‘All seems quiet.’
‘Yes, ma’am, just another routine day here at Bug Central. Bugs doing their bug stuff and leaving us alone. Step easy, Commander.’
‘Thank you, Colonel.’ As routine an exchange as they’d ever had, Jha thought. She’d known Wang for a long time, in fact, since they’d shipped together as junior officers on the Benjamin Franklin under Maggie Kauffman many years ago.
And yet – look where they were! You couldn’t escape the thought: what if the gossamer bridge they had just crossed to get here vanished as suddenly as, presumably, it had appeared? But here were these marines in this extraordinary place, and the young scientists from the Cowley doing their jobs, joshing and complaining about the food as if they were in some training camp in a Low Earth Iowa. Of course the local kids weren’t troubled at all. Jha suppressed her own gloomy speculations. What else could you do?
She went to rejoin Abrahams and Bowring, who were peering up at the crowded sky.
Bowring said, ‘It’s clear this world doesn’t belong. Not in this chain of worlds, our Long Earth. We’re a little light on mathematicians in this expedition,’ he said ruefully. ‘Damn brain-boxes tend not to travel well. But those we do have are suggesting we’re seeing some kind of flaw in the Long Earth. I mean, its structure in higher dimensions.’
‘It has to be something like that,’ Abrahams said.
‘I’m afraid we have no kind of handle on that yet, on how this could happen – or how to fix it. We’re going to need somebody a lot smarter than us to figure that out.’
‘Indeed,’ Abrahams said dryly. ‘But there’s no evidence that the beetles can step, is there? I mean, aside from the unique step that takes them from Gallery to Planetarium.’
‘None at all,’ said Jha severely. ‘But we’re keeping an eye on that. The Captain’s posted sentries in neighbouring worlds, stepwise. It seems that a handful of these bugs leaked into New Springfield from – someplace else. Well, from this place, wherever this is. The point is, now they’re using the resources of New Springfield’s Earth to breed like rats in a granary. We do not want these bugs to step over into another Long Earth world and start all over again. And, worse yet, spreading even further.’
‘A wise precaution.’
Bowring said, ‘But we are making some progress with our observations.’ He pointed at the sky, the crowding discs of the stars. Many of them were too bright to look at directly, like fine needles in the eye if you stared. ‘Evidently this is a world inside a globular cluster, a dense cloud of stars. The density tails off if you look through the crowd and further out. Clusters are big balls of stars, quite compact, and most of them orbit the centre of the Galaxy, each travelling as one big mass.’
‘But which cluster?’ Jha asked. ‘Have you made any progress with that?’
‘Actually, yes,’ he said with a grin. ‘Clusters differ in their age, their metallicity, their size, and we can measure such parameters. We think this is a globular cluster called M15 in our catalogues. Thirty thousand light years from Earth – well, that’s about as far away as the centre of the Galaxy. Very old but pretty big, a hundred thousand stars crammed into a space less than a couple of hundred light years across. The astronomers we have on board are pretty excited, actually. There’s believed to be a big black hole lurking at the centre of this cluster – a mash-up of dead old stars, I guess. They’re thrilled to be up close and personal with such a thing.’
‘But black holes aren’t what we’re here to study,’ Jha said reprovingly. ‘We’re primarily studying the assemblers. Whatever they seem to be doing on this world.’
‘“Doing on this world”,’ Abrahams repeated. ‘They’re clearly not native to Earth. You don’t think they’re native here either?’
Bowring shrugged. ‘Hard to be definitive, we’ve so little evidence. But, those bubbles you see?’ He gestured around the landscape. ‘Sacs of air everywhere. They look biological, like flotation sacs on seaweed – much larger of course—’
‘Yes.’
‘The gaseous contents of the sacs match the contents of the bags you see attached to individual beetles. And they all contain a subtly different suite of gases from the local atmosphere – which itself isn’t far from Earthlike, which is why it’s breathable for us. In the sacs there’s more carbon dioxide, more sulphur compounds and so on. Rather like a dilute industrial smog, from the peak days of the Datum.’