Island in the Sea of Time (36 page)

“We had ways of keeping those from spoiling, and of sending them a long way very quickly,” Alston said.

“Ah,” Swindapa nodded. “Steam engines.” She tapped a book at the end of the table:
The Great Inventions.
“Reading is
fun,
” she added. “Especially at night.”

When she’s given to nightmares,
Alston thought, nodding. Not surprising. Aloud:

“We might think about a steam auxiliary for
Eagle,
when the last diesel’s gone,” she said thoughtfully.

“Bulky, though,” Rapczewicz said.

Swindapa sneezed and raised a hand. Alston made an admonitory clucking noise. “Sorry,” the girl said, pulling out a handkerchief and using that instead of her fingers.

“Useful for short distances,” Alston said. “She couldn’t carry any great amount of wood, but wood’s not scarce, either. Victor, why don’t you look into it? Have a talk with Leaton, see what you can come up with. It’s a long-term project, though.”

The Cuban-American officer made an inarticulate sound of agreement around a mouthful of drumstick. “I’ll get Will . . . Lieutenant Walker in on it, Skipper,” he said. “He’s got an eye for machinery, and he’s a good draftsman, too.”

“By all means, Victor,” Alston said.

She thought she heard Swindapa mutter
scumbag
under her breath.
I can’t completely disagree
, she thought.
On the other hand, I can’t completely agree, either.
You had to be fair; a gut feeling wasn’t enough to justify coming down on a capable, hardworking officer.
On the other hand, there’s that administrative reprimand over the junk that went missing from the evidence locker.
Nothing proved, not even enough evidence for a decent suspicion. Still . . .

“I understand he’s found permanent quarters ashore,” she said.

“Moved in with Dr. Hong—Alice Hong,” Ortiz said.

Coleman cleared his throat. “She’s a very capable physician,” he said, with a neutral tone that spoke volumes. Alston raised an eyebrow.
These Yankees can say more with the words they
don’t
speak
. . . .

“Well, we can hardly insist that everyone live in barracks,” Alston said, after swallowing a mouthful of duck. “One thing we can do . . .” She turned her eyes to the Arnsteins, at the foot of the table. “And I’d like your help on this. We’ve got to get a classroom schedule going again for the cadets. Academics may not be as important here as back up in the twentieth, but I want those young people to have something
approachin’
a liberal education, as well as specialized things.”

Ian nodded. “Well, I’ll be glad to teach a history course . . . God, maybe ‘current affairs’ would be a better description? Will we have time?”

Alston nodded firmly. “We’ll
make
time.”

Doreen pursed her lips thoughtfully. “I should talk to Martha about this too. She’s been worrying that we don’t have anything past high school on the island.”

Alston’s eyebrows went up. “Hadn’t thought of that,” she admitted.
There’s a certain comfort to having a limited sphere of responsibilities,
she thought. All she really had to do was oversee matters military and maritime, including the Guard . . . which was a hell of a job, but not nearly as nerve-racking as Jared’s. He had to be responsible for
everything
, and she didn’t envy him in the slightest.

The site of Providence that would never be was beautiful in the summer sun. Water glimmered broad across Narragansett Bay, like a field of hammered metal under the sunlight. Water purled back from the steamboat’s prow, churned foam-white from its thrashing paddles; the steady whunk
-chuff
of its engine echoed back from the great trees that lined the shore as they headed northwest up the bay. On the hills above the bay, green waves receded into blue distance, the edge of a climax forest that stretched from Florida nearly to Hudson Bay and inland to the Mississippi, rustling mystery ten stories high.

It was thicker, ranker, the trees growing straighter and taller than those which had greeted the first of Cofflin’s English ancestors. Birds flocked thickly, gulls, pelicans, duck, geese, and the hawks and eagles and falcons that preyed on them. He saw a bald eagle swoop by within a hundred yards of the noisy steamboat and snatch a twofoot fish from the surface of the bright water. Its wingtips dimpled the wave once, twice as it flogged the air, and then it was a dark soaring shape heading back toward the shore with its quarry in its talons.

He winced a little at the thought of the Indians. The islanders had come, very cautiously, and found abandoned huts. The ones near Boston had been full of the dead—whole families lying rotting. Perhaps the worst had been the children who hadn’t died of the virus out of time, who’d starved or died of thirst as they lay beside dying parents. . . .

We didn’t know!
he cried out inside himself. At least all the local tribes seemed to have fled inland, plenty of coastal campsites but no people. Nobody since had reported any contacts, and overflights hadn’t seen any fires that weren’t natural. He pushed the matter out of his mind; no help for it, and too much else to consider.

Cofflin stood and watched as the shore drew nearer. A piledriver mounted between two rafts went
thunk . . . thunk . . . thunk
over and over as rope and pulley and hand-powered crank drew the stone-weighted oak pole up and released it with a downward rush. It was driving seventy-foot logs into the mud of the bay, in a row four trunks broad and already twenty long. As he watched another log came slithering down a steep trail, pulled by a brace of hairy-footed horses, with cursing humans steadying the great baulk of timber with ropes snubbed around stumps and trunks to keep it at least mostly under control. The bottom of it had already been shaped into a rough point. Other logs were being pegged and mortised into the vertical piles, webbing them together. Near it a barge-shaped raft of rough-cut timbers held a cargo of charcoal in wooden tubs, piled firewood, and slatted wooden cages full of captured wild turkeys gobbling in indignation.

He stepped out onto a floating pier of smaller logs as the teams pushed the big timber into the water. Rowboats hitched on and began hauling it toward the end of the growing wharf; he walked carefully shoreward, feeling the surface bob a little beneath his feet.

“Making progress, Sam,” he said to the man who waited for him. They shook hands.

“More to be done,” the burly carpenter turned lumber boss said. “Wharf’ll be ready come July.” He shook his head. “Feels odd, having timber cheap and nails scarce like this. But she’ll be ready.”

Cofflin felt a glow of satisfaction. That would give the
Eagle
a secure, protected deepwater anchorage for the winter. In the meantime, it meant cargo from here could be loaded directly onto her decks, at an enormous saving in time and effort. They were all becoming fanatics for the labor-saving device; there was simply so much to
do.

Sam Macy waved him toward the shelters, and they fell into step. Half a hundred yards away stood a row of log buildings. The timbers had been roughly squared on top and bottom, then notched at the ends and pushed up sloping poles into position; Martha had done up an instruction pamphlet on the technique, culled from history books and more recent hobbyist magazines. Stable and barn with hayloft, smokehouse for the venison, bear, and duck the crews hunted in their spare time. Hides were tacked to its outer wall, stretching and drying. Bunkhouses, another divided into apartments for the married couples; storehouse, cookhouse, mess hall. Last but not least was the one beside the stream, a framework of upright timbers instead of horizontal logs. A flume guided water to the top of an overshot wheel on its side, and from within came the
ruhhhh . . . ruhhhh . . . ruhhhh
of a vertical saw ripping its way through the tough wood.

“We’re getting beam and plank in some quantity now, as well as the firewood and charcoal,” Sam Macy said. “But Jared, it bums my butt to use trees like this for fuel, it really does. Planks four feet across and twenty yards long, and not a single knot!”

“No choice, Sam.”

The logging boss nodded gloomily. “At least we’ve managed to get some wood alcohol out of the sawdust and chips,” he said.

“Doc Coleman’ll be glad. Needs it for disinfectant.” Someday they might get enough to use as motor fuel.

“We could do more if Leaton could send us someone who could do real repairs on the metalwork,” Macy said. “That’s one of the big things holding us up, sending broken parts back to the island. That and the fact that only a few of us have even a faint idea of what we’re doing. God, some of these people, they can’t lift a sandwich without putting their backs out—and making charcoal is
dangerous.
Get airing the pile just a little wrong, and it can
explode
, not just spoil the load.”

Cofflin chuckled. “You think you’ve got problems that way,” he said. “You should hear Leaton.” His face grew serious. “Now let’s settle this little matter.”

They stepped into one of the big cabins. The floor and the fireplace at one end were local rock, hastily shaped and then cemented together. Light came from windows cut through the logs, but it was a little gloomy inside nonetheless. The pothooks and andirons that held a black iron cauldron over the low flames were a hundred and eighty years old, and had spent the last couple of generations in a museum, but they were still functional. Two figures sat at a table made of a single great plank, holding hands. They stood defiantly as Chief Cofflin walked in. He peered.

“Why, I thought . . . Sam, you can build a house, you can run a lumber camp, but you can’t send a message to save your life. I thought you said it was Ed Smith who’d gotten her pregnant.”

“That’s Fred Smith. I swear, Jared, I said
Fred
.”

Edward Smith was this boy’s father, in his fifties, married with three children. Jared Cofflin had come over from Nantucket ready to kick some molesting butt, full of righteous anger.

Cofflin sighed. Another thing that was hard to get used to, not being able to call up and settle details over the phone. Radios were precious, used for emergencies, batteries even more so—though Sam was talking about hooking a car alternator up to the waterwheel here once they had time to get the necessary gearing done back at Seahaven.

“Let’s sit down and talk this over, why don’t we?” Cofflin said.

Nice girl
, he thought. Black hair in a ponytail, blue eyes, scrubbed outdoors look. The kid had a scraggly beginning brown fuzz of beard; a lot of the male islanders were sprouting chin fungus these days. Muscle swelled at the sleeves of the young man’s T-shirt and stretched it across his shoulders, probably a lot of it added since the Event, like the hard callus on the palm of the hand he offered.

“Fred Smith, Tiffany Penderton?” Cofflin asked.

The camp cook brought them four mugs of hot liquid from a smaller pot over the fire. It was sassafras tea, deep red and a little astringent despite the honey added to sweeten it.
Sure as hell isn’t coffee.
Still, having a cup of something in your hand helped to break the ice.

“Son, there’s been a misunderstanding here,” Cofflin said. The boy’s hand tightened on the girl’s. “The report reached me secondhand, and I heard it as
Ed
Smith being the man responsible.”

Tiffany giggled, looking much younger. Her companion went blank for a second, and then said:
“Dad?”
After a moment he went on: “Sir, when I heard you were coming, and we were supposed to drop everything and meet you, I thought that Tiffany’s parents had, um . . .”

“Got to me, yes, I know, son.”

The tension around the table dissolved into laughter. “All right. Now, I understand you two are willing to do the right thing?”

They nodded. “Yeah. We’ve been planning on it for, oh, months now.”

“That long?” Cofflin said dryly. “Well, it’s breaking out all over, isn’t it?” They looked at him as if he were an alien being, or a different order of creature at least. “Mrs. Cofflin is expecting as well.”

Polite bafflement this time, and perhaps slight horror.
Well
,
it must seem unnatural, people our age,
he thought charitably.

“Remember, taking care of a baby is a lot of work—on top of everything else you have to do.”

“I’m not afraid of work,” the boy said.

“Isn’t, at that,” Macy amplified. “Good hand, learned as fast as any of us. Tiffany’s a dab eye for edible greenery, too.”

As if on cue, the cook came back with four bowls and a platter of thick-cut bread. There wasn’t any butter, but the bread was still hot from the oven, and there were mushrooms and some sort of chunky root in the venison stew. “Pity you don’t have much time to hunt,” he said. “Some people back on the island would kill for this.”
Wild mustard leaves and chives,
too, he decided.

He went on: “Well, do you want a church wedding back in town, or what?”

“No, sir,” Smith said earnestly. “We really like it here, and our parents, well, ah, actually Tiffany’s parents, well . . .”

“I understand,” he said. The Pendertons were coofs, and pretty well-to-do at that. Ed Smith had been a garage mechanic, before the Event. “When do you want the ceremony?”

He certainly rated as better than a justice of the peace, all things considered. As long as it was performed in public and duly witnessed, they weren’t being technical about weddings.

“Tonight, Chief?” Tiffany Penderton said quietly.

“Why not?”

He ate another spoonful of the venison stew. You could probably get sick of this—he’d gotten tired of lobster lately—but it was a very pleasant change. The deer on Nantucket would be killed out soon. When they had time, maybe they could send some more hunting parties ashore. . . .

Time
, he thought, smiling at the youngsters. Time was he’d have thought the pregnancy a sign of trouble to come, and the kids far too young; plus they’d probably never have been thrown together enough to meet. Not everything about the Event had been a disaster.