"Doctor, you can do anything you please for the public good right now. Anything you can get past me and the Town Meeting, that is."
"And that's the situation, people," Captain Alston said.
She was speaking from the quarterdeck bridge above the pilothouse, with the ship's officers around her. The crew covered the main deck, standing by divisions as if for an inspection at Quarters, all within easy hearing distance. They murmured, the sound growing louder and louder, until the petty officers and boatswain shouted for quiet.
Easier to deal with than civilians, she thought. The town meeting ashore had been the next thing to a riot, and it had lasted most of the day. At least you could tell people in uniform to shut up and listen. She glanced over at Nantucket; they'd dropped anchor in the dredged channel that led to the steamer dock, there being no room to tie up with the big ferry at its moorings. For the moment she was just as glad not to be at quayside. The situation on board would be easier to handle if it could be kept isolated from the rest of the island for a little while.
This anchorage is going to be a bitch in rough weather, she thought, her mind distracted for a moment. Sheltered enough for ordinary storms, but in a really stiff norther… When full quiet had been restored, she went on:
"Ladies and gentlemen, we're in an… unprecedented situation. There is no United States Coast Guard. There is no United States. We're marooned, adrift in time."
She pointed. "A little more than seven thousand of us altogether, and the rest of the planet in a state of savagery. However, we still need discipline and organization. Accordingly, anyone who wants to take his or her chance ashore may do so now. Those who wish to remain with the ship will be under orders as before, and I'm placing the ship at the disposal of Chief Cofflin and the Council in Nantucket. There may be no United States, but these people are still Americans-and helping them is what we're in this uniform for."
"What about our families?" someone called.
Alston clamped her hands behind her back. "There's nothing to be done about that. Everyone and everythin' we knew is gone. People, either this… whatever it was will reverse itself, or it won't," she said. "If it does, everything is back to normal-except that y'all make your fortunes on the talk-show circuit."
That brought a shaky laugh. She went on: "But we have to operate on the assumption that it won't. Because if it doesn't, and we sit down and wait for a return that doesn't happen, we're all going to die. If we work, we may pull through. As for our people ashore… they'll have to assume we were lost, somehow. Nobody knows what happened back up in the… future." It was still a little hard to say it. "At a guess, the year 1998 got the Nantucket that should be here, in which case they'll have some inkling of what happened to us. Grief is natural, but we've no time to sit down and cry."
Not if I have any say in the matter, she added mentally.
Keeping people too busy to think was an ancient military tradition, and for very good reason. She hadn't asked to be stuck in this situation, but things weren't going to fall apart if she had anything to do with it. The United States Coast Guard, or the Lord God Almighty, or fate, or whatever, had left them in her hands.
The uproar began as she finished speaking. It lasted far into the night, and ended with half a dozen cadets and a couple members of her crew sedated or under restraint.
"But nobody," she said in the officers' wardroom, "wants to jump ship."
"I think it may have struck them that at least they get rations here," Hiller said.
Like her, the sailing master didn't have any ties ashore. Well, she had two children, but they'd gone with their father in the divorce and that was going on fifteen years ago. Wouldn't have done any good to fight for custody, not in South Carolina with what John knew and threatened to reveal if she contested, and it would have wrecked her career when things came out. At least John had warned her first, not just blabbed to the wind.
Some of the other officers still looked as if they'd been hit behind the ear with a sandbag. Most of them did have people back when. Walker, now, Walker looked excited. She had her doubts about him, anyway. Intelligent, hard-working, and they even shared a hobby in the martial arts, but there was something…
"Speaking of rations, how are we found?" she asked.
The fuel-oil tanks were full-they'd topped up in New London before they left. Thank God for small mercies. The Eagle's auxiliary was a fairly recent thousand-horsepower Caterpillar diesel named Max, practically immortal given that the ship's own machine shop could make most replacement parts; the generators and freshwater plant ran off the same fuel system. Oil would be the weak point. Wind only from now on, she thought. We use the auxiliary on nothing but real emergencies.
"Ma'am," the quartermaster said. "We'll be out of fresh vegetables and the like shortly. Flour, canned and dried goods, and so forth, maybe four weeks. But ma'am, two hundred people take a lot of feeding."
"Reduced rations immediately then. Use the perishables first, and I'll talk to Chief Cofflin and see what they can spare from shore. From what Lieutenant Walker says, the fishing and so forth will be very good. We can lend a hand with that right away. We'll also probably be making a run to England-well, to the British Isles, whatever they're called here-and-now-to trade for grain. I'd like your ideas on that ASAP, by tomorrow morning, if you please."
Officers needed to be kept busy too. "Also on how we can convert the ship for operations in a low-tech environment. More fuel's out of the question, and so are electronics or most machine parts except those we can make in the shop on board or get from the island. We'll be lucky to get cordage and sails."
"Captain Alston." That was the former operations officer, Sandy Rapczewicz, now acting XO. She was a competent-looking woman in her thirties with a weathered, pug-nosed Slavic face; her eyes were red, but she seemed calm enough. A teenaged son ashore, Alston remembered, and a husband. "I was just thinking. We're in the past, right?"
She nodded. Rapczewicz went on: "But if we, um, do things-make contact with the locals, that sort of thing- won't we, um, sort of change the way things happened? It isn't in the history books, thousands of people and a ship appearing in Moses' time."
Silence fell around the table. Alston nodded. "Sandy, you're right." Some of the officers were beginning to look frightened. "On shore, I talked about that to some of Cofflin's Council, a history professor and an astronomer, and the town librarian, who's an amateur archaeologist." Odd what types ended up on Nantucket, but it wasn't your average island. "One thing they agreed on-even if we all dropped dead tomorrow morning, we've already changed history."
"How's that, Captain? We haven't done anything yet."
"We're here. A lot of buildings and so forth are here, including brick and concrete and stone that'll last. When Europeans arrived, they'd find the ruins. More important, the islanders already sent some people ashore, they had contact with the Indians-and according to the doctor in charge of the local clinic, the one they brought back is dying of the common cold."
That brought everyone up. "The person with the cold sneezed on one of the others on shore, too, which means their whole tribe probably has it by now. You think that isn't going to change history? They'll pass it on, since not all of them will keel over at once. And as a practical matter, everyone on the island isn't going to drop dead tomorrow. People will try to survive. Even if everything goes wrong, hundreds will be around for years, and everything they do will change things."
Rapczewicz crossed herself. "Then we could be destroying the future-everyone we know, the whole country."