“Helps to have the right tools,” the man said ruefully. Help even more if one knew what one was doing, Matt thought, but he kept the thought to himself.
It was an elegantly compact system of wheels and pawls and a cam, controlled by a button on top. He studied it, pulling gently on the line while doing this and that. The cam seemed stuck in an odd position, so he pressed it gently. Suddenly, a click, and the line pulled loose. “Here, this is it.” He held it up to Mose and showed him the part that had come unstuck.
“The drag?”
“Whatever you call it.” He loosened it with an external dial, gave it a drop of oil, and tightened it partway.
“So you workin’ at MIT?”
“Used to.” Take a chance. “You know anything about chronophysics?”
He laughed. “Didn’t have school past readin’ and numbers. Not much in numbers—that’s what you do?”
“Used to. See whether I can get my old job back.”
Mose jerked his head in the direction of the cab. “You can get that old thing to work, they bettergive you a job.”
Matt screwed the housing down tight and handed it up. “Give that a try.”
Mose stirred up a jar full of dirt and pulled out a wriggling worm, and threaded it onto the hook at the end of the line. He did a couple of arcane tests, the worm dropping and stopping, then grunted okay.
Matt followed him to the water. With a practiced flip of the rod, Mose sent the bait out in a satisfyingly long arc. It splashed about twenty-five yards out, and he handed the rod to Matt.
“Uh . . . what do I do? I’ve only fished with cane poles.” About two hundred years ago.
Mose picked up his own rod and demonstrated. “You feel the fish bite, wait a second, an’ set the hook.” He gave it a little twitch. “Not too hard. Then reel ’er in.” He rotated the handle on the side, clockwise, and the line came back. Matt imitated him.
“So what do you do in this kronny stuff?”
“Chronophysics? Well, I’m actually kind of a handyman. I build . . . devices for experiments and fix them when they don’t work.”
“Plenty of that around. If MIT doesn’t take you back?” Indirectly asking, “What did you do to get fired?”
“Mose . . .” he looked around. “Can you keep a secret?”
He transferred the rod to his left hand and crossed his heart. “Swear to Jesus.”
“I’m . . . well, I’m sort of an experiment, myself. I’ve been asleep for almost two hundred years.” Mose just looked at him. “What year is it now?”
“Seventy-one.”
“Seventy-one years from what?”
Mose winced. “Don’t talk like that,” he whispered.
“Look, I meanit. I don’t know anything about this world. You’re way in my future.”
“That’s why you talk so funny.”
“Yeah.”
“I thought it was maybe Ohio.”
“No, it’s the way everybodyused to talk. Thanks to TV, I suppose.”
“I’ve heard of that. We don’t have it anymore, praise Jesus. Sometimes you see piles of them, all burnt, left over from the Day of Return.” He looked around. “That’s what happened seventy-one years ago. Jesus came back, just as was prophesized.”
Matt had a strong urge to set the pole down and go south as fast as possible. Find someone at MIT who would tell him what was going on.
“You shouldn’t let on you don’t know,” he continued quietly. “Some folks aren’t reasonable. And there used to be Deniers.”
“Used to be.”
He nodded and reeled in some line. “Still are, ’way west, in Gomorrah. Or so it’s said. Nothing in the Bible about that, just the old Gomorrah.”
“California?”
“I heard it called that. Or Hollywood,” he said slowly, savoring the three syllables. “Decent folks say Gomorrah.”
“No doubters out here, no Deniers?”
“Not since I was a boy.” He looked troubled, staring out to where his line met the water. “It was a bad time. Best not to talk of that either, except in family.”
“There’s a lot people don’t talk about,” Matt said.
“It wasn’t that way in your day?”
“Not so much—wait!” The end of his rod twitched twice and, before he had time to react, bent sharply.
“Got one!” Mose said. “Steady, now.” The fish swam left and right as Matt reeled it in, and a couple of times it sped straight away, overcoming the drag, but in a minute Matt had it close to shore. Abraham waded out with a hand net, and used it with both hands to lift the fish out of the water. It was as big as an adult’s forearm, and lively.
“It’s a blessed one,” the boy called excitedly. He almost tripped, splashing through the water.
“Beginner’s luck,” Matt said.
“Oh, it ain’t luck,” Mose said. “It’s fortune, for us, but it ain’t luck.”
The fish was thick and glittering black and had a precise silver cross on each gill plate. “You don’t know about these.”
“Never seen such a thing,” Matt said.
“Don’t get one ever’ day. Ruth!” He called to the woman, who was sitting at a picnic table reading the Bible. “It’s a blessed one!”
She hurried over, her eyes down. “Oh, my,” she said, and took fish and net over to a thick plank by the water’s edge. She held it down, still flopping, on the wood, and with a thick-bladed knife pressed down hard behind the gills and decapitated it. She kissed the cross on each gill plate and threw the head back into the shallows.
It wriggled away.
Abraham had brought a bucket of water. Ruth used a thin-bladed knife to slit the belly of the fish, and threw away a small mass of red-and-silver entrails. Then, with thumb and finger, she peeled the fish like a fruit.
“Almost all meat,” Mose said.
So it was. A bioengineered food machine. “You don’t catch them often?”
“This kind, maybe twice a week, praise God. This is a good sign for you.”
“Well. Good.” Matt was watching Ruth clean the fish. It didn’t seem to have any bones; basically a rectangular slab of meat. She rinsed it off and sliced it into eight thick steaks, which she arranged in a shallow bowl and covered with a red sauce from a Mason jar.
"Barbecue,” Mose said, pronouncing it "Bobby Q.” "Let’s get the fire goin’.”
“Good coals, Moses,” Ruth said. “We don’t need a big old fire.”
He rolled his eyes. “Good coals.” He led Matt to the barbecue pit, by the picnic tables. Abraham and the other two children, younger girls, had rounded up fuel—dry grass and thin sticks—and were arranging it in neat piles. From well-used plastic bags they sorted out larger sticks and a few large chunks of wood, some carbonized from earlier use.
“The girls sniff around and pick up wood in the morning, ” he said. “Gets harder to find.”
“You move into the city for heat? Later on.”
“Yeah, they got solar. Crowded, though.” He made a pile of the light grass and arranged a cone of twigs, teepee style, over it, then took a firestarting thing out of his pocket, like a fat nail file with a metal stick hanging from a chain. Striking the stick against the file made bright blue sparks. The grass started to smolder, and he blew it into flame. The twigs began to crackle, and with intense concentration he added slightly larger twigs in tripod threes, still blowing gently on the flame, with his hand cupped behind it.
Surely that action went back to the Stone Age. But the firestarter went back only to the twentieth or twenty-first century, as did the Mason jar with the "Bobby Q” sauce. To pour on the bioengineered fish.
“Where’d you get the spark maker?”
“Always had it,” Mose said, not looking up. “Took it outa my daddy’s pocket when he died.”
He built a loose house around the small blaze with twigs about as thick as his thumbs. “You did well, girls,” he told them, and they nodded gravely.