Cofflin ran a hand over his forehead. Chicken pox had been ghastly among the local Indians, and it had killed more than a few Albans here on Nantucket before they'd gotten it under control. The fact that it took weeks to cross the Atlantic was a help too, since the voyage time exceeded the latency period and not many on the Island had turned out to have shingles, the chronic form. Those who did weren't allowed off, either. The thought of a smallpox epidemic…

"What can we do?" he asked.

"Luckily, there's no evidence at all that smallpox exists here."

Coleman said. "What we've got is the possibility of it lurking in some backwater. That's the good news."

"The bad news is that we're poking into a lot of backwaters," Cofflin said. "Ayup, can't stop, either."

Clemens leaned forward eagerly, balancing his cup and saucer on his knee and gesturing with his free hand.

"We can do something," the young man said. "Vaccination originally meant simply infecting everyone with cowpox as children, and repeating the process periodically. I recommend we put it to the Meeting and have a universal program-everyone on the Island, everyone who touches on the Island, and everyone we can get to do it over on Alba, too."

Cofflin glanced over to Coleman for confirmation, then nodded decisively, and pulled a pad of paper toward himself. "Right. Let's get going on this…just a second."

He ducked into the next room, where Martha was dictating a letter to her secretary. "Sorry to interrupt, Martha, but could you handle Gerrard next? Doc Coleman and I've got a bit of a crisis."

"Certainly, dear, but you should see Hillwater after that."

He nodded. Paul Hillwater wanted this new Conservancy Office set up, to regulate things like whaling and forestry. Good long-term idea, and in the shorter term he needed Hillwater's friends Dane Sweet and the other old-line environmentalists.

I'll put Sweet in charge, he thought. Two good reasons for that; one, he'd do a good job of it, being a conservationist but not crazy, and two, then Sweet would be the lightning rod for complaints. Let him take the heat from both directions.

Martha smiled at him, the familiar dry, quiet curve of the lips. Knows exactly what's going through my mind, he thought. It was a profoundly comforting thing. Doreen and Ian were like that, too. Marian and Swindapa weren't, and he wondered how they stood it.

People are different, he decided. Just because it was banal didn't make it any less true.

"Well, you brought that off fairly well," Coleman said, as the two doctors pulled their bicycles out of the rack in front of the Chief's House.

"Thanks, Henry," Clemens said. "I felt a mite nervous, bearding the Chief in his den."

"Jared doesn't bite," Coleman said dryly.

"Yes, but he's the Chief."

"You youngsters needn't put the reverential tone into the word," Coleman said. "He's our Chief Executive, not a king. Ayup. You've got a good eye, youngster. Doubt I would have spotted those pocks for what they were."

A shy grin. "I'm starting to feel like a real doctor."

Coleman stopped with one foot on the pedal. "Dammit, don't let me hear you say that again! You are a real doctor. Real as I am."

"Sir… Henry, you know I don't have everything a medical school up in the twentieth taught."

"You know more than a lot of those overspecialized machine tenders," Coleman snapped. "You're a damned fine GP and general surgeon, and you know how to improvise. You can do anything I can do, you know what works and why, and you're qualified to teach it. I'd call that being a real doctor, all right. I'm not immortal, Justin; none of us geezers are. If anyone's going to keep the torch lit, it's going to be you, and the others your age."

They pushed out into the traffic, pedaling easily. Doctors rated the cherished Pre-Event bicycles, not the heavier solid-tire model that Seahaven's spin-offs made. Gay Street had little afternoon traffic, only a delivery wagon pulled by a sleepy pony. Justin Clemens puffed a little as they wove among the heavier traffic on upper Main, dodging past a steam-hauler, a few of the well-to-do in one-horse buggies, and a stream of more prosaic wagons and cycles like their own.

The Cottage Hospital had picked up the name before it moved into its present gray-shingle quarters on South Prospect Street forty years before the Event. It had grown since the Event; new covered passages snaked out to neighboring buildings, tying them into the older block. Nineteen beds had grown to a hundred or so, not counting the out-stations at the mainland bases and in Alba, and this was now the only teaching hospital in the world, and the only center of medical research. The gardens were still lovely with trellised roses, though.

Those were Coleman's hobby, the sweet-scented, old-fashioned type. A trellised vine was blooming under the white-painted windows as well, shaggy and bee-murmurous. The head of the hospital thought the sights and scents were good for convalescents and worthwhile just on general principles.

Clemens broke into a beaming grin as he saw Andrew and Kate Nelson helping their eight-year-old son into a street-tricycle-room for two passengers in the back-waving to him.

"Feeling a lot better, sprout?" he asked the boy. Smoothest appendectomy I ever did, he thought.

"Sure am, Doctor," the boy said.

The smile slid away from Justin's face as the parents completed their thanks and another bicycle drew up. The rider was a woman of his owns age, a trim figure in green shirt and slacks and bobbed yellow hair, with a satchel over her back.

'"lo, Ellen," he said.

"Justin," she replied. Her eyes went to Coleman, and she patted the knapsack. "Brand had the poppy extract," she said. "I'm off to get it into the safe."

Coleman nodded. They needed that white ooze; it was the base for morphine. "Production's up?"

"Another quarter acre, and two more next spring, she says."

All three of the doctors shared a silent moment of thanks that opium-poppy seed had been available on the Island after the Event, even if it had taken years to breed up enough for full-scale growing.

The elder medical man sighed when Ellen Clemens disappeared through the double doors. "I don't suppose there's any chance of keeping you here," he said.

Justin shook his head. "That… wouldn't work," he said bleakly.

Coleman nodded with another sigh. A messy divorce was always bad news; in post-Event Nantucket, with nowhere to go, it could get very bad indeed.

"I suppose I could try Alba," Clemens said. "Not as frustrating as the mainland, and they need extension officers."

"Hmmmm," Coleman said. "I think there may be another alternative, if you've the itch for travel."

"Gorgeous damned thing, isn't it?" Marian said quietly.

"She will dance with the waves like Moon Woman's light on a waterfall," Swindapa agreed.

Ian nodded. Well, in the abstract, I agree.

The shipyard had started out as a boat-holding shed, where pleasure craft were stacked three layers high for the winter. The size had made it a natural for building ships, when the Islanders got around to it; the overhead cranes alone were an enormous convenience. Now the huge open-ended metal building was filled almost to its limit by the craft that lay in its cradle within.

"Two hundred and twelve feet long, beam thirty-six feet, depth deck-to-keel twenty-one feet," Alston said, caressing the words. "Forty-six feet of raised quarterdeck. White oak, black oak, beech-wood, white pine. Nine hundred twenty-seven net tons."

He could barely hear the murmured terms of endearment under the racket. Well, everyone has their own Grail. His had always been to know. Before he met Doreen or held his son, it had been the strongest thing in his life, and it wasn't the weakest even now, not by many a mile.