Although it was only a few air miles from Catawba Point to South Bass Island, the wind was light and variable that morning, and tacking Kelleys Dancer out of Sandusky Bay, around the point, and out to Put-in-Bay harbor itself had consumed the whole morning since dawn.
Jason asked, “Hey, is that a lighthouse or something?”
“Perry’s Monument,” Barbara said.
“Perry who?”
“Oh, man, you’d have had a hard time when I was teaching American history.” She sighed. “Oliver Hazard Perry. War of 1812. ‘We have met the enemy and they are ours.’”
“They buried him there or something?”
“No, he won the only naval battle of any size that ever happened on the lake.” She sighed. “I wonder if kids will learn more or less history now that history’s starting over. Hard to see how they could learn less, actually. There could well be a battle bigger than Perry’s next spring—over between Buffalo and Erie there’s getting to be a pirate problem, or maybe a tribals-in-boats problem, it’s hard to tell. At least we’ll have work, anyway.”
“You’d be in the battle?”
“I hope not, but we’ll probably guide them there,” Rosie said. “We know that area—actually we know the whole lake pretty well. Barb’n’me spent ten years after retirement as rental crew for old farts that cruised the lake; that’s where we got Kelleys Dancer, the owner died right after Daybreak once there wasn’t no fridge for his insulin.”
Closer to Put-in-Bay, there was more and steadier wind. Rosie said, “I’m impressed that you’re going to Cooke Castle. Gotta be the last place in North America where they still use the right fork for each course. They might dip you all in bleach before they let you in the front door.”
“They’re not that stuffy.” Barbara hugged her husband. “Just because the world has ended doesn’t mean people can’t wear a clean shirt now and then.”
Gibraltar Island sheltered the eastern half of Put-in-Bay; it looked like a nineteenth-century millionaire’s estate or a twentieth-century college campus, and had been both. “They have electric power over here!” Chris said, realizing an electric winch was pulling them into their berth.
“Some of the time, yeah, whenever they’re not wiping for nanos. Some engineers from OSU built them windmills you see over there south of town, and another guy from Tri-State U’s got a wave-power generator running.”
They had been told that Dr. Fred Rhodes would meet them at the wharf; the squat, wide-shouldered black man waiting there wore an old Ohio State hoodie, homemade deerhide trousers, wingtips, and a black crusher. His full beard probably hadn’t been trimmed for many years before Daybreak, and reached beyond his lower ribs, about as far down as his dreads reached in the back. He pumped Larry’s hand eagerly, then Chris’s and Jason’s, and said, “Everyone is so excited; the first report on an overland traverse of the Lost Quarter.”
“I was never any good at oral reports in school,” Larry said. “In fact I hated them.”
“Too late. Bet you hated field trips, too, and I’ll never be forgiven if I don’t take you around and show you Stone Lab.”
Stone had been OSU’s field limnology lab before Daybreak. Just after Daybreak, about a hundred scientists had come to Stone from Ohio State and other universities. They had ridden out the big wave and the fallout from the Chicago superbomb, the fires and the destroyed gear from the Pittsburgh EMP strike, the tribal raids across the ice in the winter and the pirate attacks a few weeks before, and they had rebuilt and gone on.
Now, after the destruction of Mota Elliptica, they were quite possibly the most advanced scientific facility on the continent. Because limnology draws on every other science, Stone Lab could do at least basic work in every field.
Gibraltar, not really much bigger than a couple of city blocks, was threaded all over with blacktop pathways that were breaking down. “We’re less than ten miles off shore,” Rhodes said. “Biotes blow right on over from all that urban area west and northwest of here.”
“What’s all that doing to the lake?” Chris asked.
“We’ve got about twenty scientists with about sixty opinions on exactly what it will mean, but all round the Great Lakes, you have all that plastic, rubber, and gasoline rotting, and the fallout kill zone covered southern Ontario, so you have more decaying biomass and less to keep it out of the water than there’s ever been and all that’s washing into Lake Erie, and you know, the whole western side of Erie is only about forty feet deep at most, usually less. A decade or two of fast-growing green goo, and maybe we’ll be looking at the Great Erie Swamp, or the Erieglades, and this pretty little island might just be a high hill in the middle of it.”
Cooke Castle had been a nineteenth-century millionaire’s summer house; a big stone mansion wrapped in faux-medieval frouf, Chris scribbled in his notebook. With its tessellated tower, it stuck out of the remaining gold, red, and yellow fall foliage like a fantasy Hollywood castle or an imaginary private school.
The auditorium that afternoon was jammed, with the crowd spilling over into the aisles.
“The Wapak Scouts know the local ecology much better than I do,” Larry pointed out, “so I’d suggest you see about bringing them over if you want more observations. Plus they’re smart, hard workers, and mostly young and until recently you were a university—I think they belong here. And I do think that as long as you didn’t run right onto a tribal encampment, one or two of you in the company of five to ten Wapak Scouts could travel pretty safely to anywhere. At least, I’d go anywhere with them.”
That evening, they rowed across the harbor to South Bass Island, for a feast of roasted perch and new potatoes, with plenty of the island wine to wash it down. In Put-in-Bay Chris found an honest-to-God newsstand, with back issues of the Post-Times, Weekly Insight, and Olympia Observer, plus half a dozen other papers; he could rent a complete set of what he wanted for the rest of the afternoon, and they took Pueblo scrip. Off to paradise by himself, complaining only at the absence of coffee, he vanished into the back reading solarium.
Larry and Jason were trying out fried lake fish (Rhodes had assured them that tritium did not biocentrate) and the local white wine at a dock-side bar, and agreeing that life hadn’t been this comfortable in a long time, when Chris burst in, waving the paper and one of his notebooks.
“Did you find a typo or something?” Larry said.
“No, I found the biggest mistake of all time,” Chris said. “Look at this.”
“Damn. So Leslie was the traitor? I always liked her,” Jason said, “even if she was pretty condescending to Beth; I think she just didn’t know how to talk to somebody outside her own lifestyle.”
Chris said, “Now look here. A couple weeks later. This is the accounts from Deb Mensche, Dan Samson, and Roger Jackson, about their expeditions into the Lost Quarter.”
Larry sat back and said, “Shit.”
“What?” Jason said.
“We were being followed at least from crossing the Tippecanoe on, right? And how many days’ walk from Castle Earthstone is that? So, so far, so good. If Leslie was the traitor, then she found out about our operation, and set us up to be ambushed and fed. But if she knew about that, she’d have known about these three other missions—and those are plain as day Heather using the two-source method for locating a traitor. Leslie would have known that—it had less security than we did, by far—and made it point at someone else. If she was far enough inside to know about us, she couldn’t possibly have missed that.”