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.
‘You won’t be forgotten,’ Rocky said thickly, his guilt obvious.
Stan grinned. ‘You betcha. Have a drink on me with the stalk jacks under that freakin’ space cable.’
‘We’ll remember you. Everything you said and did – you had so little time – we’ll remember it all, and pass it on.’
‘Just clean up my jokes, will ya?’
Rocky’s face worked. ‘Stan, I—’
Stan grabbed him, hugged him close, patted his back. ‘Don’t say it. You did what you had to do. You did what was right.’
‘Not everybody sees it that way.’
‘What matters more, what I say or what they say? And I say it’s OK. You remember that.’ He released Rocky.
Now it was his mother’s turn. Unlike Rocky she did not submit to the hug Stan offered. Joshua thought she blazed with anger, a fire visible in her face, her posture. Maybe it was a way of staving off the loss. Stan’s father, Jez, wasn’t here at all; he’d never followed Stan to this place, his Golgotha.