Island in the Sea of Time (3 page)

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—“two-thirty 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 skyward. 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 toward 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 again, with a griping pain below her breastbone.

“Let’s look for the polestar,” 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. 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.

This can’t be happening to me! I’m an overweight Jewish grad student from Hoboken, New Jersey!
Things like this didn’t happen to anyone, and if they did it was to some blonde 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 had been 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 Br’er 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, 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.
Then we will be well and truly fucked.
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 island’s permanent 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.

“What?” he said sharply.

“I ways . . . 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 thick-lensed 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.

“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.”

 

“Why haven’t the morning planes arrived?” someone said plaintively. “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 on to the tightly controlled fear that made him want to snap at the hapless airport employee, or at 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. Twin-engine prop puddle jumpers flew in from the mainland, and private planes. Right now it looked a little forlorn 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 P.M. Today
flyers the police chief had ordered spread around.

“Andy. I need an emergency flight to the mainland.”

“I hate to take her up so soon,” the pilot 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 floatplane 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. Look, I don’t often ask for favors, but—”

“Okay, okay,” 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, Cofflin 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.

“I’m taking a floatplane and doing some reconnaissance 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.” 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 around as he slid into the other rear seat, putting the assault rifle between his knees. He had a camera, too, something better than the Polaroid 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 . . . Redford, yeah.