by Gary Gibson
‘Vultures,’ Casey muttered. ‘That’s about all you need to know.’
Winifred laughed. ‘Maybe the Authority sent them here on a junket to find out where all their taxpayers’ money is going.’
‘But why the hell bring their families?’ I asked. ‘I mean, surely that’s a hell of a risk?’
‘Sure it is,’ said Casey. ‘But look at them. Why do you think they’re really here, except for the fucking thrill of it all?’
The children were clearly excited, pointing up at the mountain falling towards them from out of the sky. Why they weren’t pissing themselves with fear instead was beyond me. I couldn’t hear what questions the adults were asking Mayer, but a few of them were taking turns peering upwards at the rock through a single pair of high-powered binoculars.
‘Until now, when you said they were tourists, I really thought you must be kidding,’ I said to Yuichi.
‘In fairness, sometimes we end up babysitting teams of scientists collecting observational data,’ said Yuichi. ‘Something like this doesn’t really happen so often.’
‘You know what this is, right?’ chuckled Casey. ‘Bramnik’s got Kip Mayer over there, leading a charm offensive on his behalf. Bramnik’s so shit-scared he’s going to lose his job to Greenbrooke, he’s making sure his bosses hear all about what a really fine job he’s been doing.’
I knew better now than just to ask outright what that job might actually be. That the Authority wanted to retrieve data related to transfer stage technology from an alternate Iceland made at least some kind of sense, but the thing I couldn’t work out was what possible reason the Authority might have for wanting anything to do with how the bee-brain chimera had been developed. Even though Yuichi and others had warned me not to get too hung-up trying to figure out the ultimate purpose of all the missions the Authority sent us on, I couldn’t let it go. Either I found out at least part of the truth, or I descended into the same incipient or full-blown alcoholism already afflicting many of my fellow Pathfinders.
‘Maybe they’ll put Mayer in charge,’ Haden suggested. ‘He’s more or less running everything here as it is, Bramnik’s away so much.’
Yuichi was about to say something else when Mayer beckoned us over. We joined him and the tourists, and Mayer got Casey to answer some of their questions while the rest of us hung back.
The Australian grinned toothily, and began to speak.
‘I’ll give him this,’ I whispered to Yuichi. ‘He’s good. Maybe he should have been on TV.’
‘He was,’ Yuichi whispered back. ‘He used to make wildlife documentaries back on his alternate.’
I listened as Casey told his audience all about the work we did, and about two other non-Pathfinder teams currently on stand-by in other parts of this alternate, ready to take measurements once the impact took place, following which they would escape via their own transfer stages. Casey was, indeed, an excellent raconteur, and I found even myself drawn in by his description of how we did our work.
After a few minutes of this, a soldier stepped over to Mayer and spoke quietly in his ear. ‘That’s it,’ said Mayer, raising his hands until he had the undivided attention of everyone in his audience. ‘Everyone get ready. Impact in just five minutes. If you’d care to follow me, I’ll run through the safety procedures one more time . . .’
I watched as the tourists followed Mayer over to where two other soldiers were busily setting out folding deckchairs. The tourists all sat, facing east in the direction of the impact zone. The scene struck me as entirely surreal.
In the meantime, Casey had hauled a shoulder-mounted video camera out of a bag at his feet, before propping it on his shoulder. I watched as he fiddled with its controls, slowly sweeping the lens from one horizon to the other and frowning and mumbling to himself before making yet more minute adjustments to the camera settings.
From somewhere on the streets below us came the rattle of automatic gunfire and the screech of numerous cars accelerating hard. Then I heard screaming, the sound raw and ragged and echoing from the walls of the buildings around us.
This is wrong, I thought to myself.
‘No,’ Casey said quietly, and I saw he had stepped up beside me. ‘This is life.’
I started, realizing with a shock that I must have spoken out loud. I glanced around at the other Pathfinders standing nearby, but none appeared to have overheard me. Or if they had, they weren’t letting on.
‘All this,’ Casey continued, ‘is what happens when you fail to have any kind of contingency plan for a fucking great asteroid coming straight at you. The people living on this alternate could have put the funding into watching the skies, to protecting themselves. But they didn’t.’
I felt a long-suppressed anger bubbling up inside me. ‘We should be helping these people, not treating their deaths like a sideshow.’
‘Helping them?’ Casey chuckled. ‘And what about the next alternate after this one – will you save the people there? Or maybe the next one? Or did you miss the bit where someone explained to you that there’s an infinity of possible timelines? Tell me, Jerry, which one would you pick?’
‘Does that make it any less wrong?’
‘And how would you go about warning them?’ he continued, as if I hadn’t said anything. ‘By showing them a transfer stage? Maybe they’d confiscate it, or decide you were crazy and lock you up to eventually die with the rest of them. Or maybe they’d believe you and still not do a damn thing to help themselves.’
‘We could at least save some of them—’
‘And put them where? And how would you pick who you save, even assuming you could persuade the Authority to consider the idea? I get it, Jerry. You’re the classic bleeding-heart liberal, not a realist. And I already told you – they could have saved themselves, but they didn’t. Fucking idiots.’
I felt my face grow warm. ‘You talk as if they deserve this.’
‘Somewhere real close by this alternate, Jerry, I guarantee there are others just like it, except they actually exercised some forethought. I don’t need to visit those alternates to tell you what they’d be doing right now – celebrating the fact they cheated death, instead of just waiting for it.’
‘Then why the hell don’t we go to those places instead? Doesn’t it strike as you insanely morbid, the way we keep pitching up on all these post-apocalyptic realities?’
‘Who cares why?’ Casey grinned. ‘Didn’t it ever occur to you that getting to travel through the multiverse, to see all these different worlds, regardless of how they pitch up, is an incredible adventure?’
‘You make me sick,’ I said, turning away.
I saw Casey from out of the corner of my eye, regarding me sourly. ‘Man, I’d forgotten what a pussy you were.’
I moved away from him, sick of the sound of his voice. ‘You’ll get used to stuff like this, Jerry,’ he called softly from behind me. ‘We all did. Even the old you managed, in the end.’
I needed to put some space between us, but there wasn’t really anywhere to go on that rooftop, particularly given how crowded it was.
‘Here it comes,’ I heard someone shout.
It was as if the sun had dropped from out of the sky, trailing flames. The asteroid was now much too bright to see directly, and I instinctively averted my gaze. I looked instead over towards Mayer and his entourage, all of whom had put on dark glasses, so they could follow the asteroid’s plummeting descent with relative ease.
I looked down at the concrete beneath my feet, seeing my shadow sweep in an arc as the asteroid roared through the atmosphere at tens of thousands of kilometres an hour. We were close enough to the impact zone that I could actually feel the heat on my face, even at a distance of a few hundred kilometres. The land directly beneath its path must surely be in flames.
And then, almost as soon as it had appeared, the asteroid was gone from sight. It was, I knew, busy burying itself deep in the Earth’s crust, somewhere just off the East Coast of the USA. A wall of burning air w
ould soon come rushing towards us at thousands of kilometres an hour, flattening everything in its path, and right behind that would be earthquakes of a kind never experienced by human beings in this alternate.
And then, finally, the ocean would come sweeping inland in a series of kilometre-high tsunamis, drowning the entire continent and delivering the final blow to anything left standing by the first wave of destruction.
I looked up again in time to see a black wall rising from beyond the horizon, rushing towards us at phenomenal speed. I felt a kind of primal terror I had never experienced, even when confronted by the night patrol. A gust swept across the roof, catching at people’s hair; one of the children giggled nervously, and the building beneath our feet began to sway, gently.
My ears popped in the same instant that windows shattered all across Philadelphia. The building’s swaying grew in intensity, and I heard a stifled scream.
‘Everybody in place,’ Mayer shouted, ushering the tourists back towards the stairwell. ‘We’ve got a couple of minutes, tops, before the shockwave reaches Philly.’
They’re cutting it too close, I thought. Much too close.
We followed after them, crowding down the narrow stairs to the lower floor, all of us clustering together at the centre of the transfer stage. There was barely enough room to fit all of us inside.
Most of the huge feature windows had been reduced to glittering rubble, but Casey was still filming, his teeth gritted in what was either a snarl or a happy grin as he swung the lens to and fro. I couldn’t help but notice that a very few of our guests had a hungry, eager look about them, as if whatever appetite had brought them to this alternate had been insufficiently satisfied.
The rig technician made one final adjustment before joining the rest of us inside the circle of field-pillars. The wind had become much stronger, howling down Philly’s broad avenues. I saw a deckchair go tumbling past a window as the air around us twisted.
I still had a clear view between two neighbouring buildings of the great black wall rushing towards us from over the horizon. In the very last moment before transition, I saw a distant tower shiver into dust just before it was swallowed up by the maelstrom. And then we were back in the hangar, back on Easter Island.
Someone laughed with clear relief, and I resisted the urge to fall to my knees and hug the floor of the stage.
‘Did you see that?’ I heard a woman’s voice say, excited and urgent. ‘When I saw that thing rushing towards us . . . ! I thought we were goners for sure!’
I followed the rest of the Pathfinders down the ramp. None of us said anything at first.
‘That,’ Winifred said finally, as we stepped outside the hangar, ‘was fucking nightmare fuel.’
‘It’s reassuring to hear you feel the same way,’ I said.
‘It wasn’t meant to be reassuring,’ she said, and I watched her stalk off into the sunshine.
FOURTEEN
Somehow, the idea of reading my predecessor’s last diary hardly seemed such a big deal any more, after everything I had just witnessed. So I followed the other Pathfinders to the Hotel du Mauna Loa for what I now understood to be a constant ritual: a drink to success and, most importantly, to survival. There was a toast to Nadia, and discussions concerning a much-delayed memorial service of some kind. Before long, a date was settled on, although all agreed to consult on the matter with Rozalia in case she had her own ideas.
I got home later that afternoon, tired and feeling less rattled after a few beers and something to eat. I slept for nearly twelve hours, into the next day, dreaming I was running away from an explosion that pulled me up off the ground and threw me high above the clouds, until I floated among the stars and the air froze in my lungs.
When I woke, I knew I could delay no longer. I picked up my predecessor’s final diary and turned to the first entries, a cup of coffee by my side.
The first entries were as I remembered them: identical to my own. It was strange how quickly the memories came back of what now seemed another life, and I found myself remembering also how it had all started, and how I came to be alone in the world for so many years.
If it hadn’t been for an old college friend, I might never have survived the end of the world.
Not long after graduation I had got myself hired by a research outfit named GreenTech based in San José, on the strength of my PhD thesis on experimental biogenetics. GreenTech liked the predictive computer models I’d developed to help in combating antiviral-resistant diseases. Then, over the course of my first year working for them, I gradually became aware that GreenTech had a number of research contracts with the US military.
Now, this was far from unusual, even in biotech, and the money that kind of work could bring in often made the difference between life and death for companies like GreenTech. I never had cause to think any more of it, until the day I got an email from Floyd Addison, an old friend from university, saying he was passing through town and asking me to meet him for lunch.
As it turned out, however, Floyd was doing anything but ‘just passing through’.
We met at a diner a short walk from my work. I was still unused to the dry air and heat of California, after years of studying in Britain and dealing with its blustery rain and four-seasons-in-a-day weather. We talked about old friends, and about my recent wedding to Alice Crosby, and he apologized for not being able to make the wedding. We made small talk about buying vs renting, and the shocking rental prices in San José. I only realized that this was more than just an unexpected social call when he dropped a fat manila folder on the table between us.
‘Have you ever heard of Red Harvest?’ Floyd asked me, eyeing me speculatively.
‘I don’t think so.’ I glanced uncertainly down at the folder and wondered what was going on. ‘What is this?’
Floyd responded by pulling some photographs out of the folder. ‘Know any of these people?’
I gave him an appraising look, then glanced through the photographs, feeling as if I’d just stumbled into some ridiculous spy movie. ‘Sure,’ I said warily. ‘That’s Marlon Keene, the other one is Herschel Nussbaum. They’re colleagues at GreenTech.’ I laughed uneasily. ‘What are you these days, some kind of spook?’
‘Red Harvest is a religious group,’ said Floyd. His Oxford education had smoothed out the rougher edges of his Kentucky accent. ‘A cult, by any other name, and one with strongly millennialist leanings.’
‘What does that even mean?’
Floyd’s eyebrows rose by a couple of millimetres. ‘It means,’ he said, ‘that they’d really like to bring about the end of the world.’
‘Oh, come on.’ I could hardly believe I was hearing this. ‘Marlon and Herschel are smart guys. They’d never get involved in crap like that.’
When I thought of Herschel, I thought of someone quiet and introspective and calmly intelligent. Marlon, like Floyd, was from the American South. He was the first in his family to go to university. When I thought of cults, I thought of glassy-eyed drones in matching jumpsuits, or wild-eyed Charles Manson types roaming the desert in pickup trucks looking for victims.
‘Smart people are just as likely as anyone else to wind up in a cult,’ Floyd insisted. ‘And smart people aren’t always that good at reading other people. Maybe they get lonely, or they lack certain social skills, or maybe they’ve got the kind of spiritual questions they don’t think they can get the answers to from a church.’ Floyd leaned back, tapping a finger against his coffee cup. ‘After that, it’s the proverbial long, slow slippery slide into believing the craziest shit. Intelligence has nothing to do with it.’
‘What’s going on, Floyd? Why are you even telling me this?’
‘Were you aware GreenTech is about to be the subject of an external audit?’
I looked at him, stunned. ‘I had no idea. How do you know?’
‘I work for the government,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Somehow I’d figured that.’
‘I know a lot of
things about the work GreenTech does,’ he continued. Then he rattled off a list of current projects, some of which I recognized, partly because my employers had required me and everyone else working at the facility to sign a number of frankly punitive non-disclosure agreements. Hearing those projects even named outside a lab environment made my heart freeze.
‘Just to be clear,’ I asked, only partly joking, ‘which government?’
He smirked, then pulled out his wallet and showed me his Central Intelligence ID.
‘You were a maths major,’ I said. ‘How the hell does a maths major . . . ?’
‘Codes and ciphers,’ he replied. ‘And that’s all I’m saying on the subject.’ He put his wallet away. ‘Maybe if you help me out, I can shield you from the fallout that’s going to come from that audit. Because, believe me, it’s going to be a bitch.’
‘I haven’t done anything wrong,’ I said, hating myself for whining.
‘Dirt clings to the guilty and the innocent alike,’ Floyd said. ‘All I ask is that you keep an eye on Marlon and Herschel.’ He scribbled some numbers on a napkin and pushed it over. ‘And call me if you see or hear anything that strikes you as odd.’
Just before the audit came in, I managed to jump ship with Floyd’s help, becoming an independent consultant. Things were tight for a little while, and Alice and I had to cancel our plans to buy our first house. In the end, we were priced out of San José anyway, so when a job came up back in the UK I grabbed it while I could.
In some ways, the move back across the Atlantic was easier for Alice than it was for me. English by birth, she had never been comfortable with the dry, hot Californian weather, whereas I, after too many years enduring rain and long, dark winters in our student days, had grown to love the West Coast weather.
Meanwhile, amidst all the furore around GreenTech, Marlon and Herschel quietly vanished without trace.
‘We know they had help.’ It was a different restaurant, this time on a rainy Saturday afternoon, in London. The people around us had Selfridges bags piled against their tables like sandbags around machine-gun nests. A thin grey drizzle carved tributaries through layers of dirt streaked across a street-facing window. I hadn’t seen Floyd in two years.
