"Almost anything," Arnstein said. "Cloth, ornaments- with the number of jewelry stores on the island, that should be no problem-metal tools, anything like that. Bits of glass would probably do, wire…"

"I'm putting you in charge of it," Cofflin said. "Incidentally, you're going." Arnstein yelped. "You're the closest thing to an expert on dealing with primitives we have."

"But I won't even be able to talk to them!" Arnstein protested.

"I thought you knew ancient languages?"

"I know Latin, which isn't spoken yet, and Greek, classical Greek, and I've read Homer and looked at the Linear B stuff. But even the classical period's seven hundred years in the future! Homeric Greek is to classical what Shakespeare's English is to ours, and Mycenaean is five hundred years before that, call it Chaucerian. And they won't be speaking Greek on the shores of the English Channel, anyway."

"Neither will anyone else be able to talk to the locals, will they?" Cofflin said.

"Not unless we have a Lithuanian," Arnstein admitted. The others looked at him. "Lithuanian is a very conservative language," he said. "About like Sanskrit, which is being spoken in northwestern India at this date. Indo-European languages should be spreading through western Europe about now, defining now as being the last millennium and a half or so, unless you believe Colin Renfrew's nonsense… sorry, academic squabble. But someone who spoke it would probably be able to pick up any of the early versions of Indo-European fairly quickly, other things being equal." He shrugged. "But how likely are we to find-"

Doreen Rosenthal cleared her throat, twisting a lock of hair around a finger. "My mother came from Vilnus. I speak it," she said.

Martha Stoddard looked up from her notepad. "There's a fairly good languages section at the Athenaeum," she noted. "And I know at least one retired linguist on island. Speaking of which, Jared, we're going to be doing a fair bit of research on one thing and't'other. Old-style ways of doing, and such." She frowned. "Plus we ought to print out some things on CD-ROM, right now, while we can."

"Good idea, Martha. You're in charge of research projects, of course." Cofflin turned his head to the manager of the Nantucket Electric Company. "Fred, how are we fixed for energy?"

"I've got about one month's fuel," he said. "Fuel barge was tied up at the… Event, topping up to take us through to the switchover to the mainland cable. According to the gas stations and boating people, there's enough gasoline for, say, two weeks at normal usage. After that, well, we might be able to get those windmills going again. Remember that wind-farm idea?" Everyone nodded. The tall frames of the wind generators still stuck up out of fields around the town. "That would give us, oh, five, eight percent of our usual output indefinitely."

Cofflin nodded. "We're closing down all private autos as of now," he said. "Official use, ambulances, fire engines, and Angelica's tractors only. The trawlers have first priority. How many bicycles do we have?"

"About thirty-five hundred, counting private, in the rental places, and in the stores."

"Good, that'll help." One advantage of being a tourist trap. "Fred, you get together with Doc Coleman, and we'll arrange an essential-uses-only electricity schedule. That ought to stretch the fuel oil. The rest of us will have to go to bed with the sun until we get whale-oil lanterns. Next…"

It was a relief to be finally doing something.

"We're working like slaves!" the man complained.

He was thirty-something, and from the look of his jeans and plaid shirt, wealthy. Certainly coof-that New York accent was a dead giveaway. Not liking the work much, from the way he straightened and rubbed at his back and threw down his billhook.

I can't blame him, Angelica Brand thought. This is something out of a made-for-TV special. She was a farmer from twelve generations of farmers, but her generation used tractors and genetic engineering.

Pictures of Nantucket from back in her great-grandfather's day showed a landscape that looked like North Dakota, hardly a bush over knee-high, but most of the island was overgrown now with a thick head-high spiny growth of scrub oak, bayberry, beach plum, red cedar, honeysuckle, pitch pine, and God knew what, all laced together with wild grapevines and Rosa rugosa.

The tractors, bulldozers, and earthmoving equipment from construction sites had knocked down much of the aboveground brush. The machines left the scrub still chest-high to head-high, many of the main stems still unbroken. The clumsy untrained labor of hundreds was scarcely sufficient to cut the brush loose and drag it into windrows for burning, especially when most of them had never lifted anything heavier than a computer mouse or a squash racket in their lives. The smell of it was acrid in her nostrils, but the ash would be useful. Clumps of men and women were scattered through the scraggly-looking wreckage she was supposed to turn into a field, hacking and levering and dragging at the roots. Tools were in short supply, too.

Other squads were slumped resting near the truck with the water, hardly even bothering to lie in its shade despite the unseasonable heat. A few were putting a better edge on their tools at the portable grindstone someone had dug out of an attic. It was the foot-powered type, and worth its weight in gold.

The man thrust his hands under her nose. "Look at this!"

Shreds of skin hung down from broken blisters, and bits of the cloth he'd used to wrap his hands clung, sticky with the lymph. Angelica Brand nodded sympathetically. "We've got a tub of ointment back at the house," she said. "When your shift's off, come on up. There's some cider, too."

"I'm a certified public accountant!" the man half screamed. Spittle flung from his lips. "I'm finished with this!"

He'd picked up the billhook again. It had a wooden shaft five feet long, with a steel blade socketed onto the end, like an arm-long single-edged knife with an inward-curving tip at the end.

"You can take this fucking thing and ram it up your ass, bitch!"

Angelica planted her hands on her hips and glared back. "Don't you use language like that to me, mister!" she snapped, fatigue and irritation flaring. "I don't care if you were a rocket scientist. We have to eat this winter. Or do you think somebody's going to dock with a ship full of bananas and Big Macs?"

"I'm an accountant, not a farmer!"

"We don't need accountants right now. And if you don't work, you don't get any rations. No exceptions for the able-bodied."

A woman's voice shouted: "Don! No!"

The accountant ignored it. Brand's anger turned to a yell of fear as the man swung at her with the billhook. If he hadn't been staggering with exhaustion he might have hit her. A root caught at her boot and she went over backward, staring at the sunlight breaking off the edge of the heavy tool as he swung it upward.

Thunk. The butt end of another billhook drove into the berserker's back. He screamed and whirled, but a third tripped him. Men and women piled on, wrestling him to the ground and holding him despite his thrashings.

"Obliged, Ted," Angelica said shakily, getting to her feet and dusting herself off. The man nodded silently, which was like Theodore Corby; she'd known him since she was a girl, and he never used a word where an economical movement of the chin would do. "Much obliged."

She looked around. "Well, nobody said to stop working!" she called. "Come on, everyone, there's a job to be done!"

"What'll we do with this guy?"

The man had stopped roaring and heaving. Now he was lying prone in the dirt and ash, crying noisily.

"I…" She hesitated. I run a vegetable farm! she thought. Five to fifty people worked on it, according to season, and this had never happened before. "Bring him along. We'd better call the Chief."