The Long Mars

32

Maggie found that the reactions of the crew to these Happy Landers was extreme—mixed, but extreme. “Like they all love them or hate them,” Mac growled. “Mostly they love ’em,” he admitted.

In those terms, Gerry Hemingway was a lover.

“You should see what they’ve done with the native ecosystem, Captain. Those experimental fields out front? You understand we have a mix of life origins here on this world, with Datum types—our DNA type—mixed in with at least one other kind. Well, they’ve been experimenting, through domestication, even a little genetic tinkering using equipment scavenged from the Armstrong’s lab. They’re developing useful crops, for food, fabrics, drugs, from the DNA stock. And they’re using the partner life forms to support that—as nitrogen fixers, for instance, pest control, even using them as natural, self-repairing supports for the crops.”

“And that affair with the wires and the batteries and the jars?”

“Power production. Milking the photosynthesizing plants for energy to be stored in the batteries, or to crack water for hydrogen. They’ve made incredible progress, though it’s hard to judge the details—hard to judge exactly what it is they’ve done, they don’t seem to write stuff down. And when they try to explain it—Rachel spent fifteen minutes with me, she was open enough, but—” He shook his head. “I was a slow starter at grade school, you know, Captain. Made up for it later. Speaking to her, to this kid from the boonies, from some place where they don’t even have proper schools—this kid who must have been self-taught in every discipline we discussed—Captain, she made my head spin. I felt like I was back at grade school again, and she got kind of impatient when I couldn’t keep up, like she wasn’t used to being asked to clarify her statements.”

Mac grinned. “Well, that’s how you make the rest of us feel, Gerry.”

Maggie said, “Shut up, Mac. So they’re—well, they’re smarter than us. More inventive, faster learning.”

“I’d say by a significant degree,” Hemingway said seriously.

“I’d agree with that,” Mac said. “And not just smarter academically. Smarter with people too. You can see it by the way they’re dazzling everybody. It’s all subtle signals, subtexts, body language. All working just under the radar of the conscious mind.”

“But they ain’t foolin’ you, huh, Mac?”

“Maybe I’m better at recognizing this stuff than most. I did some psychology options before they let me out into the wild, you know. Once did a term paper on Hitler. How he got so many people to do what he wanted. You can analyse it quite specifically.”

Hemingway scoffed. “You’re not seriously comparing David, say, to Hitler.”

“These guys are worse, potentially. Hitler had the charisma but he wasn’t all that smart—probably wouldn’t have lost his war otherwise. These characters are smarter than us—Maggie, I’d like to try IQ tests and such on them, I predict they’d break the scale. Definitively smarter. And smart people can fascinate, baffle, like a magician bamboozling a five-year-old kid.”

If Hemingway was a fan and Mac an immediate sceptic, Wu Yue-Sai, despite seeming briefly dazzled herself, was definitely growing suspicious. She showed Maggie around the rest of the settlement. Most of the fields were scratches, the structures half-finished. And, in a roughly dug pit, there were heaps of ration packs from the downed Armstrong, all scraped clean, even MREs, military-class meals ready to eat, usually a last resort when it came to cuisine choices.

“Captain, one must have sympathy for their plight. Whatever happened to bring them here, we have five Crusoes, pitched into an alien wilderness with a challenge to survive. Yet they are five young people, strong, healthy and very smart, who have spent years here. And, aside from their remarkable experimental set-up which Lieutenant Hemingway has shown you, they have made remarkably little progress. It’s as if what they have achieved, save for the basic provision for shelter and so on, has been—well, for show. Half-finished, abandoned.”

Mac grunted. “Eating off ship’s rations while meddling with the plants’ genetic make-up. Five Doctor Frankensteins.”

“But no Igor,” Maggie said with a grin.

Wu Yue-Sai said slyly, “Actually I understand that reference. It is odd you should say that, Captain. I think they do have an Igor.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look here.”

She showed them one of the secondary structures, a rough tepee that contained nothing but a heap of fire-damaged clothing, presumably hauled from the crash. Yue-Sai had examined the structure closely, even pulling the supporting struts out of the ground. And she had found, roughly scratched into one strut—far enough down that it would have been buried, out of sight—a pair of initials.

“SA,” Mac read. “There’s no ‘S’ among the group we met.”

Yue-Sai said, “Indeed not. Then who is SA? Was it SA, in fact, who built this structure?”

At that moment Snowy came running. When he really wanted to move fast he went down on all fours, big, strong, wolf-like, and very animal, despite the adapted uniform he wore, the gloves on his paw-hands. He was a bizarre and terrifying sight.

When he reached Maggie he stopped, straightened up, as if morphing back to human form, and saluted her. “Captain. I have ff-found… You ss-see.”

Making his own investigation, he’d followed scents. That was very wolf-like, Maggie thought. Covering a lot of ground quickly, he’d followed one trail to a clump of forest, of comparatively tall trees in this bonsai world. In the heart of the wood he’d found a cage, swathed in silver survival blankets under a covering of leaves—those blankets would have rendered the set-up invisible to infrared sensors, Maggie realized.

And in the cage, Snowy had found a man, bound and gagged, in the remains of a marine uniform.

Maggie immediately snapped out orders. “Nathan, go round up those superstars and tie ’em down. Use lethal force if you need to.”

Nathan Boss hesitated for one second—that was the glamour fighting against Navy discipline in his head, Maggie thought. Then he said, “Yes, Captain.”

“Mac, Yue-Sai, Snowy, come with me. Let’s go rescue that marine.”

It wasn’t hard to bust open the cage.

When they’d got through, Maggie went in herself to release the man. She pulled the gag away from his mouth tenderly. He was filthy, rough-shaven. He whispered hoarsely, “Thank you.” Yue-Sai had a water flask. She passed it over and he drank greedily, his gaze flickering nervously from one face to the next. “Hey, Wolverine,” he said at length. “Don’t eat me.”

“He’s a member of my crew,” Maggie said reassuringly. “His name’s Snowy. Acting Ensign Snowy.” She turned to Mac. “Now do you see why I brought him along?”

“Thank you, Snowy,” the marine said seriously. “Without you finding me—well, I reckon those damn Happy Landers would have left me for dead, after you took them off this place. Probably only kept me alive after you showed up as an insurance policy. Or hostage, maybe. They think things through, all ways up.”

“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.”

“Good idea, Captain.”

“Hmm. Why not book us all in? All who’ve had contact with these characters. Yes, me too. I feel like I need a detox of the soul. Now let’s get out of here.”