Marina looked horrified. ‘We can’t stop them, then.’
Jha said evenly, ‘Not on this world, no. They’ve simply ignored everything we’ve tried to do to them, just as they ignored every contact we attempted.’
Marina said, ‘So are we just going to give up?’
Now Stella Welch, the Next woman, shared a brief exchange of quicktalk with Marvin, and stepped forward. ‘It’s time for us to be open with you. You have called on us for help, and you were wise to do so. Yes, Marina, we have to give up this world. We can’t destroy the beetles. But we must protect the rest of the Long Earth from these creatures. The threat of their spreading is great.’
‘All this talk,’ Marina said, anxious, angry. ‘What are we going to do?’
Welch faced her. ‘We think we have a way. We must seal off this world. Make it impossible to step into, or out of. We have been studying the phenomenon of the Long Earth. Stepping itself. We believe it may be possible to do this. There will be costs – for us, as well as for you, whose home this was.’
Marvin frowned at her. ‘Costs for us? We haven’t discussed this. You’re thinking of Stan Berg, aren’t you?’
Marina asked, ‘Who?’
Stella ignored her. ‘Yes, Marvin, it may be necessary to use him. He may be the strongest of all of us. As demonstrated by the facility in exploiting soft places that he seemed to develop simply by observing us. If he can be brought here—’
‘You want me to arrange for him to be collected?’
‘I think that would be wise.’
Joshua had no idea who this Stan Berg was, but he already felt sorry for him. ‘What “costs”? Of what kind?’
Stella looked at him gravely. ‘The world must be closed, you see—’
‘From the inside,’ Marvin said.
Ken Bowring gaped, and took off his sunglasses. ‘This is the first I’ve heard of this. From the inside? The inside of what?’
Stella and Marvin exchanged a look. ‘It is difficult to explain without the mathematics,’ Stella said.
Joshua said, ‘I think they’re saying that whoever does this, whoever saves the Long Earth, will be laying down their life.’
There was a shocked silence.
Then George stepped forward. ‘We asked you here to help us, and now we must trust you. And we will. What can we do to assist you?’
Stella glanced at Joshua. ‘First of all – could you please persuade Sally Linsay to talk to us?’
48
AS IT TURNED out, as Rocky eventually came to figure it, by the time the Next came to ‘collect’ him, Stan had started to whip up so much trouble at Miami West 4 that there were all kinds of people who would have been glad to see the back of him regardless.
On the very day the Next came for him, in fact, Stan was preaching. Then again, most days he was preaching now, since coming back from the Grange with a head full of new ideas.
In the heavy afternoon sunlight of a late spring day, in this footprint of Miami – at the foot of the space elevator, an eggshell-blue thread that connected Earth to sky – Stan sat on the roof of a low concrete bunker and looked out over his fellow stalk jacks, a hundred or so of them gathered before him. And the crowd was in turn being surveyed by uniformed state cops, company security guys, and presumably by other agencies undercover. Ready for the trouble which seemed to be attracted to Stan.
And Stan Berg said, ‘Apprehend. Be humble in the face of the universe. Do good. Eleven words. Three rules. There endeth the sermon for the day, unless you want to hear a few lame gags …’ Laughter.
Even Rocky, at the back of the group, could hear him clearly. Aged just nineteen, Stan had developed a way of projecting his voice.
Rocky stood here with three women. Roberta Golding, the enigmatic Next woman who had escorted them to the Grange. Melinda Bennett, the young Arbiter, who had revealed herself to Rocky as a Next on his return, living quietly among ‘ordinary’ people, just as quietly intervening to help keep the peace – or, if you listened to Stan, to anaesthetize mankind into passivity. And Martha, Stan’s mother, listening to her son preaching, who quite clearly did not want to be here, and yet just as clearly could not bear to be anywhere else.
This was a meal break before the evening shift, and Stan had attracted a good crowd. Stan himself looked totally at ease as he took a bite of his sandwich, and a sip of alcohol-free beer. He said now, ‘You know, I never did like numbers much.’