Cuddy looked at Walker, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully. He was a nondescript-looking man a little older than the Coast Guard officer, brown of hair and beard, wary gray eyes in a tanned face.

"Look, Will," he said. "You've been fan-dancing around this for days now, you and your friends there." He nodded; Seaman Rodriguez and Cadet McAndrews sat behind Walker, lounging at their ease. "Gold and dancing girls, yeah, it sounds good. A lot better than shoveling shit for a living. How, though? Cut to the chase, man."

"Okay, Bill," Walker said. "You want to stay here all your life?"

"Not particularly," Cuddy said. "Leaton's a pretty good boss, but I don't want to be a machinist, it's just the best thing available. And I certainly don't want to bust my ass cutting fucking wheat or chopping down trees. On the other hand, I don't want to go live in a mud hut, either, even if it's the biggest fucking hut in the village."

Walker nodded with a charming grin. "There's a lot more than mud huts over there, in some places," he said. "There's my friend Isketerol's hometown, for example, or Greece. Shit, they've even got running water in the Mycenean palaces-flush toilets. Which we don't, anymore. Plus we can get the natives to build what we want. Plenty of places a bunch of us could pretty well write our own tickets."

"If the locals didn't punch our tickets," Cuddy said.

"Timid?" Walker asked, a slight edge of mockery in his tone.

"No, just cautious. We don't have any fucking tanks, man."

"Yeah, that's a point. That's why it'd have to be done in a group, with some organization."

"And you to head up the organization?"

He shrugged. "Somebody has to," he said. "Why not me? I've got the training, I know some history, and I've learned the languages. There'll be plenty for everyone when it comes time to share out."

Cuddy sipped at his drink. "Why me?" he said.

"You don't have any local ties, you've learned a lot of useful stuff from Leaton, and I think you're the ambitious type… but reasonable about it," Walker said. "And hell, it's not even illegal. The law's back up in the twentieth. Nobody declared Cofflin's goddam Town Meeting a sovereign state. The captain's authority came from the Department of Transportation and the UCMJ; it ended when we got shoved here. They've got no right to tell us we have to stay here and make like farmers."

The other man put down his glass. "They've got the power, though. Most people are behind them. What if I go to the chief, or your captain, and tell them what you've told me?"

"Then I'd be in deep shit, and you'd be back to blisters."

Walker said. The grin slipped off his face, leaving an expression more like something out of the deep woods. "For the rest of your life."

Cuddy looked slightly nervous for the first time. However long the rest of your life was ran unspoken between them. He nodded slowly.

"Okay, I'll think about it." He looked around. "Even with things the way they are, this place still has some of the comforts of home. Doctors, for instance."

Walker flipped one palm up. "Give me credit for some brains, Cuddy."

"Ah, right, you'll have gone looking for other people who know things you need. Like, I did a hitch in the Crotch, too."

Walker clapped. "Give the Marine a great big cigar!" he said dryly. "Semper Fi, mac. Now's the time, Cuddy. Are you in, or are you out? Last chance to be out and just keep your mouth shut. Once you're in, you do it my way."

Cuddy finished his drink and looked after the procession. The music and lights were fading into the darkness of the summer night, a little cool here near the waterfront even in this season. The road was littered, straw and flowers and fresh horse dung. Walker saw his face harden in decision.

"Okay," he said. "You've got the brains for it, if you've come this far without getting caught, and you've got the balls for it, looks like." He nodded and offered his hand. "I'm in… boss."

"Kemosabe, me think it too quiet," Cofflin said.

"That's right up there with 'What you mean we, white man?' " Marian Alston quoted. "What's too quiet, Jared?"

September was a good time for a civic holiday; the grain harvest was in, and everything else was well in hand, well enough for the school year to be starting up again soon.

Not that there isn't enough to do, Cofflin thought. He was beginning to see why socialism was impractical, something he'd simply taken on faith before; there just wasn't a mind alive that could soak up all the information needed to make all the economic decisions, even for this miniature city-state. It was a profound relief to get the government- which had somehow turned out to be himself and his friends-out of more and more, after the desperate scramble of the first weeks after the Event.

Private schemes were bubbling up on all sides: to make iceboxes to replace refrigerators; to cut and store ice in underground pits; to start a manufactory to weave sailcloth, once the flax was cut; another to put up a ropeworks- Eagle alone had five miles of running rigging.

Now at least he could deal with priority projects, like the schooners Marian wanted built, and public policy… and one policy was that everyone not superessential had to take a few days off after the harvest party.

The beach wasn't crowded, there was too much of it and too few people for that, but there were parties clumped along it as far as he could see. Flying kites or playing volleyball, throwing Frisbees, playing the guitar and singing, or just sitting around talking. More out in the water swimming; Nantucket's offshore water got fairly warm in the late summer, up in the seventies, in vivid contrast to most of the New England coast. From what he'd heard, there were even a few hardy souls surfing today, over on the south shore. Rod-fishermen were casting in the waves for bluefish, and families with rakes were gathering scallops. It might have been an evening some year back before the Event… except that everything was different. Even the way people looked; they'd acquired the roughened, weathered patina of outdoor workers.

Bonfires cast sparks into the sunset, down the long curve to the point. The evening was warm enough for his T-shirt and jeans to be comfortable, or Martha's single-piece bathing suit and sunrobe, or Marian Alston's cycle shorts and muscle shirt. A rummage of children went by shrieking down at the water's edge, chasing a soccer ball and kicking up spray. Their noise was soon lost in the vastness of sea and sky.

"Ah, the hell with it," he said. "The only thing that really worries me is that Pamela Lisketter has shut up."

He got up and went over to the pit. There was an art to a successful clambake. First you had to have lots of rock-weed, and after all the soul-butter he had to hand out in this damned politician's job they'd saddled him with, wading out to collect it-Polpis Harbor was the best spot-was a relief. You couldn't soft-talk a wave; go at it wrong and it dunked you, and that was that. The pit he'd dug in the sand behind a dune was properly shallow. He'd lined it with wood-driftwood was best-and then carefully packed the stones and surrounded them with a mound of more wood.

"That's the tricky part," he said to Alston as she came up, beer in hand. "You've got to build the rocks up so there's room for air to filter around every rock, but not too much."

"Looks hot enough," Alston said. The rocks were beginning to flake, glowing and cracking with dangerous popping sounds.

"Ayup." Cofflin cast a critical eye on them, then picked up a long-handled rake.

"I thought you'd be glad that Lisketter stopped talking about walking lightly and petitioning to stop all the trips to the mainland," Martha said, bringing up the baskets of food. She was just beginning to show, a rounding out of the stomach.