Free Heirs of the New Earth by David Lee Summers Page A

studying, rather than killing, whales. Coffin realized he'd been inside too much. He needed fresh air.
    Samuel Coffin made his way back down the stairs and locked the front door of the Ellis house. Stepping into the backyard, he retrieved a bicycle from the shed and began peddling toward his home, five miles away. For his age, he was in good shape and refused to buy a hover car. While his joints groaned and complained, riding the bicycle kept them from seizing up entirely. “The day I have to buy one of those hovers is the day they'll bury me in the island's sand,” he'd said once. Hovers were loved by off-islanders who sped around the island looking for souvenirs or admiring the island's “quaint” charm. “The island's charm can't be seen at 200 kilometers per hour,” complained Coffin another time. “You have to drink it in slowly."
    On his way through the village of Nantucket, Old Man Coffin rode past a red brick building with white columns—truly an impressive example of Greek revival architecture. It was the Coffin school, named for one of the old man's ancestors. Indeed, one of the island's original English settlers was Tristram Coffin and, by the middle of the nineteenth century it was claimed that most of the island's young people were descendants of Tristram Coffin. Now, in the late 30th century, Samuel Coffin was the last living descendant who bore Tristram's surname. As he rode through the village of Nantucket, Coffin did notice that the streets were strangely quiet. Again, he remembered the reports of the Clusters orbiting the Earth. “People must be inside, noses stuck in the holos,” said Coffin to himself, blissfully unaware of the Doomsday Dead.
    Samuel Coffin sped past the school and out of town, then followed a plastic roadway most of the way to the village of Madaket. As with Nantucket, both the road and the village were unusually quiet. Twisting and turning his bike through the streets of the tiny village, Coffin was relieved to see a few old friends—like him, descendants of the old families. He waved at them as he sped by on his bike. He grumbled the word “off-islanders” at a few of the people whose families had moved to the island recently—within the last century or two.
    Most of the village behind him, Coffin found himself riding along a trail of decayed asphalt out into the moors. Finally, even the ancient asphalt disappeared and Coffin dismounted and pushed his bicycle over the sandy road rather than try to peddle. At last, he arrived at a small, dilapidated shack sitting alone in the sand save for some scrubby green plants. He leaned the bike against a gray, wooden wall and licked his lips.
    Old Man Coffin sighed as he stood in front of his shack and stared at a carving of a whale's spout that hung outside the door. The shack's electrical power generator had failed since his last visit, and the force field that protected the sign had also failed. Without protection, the sign would rot away in the island's wet weather.
    Entering the shack to look for a step-stool, he recalled words from Herman Melville's novel, Moby-Dick : “Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of out-hanging light not far from the docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath—'The Spouter Inn:—Peter Coffin.’”
    What most people didn't realize was that Peter Coffin of New Bedford really existed. Like Samuel, he was a descendent of Tristram Coffin. Melville likely stayed at Coffin's inn, and then wrote about it in the novel, Moby-Dick. Finding a stool, Coffin carefully pulled the sign of the famous Spouter-Inn off of its hooks and lovingly brought it inside.
    Gaunt, white-haired and back-bent, the moniker “Old Man” fit Samuel Coffin very well. However, the fact of the matter was that he'd earned the nickname when he was in his thirties.