The Long Mars (31 page)

‘I know you,’ Maggie said. She smiled. ‘Though I’ve seen you looking better. You served under me on the
Franklin
.’

He grinned. ‘Until you booted me off for screwing up a ground patrol at a place called Reboot, Earth West 101,754, Captain.’

‘I remember. Sorry about that.’

‘No, you were right.’

‘Lieutenant Sam Allen, right?’

‘Yes. US Marines. But I’m a Captain now.’

‘OK, Sam. This is Joe Mackenzie, my ship’s surgeon.’

‘I remember you too, sir.’

‘Sure you do, son.’

‘I’ll have Mac look you over, and get you out of here and up to my ship. And then we’ll have a serious talk with David and the rest.’

‘Captain—’

‘Yes, Sam?’

‘My wife and kid. I guess they’ll think I’m dead.’

He was on the verge of tears, and Maggie imagined a five-year flood, pent up. ‘I know they’re fine. I met them at the—’

‘The funerals?’

‘They’re waiting for you in your family home. Benson, Arizona, right? Where you grew up. We’ll take you back, son. We’ll take you back.’

‘Are we under arrest?’

David and the others sat on the ground, out in the open, hands visible. Armed marines circled them, well out of range, and the scene was being watched over by two airships.

‘Well?’ David snapped. ‘If so, under what authority? Military, civilian? Do you claim to be acting under the US Aegis? Can such a concept be any more than a fiction in a world so remote that the very genetic basis of life is different – where nothing like North America, even, is recognizable?’

Maggie studied him. He was handsome, forceful, quite unafraid, very impressive. He seemed to have a sense of entitlement about him, a right to power over others, that she had seen in scions of old-money families, for instance. And yet there was more than that, something outside human norms. Something compelling, hypnotic.

She murmured to Mac, ‘If I start falling under his spell, pinch me.’

‘I’ll do that, Captain.’

Sam Allen, showered, fed, tended to by Mac, in a fresh uniform that didn’t quite fit him, stood by Maggie. ‘Don’t let him take the lead, Captain. He’s smart with words. Even when he doesn’t know what the hell you’re talking about, he can work it out awful fast. Filling in the gaps, figuring stuff out. Before you know it, he has your head spinning like a top.’

David sneered at him. ‘I wonder how you survived at all, among us.’

‘By not listening to a word you said, pretty boy.’

‘OK, David. Let’s just hear it. The unvarnished truth, please. You come from Happy Landings. You grew up there, right?’

From a fragmentary account drawn from David and the rest, interspersed with more of that high-speed private language between the others – and interrupted by Sam Allen, who during his years here had picked up more of the truth than David and the others seemed to have realized – Maggie pieced together the full story. Almost everything they’d been told so far was a lie. But the five had come from Happy Landings.

Happy Landings was a strange place, that was clear enough. Even in the annals of USLONGCOM, the Long Earth military command, it was a legend, a piece of exotica, an odd little community off in the wilds that seemed to have been around long before Step Day. Some kind of natural accretion point for steppers, where trolls lived alongside humans, in apparent harmony. And where, to any visiting outsider, a lot of the kids seemed alarmingly bright . . .

Maggie had insisted that Shi-mi join her in these sessions for background briefings. Now the cat murmured privately to Maggie, ‘Did you know that Roberta Golding was from Happy Landings, originally? And now
she
is in the White House.’

Even before Yellowstone, before the great flood of refugees out of Datum America and the rest of the planet, there had been trouble in Happy Landings. Since Step Day many more people had been moving around the Long Earth than the earlier handful of natural steppers, and more had been arriving in Happy Landings than the community could absorb. Everybody was upset by this sudden flux of outsiders. These were people who didn’t fit in with the local ways and didn’t
want
to – and, worse for such a private community, started to feed back accounts of peculiar features to the Datum authorities, and attracted still more unwelcome attention.

‘They were in turmoil,’ David said, with some contempt. ‘The mayor. Our so-called leaders, elders all of them.’

‘Let me guess. You stepped up to help.’

‘Our insights were deeper, those of us of the younger generation. Our minds qualitatively stronger.
Qualitatively
. Do you understand what that means, Captain? We
think
better than those who went before us. This is a demonstrable fact. And this despite our lack of years.’

Mac growled, ‘You offered to take over, did you? A benevolent dictatorship.’

‘We offered leadership, if that’s what you mean. We would not have excluded the elders. We knew we needed their knowledge, experience. But the wisdom was ours.’

‘Ah. The wisdom, and the decision-making. I’m guessing your offer was politely refused. And I’m guessing you were prepared for that refusal.’

It had been a kind of coup d’état.

‘We had acolytes in all the townships,’ David said, sounding almost dreamy, like a kid recounting some feat at school sports. ‘We had weapons. Our planning was meticulous, our preparations entirely unsuspected. One morning, Happy Landings woke up in our control.’

‘It didn’t last long,’ Sam Allen said with contempt. ‘Their glorious reign. Getting them out was bloody, however. Captain Stringer – of the
Armstrong I
– knew more of the detail than I ever did. What’s for sure is that by the time this bunch were put down, there were a lot of dead, among their own followers, I mean, as well as those who supported the “elders”, as they put it. These five were the ringleaders. Five twenty-year-old Napoleons. According to the mayor, they showed no remorse.’

‘Remorse?’ David said, as if surprised by the word. ‘To feel remorse would imply that one accepts some mistake, would it not? We made no mistake. Our rule would have been the optimal way forward, for Happy Landings. This can be demonstrated logically, even mathematically—’

‘I don’t want to know,’ Maggie snapped.

‘The elders seemed unsure what to do with them,’ Sam said. ‘They don’t practise capital punishment in Happy Landings. They didn’t want to lock them up for ever, for as sure as eggs is eggs they’d bust out some day. And they didn’t want to turn five young psychotic geniuses loose on the rest of humanity.’

‘Well, that was benevolent,’ Mac said wryly.

‘And then, in the middle of all this, our twain showed up in the sky . . .’

After making the crew of the
Armstrong
welcome, the elders of Happy Landings made a request of the Captain. They knew the ship was going on, further West, into the deep Long Earth; its mission was a kind of pre-Yellowstone precursor of Maggie’s own. They wanted Stringer to take David and the rest to – well, some place like this. A world so far out in the reaches of the Long Earth that they could never physically walk back. A permanent exile. Some day, perhaps, they could be brought back home, if they repented, reformed, or if some way could be found to contain them safely. In the meantime, the rest of humanity would be safe.

Maggie frowned. ‘How would the elders even know such a place as this existed? The
Armstrong I
was the first to go out there.’

Sam Allen smiled. ‘They deduced it. They proved to themselves it had to exist, that the kind of waves of deadly worlds and such that
you
found must be out there. They aren’t as smart as these kids, but smart enough. And they were right, weren’t they? Well, Captain Stringer agreed. I think he figured that if he couldn’t make the exile idea work, he could always ship ’em back to the Low Earths, and deal with them there.’

‘But it all went wrong,’ Mac said gloomily.

The five of them had seduced half the crew and bamboozled the rest. They soon broke out of their secure quarters, and found ways to bypass the ship’s controls.

‘And the damnedest thing is that some of us, the crew, were
helping them
,’ Sam Allen said. ‘You wouldn’t believe it if you saw it, Captain. They can read you like a book – hell, before they rose up I once tried playing poker with ’em and they cleaned me out. Their men preyed on our women, and the women on our men. It was like they could read your mind. And they set everything up so smart, when they rose up they had got hold of almost everything before we even knew what they were doing. Well, Captain Stringer, and me, and some of the others, we organized to fight back. That was when the killing started.’

Mac grunted. ‘That’s what you get when you breed little Napoleons. So they started two wars before they were twenty-one years old.’

Allen went on, ‘This time they won. David and his gang, and his followers among the crew – they
won
. We’d gone further out than this world – I’ll give you the reference, Captain. There are more folks awaiting pick-up out there, more survivors of the
Armstrong
. . .’

David, in control of the vessel, had ordered a sweep of the ship, rounded up any survivors among the crew. Then he’d had them put off the ship. Even those who had supported the Happy Landers were dumped; they could not be trusted.

All but Sam Allen, who, when he saw how things were going, had hidden away, in the interior of the
Armstrong
’s vast envelope.

The rest of it was simply told. The
Armstrong
had been turned back. David and the others, living it up in the Captain’s quarters, began to lay plans on how to make a second, successful takeover attempt at Happy Landings. How they would then march on the Lower Earths, even the Datum itself. Allen just hid out.

As soon as the
Armstrong
was isolated from the stranded surviving crew on the one hand, and from the worlds of humanity on the other, Allen had emerged from hiding and caused a wrecking crash – here.

‘I had no plan beyond that point, Captain Kauffman. Figured I didn’t need one – I probably wouldn’t survive the crash, or for long afterwards even if I did. After we were down and stranded they debated killing me.’ Now he shuddered, showing emotion for the first time. ‘Not out of revenge, you understand. They did it coldly, Captain. Logically. Like I was a broken-down horse to be disposed of, or a dog gone wild. Like my whole self, my life up to that point – my wife and kid, dammit – didn’t matter at all. They really do think they’re different from us, Captain. Above us. Well, maybe they are, for all I know. But they kept me alive, in the end. Put me to work. Thought I might yet have knowledge they could use. And maybe they had some plan to use me as a hostage, if the worst came to the worst. Like I told you, they think things through every which way. I had to build that cage in the woods myself, the cage I was to be kept in.’

‘With your initials on it,’ Yue-Sai said.

‘Oh, yes. And I marked other stuff they made me build for them. They may be smart, but they ain’t all-seeing. I knew somebody would come by some day, seeking the
Armstrong
. And so did they. That’s why they didn’t attempt to repair the ship, or rig up environment suits so they could walk out, or take their farming seriously, or anything like that. They knew there would be a follow-up mission. You were to be their ride home, I guess. All they had to do was wait for you – and take you over, like they took the
Armstrong I
.’

Mac turned on David. ‘So that’s the story. How do you plead?’

David frowned. ‘Is this suddenly a trial? Do you believe this man’s drivel?’

‘Every word of it.’

‘I plead duty, then. Duty to my kind, and yours.’

My kind
. That phraseology chilled Maggie. She murmured to Mac, ‘They seem – passive.’

He grunted. ‘Not passive. Just calm. Some of the accused at Nuremberg were like this. He’s confident. He believes he’s in control, still – or will be soon.’

David said now, ‘You need not take us back to Happy Landings. Take us back to your worlds – the Low Earths. We have learned of Yellowstone, from your crew. Let us help rebuild the Datum Earth. Our leadership, our wisdom, would be invaluable at such a time. Indeed, from what we have heard from your crew it sounds as if some of us have been at work there already, quietly.’ He smiled. ‘It is our duty to help you. It is
your
duty to allow us to do so, Captain.’

Maggie shook her head. ‘You’ll have to show me your study on Hitler some time, Mac. David, you really are good. There’s about twenty per cent of me longs to agree with you.’

‘Then let yourself agree. We offer you order. Security.’

‘Hmm. The security of the sheep in the fold? The order of the serf under the lord of the manor, like poor Sam Allen here? No, thanks.

‘I think this is the safest place for you, for now; if you’d been able to break out of here you’d have done it by now. So we’re going to complete our mission. We’ll collect the
Armstrong
crew en route. We’ll call back here on the return leg. Maybe we’ll take you home, if I think we can do it securely . . . Well, that’s my plan. Whereas you’re confident you can bring me down, aren’t you, if you get the chance? Like poor Stringer. Well, you won’t get the chance, not from me. If I’m not absolutely certain I can have you contained I’ll just leave you here, and kick this particular ticking bomb upstairs when I get back to USLONGCOM. I’ll leave a team to keep you under guard. Mac, work with Nathan and McKibben to pick a bunch of ornery souls who won’t fall for their blarney. Sam, you can advise them on that.’

‘Yes, Captain.’

‘For sure you’re going to face charges in federal courts – sabotage, murder. Whether or not this place is under the US Aegis, Happy Landings certainly is, and so was the
Armstrong
.’ She stood up.

David said smoothly, ‘But I have not yet finished speaking, Captain.’

Even now, the tone of casual command. ‘But I’m done listening to you. OK, Sam, you come with me. You’ve done a hell of a job here. Dinner at the Captain’s table for you . . . Mac, we ought to fix up some kind of counselling for the crew affected by this. I’m thinking of Gerry, for example. And Wu.’