‘We?’
‘All of mankind.’ She smiled, a twisted grin. ‘Both flavours.’ She glanced at Roberta. ‘No more arguments, no more manipulation, no more justification. Let’s just tell him.’
And so Sally and Roberta, slowly, steadily, with no dramatics or visual aids, tried to tell Rocky the story of Earth West 1,217,756, of New Springfield. And of the creatures called silver beetles, and what they were doing to that world – and of the threat they might pose to the whole Long Earth, and a scattered mankind.
When it was done, Rocky felt overwhelmed. ‘I don’t see how Stan can help you with this. What’s he going to do, preach at these – beetles?’
Roberta said now, ‘Rocky, you’ll have to trust us.’
‘Trust you? I don’t trust any of you Next.’ He faced Sally. ‘But you. If I ask you straight questions, will you tell me the truth?’
She nodded gravely. ‘If I can.’
‘Is this necessary, really? Does this – closing up – have to be done?’
‘Yes. Yes, I believe it does.’
‘Does it have to be Stan? Why?’
Sally spread her hands. ‘It’s hard to explain. A sufficiently advanced stepper isn’t just a traveller. He, she, interacts with the way the Long Earth itself is put together … And Stan is the most advanced stepper I ever came across. It’s as if he understands the Long Earth better than anybody before or since. And that’s what makes him so powerful.’
Roberta said with dogged patience, ‘It’s all theory, frankly. One point, however, is that Sally here is going to have to work with him on this. Coach him.’
Sally grunted. ‘More like, we’ll be learning together …’
‘Why not just ask for his help? Why this press-ganging?’
There was an awkward silence. Sally said at last, ‘Because, Rocky, we can’t afford for him to refuse.’
‘And if Stan does this – if I give Stan up to you – will he survive?’
Sally sighed. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, he won’t survive.’
Rocky tried to take it all in. ‘Will he be alone?’
‘No,’ Sally said firmly. ‘I can promise you that. Personally.’ And she took hold of Rocky’s hand.
50
THEY WASTED NO time. If it had to be done, they’d decided, it was best done immediately.
It was evening when they got back to the elevator base site. Stan was still on his plinth, with his followers and some of the other workers. His sermon had triggered a bull session that looked like it could go on all night, Sally thought.
Rocky made his way through the crowd towards Stan.
Sally stood back, with Roberta Golding and Stan’s mother.
‘Good,’ Roberta said, watching. ‘Rocky’s doing well. Nice and calm. Just a friend coming to bring Stan home to his family. Not like an arrest at all …’
Martha said dully, ‘The way Rocky’s chatting to the followers as he passes – you’d never know what’s in his soul. He always was a good friend to Stan. But he’s going to have to carry this with him, the memory of what he’s doing, for the rest of his life, isn’t he?’
Impulsively, Roberta hugged her. ‘I guess there’s no greater price a friend can pay.’
Rocky reached Stan. He grinned, accepted a bottle of beer, and pointed to Stan’s mother at the back of the crush. Stan shrugged, looking like he was apologizing to his fan club. Then he picked up his jacket and began to make his way out of the peaceable crowd, Rocky’s arm around his shoulders, with no resistance from his followers.
Roberta murmured, ‘I once told you that you’d lose him, Martha. One way or another. At least this is a good way, a positive way—’
‘No,’ Martha snarled. ‘There is no good way.’ And before the boys got back through the crowd, she broke away from the women and hurried off.
51
ON EARTH WEST 1,217,756, the end game was close, everybody said.
Joshua could sense it. If you stood out in the open on this world, under the streaming sky, you could feel the shuddering of the planet as more and more energy was poured into it by the beetles’ globe-spanning motor. And you could see the quickening spin in the almost perceptible shifting of the shadows, on the rare occasions when the sun was visible through the cloud.
As seen from orbit by the small observation satellites thrown up by the Cowley, the spinning world now looked like Jupiter or Saturn, striped with horizontal bands of cloud. Two-hundred-miles-per-hour hurricanes stalked the oceans and spilled on to the land, battering the already devastated coastal regions. Inland the cores of the once-global forests still stoutly resisted the storms, but only a handful of the furball mammals, living underground or deep in the trunks of trees, had recently been seen.
The day was reduced to less than eight hours. As estimated by Ken Bowring and Margarita Jha of the Cowley, this world’s rotational energy had increased nine-fold, gravity at the equator was down three per cent, and the planet’s flattening as it spun up was now causing crustal distortions of a couple of hundred kilometres – far more than the maximum thickness of the crust itself. Joshua couldn’t believe such numbers. And it was getting worse. Lobsang and George guessed that the beetles’ coupling of Earth to sun was being enhanced by some means more advanced than the obvious Dyson-motor latitudinal viaducts and streaming moon rocks – some means of transferring huge quantities of spin energy and momentum that human observers were not equipped to recognize … But there was no time left to learn.
Joshua, however, didn’t need science measurements to apprehend the unfolding tragedy here. And it seemed to him that the ultimate possibility was at last being taken seriously, among the scientists and military people, Lobsang and his Next allies. The possibility that the goal of the beetles was not the transformation of this world into some new form, but its destruction.
And that made the final decision, about whether to go ahead with the operation the military people had come to call the Cauterizing, an easy one to make.
Team Stan, as the boy himself had called them – Stan, George and Sally – gathered in the lee of Manning Hill, on the north-western periphery. On the summit of the hill still stood the wind-smashed remains of the home George and Agnes had lived in with their adopted son.
The townsfolk had long gone, the Irwins and the Bambers and the Todds and the Claytons and the rest, gone with their dreams, off to build a new home someplace else. Nikos Irwin, who with his dog Rio had first encountered the beetles in their mine working, had gone with his family – but Rio had died a few months back, and left her bones in the ground of this doomed Earth. It was less easy to be sure that the rest of this planet was empty of people too. Before the weather had closed in the Cowley had undertaken spiralling tours of the North American continent, broadcasting warnings, setting up automated radio stations; there was even a comsat flung into orbit, similarly blasting out instructions to step away – as if, Joshua supposed, anybody still struggling to hang on to this spinning-top of a world needed to be told. Well, if anybody stayed for the end game it was their decision, their responsibility; they must be able to guess what was coming.
Whereas Lobsang – George Abrahams, Agnes’s husband – Sally Linsay, and young Stan Berg, who were staying for the end, didn’t need to guess. They would get to see it for themselves.
The final round of goodbyes was ghastly.
Joshua watched Stan Berg, wearing robust military-specification survival gear that almost fit him, trying to deal with his mother Martha, and Roberta Golding, the enigmatic Next woman who seemed so drawn to him. Stan for his part seemed more concerned for Rocky Lewis, the boyhood friend who everybody muttered had ‘betrayed’ Stan.