Island in the Sea of Time (8 page)

“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. 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.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.” 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. “We’ll do the clearing and planting by hand if we have to.” 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 anymore,” the town clerk said.

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 going to have to wait.”

Martha Stoddard cleared her throat. “The older people, we’ve got a lot of retirees, they can do things like childminding. We’ll need a day-care system with everybody able-bodied 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 specialty:

“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 had 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. 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. “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.

Martha Stoddard spoke again: “You might try locating wild Jerusalem artichokes, here and on the mainland. They’re a native plant. 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 scout 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.”

Angelica Brand nodded and started to speak; Cofflin 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?”

Ron Leaton, 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; 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 facility on the island, unless you counted the high school shop classes and the
Eagle
’s onboard machine shop.

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 twelve-by-thirty-six engine lathe, an Atlas horizontal milling machine, a seven-inch Ammco shaper, and I just got in a Schaublin eight-by-eighteen 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 five-eighths 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-gauge blocks, after all. I could turn out, say, a twenty-five-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.

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 clothing 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, three genuine blacksmiths; one who specialized in blades, 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 Caribbean 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.

Brand spoke: “Chief, 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 dualpurpose Corriedales; and four stallions, forty-two mares, twenty-one geldings; and 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
across the Atlantic easily enough,” she said. “Assumin’ the winds and currents are basically similar, in about two weeks on the northern route, with a little more to get back. 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 printout to you in a couple of days.”

The chief gnawed at his lip, wishing he’d been able to get more sleep. 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, or 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 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.”