Island in the Sea of Time (10 page)

“Thank God this type floats when it’s dead,” Walker said. “Let’s make her fast.”

The Eagle was making sail in their direction; there were lookouts up at the mastheads with binoculars. Cadet Simpson slipped out of her pants and jacket and went overboard with a line to make fast around the whale’s flukes. Walker watched with interest; someday they’d have to admit that the old fraternization rules didn’t make much sense. Or maybe there would be opportunities when they went east, next week. . . .

The ship was looming larger, moving fairly quickly despite the four whales secured to her sides. This one towed astern, and they’d have enough for starters.

He looked east. Who knew what waited there?
Upon a peak in Darien . . .

 

“We’ll take hundreds of these,” Ian Arnstein said.

The spearhead was seven inches long, and three wide at the broadest, cut and ground out of a straightened section of automobile leaf spring. The edge was razor-sharp, tapering to a murderous point. The tang was socketed onto a smooth eight-foot wooden shaft; the whole ensemblage felt heavy and solid and well balanced. Deadly. Ian hefted it and tried to imagine using it.
Damn. I’d rather have read about this than had to do it,
he thought.

Seahaven Engineering had moved into a big former boathouse, out east of town near the head of the harbor. The machine shop was noisy, clangs and thumps and shrill screaming sounds as somebody pushed a piece of metal against a grindstone; it smelled of iron and ozone.

Ronald Leaton nodded; he was looking as tired as everyone else, and was dressed in a grease-stained baseball cap and overalls that looked like they’d been on for days. “Here’s some of the other stuff you ordered.”

Big knives ground out of bar stock, and short Romanstyle swords. Those had smoothed wooden hilts, brass pommels, and an S-shaped guard made of rebar and welded on. Ian picked one up and hefted it, prodding the point into the battered wooden table it rested on.

“These are probably better steel than the originals,” he said.

“Yup. That long fancy one you wanted will take another day or two. Got a book from one of the stores,
The Complete Bladesmith
, had a lot of useful hints. John Martins is setting up a forge—he’s that blacksmith who was here visiting Barbara Allis. He made things like that for hobbyists. And here’s our masterpiece.”

This time Ronald had used a whole leaf from a spring for the crossbow. It was set at the front of a rifle-type stock.

“How does it cock?” Ian asked. There was a steel claw arrangement hooked to the center of the wire string stretched across the shallow cord of the bow. He pulled at the string with a tentative hand. It was like a solid bar, immovable.

“That’s a
stiff
draw,” he said.

“Over three hundred and fifty pounds,” the machinist said. “Brace the stock against your hip and hold the grip. Now put your other hand on the forestock, through that oval metal loop that sticks out beyond the wood. Feel that catch under your thumb? Press it down.”

Ian obeyed. A steel lever came out of its slot in the forestock, hinged at the rear a few inches ahead of the trigger guard.

“Pump it back and forth, like the lever on a car jack.”

There was a soft heavy resistance with every stroke, and the crossbow’s string inched backward. At the sixth it clicked home near the trigger action and the rear sight, the heavy steel bow bent and ready.

Ian whistled. Not even the windlass-wound monsters the crossbowmen of medieval Genoa and Venice used were more powerful, and it had taken far less time to cock, barely ten seconds, probably less with practice.
Almost as fast as a bow
, he thought. And it took years to make a good archer; this you could learn to use in a couple of days.
Well, we understand mechanical advantage better than they did back then in medieval times . . . in the future
. The confusion of tenses made it difficult even to talk about time travel.

“We’d better go out back to test this,” Ronald said.

The paved space was full of people sorting car parts, putting aside ones to keep in stock for the limited number of vehicles that were being kept running; a crew of car mechanics and enthusiastic amateurs were working on a four-wheeled horse cart made out of tubing and two-byfours and the wheels and axles from a Saab. A hundred paces away a wooden target was propped up against the wall of an unoccupied summer cottage.

“Just a front and back sight on the bow,” Ronald said. “Here’s something to shoot.”

He handed Ian a bolt, eighteen inches of heavy wooden dowel with a three-bladed steel head at one end and a trio of plastic flight feathers at the other. Ian dropped it into the slot and snuggled the butt against his shoulder. Squeeze the trigger . . .

Whunnng.
The cord whipped forward, and the bolt flashed in a snapping blurr.
Whunk!
It struck in one corner of the target, sunk half its length and quivering like a malignant bee. Ian pushed his glasses up his nose and whistled.

“Not bad,” he said. “Not bad at all.”

He looked at how the bolt had plowed itself a foot deep through solid wood.
Logical. These things used to pierce armor.

They certainly weren’t going to be making smokeless powder and metal cartridges anytime soon. They
might
be able to make black powder and muskets in a few years. In the meantime these would save a lot of utterly irreplaceable ammunition.

“Lunch,” Ronald said, as someone hammered on a triangle back at Seahaven Engineering. “If you don’t mind fish.”

“Fortunately, I don’t,” Ian said. People on the island who were allergic to it were in deep trouble.

“Or there’s steak,” Ronald went on, grinning.

“Whale steak. Sort of like beef, only fishy. We made the harpoon gun, so we get dibs.”

 

“Morning, Chief.”

“Morning, Fred.”

Fred Roberts was up the frame of the wind generator, head and hands inside the opened housing. “You wouldn’t believe how things corrode in this sea air.”

“Oh, I guess I would,” Cofflin said dryly, leaning his bicycle against the steel of the support. “Always thought these eggbeaters were a boondoggle. Your tax dollars at waste.”

More of the Nantucket Electric Company people and teams from the general population were running up sheds around the base. He recognized four or five men who’d worked as house carpenters before the Event, with dozens of the unskilled doing fetch-and-carry. Cofflin looked inside the long shed; electricians were setting up row after row of car batteries in parallel, on bookshelf-style supports that filled the inside. He nodded at their greetings. The batteries would help even out the flow of power from the windmills, taking up the slack when the air was calm or giving extra at peak demand. Luckily, it was a rare day on the island without a breeze. He ducked back out; Fred was answering his last remark:

“They were a boondoggle, but we’re lucky to have them. . . .
There.”
He pulled his head out of the machine and wiped his face on the sleeve of his overall. “Got it, I think. We should be able to get most of these things running, for a while at least. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, and it’ll get harder and harder to replace lost parts. I suppose we could rewind the coils by hand with telephone wire . . .”

His voice died off into a preoccupied mumble, an expert talking with himself. Cofflin nodded and looked out over the landscape of the island that had been his ancestors’ home for fifteen generations. More, if you counted the very faint trace of Indian blood.

Not far away, one of Brand’s tractors was dragging an improvised harrow over half-cleared land. People were walking behind it in long rows stretched across the turned gray-brown soil. The first row were making holes with shovels, hoes, billhooks, and sticks. The second row had sacks slung from their shoulders, and they were dropping in quartered potatoes, each piece with two eyes for sprouting. The third were carrying buckets, dropping in a dollop of fertilizer—better not to ask where it came from—and filling in the holes, tamping them down with their hands. It came to him that he’d never seen that many people working in a field, not even when he spent a few summers picking tobacco in the Connecticut Valley. Not that many . . . not in America, at least. In Asia, yes. Though most of his traveling there had been behind the splinter shield of a 20mm.

Fred was climbing down the ladder built into the support leg. “It’s amazing,” he said. “Here we’re doing just a few things, and everyone on the island is working dawn to dusk.”

Cofflin took a Tupperware container of fish sticks from the carryall at the rear of the bike. He opened the top and offered some to the other man. Fred sighed, then brightened slightly at the taste.

“S’good,” he said.

“Ayup. Martha made ’em up. Not looking forward to the day the spices run out,” he said. “Reason I came was we need more ice. Until we can salt down the fish, that is. Loads are coming in pretty fast.”

“Well, I suppose we could switch on the A&P again, and put buckets of water in the freezers. . . .”

 

Marian Alston strolled toward the point where the streets met, hands in her pockets. It was very dark without the streetlights, but heaven was frosted with stars and the moon was full. She walked quietly; nobody was about at this hour, and the houses around were dark and shuttered, waiting for summer dwellers who would never arrive. Trees overarched brick sidewalks crumpled into unevenness by thrusting roots; she took the middle of the road, where a little cool white light filtered through the leaves of the elms. The night was quiet enough that an occasional voice from the distant center of town sounded clear. The crickets in the small marsh up the street were louder. Both seemed to enhance the silence.

Tempting to leave it all. Sail away from the problem, go see the strangeness she’d been landed in, lose herself in wandering and adventure.
Not really an option, of course.
Yet it was
Eagle
she loved, and the sea. This island was too new to her to hold her heart.

Different
, she thought. She’d liked to walk out at night sometimes when she was a girl in her father’s house. The sky looked cooler here; life was colored in shades of blue and fog-gray, without the yeasty aliveness of the Low Country. She wondered what it would be like to visit there now, so long and long before the first small wooden ships dropped anchor before rivers not yet named Ashley or Cooper. No crumbled tabby ruins to find among the trees, overgrown remains of Great House and slave quarters. No weathered wooden shacks; no clipped green golf courses amid the palmettos either. Just water, reeds, stars . . . her lips quirked. Indians, of course. The mosquitoes would be there too.

She shook her head ruefully and returned to the present. The monument in the center of the crossroads was small and unassuming. No statue, just a round millstone base and above a granite plinth with the names of the island’s Union dead. Very many names, for so small a town; men who could have stayed home in comfort, and the way the war turned out wouldn’t have affected their lives one bit. Men who ended lying on bloodstained tables down from Cemetery Ridge, with their bones shattered into splinters by minié balls and the surgeon’s saw ready; men shivering and puking out their lives with yellow fever in the swamps along the Chickahominy; men drowned in the blackness of Farragut’s ironclad in Mobile Bay; men down in the red clay while ants marched over their tongues toward sightless eyes. They had gone a long way from home, to die among angry strangers.

The captain of the
Eagle
took two steps backward and came to attention. Her salute was slow, with a precise quivering snap at the end. Then she turned and walked homeward.

 

“Still working, Ms. Rosenthal?” Ian Arnstein asked.

Doreen Rosenthal, started and looked up from her books.

The
Eagle
had electric light still, which was one reason why she’d moved aboard a little early. He didn’t intend to move his bag of essentials and crates of references into the little cubbyhole they’d assigned him until tomorrow, the day of their departure. He sat down across from her; the officers’ wardroom was empty, although there was coffee in the corner for the night watch.

“Studying, not working,” she said, holding up the cover of the book. It was a physics text; the title made very little sense to him. “Trying to figure out what happened to us. That’s Doreen, by the way. No sense in being formal if we’re going on a cruise.” She smiled shyly.

He smiled back. “Well, it beats bush-clearing detail, Doreen.” Everyone on the Council was supposed to put in at least a few hours. It made sense in a political sort of way, he supposed, but his back hurt. “Most people call me Ian.”

“Funny, you don’t
look
Scottish.”

They shared a laugh. “My parents were extremely assimilated. Any luck with the search for the causes of the Event?”

He went over to the urn and poured them both a cup; no more coffee soon, so make the best of it. No more cream or sugar, either—the output of the few dozen cows on the island was reserved for the sick and children. Cows could breed, but he didn’t even know if sugarcane had been domesticated yet, and they certainly weren’t going to be sending any expeditions to India to find out for a while.
I wonder if we could get honeybees in England?
he thought. One more thing to look up. He remembered that there hadn’t been any in the Americas when the settlers arrived, but not whether anyone was raising them at this early date in the Old World. Or there might be some hives on Nantucket.

“No luck,” Doreen said, sticking a piece of paper in the book and closing it.

“How do you take it?”

“Black.”

Paper . . .
Ian shoved the thought into the enormous to-do file. “Do you favor the Act of God hypothesis, or the Saucer People theory?” he asked with a grin, setting down the cups. “Those are the two main schools of thought on the island, and apart from food and blisters, people don’t talk about much else. Then there are the dissenting minority churches; the Satan-did-it, and the Government Secret Project slash Conspiracy. And a new eclectic faith, the Saucer People Are Part of the Conspiracy.”