Island in the Sea of Time Read Free Page B

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