Island in the Sea of Time

by S. M. Stirling

  It wasn’t real easy to have a riot in a town of four thousand people; particularly not when most of them were old-stock Yankees and phlegmatic by inclination and raising��� but everyone was coming real close about now. He looked up. If he thought it’d do any good, he’d be inclined to start screaming himself. The dome of fire had been there all night, hanging over the town, over the whole island, like the face of an angry God. Every church on the island was jam-packed, but at least those people weren’t causing any harm and might be doing some good.

  “The phone to the mainland’s out,” he went on. “Radio and TV are nothing but static; the airport can’t get through either. The last planes from Hyannis and Boston didn’t arrive. Now why don’t you all go home and get some sleep. If things aren’t back to normal in the morning, we’ll-”

  A collective shout that was half gasp went up from the crowd. The stars were back. There was no transition this time; one minute the dome of lights was there, and the next it wasn’t. He suddenly realized that a sound had accompanied it, like very faint frying bacon, noticeable only when it was gone.

  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 was��� 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.

  “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 differen
t 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 twin-tailed 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.”