Island in the Sea of Time (82 page)

Leaton laughed ruefully. “All right, what good
are
you these days?” He shook his head. “The Town still is in charge of unused buildings, isn’t it? We could use double the space.”

Jared and Martha looked at each other. She cleared her throat. “Ronald, the Council
has
been considering that. We were thinking that it might be advisable to have some of your people start their own engineering shops, for the simpler work. Town would help them get started, the way it did you.”

“Oh.” Leaton blinked, surprised. “Not satisfied with the job I’m doing?” he asked, sounding slightly hurt.

“Hell no,” Jared said. “You’re doing a wonderful job. It’s policy. Better to have competition, ayup? And we want to encourage people to set up on their own, not have too many on wages.”

“Oh.” Leaton frowned thoughtfully. “You know, that’s not a bad idea, now that I come to think of it. Must be a bit annoying, only having me to come to when you need something done.”

Glad you see the point,
Cofflin thought with an inaudible sigh of relief. These days it seemed that everyone on the island had a wonderful idea that needed a machine built to do it, everything from flax-crushing and ropemaking to pressing hazelnut oil, and only Seahaven to do any of it. It was better to have a lot of little firms, where more people had a chance to become their own boss.
Speaking of which
. . . He glanced over at Martha.

“We were talking with Starbuck about organizing the financial setup here, too,” she said. “Now that things are getting less informal. Organizing Seahaven as a company, that is. You put up your experience and the original machine tools, the Town provides the building and all the raw materials we’ve furnished, and the staff gets a share too that they hold as a block trust, and anyone can cash their share out if they leave. We thought that forty-thirty-thirty would be a proper ratio, organized as a joint-stock company. It won’t make all that much practical difference right away, but for the long term . . .”

“Ah.” Leaton frowned even harder. “Well, to tell you the truth, I’ve been thinking about organization myself, this last couple of months. Right now we’ve got everything jumbled up together—splitting up a bit would help, ah, even out the flows all ’round. Save time and effort. For example, we made up the blowers and hearth and so forth for the glassmaking plant, but there’s no earthly reason it should be run as part of Seahaven.”

“Exactly,” Cofflin said, relieved.

Martha nodded. “Wish that glassworks was more useful than it is,” she added. “We’ve got the glass jars, but you need tight lids for heat canning, though, and it’s hard to do that without rubber washer rings.”

They all sighed agreement. Everyone had gotten
extremely
sick of salt fish and meat last winter, even if wild greens had kept scurvy and other deficiency diseases at bay. Nobody had wanted to see another piece of dried dulse by spring, either. The icehouses and bigger vegetable crops would help with that this year, and vary the diet, but it would be nice to be able to put up vegetables and fruits in quantity.

“Terri Susman had an idea about that,” Leaton said. “She thinks we can reprocess tires to get good-quality sealing rubber. Have to get the steel wire and the cord out, of course, then chop up and reheat the rubber.”

“Have her talk to Martha, then,” Cofflin said. She was in charge of screening new Town-backed projects. “We should get on to that before summer, when the truck crops start coming in. Plenty of glass jars available now, if we can get the sealing we need.”

Martha made a note on a pad she kept with her. “We’ll need sulfur to cure raw rubber, won’t we?” she said.

Leaton nodded vigorously. “That’s getting to be our problem,” he said. “Mechanical things, that I and my people can handle. It’s
chemistry
that we’re running into bottlenecks with. I could use some sulfuric acid for pickling and cleaning steel, God knows I could, but we can’t make it in quantity—and what we do make is cruddy, full of impurities, and the quality is variable as hell. Same with nitric acid. Here, let me show you.”

He pulled a scrap of crinkly-looking cotton cloth from a drawer of his desk and put it in a metal pan on the top. Then he took out a fire-starter, snapped it, and dumped the tinder. The cloth went up with a
whoosh,
a subdued crackling, and a puff of bitter smoke.

“There’s our prospect of nitro powder,” he said, exasperation in his tone. “If we
could
do it, we could get blasting explosive and propellants out of sawdust and cloth scraps, anything with cellulose. But we can’t. The acid we make’s too dirty, and we can’t stabilize the results—it goes off if you breathe on it. The chemistry teacher over at the high school, Cynthia Dawes, she’s working on it. Probably get it right in a year or two, but it’s the old story, not enough people, specialists especially.”

“Plus we have to be careful about by-products,” Martha said. “No PCBs or dioxin in the groundwater here, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

Both men nodded; Nantucket was a small island, and its water supply was completely dependent on the underground aquifer. Keeping that unpolluted had been hard enough up in the twentieth. The island didn’t have that much fresh water to spare in the first place—if you overpumped the underground supply it got brackish and then salt—and they couldn’t possibly let poisons filter down through the sandy soil into the reservoir below.

“Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” Leaton said, and Martha nodded. Jared blinked and shrugged; he got the gist, if not the actual reference. “We’re redoing the early Industrial Revolution, only we can’t afford to make the mistakes they did. Anyway, smokeless powder’s out of the question, for a couple of years at least. Black powder we can do—but there the limiting factor’s the raw materials. Charcoal is no problem, but we’re just now getting significant amounts of saltpeter from the sewage works. And sulfur, well, the nearest accessible sources are down in the Caribbean.”

“Through jungle and up volcanoes,” Cofflin added. He’d taken a look at the reports. “It’s even less popular than the salt-mining detail. Thanks for that mechanical scoop thing, by the way—it’s taken a lot of the heartbreak out of that salt collection.”

“Plus it’s dangerous,” Leaton went on. “Making black gunpowder, that is, no way to avoid occasional frictional explosions, that’s why Du Pont got out of the business. Once we’re up above the couple-of-pounds-a-batch level, I’m going to move we put the plant out by the old airport.”

He sighed. “We’re doing the best we can with what we’ve got . . . I showed you our Hawkeye addition to the ROATS program, didn’t I?”

“No, actually,” Cofflin said. “With this job and a kid, some details just don’t get through. Captain Alston was satisfied, and I took her word for it.”

“Ah. Well, come have a look, then.”

Cofflin suspected that the machinist just liked an excuse to get out of his office and get his hands on some machinery; but hell, he didn’t like sailing a desk much himself. They followed him out into the main shop, and then into the tangle of outdoor projects on the other side of the main building. Leaton dodged into a shed and brought out a weapon, slinging a leather satchel over one shoulder as well.

“Here it is,” he said with diffident pride.

“Hmm.”

Cofflin hefted the rifle . . .
better check
. Yes, spiral grooves down the barrel. Fully stocked in black walnut, looking a little like a hunting rifle except for the hammer and frizzen pan on the side. He swung it up to his shoulder and looked down the barrel; heavier than an M-16, about nine pounds, but well balanced and with a nice solid feel. Mauser-style adjustable sights.

“Feels sweet,” he said. “A flintlock, I see.”

“Ayup. We’ve got another model ready to go into production when we finally get the percussion-cap problem licked. We’re going to use a tape primer method, like a kid’s cap pistol, only using sheet copper instead of paper.”

“How’s it work?” Cofflin asked.

“Pull the hammer back to half cock,” Leaton said. “Then hold the rifle in your left hand and raise that knob along the back of the stock.”

“Ah,” Cofflin said.

There was a plunger-shaped brass tube bolted to the underside of the section that had swung up, set so that the head of it would slide into the rear of the chamber when the lever was pushed back down.

“Hmm. Will that give you a tight enough gas seal?”

“Nope,” Leaton admitted. “Not by itself. And drawnbrass cartridges are not feasible, right now; too big an operation. Here’s what we did instead.”

He opened the satchel hung over his shoulder and handed the Chief a round of ammunition. The bullet was shaped much like the rifle rounds he was familar with. Not jacketed, though, and it looked like . . .

“Plain lead?” he said.

“Slightly alloyed with antimony and tin. Ten millimeter, or point-four-inch, if you prefer.”

Cofflin snorted, and Martha gave a dry chuckle. The metric-versus-old-style controversy was taking up a lot of time at the more recent Meetings, with the constitution on hold until the expeditionary force in Britain returned. The question of whether or not to hold Daffodil Weekend was a close second.

The rest of the cartridge was paper, and he could feel the black powder crunching within as he rolled it between thumb and forefinger. The rear felt thicker and stiffer.

“Go ahead,” Leaton said eagerly. “There’s a wad of greased felt at the base of the round. It packs into the gap between the head of the plunger and the chamber under the gas pressure, and seals it—well enough for one use, anyway.”

Cofflin slid the cartridge into the chamber with his thumb and snapped the lever back down; an unseen spring held it snugly in its groove atop the rifle’s stock. “Ayup, I see,” he said admiringly.

“That’s really quite clever,” Martha said, her tone neutral.

The men both looked at her. She raised a brow and continued: “No, really. I’m just not an enthusiast. Guns are like tractors or can openers to me—tools. It’s a gender thing, I think.”

“Marian likes weapons,” Cofflin said, feeling slightly defensive.

“No, she’s
interested
in them. They’re part of her work, as filing systems were for-me when I was a librarian,” Martha corrected. “And swords are her recreation, like squash rackets. Anyway, dear, I wouldn’t deny you the pleasure of firing it.”

Jared put a hand over his heart. “Cut to the quick,” he said. “Put in m’ place. Range is over there, Ron?”

They walked to a shooting gallery that ended in a high sand mound with a wooden target. “Prime it like this,” Leaton said. He pushed the pan forward and dropped a measured quantity of powder into it from a spring-loaded flask, then flipped it back.

Cofflin raised the rifle to his shoulder, snuggled it firmly, and thumbed the hammer back to full cock. The target was only a hundred yards away, no need to adjust the sights. Squeeze the trigger gently . . .

Shhssst.
Flame and whitish smoke shot out of the pan.
Crack
on the heels of that, the gap almost imperceptible. The rifle thumped his shoulder, harder than he was used to but not intolerably. More dirty-white smoke shot out the muzzle. Almost at once a gray fleck appeared on the bull’s-eye, where the bullet had punched through the paper to the wood beneath; it was about an inch up and two to the right of center.

“Not bad,” he said admiringly, lowering the rifle and working the lever again. It slid up, releasing more sulfursmelling smoke. “I’m rusty, I think, to miss that far on a clout shot. How’d you load the next round?”

“Just push,” Leaton explained. “The spent wad blasts out ahead of the next bullet, and as a bonus it cleans out some of the black-powder fouling. Insert the next cartridge, prime the pan, and you’re ready to go again. It shoots faster than the crossbows with practice, it’s less muscular effort, and it’s got three times the range. More stopping power, too—that big soft bullet makes some pretty ugly wounds, and the muzzle velocity is up around fourteen hundred feet per second.
And
it’ll punch through any practical metal armor.”

He paused, pursing his lips. “It’s not perfect, of course. Flintlocks are vulnerable to wet weather—we can’t help that. You have to watch the fouling buildup in the barrel, clean it regularly, and not let the chamber get too hot between rounds. But it’s a hell of a lot better than the crossbows; about as good as 1860s, 1870s weapons, except for the priming.”

“Now break my heart,” Cofflin said.
Walker can’t have anything like this. Not enough precision machining capacity.
“Not enough ammunition?”

“Not enough ammunition,” Leaton sighed. “The bullets are no problem. We can stamp them out of sections of drawn lead wire, and half the sailboats here had lead keel weights, so there’s plenty of the metal. It’s the powder.”

Cofflin sighed along-with the machinist. A wonderful rifle with no ammunition was just a rather awkward club. And you not only had to have enough to use, you had to have enough for regular practice.

“Keep the miracles coming, Ron. We’d better get back to our baby and the job,” Cofflin said.

“What’s next on the schedule?” he asked, as they walked back through the factory and picked their daughter up from the cooing guard. The Indians were gone, leaving only a faint woodland smell and a hackle-raising memory.

“Lunch at Angelica’s,” Martha said. Brand had stayed in her farmhouse; it was the most practical headquarters for overseeing the island’s agriculture. “Officially, we’re going to discuss who gets the last of the rooted cuttings for the fruit trees. Unofficially, she’s going to nag you about that idea of hers, putting in a farming settlement on Long Island.”

“Good
God,”
he groaned. “Doesn’t she ever give up?”

“Rarely,” Martha said. “It’s a national characteristic.”

They came out the end door of the wooden extension. A carriage with a single horse between shafts was waiting for them; it looked rather odd, low-slung, with car wheels and a wooden body, but the seats were comfortable and there were good springs and shock absorbers. They climbed into the open passenger compartment and settled themselves. The teenage driver clucked and flapped the reins, and the vehicle set off; up Washington, to avoid some street repairs, down Stone Alley, past the Unitarian church on Orange, up Cherry to Prospect, then out into open country along Milk until it became Hummock Pond Road. Cofflin shook his head slightly as the countryside slid past
. Not the same island at all,
he thought. Oh, the contours of the land were there, but apart from a strip along the road and some windbreaks, the scrub of bayberry, low oak, hawthorn, rose, and whatever was mostly gone—haggled—off stubs at most. Instead there were open fields divided by board-and-post fences, many with the beginnings of hawthorn hedges planted along them.