We still can’t raise the mainland. We’ve had to ground everything because we can't file flight plans, and there are people waiting for their planes!”

Cofflin held onto the tightly-controlled fear that made him want to snap at the hapless airport employee, or Rosenthal for blowing her nose behind him. The airport was a little stretch of double pavement off in the middle of the island’s moor and scrubland not far from the south coast, about as far from anywhere as you could get on Nantucket, which wasn’t far. Twin-engine prop puddle jumpers flew in from the mainland, and private planes. Right now it looked a little forelorn in the light of earliest dawn, the sky blue but bleak and cold with mare’s-tails of high cloud. The buildings were shingle-covered, like most stuff on the island; a bunch of mainlanders were waiting, with their children and carry-on luggage. Waiting to go to an America he suspected they’d never see again.

“Sorry, Mary,” he said. “That’s what I’m trying to find out. Andy Toffler here yet?”

“You called?” a voice said. "Jared. Mornin', ma'am."

Cofflin turned; there was Andy, in a battered old leather flying-jacket, holding a paper cup of coffee and one of the Emergency Town Meeting -- 1:00 PM Today flyers the police chief had ordered spread around.

“Andy,” Cofflin said -- they’d gone fishing for blues together a few times, not so much since Betty died, though. “I need an emergency flight to the mainland.”

“I hate to take her up so soon,” Andy Toffler said. “God alone knows what all that whatever-it-was did to the electronics. I still can’t get my radio to pick up anything but stations here on Nantucket.”

“It’s the only seaplane on the island,” Chief Cofflin said.

Andy looked at him. “Something wrong, Jared?” he said. “I mean, beyond what we know’s wrong. Why do you need a float-plane to hop over to Boston?” His eyes narrowed as he looked at Rosenthal, and saw the carrying-case over Cofflin’s shoulder. “Why the scattergun?”

“Andy, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you, so I’m going to show you. Look, I don’t often ask for favors, but --”

“OK, Ok,” the pilot said, spreading his hands in a placating gesture. He’d been a fighter jock once, but the bravado had mellowed with the years that left him bald on top. Not all the Kentucky was out of his voice, though. “No problem. We’re tanked up. Y’all come on aboard.”

Cofflin handed the astronomer in through the door and followed himself, folding his lanky frame into the copilot’s seat. The little floatplane shuddered as the prop spun and then settled down to a steady vibrating roar behind the silver circle. He reached for the headphones.

“Mind if I make a call?”

“Go right ahead,” Toffler said, running through his flight check. “Hope you have better luck than I did.”

As the airplane taxied out on the little wheels built into the floats, Coffling turned to the frequency the Coast Guard ship used. “Eagle, Eagle, this is Cofflin, over,” he said. “Do you read?”

“Cofflin, this is Eagle. Captain Alston heah.” The Coast Guard officer’s voice was accented like gumbo, but it carried a sense of crisp confidence that the policeman was glad to hear. “Anythin’ new since we spoke?”

Alston had taken Rosenthal’s news with a long silence, then calmly said that her own observations of the night sky were ‘compatible’. It was nice to have someone else who wasn’t inclined to gibber. When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. A saying far too many people here were taking as their guide.

“I’m taking a floatplane and doing some reconaissance on the mainland,” Cofflin replied. “We need... ah, confirmation of Rosenthal’s theory.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. Then: “Could you stop off here and pick someone up? I’d like to have one of my people go along, if you don’t mind.”

“Captain, I’d appreciate it. There’s room for one more; just me, the pilot, and Ms. Rosenthal at present.”

And the astronomer was there because he’d been afraid she’d crack up if he left her behind; crack up, and-or start babbling her findings all over town. Behind him her face was crumpled and blotched, and she was going through kleenex at a ferocious rate. He really didn’t blame her much. It must be even worse for a scientist, used to an orderly and predictable world...

“That’s fine, Chief Cofflin,” Alston said. “You have our location?”

“Roger that.”

“We’ll heave to, and anchor after you pick up my officer.”

“Roger. Cofflin out.” Time was of the essence. He looked at the pilot. “You got that?”

“Hop, skip and a jump.”

The Coast Guard officer turned out to be a fresh-faced young lieutenant with an M-16 over his shoulder, plus webbing with ammunition. He hopped nimbly from the ship’s boat to the right float of the seaplane, and offered a hand all round as he slid into the other rear seat, putting the assault rifle between his knees. He had a camera, too, something bigger than the Instamatic Cofflin had brought.

“Lieutenant William Walker,” he said; there was a Western twang to his voice, and he looked like a younger version of the Marlboro Man, square-jawed and handsome in a boyish way.

No, Cofflin thought. He looks like... what’s that guy’s name... Tom Cruise, yeah.

“Happy to meet you.”

“Can’t say as I’m too happy about anything, at the moment,” Cofflin said with a dry smile, shaking his hand. It was hard and felt extremely strong. “But welcome aboard.” He nodded at the assault rifle. “See you came prepared.”

Walker chuckled. “The sum total of the Eagle’s armament, if you don’t count the flare pistol,” he said. “I notice...” He nodded at the shotgun in turn.

Conversation died away as they accelerated, throwing up spray from the floats. “Water looks odd,” Toffler commented as they lifted and circled the windjammer, then headed for the mainland. “And what the hell’s that?” He indicated a silvery patch below.

“Take a look,” Cofflin said.

The plane banked and slid down, swooping; not all Toffler’s fighter-pilot reflexes had gone the way of his hair. They leveled out and made a pass with the floats nearly touching the water, the heavy salt smell filling the cabin. Not only salt.

“It’s fish,” Cofflin said, wrinkling his nose. “Dead fish. Damn, but there’s a lot of ‘em.” Seagulls swarmed around the massive shoal, diving and pecking.

“Cod,” Lieutenant Walker said, peering out through binoculars. “Thousands and thousands of cod, big cod.”

Cofflin grunted skeptically. He’d been a deep-water fisherman himself, deckhand on a trawler. There hadn’t been concentrations of codfish like that around New England waters for... then he remembered what Rosenthal had told him, and shivered.

“What killed them?” he said, trying to lose awe in practicality.

“There’s a curving mark in the water,” the astronomer behind him said suddenly. He started a little; she hadn’t spoke much since the airport. “See, you can follow it.” Different shades of blue, and a crosshatching of waves.

The Coast Guard lieutenant used his binoculars. “The lady’s right. It’s the edge of a circle, a very big circle, or at least some geometric figure. Like the effect you get with a river estuary emptying into the sea, or two very distinct currents... I’ve never seen anything quite like it, though. Like two different bodies of water just starting to merge.”

“Never seen anything like it. That’s something we’re all getting used to saying,” Cofflin said dryly. He clicked on the radiophone and relayed the information to the Eagle.

“Could you fly along the edge of the phenomenon for a few miles?” Alston said. “I’d like to get a radius.”

“Good idea.” He handed the radiophone to Walker, who called the data to his commander.

A few minutes later she answered: “Got that. Just a second... Not a circle. It’s pretty well a precise elipse, centered somewhere on the island. Not an exact distance in miles or kilometers, though -- something like twenty-three point four miles across and five in height. We were just inside the edge of it, then.”

Cofflin grinned humourlessly at the tinge of bitterness and took the radiophone. “Bad luck for you, Captain -- but good for the rest of us, I think. We’re heading in to the coast now.”

“You folks know something that Ah don’t?” Toffler said. Sweat shone on his forehead and the high dome of his head, and the Kentucky accent was stronger.

“Fill him in, Ms. Rosenthal,” Cofflin said wearily.

The fact of what had happened was beginning to sink in now, and it left silence in wake of the astronomer’s hesitant voice.

“The... the transition event must have included a body of water around the island,” she finished. “That’s what we’re seeing here. There would be differences in temperature, salinity, and so forth. Perhaps the fish were caught at the, uhm, interface. It looked electrical and it affected our electronic apparatus. Where it met the water, I think it electrocuted some of the sea life.”

The floatplane flew low, a few hundred feet up, over intensely blue ocean just rough enough to show whitecaps; the sky was clear but a little hazy with high cloud. Even with the mainland just a streak ahead the differences were plain. Not even the shapes of land and sea were precisely the same. After a few minutes minutes Toffler tipped one wing and spoke:

“Thar she blows.”

Cofflin shaped a silent whiste. Thar she did, in twin-tailed spouts. He’d never in his life seen that many whales; the spouts and glistening backs stretching for miles. “Big pod,” he said expressionlessly. “Right whales. Blackfish.”

Which had been virtually extinct in these waters since the 18th century.

By the time they overflew a Cape Cod empty of roads and houses and reached Boston, he was almost unsurprised at what they found. There was still a bay and islands, but only roughly like the maps. Dense forest grew almost to the water’s edge, huge broadleaf trees towering hundreds of feet into the air, and birds rose in their tens of thousands from salt marsh and creekmouth, enough to make the pilot swerve. Toffler circled for a few minutes, aimlessly. What clear spots there were on dry land looked to be the result of old forest fires. Under his numbness Cofflin thought how beautiful it was, with an unhuman comeliness that made Yosemite look like a cultivated garden.

“Well,” he said, “I think you were right, miss.” Rosenthal nodded and sneezed into her kleenex.

Walker pointed. “There.”

A stretch of shingle beach edged a seaside clearing where a creek ran into the sea. In it were a score or so of shelters made by bending saplings into U-shapes, sticking each end into the ground and then covering the sides with bark and brush, like Stone Age versions of Quonset huts. Fires trickled smoke, and human figures pointed upwards. When the plane came lower overhead they scattered like drops of mercury on dry ice; a few pushed big log canoes into the water and paddled frantically away along the shore. Lower, and they could see a woman turn back, scoop up a crying infant and scuttle for the edge of the woods with the child in her arms.

“Can you take us down there, Andy?”

“Sure,” the pilot said. “Water’s calm and that looks like a sloping surface, I should be able to ground the floats.”

The seaplane turned into the wind and sank. There was a skip... skip... skip sensation as the floats touched; the airplane surged forward, then sank back to a slightly nose-up position as Toffler turned it towards the shore. Cofflin cracked the door and looked down.

“Sand and gravel... getting shallow, any minute now...”

Toffler killed the engine and the plane coasted forward. The aluminum of the floats touched bottom; they slewed about slightly and stopped. Cofflin picked up his shotgun and stepped down, onto the float and then into knee-deep water. He wiped his brow.

“Hot for March,” he said, looking inland. Even for the end of March.

Walker followed him, using his binoculars again. “Can’t see any of the... Indians, I suppose. Looks like they’ve cleared out.”

“Wouldn’t you?” Toffler asked. “Let’s get the plane secured, we need to stake down some lines.”

The men occupied themselves. Rosenthal took some items from her backpack and fiddled with them. “You’re right, Chief Cofflin. It’s eighty Fahrenheit.” That was unusual, although not completely unknown for Massachusetts in early spring. “And look at the trees, the other vegetation.”

Cofflin straightened up and did. “Season’s pretty far along,” he said. “But how do we know it’s March?”

“I worked on my calculations,” she said. “It’s March, all right. Early spring, at least, but I’m morally certain it’s the same day, down to the hour, that it, ah, would have been. Sunrise was at exactly the right time.” She paused. “The climate may well be in a warmer phase.”

Cofflin nodded, feeling his stomach twist with a sensation that was becoming unpleasantly familiar; sheer whirling disorientation, as if the ground kept vanishing from beneath his feet. He clicked off half a dozen pictures of the shore, then handed the camera to the astronomer.

“Let’s take a look. Andy, you take the left; Lieutenant Walker, you’re right, I’m point, and Ms. Rosenthal, you keep behind me, and get plenty of pictures.”

“Why?” she said, with a flicker of spirit, and a sneeze.

“Because you’re not armed and there may be dangerous animals or people,” he replied, glad to see the stunned depression leaving her face.

The air was not only warm, it was fresh like nothing he’d ever smelled off the island. It swarmed with insects, and the birds were so many and so raucous it was almost distracting. Closer to the huts it wasn’t as pleasant; evidently whoever lived there had never heard of latrines. From the look of it they kept dogs, too. Off to one side was a midden-heap, mostly oyster shells with a liberal helping of fish offal. The primitive wickiups were even cruder than they’d looked at a distance; inside were hides and furs, bedding made of spruce branches and grass. All around were a scattering of tools made of bone, stone, horn and wood, and shallow lug-handled soapstone dishes. Hide stretchers, fire-carved bowls, wooden racks lashed together with thongs that held drying fish... he picked up a flint scraper somebody had abandoned beside a raw deerhide. Not a museum piece, he realized suddenly. It was still warm from the hand of whoever had left it. Some of the wooden utensils were intricately carved and colored. One hut held a rack of what must be ceremonial masks, grotestque and compelling.

“Incoming!”

Cofflin hit the deck with old reflex, but it wasn’t mortar shells trying for a brown-water gunboat. Something went shunk into the ground ahead of him. A spear, he thought. It seemed pretty slender for that, though, more like a huge arrow. The head was a triangular flint, so finely worked it looked almost metallic, lashed into the haft with leather thongs. His hands racked the slide of the shotgun automatically. Five rounds, mixed rifled slugs and deershot, he thought.

Then he saw the men. Six, maybe ten of them running forward in dashes from cover to cover, short brown men with queues of shoulder-length black hair, naked except for hide breechclouts looped through belts around their waists. One of them fitted another of the slender javelins into a wooden holder with a curved end-piece to hold a shaft in position and a butterfly-shaped stone weight on its end. He ran forward a few steps, half-skipping sideways, and swept his arm forward. The spear came forward, pivoting out on the end of the flexing stick.

Spear-thrower, Cofflin realized. Atlatl. He’d read about it in a National Geographic article. The stick extended the length of the thrower’s arm, giving enormous leverage. The spear blurred through the air and someone shouted with pain -- Andy, he realized with a sudden stab of panic. Their pilot. These spears were coming down like mortar shells, lying flat didn’t do much good. The surge of adrenaline cut through the glassy barrier insulating him from the world. Suddenly everything became real again, and he knew that he could die here.

“Over their heads!” he shouted, and let a round off. Walker followed suit, the M-16 giving its light spiteful crack over the dull thump of his shotgun.

One of the Indians screamed and threw away his spears, pelting back towards the woods. The others dropped to the ground. Cofflin twisted to look over his shoulder; Rosenthal was next to Andy, working on his leg. A spear was through the pilot’s calf, but from the way he was swearing it wasn’t immediately fatal.

“How’s he look?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” the astronomer said. “There isn’t much bleeding.”

“Hurts like hell, but it’s through the muscle,” the pilot said, his voice tight with control. “Miss, get my knife out and cut it off here -- that’s right. Now let’s pull... Christ, woman... sorry. Ok, Ok, now pack it with the handkerchief. “ He looked up at Cofflin. “I’ve got a first-aid kit in the plane, should be all right, but I’m not going to be runnin’ any marathons soon.”

“I doubt they hold ‘em here,” Cofflin said, voice tight with relief.

“Heads up,” the young Coast Guard officer said.

The Indians were getting up... and moving forward, fitting more javelins to their spear-throwers. Their voices sounded, a shrill yipping broken with howls like wolves. Deliberately like wolves, he realized.

“Damn, but they’ve got guts,” Cofflin said. Thinking straight, too. Saw that the noise didn’t hurt anyone, and now they’re coming to clear the strangers out of their homes. Probably their families’re waiting back in the woods.

Maybe in their stories the hero always beat the evil magician in the end. It still took guts to attack outlandish men who climbed out of a great metal bird.

“I hate to hurt them,” Toffler said, echoing his thought. “It’s their home.”

“Them or us. That Mighty Matel is more accurate than my scattergun, lieutenant. Try to wound.”

Walker set himself, exhaled, and squeezed his trigger. This time one of the Indians fell, screaming and clutching at his leg. The others wavered. Walker fired again, and dirt spurted up at another’s feet. That was enough for most of them; they followed the first and ran yelling into the woods. The last man threw down his javelins and spear-thrower and charged, a longer stabbing spear in one hand and a flint hatchet in the other. He was howling like a wolf as he came, dodging and jinking like a broken-field runner, and his face was a contorted mass of glaring eyes and bared teeth.

“Damn, he’s not stopping for shit,” Cofflin said, navy reflexes taking over from peacetime habit. “Take him down, lieutenant.” Poor brave bastard.

Crack. The Indian fell.

The islanders waited tensely, but there was no sound save the birds and insects. Nothing moved. At last Cofflin stood. “Let’s take a look at them,” he said. “Ms. Rosenthal, could you get the aid kit from the plane, please?”

The wounded Indians were short men, neither over five-six; they wore a long roach of hair on top of their heads, braided at the back, but with the sides of their heads shaved and painted vermillion. Their skin was a light copper-brown, their features sharper than Cofflin would have expected. The first one to fall had a gouge over the big muscle of his thigh; he stopped trying to squeeze it shut with his hands and started crawling when they approached, naked terror on his face. He pulled a stone knife from a birchbark sheath at his waist and swiped at them; he was chanting, something high-pitched and rythmic.

Death-song, Cofflin guessed, dredging at bits of old knowledge. Ok, let’s see if we can communicate.

He put down his shotgun and spread his open hands. The Indian waited, tense and wary. His eyes widened as Rosenthal came up beside the other man. Cofflin glanced aside at her. Oh, he thought. The astronomer was wearing a T-shirt under an open jean jacket, and her gender was entirely obvious.

“I think the fact that you’re a woman makes him less frightened, Ms. Rosenthal,” he said. “Wait a minute. Get out one of the rolls of bandage.”

Slowly, Cofflin mimed a wound on his leg, and binding it up, then pointed to his companion. After a moment, the Indian made an odd circular motion of his head that seemed to correspond to a nod. His bloody hand began to return the flint knife to its sheath. Cofflin shook his head, then made a waving motion with his hands. He took the knife from his own belt, tossed it aside, and pointed to the Indian as he recovered it.

Reluctantly, the Indian did the same with his own weapon. “All right, doctor,” Cofflin said. “Move slowly, and be careful. I’ve got you covered. Put some of the antiseptic powder on it, then bandage it up.”

He held the shotgun ready. Rosenthal licked her lips and moved in, motions slow and careful. The narrow black eyes of the wounded man went wide for an instant as the astringent powder struck the wound, but he moved the leg to let the woman finish bandaging it. She sat back, sneezed, and looked helplessly at her blood-covered hands.

“All right, back off again,” Cofflin said. Maybe the gesture of goodwill would help. They’d have to deal with these people again, probably. And nobody could blame them for assuming the worst when uninivited strangers arrived. “Lieutenant, what about the other one?”

“He’s bad,” the Coast Guardsman said. “Sorry. Thighbone’s broken, compound fracture. I’ve stopped the bleeding and put him out, but without a good doctor and antibiotics, he’s a dead man.”

Cofflin thought, watching the other wounded Indian drag himself backward towards the woods. If we leave him, he’ll die. On the other hand, if we take him away, they’ll think God-knows-what. On the third hand, we can patch him up, maybe teach him a little English, and he can interpret. Give him some presents, knives, pots and pans, costume jewellry. Squanto R Us. And he wanted the man to live, admired the way he’d defended his family and home against something overwhelming and alien.

“All right, then,” he said. “Let’s get out of this screwup. Andy, you can fly, can’t you?”

“I’d better, Jared. Yeah, I can. It’s not leaking much and I can move the foot. Can’t walk, though.”

“We’ll put the Indian in between the seats, then we’ll give you a lift,” he said. “You can use an M-16?”

“Been a while since Basic, but I reckon I remember,” Andy said. Walker handed him the assault rifle and he rolled over, wincing, to cover their labors.

The limp weight of the unconcious man brought back other, unpleasant memories for Cofflin. He thrust them aside; manhandling the dead weight into the airplane was hard enough as it was. As an afterthought, he taped the man’s wrists and ankles together. Having him wake up and freak in midair was not something he wanted to experience. Then they returned for the pilot; with an arm over each man’s shoulder he made a slow hopping way back to the airplane.

“Goddam,” he sighed, settling into the pilot’s seat. “You know, I was feeling pretty lousy coming here. As if nothing was real, you know. But now, this feels damned real. Shot in the leg by an Indian. Goddam.”

Cofflin nodded. So did Walker, and Rosenthal sneezed agreement. He picked up the radiophone.

“Might as well have an ambulance waiting,” he said, looking down at the wounded man lying unconscious at his feet. The bandage around his thigh was glistening red. “And then there’s that town meeting.”

“Captain, it’s the XO. I think you should come at once, ma’am.”

Marian Alston cursed silently and tore herself away from the radiophone. “Take down anything they say,” she said to the operator.

The cadet who’d brought the news looked scared green, and not just with the background anxiety they’d all been suffering. Lieutenant-Commander Roysins, her executive officer, had excused himself half an hour ago, when Walker reported the news from... where Boston ought to have been but wasn’t. No way to keep it secret, not on shipboard; the rumor was running through the hull like a fire, and she’d have to do something -- say something to the crew -- soon.

“Ma’am.”

The wind on the quarterdeck was fairly stiff, and the Eagle pitched at her anchors, bows into the whitecaps.

“Captain on deck!”

“As you were.”

She returned the Officer of the Deck’s salute and went down the companionway behind the radio shack. The officer’s cabins were tiny cubicles on the deck directly below. The largest was the flag cabin at the rear, usually empty except for important visitors -- back in ‘36 the Germans had put it in on the off-chance that Hitler would visit, but the Leader had never exercised his notorious seasickness in those quarters. Hers was just ahead of it to the left, little more than a glorified closet, something she’d often thought confirmed her conviction that God was an ironist. The rest of Officers’ Country stretched ahead and to the wardroom on the other side. Not as roomy as a Napoleonic frigate, in fact, but that was a different era.

Different era, she thought. Hard to believe. This Cofflin and the astronomer might be off their heads. On the other hand, Walker isn’t -- and he saw what they saw. For that matter, she’d seen the stars last night too.

The XO’s cabin door was shut. “He won’t answer, ma’am. I tried.”

“Stand easy,” she said, and pounded on the metal with her own fist. “Mr. Roysins, open this door! That’s an order!”

Silence. Fear dried her mouth. She slammed at the door again. “Roysins!”

Still nothing. She licked her lips. “Beauchamp,” she said to the cadet. “My regards to the officer on watch in the engine room, and someone with a toolkit to this cabin, on the double.”

“Ma’am!” The cadet bolted, glad of an order.

Alston waited, expressionless, until he returned. With him was a bald man in stained blues with a toolbox and a squared-away baseball cap with EAGLE across its front in gold letters.

“Ma’am?” he said.

“Let’s have this open, chief,” she said. Baker, a CPO and a reliable man.

He nodded phlegmatically and went to work. Thirty seconds later the door swung open. There wasn’t any of the smell she’d feared, the sort that happened when a man hung or shot himself. Roysins was lying on his back in the bunk, staring open-eyed at the low ceiling of the cabin. One arm trailed down, moving with the motion of the ship, and an empty glass rolled beside an equally empty plastic container for pills. The other arm clutched something to his chest. Alston ducked in and put her fingers to the man’s neck, just to be sure. The skin was already cooling. She gently pulled the framed picture of Roysin’s wife and children free, then crossed the man’s arms on his chest and closed the eyes, holding them shut for a moment to make sure they’d stay that way. A coverlet went over his face.

God damn you, Roysins, she thought sadly. I needed you, damn it. She was going to need all the officers, to keep things going. This was no time to bug out. Roysins wo She was going to need all the officers, to keep things going. This was no time to bug out. Roysins wouldn’t have suicided if a car crash or a tornado had lost him his family, she felt fairly sure. It was the feeling of absolute separation... But that’s an illusion. Nobody’s died, they just got... unavailable. Still, she was beginning to realize why the old bucanneers had used marooning as a punishment, instead of just knocking someone on the head and pitching them overboard.

“My complements to the operations officer, and I’ll see her in my cabin,” she said. “Chief, get a sailmaker and some cloth in here.”

She looked at her watch. 10:00 hours. Christ.

Chapter Two:

March, 1250 BC

March, Year 0 After the Event

Ian Arnstein wandered down the street, pushing the bicycle he’d just bought for his last two hundred dollar traveller’s check; he always felt ridiculous riding one of the things, with his grasshopper build -- another of the drawbacks of being several inches over six feet. And I never even liked basketball. It was a cruelly pretty day, blue sky and whisps of cloud, warm enough that he was comfortable in a long-sleeved shirt and no jacket. The magnolia in the brick courtyard of the John Cofflin House had a few flowers on top -- every year he wondered if it would bloom while he was there, and it usually didn’t. There were daffodils in pots, and the whole town had the scrubbed, fresh-painted air that it always did... and nothing was the same. He wheeled the bicycle into the guesthouse where he was staying and up the stairs into his room, and stood looking at the fireplace.

“Still functional, I suppose,” he said to himself, stroking his bushy reddish-brown beard; it had stayed luxuriant while the hair vanished from the top of his head. Apart from that he might have been a face off an Assyrian bas-relief, heavy hooked nose and strong features, apart from the mild scholar’s eyes.

When winter came, a working fireplace...

The bags and boxes from the grocery store nearly hid it -- nearly hid the whole wall, come to that. Spare clothing, canned food, dried peas, everything he could think of. There hadn’t been many people in the stores, and he’d still been able to write traveller's checks. Which proved that nobody much had thought through the implications of the rumors. He looked at his watch. Nearly noon. Unbelievable rumors, but they accounted for what had happened better than anything else.

Time for the town meeting. That was going to be crowded. It was also probably going to determine whether or not he met a long, nasty death in the coming months. Possibly whether he was killed for the meat on his bones. He shivered. That was the problem with the sort of reading he did for recreation. Doing a lot of history undermined certain comfortable assumptions about how human beings acted...

He sat at the desk, slumped with his head in his hands. At this point in the type of novel that was his favorite reading the hero would be brimming with ideas, getting people moving, organizing things, providing some leadership.

“The problem is,” he said to himself, “I couldn’t lead three sailors into a whorehouse. Somebody else will have to do it.”

And if they didn’t, he was a dead man.

“The Moderator’s not... available,” the Town Clerk said.

“What do you mean, not available?” Jared Cofflin answered, frantic. “Look, Joseph, we’ve got to get this Town Meeting under way.”

The old man nodded somberly. “But Alan Scinters isn’t going to moderate it,” he said.

The sound from the crowd out in the auditorium of the high school was growing louder, more insistant. To Cofflin’s ears it was beginning to sound uncomfortably like the mob on Main Street last night.

There was supposed to be room for seven hundred and fifty, plus another hundred and fifty in the little annex where non-voters sat. From the noise, there were more than a thousand heads crammed in there, and more milling around in the corridors outside. The auditorium was named after a former principal of the old Nantucket High School; it was big, a broad blunt wedge with concrete steps that were upholstered in blue where people sat and left bare in the strips they were supposed to use for stairs. The whole idea had been sold to the Town Meeting as a civic center and place for amateur theatricals as well as a school facility.

The principal had been a fearsome old biddy, by all accounts, and she’d ruled with an iron hand for the best part of two generations. He tried to imagine how she’d have handled this.

“Why isn’t Scithers going to do it?”

“Because he and the Chairman of the Board of Selectmen were in Boston since Friday last!” Joseph Starbuck snapped. “Of the other four selectmen, Vida... Doctor Coleman has her under sedation,” The Town Clerk’s mouth shut like a steel trap. “Along with about a hundred others right now. Four suicides, he says, and a dozen attempted. Jane's babbling, and that leaves Tom and Clarice.”

Cofflin blinked: those two weren't the brightest of the lot. “Well, somebody’s got to do it. Listen to them out there! They need someone who sounds like he knows what he’s doing. You’re the Town Clerk.”

“I’m not up to it. Too old, getting set in m’ways. Afraid you’ll have to do it, Cofflin.”

“Me? I’m the police chief, not an elected official!”

“You’re also the only one who seems to be doing anything much. You know what’s going on. Get out there and do it, man, or we’ll have a riot on our hands.”

For a moment Jared Cofflin felt his mind stutter. I wanted someone to take over! he cried within himself. The reality of what he’d found on the mainland still sat in his mind like a lump of stodgy food in a sour stomach, refusing to split up and move through the rest of his brain. If he couldn’t come to terms with this... event, how on earth was he going to help everyone else do it? They all want someone to take over, and they want it now.

Jared Cofflin took a deep breath and walked out onto the stage. The space before him was black with people, every seat crammed and hundreds more standing in the aisles and the balcony sound-stage that ran the width of the place at the back; there were scores more sitting on the white-metal spiral staircase that led up to it. The acoustics were superb, enough to bring across the rasp of fear and building rage in the crowd’s undertone. This wasn’t a formal Town Meeting, bored citizens trudging through the items on the Warrant as a civic duty that included the painful need to listen to a few enthusiasts ramble. These people were in fear of their lives, and if the man who spoke didn’t give them something to calm their terror they might well rip him into quite literal pieces. And then go on to destroy the town and any chance of saving their lives in a surge of blind ferocity.

He walked out to the podium and stood in front of the meeting, shoulders slightly hunched as if he was facing into a winter storm. “All right,” he began. “You know we’re still not in contact with anyone on the mainland. Some of you have probably heard why. Now I’ll tell you all. The whole -- “ he supressed the word that came to mind “-- damned island is back in, well, in the past."

The noise burst over him like surf. He quieted it -- somehow, eventually -- and went on: “Over at the observatory Ms. Rosenthal --” he nodded to where she sat not far from him “-- used the computer and telescope there to figure it out.”

“What if they’re wrong? Computers --” someone shouted.

“You may not have noticed,” Cofflin said, stung into heavy sarcasm, “but we’re still cut off from the mainland. Because there isn’t any mainland, at least, no buildings or roads. Just wilderness. I went and took a look personally. Nothing but trees and Indians with spears.”

“Quiet!” Cofflin roared into the microphone. The babble subsided. “All right, now you know. Andy Toffler and me and Ms. Rosenthal here, and Lieutenant Walker from the Eagle, flew over to the mainland this morning. I’m not an astronomer and I’m not a scientist, but I know what I saw. There’s no Hyannis, and there’s no Boston, no roads and no buildings. The Indians threw spears at us. We took some pictures -- Andy, could you get that projector working?”

The wounded pilot wheeled his chair about on the dais, slipping the pictures they’d taken under an overhead projector that threw them enlarged onto a pull-down screen of the type used to show home movies back before video. They were blurred shots taken out the window of the floatplane, except for the last few. Those showed a clearing by the seashore, a natural meadow where a creek ran into salt marsh. In it were bark-covered huts. Human figures showed as well, most running for the woods. One stood waving a long thin shape, indistinct and blurry but unquestionably a man with a spear.

“Quiet! We’re not going to get anything done by shouting!” Cofflin bellowed, angry at last and somehow no longer in the least afraid. “George, Matt, Susan, get those people there out of here!”

Most of those who’d broken down let themselves be led away quietly. One had to be put in a hammerlock and handcuffed. “Put him in the cells, he can cool off overnight,” Cofflin said. Unfortunately, that was one of the town selectmen. There goes half of what’s left of our elected government.

The pictures went on, sharp closeups of the Indian camp. Then another blurred one as Doreen dove for cover, and then another series done with steady clarity. She may have been on the verge of a breakdown, but she kept doing her share of the work, he thought with respect. To him, the world had always been divided mainly into those who could be relied on to do their jobs, and those who couldn’t. Good pictures too, an Indian winding up, running forward, the streak of the spear, then the weapon standing in the ground. At last two of each of the wounded Indians, closeups of their faces and gear.

“Captain Alson of the Coast Guard ship Eagle -- the Eagle was just offshore last night and ended up here with us, for those of you who didn’t know -- has something to say. Let’s let Captain Alston talk, people,” he said.

His own voice was hoarse, his head ringing with too little sleep and too much coffee. Captain Alston cleared her throat. Hard weathered hands turned the uniform cap as she stood, then stopped as if she was forcing herself not to fidgit. Otherwise she stood calm as a statue, which was a welcome contrast to how most people were acting.

“We were near the edge of the, ah, phenomenon,” she said.

Her Southern accent made her voice soft, but the diction was oddly precise, almost finicky, as if every word was chosen. The voice of someone carefully self-educated, an autodictat.

“It evidently, ah, transposed an elipse of ocean as well as the island, reachin’ several miles offshore; we’ve seen evidence of that -- dead fish caught at the rim, and so fo’th. The only thing we could tell about it was that it was electrical in nature, there were static discharges and effects on our electronic equipment. My observations of the stars confirm Ms. Rosenthal’s. We’re not astronomers, of course, but we do study celestial navigation. The stars have moved, and the shift’s... the same sort that would be produced by bein’... thrown back in time. How long did you say, Ms. Rosenthal?” She pronounced the title miz.

“The spring of 1250 BC,” Rosenthal said, and hiccuped into her handkerchief before dabbing at red-rimmed eyes. “Three thousand two hundred and forty-seven years before the present. Before what was... before the... transition event.”

“All right, now,” he said when order had been restored. “Doc Coleman?”

A lean boney man in his sixties who headed the island’s hospital-clinic stood up. “I’m treating the... Indian. His leg wound’s stabilized. He’s never been vaccinated, he’s got no fillings or other dental work on his teeth -- remarkably good teeth, by the way -- and from the X-rays, he’s had several broken bones that healed without benefit of casts.”

“All right, “ Cofflin said. “We’ve obviously got an emergency here. We’re...” It was hard to go on. “We’re back in the past, somehow -- the whole island is. The question is, what are we going to do about it.”

Someone raised his hand. Cofflin recognized him vaguely, as much because of the way he looked as for a few brief exchanges of words; some sort of professor who spent part of his summers here, at the Cofflin House -- the place was named after a collateral ancestor of his. A Californian, tall, balding, with a brown bush of beard and beak-nosed. He looked a lot calmer than most of the people here. Maybe he’d keep people paying attention until things quieted down.

“You, sir.”

“Ian Arnstein -- Dr. Ian Arnstein. I’m a professor of Classical history at the University of San Diego. I was wondering if anyone had considered the implications of what’s happened to us.”

The westerner looked around. “Look, either... whatever happened will reverse itself, or it won’t. Obviously nothing like this has happened anywhere there were people to write about it, or it would be in the history books. But if it goes into reverse, we don’t have to worry. We do have to worry if it doesn’t. We’re all in danger of death if it doesn’t.”

“How so, professor?” Cofflin asked. We’re in danger of complete chaos, sure enough. That had been his main worry. Chaos he knew about, and death usually followed right along behind it.

“Chief Cofflin, there’s no United States out there. There’s no oil refinieries, no farms to ship us produce, no A&P to deliver vegetables and canned food. No factories. Once we use anything up, it’s gone unless we replace it ourselves. What are we going to eat? Winter’s coming in another seven months; what are we going to heat houses with? Banks, money -- it’s all worthless now. We’ve got a real emergency on our hands. We could all starve.”

That brought complete silence. The sheer weirdness of what had happened had overwhelmed most, to the exclusion of practical matters. Cofflin was impressed. This one is a thinker, he decided. Then the thought struck home.

“You have any ideas, Professor Arnstein?” he said calmly, while he scribbled a note. Get the guards back on the stores SOONEST, he scribbled, and handed it to his assistant. The man nodded and hurried out.

“Well, yes. I’ve, ah, I’ve read a lot of speculative fiction about things like this, and I’m a historian. We need to get organized. Supplies will have to be rationed. We have to get working on inventory so we know what it is we’ve got, and then we have to conserve everything that can’t be replaced. We need to start building up our food supplies. It ought to be possible to fish, the fishing grounds around here should be fantastically rich, and we should see what can be grown. There will be whales. We could get firewood and so forth from the mainland -- and maybe we could trade, as well.”

“Indians!” someone shouted. “We could get corn from the Indians, like the Pilgrims.”

“If you hadn’t shot at them,” Pamela Lisketter said.

Cofflin recognized her too, a member of the flake-and-nut contingent, a weaver who sold fantastically expensive hand-made blankets to support a ‘simple’ lifestyle. A tall thin woman, her only noticeable features large green-gold eyes and an air of intense conviction; she was involved in every good cause, and a great many marginal ones as well.

“How could you be so... so racist?” she went on.

“Ms. Lisketter,” Cofflin said. “I assure you we acted strictly in self-defense. Now please let Professor Arnstein finish.”

Arnstein shook his head. “We can trade for hides and game, maybe, but not corn. If this is the thirteenth century BC, the local paleo-Indians will still be pure hunter-gatherers, maize hasn’t gotten far out of Mexico yet. There were farming villages... ah, there are farming villages away down in Mexico and Central America, but even the Olmecs haven’t happened yet, or maybe they’re just starting, I’d have to look it up.”

A hand went up, and Cofflin nodded. The chief librarian of the Athenaeum rose, Martha Stoddard, a spinster lady of about forty, dry and spare; archaeology was her hobby.

“The Olmecs built... are building...” for a moment uncharacteristic puzzlement showed on her slightly horse-like Yankee face “... well, the first Olmec ceremonial centers were started about the thirteenth century BC at San Lorenzo, yes, and the first Chavin temples in Peru. Dr. Arnstein is right about the local Indians, I’m afraid. Not paleo-Indians, late Archaic phase. No farming to speak of. Possibly some gardens with squash and gourds, but no corn. You said that there was forest down to the water’s edge near Boston?”

“Ayup, Ms. Stoddard.”

“There you are, then. When the Puritans arrived, that was all open land around there -- cleared by Indians for cornfields and fuel. That hasn’t happened yet.”

She sat down again, and Arnstein continued: “Europe though, Europe is in the Bronze Age. We could get grain there. We do have a ship.”

Everyone looked at Captain Alston. “I’m willing to do anything to help,” she said. “But Dr. Arnstein is right, we need to get organized.”

Arnstein nodded vigorously. “We need an executive -- a President, a coordinator, something like that. And a council.”

“The leader being you?” someone shouted.

Arnstein raised his hands. “Oh, no. No, that’s out of the question. I’m an outsider here, and besides, I’m not suited. No. I don’t exactly know the proceedures for your town meetings, but I’d like to propose --”

“Hey, he’s not a registered voter in this town!” Lisketter exclaimed. “He’s an off-islander.”

You’re one to talk, Pamela Lisketter, Cofflin thought. Granted she’d been on the island ten years, and was quite popular with her own crowd, but she was a coof nonetheless.

Cofflin knocked his empty water glass on the podium as a makeshift gavel. “We’re all locals now,” he said sharply. “Think about it for a moment, people.”

Arnstein had stopped, uncertain. He clearned his throat and went on: “I’d like to propose Chief Cofflin as... ah, as Chief Executive Officer for the duration of the emergency or until we come up with something better.”

The Town Clerk shot to his feet. “Seconded!”

“Now, wait a --” Cofflin began. Hands shot up all over the room.

“Carried by acclamation,” the man said.

You’re going to regret this, Josesph Starbuck, Cofflin thought with a glower.

Arnstein spoke again. “I’d also like to propose that the Chief Executive Officer appoint a Council to propose measures to get us through this emergency. We can elect a... a legislature later, but we need to do things right now if we’re going to pull through.”

“Seconded!” Joeseph Starbuck said.

The hands shot up again. Cofflin’s neck bristled slightly; he could feel the mood of the Meeting shifting, turning from unfocused rage to an equally unbalanced hope. It could turn again as quickly, if he disappointed it.

“All right,” Cofflin said. “And you’re one, Joseph. Captain Alston, you’re another; Professor Arnstein, Ms. Rosenthal, Ms. Lisketter, Ms. Brand -- “ who owned Brand Farms, the island’s main nursery and truck-garden operation “-- and the rest of the selectmen.”

“Chief,” Dr. Coleman said, touching his sleeve as the last of the townsfolk stragged out. “A word.”

“Mmm-hmm?”

“The Indian’s dying,” he said.

Cofflin blinked surprise. “You said his leg was stable?” he said mildly.

“It is,” Coleman nodded. “That’s not it. As far as I can tell, he’s dying of the common cold. Possibly the flu, but it looks more like a monster cold on steroids, and that’s what Ms. Rosenthal has. I thought it might be better to tell you quietly.”

“Nobody dies of a cold, Doc.”

“I know that, but he’s managing it somehow. Progressive congestion of the nasal and bronchial passages, faster than I can drain, fever over a hundred and seven. Nothing I’ve got works. Come to it, nothing I’ve got works against rhinoviruses anyway, but this... “ He shook his head. “It came on like wildfire. It’s as if his immune system had no resistance at all, as if he were a petri dish full of a growth solution.”

Arnstein had come up while they were speaking. “Virgin field,” he murmured.

Cofflin’s eyes flew open. He remembered Rosenthal sneezing... Coleman was nodding somberly.

“It’s what they call it when a disease hits a population with no previous exposure,” he said quietly. “The results can be... unpleasant. Minor diseases, childhood diseases, they become killers.”

Arnstein bobbed his head; he was six-six, and seemed accustomed to directing his body language downward. “Ninety percent of the Indians in the Americas died within a century of Columbus,” he said. “Never been exposed to the Afro-Eurasian disease environment. It might be even worse here.”

“Why?” Cofflin whispered.

“Well, we don’t have smallpox, thank God, but these Indians -- they’re a lot more thinly scattered, less numerous than the ones the European discoverers met, would have met, three thousand years from now. In a cold climate, with a thin nomadic population and no domestic animals except the dog, there probably aren’t any epidemic diseases at all and not many endemic ones. But now --” he shrugged. “Measles... I wonder if anyone here has measles? We’d better check. That could be very bad, even in Europe and Asia, it didn’t arrive in the Roman Empire until the 2nd century, but when it did a quarter of the population died of it. Hmmm...” he trailed off, mumbling.

“Jesus,” Cofflin said.

Coleman’ face had turned pale. “I’ll... we’ll have to be very careful, very careful, with anyone who touches shore off this island. I’m going to start checking to see if anyone has measles.”

Arnstein nodded. “Measles hit about as badly as smallpox. Marcus Aurelius probably died of them -- he was...”

“... a Roman Emperor. Some of the rest of us read too, Professor Arnstein,” Cofflin said.

“Sorry. Measles, syphillis, anything like that,” Arnstein said. “Otherwise, we could exterminate whole kingdoms just by breathing on them.”

“Jesus.” Cofflin kneaded his eyes in a vain attempt to dislodge what felt like hot sand.

“I should test,” Coleman said. “For everything. AIDS, too... of course, I can’t test the entire...” Suddenly a grim smile lit his face. “Wait a minute. I can do that. Can’t I?”

“Doctor, you can do anything you please for the public good right now. Anything you can get past me and the Town Meeting, that is.”

“And that’s the situation, people,” Captain Alston said.

She was speaking from the quarterdeck bridge above the pilot house, with the ship’s officers around her. The crew covered the main deck, standing by divisions as if for an inspection at Quarters, all within easy hearing distance -- one of the advantages of a windjammer, she supposed. They murmured, the sound growing louder and louder, until the petty officers and boatswain shouted for quiet.

Easier to deal with than civilians, she thought -- the town meeting ashore had been the next thing to a riot, and it had lasted most of the day. At least you could tell people in uniform to shut up and listen. She glanced over at Nantucket; they’d dropped anchor in the dredged channel that led to the steamer dock, there being no room to tie up with the big ferry at its moorings. For the moment she was just as glad not to be at quayside. The situation on board would be easier to handle if it could be kept isolated from the rest of the island for a little while.

This anchorage is going to be a bitch in rough weather, she thought, her mind distracted for a moment. Sheltered enough for ordinary storms, but in a really stiff norther... When full quiet had been restored, she went on:

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’re in an... unprecedented situation. There is no United States Coast Guard. There is no United States. We’re marooned, adrift in time.”

She pointed. “A little more than seven thousand of us altogether, and the rest of the planet in a state of savagery. However, we still need discipline and organization if we’re going to have a chance to survive the next few years. Accordingly, anyone who wants to take his or her chance ashore may do so now. Those who wish to remain with the ship will be under orders as before; and I’m placing the ship at the disposal of Chief Cofflin and the Council in Nantucket. There may be no United States, but these people are still Americans -- and helping them is what we’re in this uniform for.”

“What about our families?” someone called.

Alston clamped her hands behind her back. “There’s nothing to be done about that. Everyone and everythin’ we knew is gone. People, either this... whatever it was will reverse itself, or it won’t,” she said. “If it does, everything is back to normal -- except that y’all make your fortunes on the talk-show circuit.”

That brought a shakey laugh. She went on: “But as far as we know, it won’t. We have to operate on the assumption that it won’t. Because if it doesn’t, and we sit down and wait for a return that doesn’t happen, we’re all going to die. If we work, we may pull through. As for our people ashore... they’ll have to assume we were lost, somehow. Nobody knows what happened back up in the... future.” It was still a little hard to say it. “At a guess, the year 1998 got the Nantucket that should be here, in which case they’ll have some inkling of what happened to us. Grief is natural, but we’ve no time to sit down and cry.”

Not if I have any say in the matter, she added mentally.

Keeping people too busy to think was an ancient military tradition, and for very good reason. She hadn’t asked to be stuck in this situation, in command of a seagoing finishing school adrift in time, but things weren’t going to fall apart if she had anything to do with it. The United States Coast Guard, the Lord God Almighty, or fate, or whatever, had left them in her hands.

The uproar began as she finished speaking. It lasted far into the night, and ended with half a dozen cadets and a couple of members of her crew sedated or under restraint.

“But nobody,” she said in the officer’s wardroom, “wants to jump ship.”

“I think it may have struck them that at least they get rations here,” Hiller said.

Like her, the sailing master didn’t have any ties ashore. Well, she had two children, but they’d gone with their father in the divorce and that was going on for fifteen years ago. Wouldn’t have done any good to fight for custody, not in South Carolina with what John knew and threatened to reveal if she contested, and it would have wrecked her career when things came out. At least John had warned her first, not just blabbed to the wind.

Some of the other officers still looked as if they’d been hit behind the ear with a sandbag. Most of them did have people back when. Walker, now, Walker looked excited. She had her doubts about him, anyway. Intelligent, hard-working, and they even shared a hobby in the martial arts, but there was something...

“Speaking of rations, how are we found?” she asked.

The fuel-oil tanks were full, they’d topped up in New London before they left. Thank God for small mercies. The Eagle’s auxiliary was a fairly recent thousand-horsepower Caterpillar diesel named Max, practically immortal given that the ship’s own machine-shop could make most replacement parts; the generators and fresh-water plant ran off the same fuel system. Fuel would be the weak point. Wind only from now on, she thought. We use the auxiliary in nothing but real emergencies.

“Ma’am,” the quartermaster said. “We’ll be out of fresh vegetables and the like shortly. Flour, canned and dried goods and so forth, maybe four weeks. But ma’am, two hundred people take a lot of feeding. It’s a good thing we were headed for the Azores and had full stores.”

“Reduced rations immediately then. Use the perishables first, and I’ll talk to Chief Cofflin and see what they can spare from shore. Luckily from what Lieutenant Walker says the fishing and so forth will be very good. We can lend a hand with that right away. We’ll also probably be making a run to England -- well, to the British Isles, whatever they’re called here-and-now -- to trade for grain. I’d like your ideas on that ASAP; by tomorrow morning, if you please.”

Officers needed to be kept busy too. “Also on how we can convert the ship for operations in a low-tech environment. More fuel’s out of the question, and so are electronics or most machine parts except those we can make in the shop on board or get from the island. We’ll be lucky to get cordage and sails.”

“Captain Alston.” That was the former operations officer, Sandy Rapczewicz, now acting XO. She was a competent-looking woman in her thirties with a weathered pug-nosed Slavic face; her eyes were red, but she seemed calm enough. A“Captain Alston.” That was the former operations officer, Sandy Rapczewicz, now acting XO. She was a competent-looking woman in her thirties with a weathered pug-nosed Slavic face; her eyes were red, but she seemed calm enough. A teenaged son ashore, Alston remembered, and a husband. “I was just thinking. We’re in the past, right?”

She nodded. Rapczewicz went on: “But if we, umm, do things -- make contact with the locals, that sort of thing -- won’t we, ummm, sort of change the way things happened? It isn’t in the history books, thousands of people and a ship appearing in Moses’ time.”

Silence fell around the table. Alston nodded. “Sandy, you’re right.” Some of the officers were beginning to look frightened. “On shore, I talked about that to some of Cofflin’s Council, a history professor and an astronomer, and the town librarian, who’s an amateur archaeologist.” Odd what types ended up on Nantucket, but it wasn’t your average island. “One thing they agreed on, even if we all dropped dead tomorrow morning, we’ve already changed history.”

“How’s that, Captain? We haven’t done anything yet.”

“We’re here. A lot of buildings and so forth are here, including brick and concrete and stone that’ll last. When Europeans arrived, they’d find the ruins. More important, the islanders already sent some people ashore, they had contact with the Indians -- and according to the doctor in charge of the local clinic, the one they brought back is dying of the common cold.”

That brought everyone up. “The person with the cold sneezed on one of the others on shore, too, which means their whole tribe probably have it by now. You think that isn’t going to change history? They’ll pass it on, since not all of them will keel over at once. And as a practical matter, everyone on the island isn’t going to drop dead tomorrow. People will try to survive. Even if we don’t, even if everything goes wrong, hundreds will be around for years, and everything they do will change things.”

Rapczewicz crossed herself. “Then we could be destroying the future -- everyone we know, the whole country.”

“If we have, we’ve already done it. Think it through. We’re still here, so the history that produced us is too, somewhere, probably. Arnstein -- the history professor -- thinks that what’ll happen is that there will be two futures, the one we came from, and the one that happens because we landed here. Rosenthal, the scientist, says that that could be; something to do with Quantum Mechanics.”

“Yeah, the Many Worlds interpretation; we studied it in physics,” Lieutenant Walker said thoughtfully.

Alston cleared her throat. “In any case, it’s irrelevant. We can’t do anything about it; even mass suicide, which is not going to happen, wouldn’t change the fact that we’re here and the consequences that follow. But we do have to eat, y’all will recollect. So ladies and gentlemen, let’s get down to some serious plannin’.”

The meeting went on for hours. As the officers left for their bunks, Alston signaled to Walker to stay. “Lieutenant, I think you’ve had an idea that you’re not sharing.”

“Ma’am,” the young man said. He hesitated. "It's just that there are so many possibilities here."

"Including death by starvation, unfortunately. That has to be our maximum priority for the present."

“Yes ma’am.”

The younger officer’s face was boyishly open, green eyes and a mop of reddish-brown hair, like an overgrown Huck Finn. It matched his Montana accent, like something out of Marlboro Country. And I can believe that as much as I want to, she thought.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

Alston sighed and sat alone, cradling her coffee and wishing for a drink. Coast Guard ships were dry, though, just like the Navy. Like the Navy had been... would be... whatever.

She poured another cup. Thinking about what had happened made her head hurt even worse. She’d considered drawing a trank herself, she needed the sleep, but no. She also needed her wits if something happened. Lucky for her she’d never been able to strike any deep roots, anywhere. At least she was used to disadvantages.

What more can the Supreme Ironist do? Let’s see, you’re a woman. A black woman. A black woman who came up through the ranks. A black, ex-ranker, divorced woman. A black, ex-ranker, divorced, gay woman. A black, ex-ranker, divorced, gay woman in charge of a ship. A black, ex-ranker, divorced, gay woman in command of a ship thrown back three thousand years in time with a crew getting more hysterical by the moment as the true wierdness of this shit starts to sink in. What else could happen?

She had an uneasy feeling she’d find out.

The Nantucket Council were meeting around an office table in the Town Building, on Broad Street down by the Whaling Museum. The building was 18th-century brick Georgian on the outside, late-20th Institutional Bland inside; the town’s bureaucrats seemed harder at work than ever, somehow. Outside the open windows voices sounded as slippery mounds of fish were manhandled into boxes, garbage bags, and the backs of pickups and the island’s ubiquitous Jeep Cherokees for distribution. The smell was already fairly powerful.

Cofflin rapped his knuckles on the table and spoke: “All right, people, we’ve toted it up, and with strict rationing we’ve got enough food for about two to three weeks from our reserves. Thank God not many of the Summer People had arrived, but we’re still up against it. Captain Alston? The fishing situation?”

Marian Alston had been sitting quietly, making notes now and then. Occasionally she would change a small ball of hard rubber from one hand to another, squeezing steadily.

“There are two real trawlers operating out of Nantucket, and they've been very useful,” she said. “Another that was here from Matapoisett sheltering from rough weather. As long as the fuel lasts, they can pull in enough to give everyone on the island a pound or more of fish a day -- the schools of cod and herring and flounder and whatnot out there have to be seen to be believed. The main problem is breaking nets because the yields are so heavy.”

“Thank God for that,” Cofflin said.

Very useful won Captain Alston the Understatement Prize; without those trawlers they might well be down to food riots and cannibalism by now.

“They were both slated to be junked next year,” he went on. He’d been a commercial fisherman himself for a while, between getting out of high school and joining the Navy; he’d gone into police work after that. Like most of the trades that were actually essential -- fishing, farming, making things -- working the nets paid squat and had zero prospects. Back up in the Twentieth, at least. Here the priorities were different.

Alston nodded. “As I said, as long as the fuel lasts, they’ll be very useful. When it’s gone, which it will be fairly soon, they’re useless. We can adapt the scallop boats to long-line hand fishing, there’s an old man on the island we found who knows the technique and we’ve got him giving lessions to yachtsmen and they’re teaching others. We can use the sailing yachts too, they won’t be what you’d call efficient, but they’ll do for sein netting. Without fuel to spare, the motorboats are worthless -- unless we cut them down and convert them to dories. I’ve got some parties workin’ on that, too, but we’re short of beams, planks, wood of all kinds.”

“No problem there.” He pushed a pile of papers across the table. “Here’s a list of surplus buildings; use the materials. Lord knows the island’s got plenty of house carpenters -- they’re yours for this. Get in touch with Sam Macy, he’s about the best housebuilder and everyone knows him.” He paused. “Bottom line, what are the fishing prospects?”

“Good. We’re landing several tons a day already; even shore fishing with lines and manual-cast nets is yielding significant amounts. The hand techniques should be coming on line about the time we run out of motor fuel for the trawlers, giving us our daily needs and about a quarter or more over for reserves. The problem is preservation. We need salt, and lots of it. Even more when we start bringing in whalemeat.”

“Whales! You can’t kill whales!” Pamela Lisketter gasped.

The other members of the Council looked down the table at her. “Why not?” Rosenthal snapped.

“They’re an endangered species!”

“Not here they’re not,” Captain Alston said. “They’re a navigation hazard. You can’t sail five miles out there without bumping into the damned things. Humans are the endangered species here; specifically, us. We need the meat, and we need oil for lighting and cooking, and the rest of them we can grind up and use on the crops.”

She turned to the farm owner. “Ms. Brand, we’ll also be producing a lot of fish offal, byproducts. Good fertilizer, I understand.”

Dr. Coleman cut in. “Save the livers of the cod. We’re going to have problems with vitamin deficiencies, too,” he noted. “I’ve rounded up all the supplements and pills on the island, but with the shortage of fresh greens and fruits you’re projecting, we may have actual scurvy by winter.”

Cofflin nodded. “Right now, what we’ll do is all eat fresh fish and whalemeat, plus perishables, and save all the canned goods and other keepers for the winter to eke out what we salt down and preserve and what we can grow. Starbuck, you see to rounding up the supplies from the restaurants. Doc, we should be able to get wild fruits and berries. Would cranberries and blueberries help? We’re got a couple of hundred acres of cranberry bog, right enough.”

“If they’re properly preserved, yes, they’ll help with the vitamin problem.”

“Dr. Coleman, I’d like you to round up all the suitable jars and cans you can find. We’ll want to preserve everything from berries to rosehips, and we’ll want to pickle fish and whale meat as well.”

Martha Stoddard tapped the table in her turn, with one finger: “There are a lot of wild plants that have useful quantities of vitamines, and edible seaweed too. My Guides troop were doing a project on them. Some of the seaweed can be dried, as well. Dulse, for example, health food stores sell dried dulse as a snack. High in vitamin C.”

“Good,” Cofflin said. “Why don’t you and the doctor get together on that? We can arrange to collect the stuff that can be dried, and get people looking for wild greens.”

“Medicinal herbs too,” Coleman said. “I’m experimenting with producing simple antibiotics, but we’re going to be short of a good deal else.”

“Good. Now that we know we’re not going to starve to death right away, what about the next few months to a year?” Cofflin said. He looked over at Angelica Brand.

“I’m sorry, Chief, but my operation is basically for flowers and luxury vegetables,” she said. “There’s only the greenhouses, and about a hundred acres under vegetables every summer, and that’s a drop in the bucket.”

Cofflin restrained an impulse to run his hands through his hair. Brand Farms was the only real agricultural enterprise on the island. There were a few hobby farms, a herb grower, private vegetable gardens, people who kept a cow or a horse or something, a lone vineyard, and that was it. It had been a long, long time since Nantucket fed itself. Even back in the Revolutionary War there had been famine here when the British blockaded the island, they’d already been trading whale oil and fish for grain. The manager of the A&P had been invaluable in tracking down all the food reserves, but there just wasn’t much. Deliveries from the mainland came three times a week even in winter.

Then Brand struck the palm of her hand to her forehead: “Wait a minute -- my off-season cover crop is winter rye. If I don’t plow that up for vegetables, we can harvest it, by hand if we have to. Call it a hundred acres at twenty or so bushels... say two thousand bushels of grain. Not until late August, though. That’s about --” she punched her calculator “about one-fifth of our needs for a year, not counting what I’d have to hold back as seed.”

“Potatoes,” Ian Arnstein said. The others looked at him; he flushed slightly and went on: “Potatoes are a pretty complete diet, they grow well in a sandy soil, and an acre will support two people. There’s probably enough here to plant a fair bit if we don’t eat them now. They keep well, too. The Irish used to live off potatoes and skim milk. We could live on potatoes and salt fish over the winter, probably.”

Angelica Brand went into a huddle with the A&P manager and her secretary and pecked at her calculator. At last she said:

“It’s pretty elementary farming, and we’ve got our usual shipment of seed potatoes on hand at my place. Yield’s about fifty pounds for every two pounds planted. Assuming we can get most of the other stored potatoes on the island to sprout, that is, because we’re not using certified seed potatoes here. We could plant a couple of hundred acres, although that will cut down on the period for living off stored food,” she said. “Plus I can put in a few hundred acres of corn and vegetables drawing on my own stocks and the stuff from the gardening and supply shops. But I don’t have the equipment to cultivate that much, even counting the relics used as lawn ornaments and such I’ve been tracking down. There isn’t that much cleared land on the island, in fact, even if we use lawns and flowerbeds. Incidentally we should use some of the lawns for fodder, grazing and hay, if we can.”

Chief Cofflin closed his eyes, then opened them in decision: “People are going crazy, sitting around with nothing to do, anyways.” There had been suicides, and aimless fights over nothing. “We’ll do the clearing and planting by hand if we have to.”

Most of the island’s economy depended on tourists. The demand for real estate agents, store clerks, waiters and cooks had taken an abrupt nosedive. He went on:

“We’ll divide them into teams. Ms. Brand, you use your tractors to do the heavy clearing, plus what earthmoving equipment we can dig up. Then we’ll have the teams move in and get ready to plant with hand tools. Anything else you’ve got seed for, too. Carrots, beets, turnips, you name it. Find the best land and we’ll worry about compensation for the owners later, if we live.”

“How are we going to pay people to work? It’s just sinking in that money isn’t worth much any more,” the Town Clerk said. Joseph Starbuck was another cousin, in his sixties, with a face that looked like it should be on a daguerreotype under a stovepipe hat.

That was a good question. “Any ideas?”

Starbuck nodded. “Food. I say anyone who wants to eat, works. We can run a sort of chit system, so many hours drawing so much, and then juggle it. Of course, we’ll have to figure out something different for people who can’t work, and eventually we’ll need a money of our own. But that’s for next year, I guess.”

Martha Stoddard cleared her throat: “Put the landscaping contractors in charge of the clearing teams,” she said. “They’ve got some experience and equipment, at least. And older people, we’ve got a lot of retirees, they can do things like child-minding, we’ll need a day-care system with everybody ablebodied working.”

“Good idea, Martha. Yours too, Joseph: work if you want to eat. Damn, you know, that sounds pretty good... any objections?” Cofflin didn’t see any. “Speaking of money, we’ll have to make a register of houses, land and cars and suchlike owned by coo... by people who weren’t here when the Event happened. We’ll have to commandeer property owned by residents, too, but let’s make it clear from the beginning that there’ll be compensation eventually.”

Everyone nodded. Angelica Brand returned to her speciality:

“Chief, this island is just a big sand dune out in the ocean. There’s not much in the way of nutrients in this soil and I don’t have much fertilizer, either. What’s more, the best land has the thickest scrub cover.”

“Plant everything you can, and you’ve got the stuff from the composting sewage works." He silently thanked God they'd managed to keep that going, for a few crucial hours a day at least. Without it they might have plague already. "We can use sludge from septic tanks too, if it’s treated -- find out how. I’m putting you in charge of food production, and levy the people you need. From now on we’re farmers, like it or not.”

“Brush,” Arnstein said. The others looked at him and he hurried on: “We have to clear the brush anyway, so we burn it and turn under the ashes. Slash-and-burn farming. The ashes should enrich the soil for a year or two.”

Brand nodded and began to make notes. “I remember something about that in the Ag. course. Most of the island’s been going feral for seventy, eighty years now... We’ll be short of hand tools. I’ll get on to the machine shop. Seahaven Engineering ought to be able to handle what we’ll need, them and the plumbers. And seed’s going to be a problem next year, these hybrids don’t breed true... and I suppose we’ll have to keep all the livestock for breeding.”

“Everything that can breed,” Cofflin agreed. “What else do you need?”

“Seed. With the sort of crash program we’re talking about here, if you can get me seed grain, and I could put in one, two, maybe three thousand acres -- oats, barley, even wheat. Maybe more, depending on how the clearing goes. That would give us a comfortable margin, and I could plant even more with fall-sown grain in October and November. The first settlers here grew small grains and corn, it was just cheaper to import it later. It’ll take a whole lot longer if I have to build up seed grain from the first rye harvest, and that’s all we’ve got -- rye and corn.”

Martha Stoddard spoke again: “You might try locating wild Jerusalem artichokes, here and on the mainland, they’re a native plant -- they can be grown from the tubers, and they’ll be flowering soon. Yield and methods are about like potatoes, and they like a poor sandy soil. They keep well right in the soil overwinter, too.”

Cofflin looked at her with respect. “Now, that’s an excellent idea, Martha. Perhaps your Guide troop could start in on that as well.”

“And this being March, the stores would be full of packets of garden seed,” Martha went on thoughtfully. “The feed stores might have whole unmilled oats, too. Some of them might sprout.”

She paused for a moment. “And get on to Paul Hillwater, the botanist -- he’s been doing a study of Nantucket’s historical ecology for years now. He can advise us on what not to clear, to keep wind erosion down and block salt spray. That used to be quite a problem here when the island was mostly bare.”

Brand nodded and started to speak; he held up a hand: “Hold off on that for a moment, Angelica; the Professor suggested something. Ron, you heard anything yet you can’t handle in the way of toolmaking?”

The owner of Seahaven Engineering was a slender man in early middle age, with long-fingered hands like a violinist. “Oh, I can work up anything you want,” he said. “Give me power and bar stock or sheet steel. The problem is there’s only one of me. I can do anything, but not everything.”

That was a problem. Nantucket simply didn’t have much industry. Seahaven was a one-man quasi-hobby, rather than a real business; most of Leaton’s living had come from his computer dealership, with the machine-shop in his basement. At that, it was the sole and singular metalworking faculty on the island, unless you counted the high school shop classes and the Eagle’s onboard machine shop. He went on:

“Mostly I replicate antiques, or make engine parts for antique cars, do prototypes for inventors, that sort of thing. And those miniature steam engines, but those are toys.”

Cofflin pressed his fingers to his forehead. “Let’s look at it this way. What have you got, what can it do, and what can you do to do more of it?”

“Ah...” Leaton frowned. “Well, I’ve got a 1956-type Bridgeport milling machine, with digital controls added on, an old Atlas 12x36 engine lathe, an Atlas horizontal milling machine, a seven-inch Amco shaper, and I just got in a Schoubling 8x18 precision toolmaking lathe, a real beauty -- Swiss. All light-to-medium stuff. There may be more on-island, I’ll start looking.”

The head of the Nantucket Electric Company cut in: “You made those flanges for us, and some other fairly heavy work. The turbocharger, for instance.”

“Yup, but I sort of cheated -- used the Bridgeport as a vertical lathe with a rotary table.” He looked around. “Forty-eight inches by twenty-nine, machined out of solid 5/8 plate --”

Cofflin cleared his throat. Leaton flushed and continued:

“Bottom line, Chief, is that I could make just about anything including more tools; a lathe is one of the few tools that can make a copy of itself. It’ll be a little awkward without a foundry, but I could make a round bar bed lathe, the Unimat type; it’ll work perfectly well, just not as durable as a cast or forged bed. I’m making a tool cutter of my own right now, or was before this all happened.”

“Excuse me,” Arnstein cut in. “You’re saying that eventually you could duplicate your operation, and then duplicate it again, and so forth? And that you can do pretty well any metal shape?”

“Yup,” Leaton said, obviously puzzled. “Give me the metal, and yes. Wasn’t that what I was saying?”

“You could make, for example, a steam engine?”

“Well, I do that all the time -- little ones, and they’re working scale models. I’ve got machinery that can work to ten-thousandths of an inch, and Watt did it with tolerances of an eighth of an inch; I’ve got a nice set of Weber measuring gague blocks, after all. I could turn out, say, a 25-horsepower model in a week, maybe convert an old VW flat-type engine. Need a welder to help me with the boiler... maybe use a propane tank... but hell, we’ve got half a dozen top-notch welders and some heavy bending rolls. Bit difficult to make really big cylinders without a foundry or casting plant, but I could if you gave me a month or two to tool up. Up to a couple of hundred horsepower. But we don’t have the fuel for many of those. Hell, we can’t keep the town power plant running for more than six months, no matter how we ration, right, Fred?”

The head of the Electric Company nodded, abstracted; he was making frantic notes. The other members of the Council were looking at each other and smiling tentatively; good news had been scarce recently.

Cofflin let out a long sigh. “Well, you’ll need more space than that basement, and more people. Look up anyone with experience, and, hmm, you and Joseph here scout for a building that’ll give you room to expand.”

He noticed Lisketter scowling. “Ms. Lisketter, what about your artisans?”

She tapped the edges of the papers in front of her. What are we going to do when we run out of paper? he thought.

“There are dozens of weavers,” she said. “And --”

Cofflin was surprised at the cogent, well-organized list that followed. He nodded at the end of it. “Good work, Ms. Lisketter. So we’ll be well enough off for clothng when our current stores run out?”

They’d also have a large surplus of silversmiths and graphic artists. And, thank God, a number of metalworkers, farriers visiting with their tools at the time of the Event, and makers of ornamental wrought iron, including three genuine blacksmiths. One who specialized in blades, although he was also a visitor caught here. Plenty of pottery makers, and there was even a glassblower who’d just moved his studio to the island last year.

She shook her head. “We don’t have the raw materials. We need flax and wool -- cotton if you can get it. I know it’s not our top priority, but...”

Arnstein cleared his throat. “Cotton might be available in the Carribean or Mexico,” he said. “Flax and wool certainly from Europe.”

“We could grow flax here, the climate’s right. It’s a useful oilseed as well. We could get the flax seed along with grain from Europe,” Brand said thoughtfully. “Grinding grain might be a problem --”

“Ayup,” Cofflin said. “Remember the Old Mill? We’ll finally get some use out of the damned tourist trap.”

There was a chuckle around the table, particularly from the native islanders. The Old Mill was a shingled windmill, kept functional for the tourist trade. For that matter, they could probably copy it. Brand spoke:

“Chief, like I said, get me seed and tools and people and I can produce grain. But I’d have to have the seed soon, for spring planting -- it looks like the growing season’s longer here, but even so, it’ll be tight. We could use more animal breeding stock as well. There’s some poultry and those will reproduce fast. It’s the larger stock that are the problem; we have a small herd of sheep, good dual-purpose Corridales; four stallions, forty-two mares, twenty-one geldings, some cows, several of them in calf, thank God, so we should get a bull-calf or two, but not a pig on the island. Pigs would be ideal, they breed so quickly and eat anything, and we could use ewes, mares and cows as well. They’re the limiting factor.”

Cofflin looked at Alston. She spread her hands. “I can take the Eagle accross the Atlantic easily enough,” she said. “Assumin’ the winds and currents are basically similar, in about two weeks on the northern route. More to get back, you have to drop south to avoid the westerlies, sort of a big circle. Plus whatever time it takes to dicker with the locals and to load; the Eagle wasn’t designed to carry cargo. My only real problem is the stars, now that we’re back to celestial navigation as our only means of finding where we are. Everything’s slightly off. We can compensate, but it’ll take time to figure out how.”

Rosenthal spoke: “I can get you a new set of data, complete tables. I’ll have the print-out to you in a couple of days.”

The Chief gnawed at his lip, wishing he’d been able to get more sleep. I wish none of this had happened. Enough. Get working, man. Risking the Eagle was not something he wanted to do, not at all. It was a priceless asset... but an asset had to be used.

“Let’s see if we can get some figures here,” he said.

They consulted, punched calculators -- oh, those are going to be missed when the batteries run out -- argued. In the end the results showed that there might be enough to keep them through winter from what they could grow and catch with the resources already on the island... if their assumptions weren’t wrong, and everyone pitched in.

“No margin,” he said. “That settles it, we need more food.” He turned to the Coast Guard officer. “When were you planning on going whaling?” he said.

“We’re rigging for it now, and Mr. Leaton has done a fine job, a harpoon gun that ought to work. Tomorrow we start, and we don’t think it’ll take more than a few days to get all the dead whales you can handle, using a plane for spotting. Some of your people are getting the rending tubs and whatever out of the Whaling Museum right now. Lookin’ like they’ll be functional.”

Cofflin nodded. “Where can we get bulk salt? Anyone know?”

Arnstein cleared his throat. “The Bahamas -- Inagua island, down at the southern tip. There are big salt lagoons there, at least there were in our time. You can scoop it up around the edges with shovels.”

Cofflin chuckled. “Damn, but that education of yours is turning out useful.”

“Actually I honeymooned there with my late wife. The tour guide told me.”

Alston spoke: “That’s shoal water. I’d hate to take the Eagle in close there.”

Cofflin nodded. “What’s that two-master sailing yacht called...”

“The Yare,” Alston said. “Wooden-hulled topmast schooner, about a hundred tons burden, Canadian-built, old but still sound. Small auxiliary engine, it’s a replica, the original design was a revenue cutter. There’s another tied up, the Bentley, seventy-foot two master schooner, about three-quarters her displacement, but the masts and rigging need work. The Yare can leave anytime, I’ll put one of my officers in command."

“All right, we’ll send the Yare to Inagua. Week there and back, and she should get us a couple of tons at least. We send the Eagle east for grain; everyone, draw up your wish lists of things to get that might be there.” He paused and thought. “Professor, what should we take for trade goods?”

“Almost anything,” Arnstein said. “Cloth, ornaments --” with the number of jewellry stores on the island, that should be no problem “-- metal tools, anything like that. Bits of glass would probably do, wire...”

“I’m putting you in charge of it,” Cofflin said. “Incidentally, you’re going.” Arnstein yelped. “You’re the closest thing to an expert on dealing with primitives we have.”

“But I won’t even be able to talk to them!” Arnstein protested.

“I thought you knew ancient languages?”

“I know Latin, which isn’t spoken yet, and Greek. Classical Greek, and I’ve read Homer and looked at the Linear B stuff. But even the Classical period’s seven hundred years in the future! Homeric Greek is to Classical what Shakespeare’s English is to ours, and Mycenaean is five hundred years before that, call it Chaucerian; and they won’t be speaking Greek on the shores of the English Channel, anyway.”

“Neither will anyone else be able to talk to the locals, wi“Neither will anyone else be able to talk to the locals, will they?” Cofflin said.

“Not unless we have a Lithuanian,” Arnstein admitted. The others looked at him. “Lithuanian is a very conservative language,” he said. “About like Sanskrit, which is being spoken in northwestern India at this date. Indo-European languages should be spreading through western Europe about now, defining now as being the last millenium and a half or so, unless you believe Colin Renfrew’s nonsense... sorry, academic squabble. But someone who spoke it would probably be able to pick up any of the early versions of Indo-European fairly quickly, other things being equal.” He shrugged. “But how likely are we to find --”

Doreen Rosenthal cleared her throat, twisting a lock of hair around a finger. “My mother came from Vilnus. I speak it,” she said.

Martha Stoddard looked up from her notepad. “There’s a fairly good languages section at the Athenaeum,” she noted. “And I know at least one retired linguist on island. Speaking of which, Jared, we’re going to be doing a fair bit of research on one thing and t’other. Old-style ways of doing, and such.” She frowned. “Plus we ought to print out some things on CD-ROM, right now, while we can.”

“Good idea, Martha. You’re in charge of research projects, of course.” Cofflin turned his head to the manager of the Nantucket Electric Company. “Fred, how are we fixed for energy?”

“I’ve got about one month’s fuel,” he said. “Fuel barge was tied up at the... Event, topping up to take us through to the switchover to the mainland cable. According to the gas stations and boating people, there’s enough gasoline for say, two weeks at normal useage. After that, well, we might be able to get those windmills going again. Remember, that wind-farm idea?” Everyone nodded. The tall frames of the wind-generators still stuck up out of fields around the town. “That would give us, oh, five, eight percent of our usual output indefinitely.”

Cofflin nodded. “We’re closing down all private autos as of now,” he said. “Official use, ambulances, fire engines, and Angelica’s tractors only. The trawlers have first priority. How many bicycles do we have?”

“About thirty-five hundred, counting private, in the rental places and the stores.”

“Good, that’ll help.” One advantage of being a tourist trap. “Fred, you get together with Doc Coleman, and we’ll arrange an essential-uses-only electricity schedule. That ought to stretch the fuel oil. The rest of us will have to go to bed with the sun until we get whale-oil lanterns. Next --”

It was a relief to be finally doing something.

“We’re working like slaves!” the man complained.

He was thirtysomething, and from the look of his jeans and plaid shirt, wealthy. Certainly coof, that New York accent was a dead giveaway. Not liking the work much, from the way he straightened and rubbed at his back and threw down his billhook.

I can’t blame him, Angelica Brand thought. This is something out of a made for TV special. She was a farmer from twelve generations of farmers, but her generation used tractors and genetic engineering.

The tractors, bulldozers and earth-moving equipment from construction sites had knocked down much of the above-ground brush. Pictures from back in her great-grandfather’s day showed a landscape that looked like North Dakota, hardly a bush over knee-high, but most of the island was overgrown now with a thick head-high spiney growth of scrub oak, bayberry, beachplum, red cedar, honeysuckle, pitch pine and God-knew-what, all laced together with wild grapevines and rosa rugosa.

The machines left the scrub still chest-high to head-high, many of the main stems still unbroken. The clumsy untrained labor of hundreds was scarcely sufficient to cut the brush loose and drag it into windrows for burning, especially when most of them had never lifted anything heavier than a computer mouse or a squash racket in their lives. The smell of it was acrid in her nostrils, but the ash would be useful. Clumps of men and women were scattered through the scraggly-looking wreckage she was supposed to turn into a field, hacking and levering and dragging at the roots. Tools were in short supply, too.

Other squads were slumped resting near the truck with the water, hardly even bothering to lie in its shade despite the unseasonable heat. A few were putting a better edge on their tools at the portable grindstone someone had dug out of an attic. It was the foot-powered type, and worth its weight in gold.

The man thrust his hands under her nose. “Look at this!”

Shreds of skin hung down from broken blisters, and bits of the cloth he’d used to wrap his hands clung, sticky with the lymph. Angelica Brand nodded sympathetically. “We’ve got a tub of ointment back at the house,” she said. “When your shift’s off, come on up. There’s some cider, too.”

“I’m Donald Masfield, a certified public accountant!” he man half-screamed. Spittle flung from his lips. “I’m finished with this!”

He’d picked up the billhook again. It had a wooden shaft five feet long, with a steel blade socketed onto the end, like an arm-long single edged knife with an inward-curving tip at the end.

“You can take this fucking thing and ram it up your ass, bitch!”

Angelica planted her hands on her hips and glared back. “Don’t you use language like that to me, mister!” she snapped, fatigue and irritation flaring. “I don’t care if you were a rocket scientist, we have to eat this winter. Or do you thing somebody’s going to dock with a ship full of bananas and Big Macs?”

“I’m an accountant, not a farmer!”

“We don’t need accountants right now. And if you don’t work, you don’t get any rations. No exceptions for the ablebodied.”

A woman’s voice shouted: “Don! No!”

The accountant ignored it. Brand’s anger turned to a yell of fear as the man swung at her with the billhook. If he hadn’t been staggering with exhaustion he might have hit her. A root caught at her boot and she went over backwards, staring at the sunlight breaking off the edge of the heavy tool as he swung it upwards.

Thunk. The butt-end of another billhook drove into he berserker’s back. He screamed and whirled, but a third tripped him. Men and women piled on, wrestling him to the ground and holding him despite his thrashings.

“Obliged, Ted,” Angelica said shakily, getting to her feet and dusting herself off. The man nodded silently, which was like Theodore Corby; she’d known him since she was a girl, and he never used a word where an economical movement of the chin would do. “Much obliged.”

She looked around. “Well, nobody said to stop working!” she called. “Come on, everyone, there’s a job to be done!”

“What’ll we do with this guy?”

The man had stopped roaring and heaving. Now he was lying prone in the dirt and ash, crying noisily.

“I...” she hesitated. I run a vegetable farm! she thought. Five to fifty people worked on it, according to season, and this had never happened before. “Bring him along. We’d better call the Chief.”

“Ooooh, gross. Totally, totally gross.”

Ned Shaw turned. The girl was looking at the yard-long cod she’d just pulled in; the lines were arranged over a rollbar around the boat, to make hauling easier. The big fish swayed, flapping, thirty-odd pounds of bad temper on the end of a heavy hook and line.

“Tie it off, tie it off!” he barked, pushing down the crowded deck. He’d been a scalloper most of his life, done some other fishing, but he’d never seen anything like that fish.

The girl made a face, but she swung the line inboard and paid out, letting the cod drop to the boards of the deck. It flopped and jumped, and she skittered backwards. A couple of the other people along the sides of the converted boat were looking.

“Like this,” Shaw said.

He put a boot on the fish -- it must weigh thirty-five pounds and it wasn’t happy at all -- and swung a length of stick with a heavy steel nut on the end. Two crunching blows and the fish was still.

“That’s good eating, that cod,” the fishermen said, heaving it into the well in the center of the boat with a grunt of effort. Mebbe forty, forty-five.

His crew -- clerks, salesgirls, high-school students, shopkeepers, computer operators -- looked at the fish and swallowed. They were all hungry, but...

Then the lines began to jerk all around him. “Get to it!” he yelled.

Lines whirred. Cod came up them; sometimes two or three of the crew would have to pull on a single line, and once a six-foot monster came over the side with people yelling and dancing to get out of its way. That one Shaw pinned to the deck with a boathook, and it took half a dozen two-handed blows of the club to kill it. He looked up, panting. The well in the center of the twenty-foot boat was full of fish, a slippery blue-grey mound of it. The deck was slimy underfoot, covered in scales; the crew were equally smeared, the hair of the women hanging in rat-tails. They grinned back at him.

“Good day’s work,” he said. “Get the tarpaulin over them and we’ll head in. Lucky we don’t have to clean them.”

The girl who’d caught the first fish of the day daubed at herself. “Gross,” she muttered.

Island in the Sea of Time

S.M. Stirling

Dedications:

Chapter One:

Chapter Two: