"Yes, some call it instinct," said cartographer H. Fenstemacher Lapp in his small, musty office. "But I like to think of it as science and hard work, too. Those details come only from a lifetime of interviewing sailors—and voyaging meself. Separating the beer blather from the fact, best that it can be done."
Lapp actually had no lap at all. He sat in a battered oak chair, his belly welling up in creased segments like stacked watermelons. A black string tie draped down over an oxford cloth shirt that spread wide between button holes to reveal hairy flesh.
"Mr. Lapp," Gregory said politely, still studying a wall hung with framed maps, "doubtless you heard the announcement—that the Monitor is dead, that few of his more restrictive dictates will be enforced by the new Government?"
"Hoo, ya. An' as if to demonstrate the new leniency, most of the farm camp management here is swinging from hemp."
Gregory's jaw muscles bulged rhythmically. "It can not be denied," he said. "But it was a mistake, being that harsh. Some of them should have hung, I unnerstand—with a trial, too—but not so many. But what I have to say to you is that the old restrictions connected to your profession are undone now—about cross-ocean travel, about charting those territories. Whatever is out there is not ta be feared, but explored."
Lapp patted his fingertips together in dainty but sarcastic applause. "An' what means this ta me?"
"What means this is that for weeks I have been wandering the docks and shelter houses, Customs bins and what-have-you. You are the best of the catographers, everyone agrees, and I am needing a cartographer for a new Government mission—to cross the Big Ocean. What I am needing of a cartographer is two things: one, the course-charting with the captain, of course, and to map the new lands as we find them; two, the ancient maps what the Monitor had ordered destroyed—only a man of your science would have dared to keep such things."
Lapp's eyes narrowed, and he scratched at his belly in one of the openings of stressed oxford cloth. "I am an abider of the law," the cartographer said, "an' I'll not have you implying otherwise."
Gregory turned away from the wall to look Lapp in the eyes. "I really don't care about that, and no harm can come to you now for having ancient maps. But I was noticing a mistake you made in an early map, mayhap thirty years old—it was mounted in a home here in Chautown. The map showed remarkable coastline detail around the Gulf of Texaco even along the radiation fields, where no sane captain would take his ship. Your later maps here are more cautiously vague, of course, but I was wondering where ya might have gotten such detail as a younger man unless you had for reference the maps made before the radiation fields were irradiated—ancient times."
Lapp shifted his bulky frame in the chair and pinched his whiskered chin. "I guess ya have me there," he said. He paused long in thought. "Tell me more about this expedition?"