S.M. Stirling: Island in the Sea of Time

"Got the stores covered?" Chief Cofflin asked, as he pushed through the crowd on Main Street.

"Right, liquor, grocery, and jewelry-just in case. We're stretched pretty thin."

His assistant hesitated; he was a short thin young man named George Swain, and a fourth cousin. Everyone on the island was a cousin, except wash-ashores. It made for a certain lack of formality. So did the fact that there were only twenty-five officers on the force.

"Some of our own people are a mite shaky, Chief."

"Ayup. Don't blame 'em, George. Still, we've got a job to do." He stopped to think for a moment, running through a list of names in his head. "Get everyone who's off-duty back on. And call Ed Geary, Dave Smith, Johnnie Scott, and Sean Mahoney. Tell them to each pick six friends they can trust and come down to the station. Deputize 'em."

George missed a step. "Chief, we can't do that on our own say-so!"

"I can and I just did," Cofflin said. "Ed's a good man and he knows an emergency when he sees one, and so are the rest. You call them and get them posted. Meanwhile, let's see if I can talk some sense into these people here." The selectmen or somebody should be doing it; he was a policeman, not a politician. But they were probably out there running around with the rest of the crowd.

He mounted the steps of the bank at the head of Main Street and looked down the cobbles toward the big planter at the foot of the street. The lights on the cast-iron lampposts shone on a sea of faces, on a street that should be mostly clear this time of night. Overhead the ghastly, garish lights still crawled and sparked, adding a weird touch to the upturned faces; all it needed was torches and pitchforks to be something out of a movie. He raised a battery-powered megaphone to his lips.

"Now, let's have some sense here," he said.

"What the fuck's going on?" someone yelled, and the crowd roared with him.

"QUIET, DAMMIT!"

The bullhorn cut through the gathering madness, stopped it feeding on itself.

"If I knew what was going on, I'd tell you," Cofflin said bluntly, in the silence that followed. "I can tell you going hog-wild won't help any. That-" he pointed upward toward the shimmering dome of light-"hasn't hurt anyone yet. But we've had a dozen accidents, a suicide, and two assaults-with-intent tonight. That has hurt people."

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.