Island in the Sea of Time (4 page)

“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. And 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. 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 spoken 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 ellipse, 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 humorlessly 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 I 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 the 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, um, 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. After a few minutes, Toffler tipped one wing and spoke:

“Thar she blows.”

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

Which had been virtually extinct in these waters since the eighteenth 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, and then covering the sides with bark and brush, like Stone Age versions of Quonset huts. Fires trickled smoke, and human figures pointed upward. 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 noseup position as Toffler turned it toward 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.

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 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,” 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. 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. 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 was a scattering of tools made of bone, stone, horn, and wood, and shallow lughandled 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.

Cofflin hit the deck with old reflex, and 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. 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 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.
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 toward 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. Okay, okay, 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 Mattel 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, dodging and jinking like a brokenfield runner. 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 the sides of their heads were shaved and painted vermilion. 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 birch-bark sheath at his waist and swiped at them; he was chanting, something high-pitched and rhythmic.

Death song,
Cofflin guessed, dredging at bits of old knowledge.
Okay, 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.”