‘We call it the Kuiper belt,’ Malenfant said. ‘Or the scattered disc, or the Oort cloud, depending how far out you go . . .’
‘You have big stuff out there, respectably sized planets even, but the Sun’s hold on those bodies is very weak. So again, minor accidents can deflect such worlds far from their courses.’
Lighthill broke in. ‘What Bob is getting at in his scholarly way is that planetary alignments can differ from Road to Road. And this Road, or anyhow this bundle, has a particular alignment that’s of use to us, in the mission we want to make. We came here from Earth, clearly. Our Earth. We refuelled at Deimos, and we crossed through Phobos to this Road, with its useful alignment. From here we will make a journey out of the inner Solar System. Out to Persephone.’
The Step crew fell silent.
‘There we will refuel, and we will have the option of returning – or going on, with the fuel from Persephone, to Shiva. That’s the benefit of the alignment, you see; we could not make it so far without the refuelling stop. Shiva: you may know of it by another name. A rogue planet. In some reality strands it will make a close approach to the Sun in a thousand years’ time, or less. Regardless of that the astronomer types tell us it will be an invaluable target scientifically, as it is a world that formed entirely outside our Solar System – whereas Persephone, you see, was clearly ejected from our own inner system. And that’s why we’re going, if we can.
‘Shiva is an Indian god, by the way. The British forces spent so much time in India, jewel of the Empire, that a lot of lingo, including names, leaked back into British culture.’
Malenfant felt almost paralysed by these revelations. He thought back to the first revelation to him of the alignment of Persephone and Shiva, with the Answerer in faraway Birmingham, months back. Even then he had had some intuition of its significance. And now, this.
‘Shiva,’ he said. ‘More resonances across the Roads? Some call it Shiva in this reality too. A god of destruction.’
Nash seemed more attuned to the reaction of the newcomers, their silence. ‘Shiva. And it’s significant to you because—’
‘Because in this particular Road, this particular Shiva may indeed be a threat, to this particular Earth. Deirdra’s Earth. Unless somebody does something about it.’
‘Ah,’ Lighthill said. ‘Fascinating, eh?’
Malenfant nodded. ‘And you crossed whole alternate realities just to find a good planetary alignment, where Persephone happens to line up with Shiva. That’s class. That’s why you came to Phobos. And it’s just chance you came upon us, with our somewhat strong interest in Shiva—’
‘Fate,’ Viktorenko said gloomily. ‘Not chance. We know this about the manifold, do we not? Nothing is accidental. Some deeper causality that we can’t see is working under the surface. A higher-dimensional destiny, maybe.’
Malenfant nodded. ‘You could be right. Maybe there’s a reason we all met.’
‘A reason?’ said Lighthill. ‘Quite possibly. Fate or not, it’s evident we have plenty more to discuss. We’ll get together for a proper confab, Colonel Malenfant. You and I. Tomorrow, perhaps? But not now, eh? More brandy?’
55
So, welcome to the confab, as requested. Tea, Malenfant?
No. Thank you, Wing Commander Lighthill. I mean it’s great stuff, but—
I know. No replacement for the sludge-like coffee you Yanks prefer, correct? And call me Geoff, for Heaven’s sake, ranks are such a mouthful.
Geoff.
And you are – Reid, is it?
Call me Malenfant. Even Emma calls me Malenfant. And I married her. In another timeline anyhow.
Disconcerting, isn’t it? You know, since the RASF first explored Phobos seven years ago – in the Harmonia, under a different commander – I think we’ve done a pretty good job of mapping out the different Roads to which it seems Phobos gives access. Mostly with physical differences of some sort. In one, we glimpsed a version of Saturn without rings! That sort of thing.
But, as I said, we have never encountered people before. And certainly not different versions of anybody we knew. I can’t really imagine how it was – to turn a corner and there she is! The missus! Save that she wasn’t the missus after all, was she?
We have been trying to work this out. And we think that we – I mean myself, Deirdra, Emma and Viktorenko – come from neighbouring strands of reality in what we call the Nixon Bundle. Where different histories flowed from different decisions made by President Nixon around about 1970. One such history is the one we all seem to be embedded in right now, where Armstrong died on the Moon—
You see, already you’ve lost me. Nixon? Not a president I know of. Armstrong? Who’s he?
Why, the first man on the Moon. Along with his partner, Aldrin. Landed in July 1969.
Americans, I am guessing?
Sure.
Never heard of ’em. I was eleven years old when the first lunar landing was made, and it was piloted by Jim Richards, Shropshire born and bred and a man I later trained with. In 1978 he landed at Imbrium in the Prometheus. And his first words on the surface, as soon as he had scuttled away from the blast zone of the atomic engines, were, ‘Well, I made it.’
British. The first to the Moon was British?
Certainly. The Union Jack he erected is still there, under a plastic dome at Imbrium Base.
Imbrium Base? 1978? Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in the Nixon Bundle any more.
Toto? A pal of this Nixon?
If only. Look, Geoff, I think we are going to have to work backwards until we find some jonbar hinge.
A what?
A place where your reality strand diverges from ours.
And that is not a sentence I expected to hear when Bob Nash brought me my vitamin juice cuppa this morning – even if it isn’t strictly a sentence, as my old English teacher ‘Leggy’ Mountbatten would have pointed out.
Sorry. Where do we start? So you say this first Moon ship—
The Prometheus.
You say it went to the Moon with atomic rocketry.
Yes, indeed. Essentially the same technology that powers the Harmonia. And that is something I can speak about, at least, for that was my technical specialism.
It was?
Oh, yes. I was something of a brainbox at school, though big enough not to have had to endure any bullying in the scrum over it. Winchester, that was. Maths and physics, those were my bag – I think I told you. After Cambridge I did a doctorate and then post-doc at the Cavendish lab, and then found myself drafted, and was posted to Barford.
Drafted? This would be – what, about 1990? Was Britain at war then?
Not as such. But there wasn’t really a time that we hadn’t been at war, in a sense, since the 1940 Armistice.
What 1940 Armistice?
It’s National Service, you see. We all must play a part. Give what we can. Some pour concrete to maintain the Blue Streak silos down the east coast. Others, like myself, use our brains. If the world is at war, it is a scientific war, Malenfant.
I never heard of Barford.
Atomic development plant in Warwickshire. Its existence can hardly be kept a secret, of course, but much of what goes on there is hush-hush . . . Old mansion house converted as the HQ, airfield nearby. Established essentially to house the German specialists we retrieved from the ruins of Berlin in ’46. Of course the Americans got the plums when it came to the physicists, including Heisenberg himself. But we got Wernher von Braun and his rocket group, or most of ’em. Still, we try to keep up with the neighbours concerning the atomics. Strategic positioning and all that. When I started, a lot of the chaps we had were refugees from Germany – Polish, Czech, even German Jews. The set-up was crude to start with. My supervisor said his own first job had been to pour heavy water into a prototype pile, by hand . . .
I slowly learned what an enormous operation I was part of, by the time I rolled up, oh, around 1990. Our uranium, for instance, came from across the Empire, from Canada, Australia,
South Africa.
It did seem strange to me that we were using rational scientific methods to construct weapons of mass destruction. I am told that when the Russians pushed the Germans back from the concentration camps they had built on the steppe, they found orderly documentation there. Bureaucracy. Memos, about the minimum food one could feed a chap and still expect him to do certain kinds of work. We and the enemy are ghastly mirror-images of each other, I suppose. I was happy to move on to spaceships.
OK. Go back a bit further. I’m checking our own history sources here. You said von Braun got out of Berlin in 1946?
All before my time, but—
The Second World War ended in 1945, in Europe, the early summer I think. The Japanese fought on until—
The What War? Sorry, you’ve lost me. I think we must be speaking of the consequences of your jonbar hinge, Malenfant. I have never heard of a ‘Second World War’. Or even a First, the existence of which I suppose is implied by the moniker.
Look, I was never a history buff. 1066 and all that! Science was my thing. But I am a senior RASF officer, and I was put through military school, and we did pick up a smattering of recent history of the warlike kind. And so I know that there was no such conflict as the ‘First World War’. We had the Great War. Germany against France and Britain in the west, Russia in the east. The Americans intervened in that one.
There was an armistice in 1918. A German defeat, essentially.
Correct. A rather punitive peace settlement.
We share that much.
But then, in 1939, under Hitler and his crew, the Germans decided to have another go. Hence, the Second Franco-Prussian War. The first being around 1870, Bismarck’s war.
But it widened out, quickly. In my timeline. I’m looking over the history as we speak. Let’s see . . . By 1940 Hitler was in France. The British had declared war, and they had an expeditionary force on French soil. They got the force out with a kind of mass heroism, little private boats crossing the English Channel.
The Dunkirk evacuation. Of course. Remembered fondly, a great national moment.
So after that, with France fallen and America not yet in the war, Churchill becomes Prime Minister—
Who?
. . . Ah. I think we may have found the hinge, Geoff. Who was Prime Minister at the time of Dunkirk?
Chamberlain. Chap who tried to negotiate a shabby peace deal with Hitler the previous year.
And who replaced him in 1940? Because he resigned after the fall of France, right?
Halifax, of course. Had been Foreign Secretary – I think. Fellow looked like a very tall undertaker, from what I remember from the history books. Lasted until 1942 – or ’43? Assassinated by a Jewish group protesting against deportation orders to Germany, and replaced by Lloyd George until—
So you never heard of Churchill?
Racking my brain, Malenfant. There was a Churchill, wasn’t there, responsible for various balls-ups in the Great War? Actions at Gallipoli, I think. Became a warmonger after that. Well, even if he was in the changing room when Chamberlain was bowled out, Churchill certainly wasn’t sent onto the pitch to replace him.
Throw me a bone here. Is all that about cricket?
Feel free to quote baseball jargon in retaliation.
OK. No Churchill. No Britain standing alone, then . . . So what happened, under Prime Minister Halifax?
Well, it’s simple enough. Negotiated an armistice with the Germans, lickety split. I mean, what else could we have done? It would have been a stalemate. We had a navy that could have deterred any attempted invasion of Britain, not to mention an air force. But Dunkirk had shown we didn’t have the land-army resources to liberate France, Belgium and the rest. We, and the Americans, soon had our hands full anyhow containing Japanese aggression in the Pacific. Immense naval battles off Pearl Harbor and Singapore. You must have seen the movies . . .
It’s kind of hard for me to imagine a Britain that didn’t stand up to Hitler. With a little help from the Russians and the Americans, granted. It always seemed key to your national character, afterwards.
Doesn’t sound very logical.
I don’t think Churchill was a very logical kind of leader.
My grandfather said he went along to boo at Hitler’s state visit – I think that was the autumn of 1940. Of course Hitler never came again. By the following year he was in Moscow, watching the Kremlin burn. Operation Barbarossa, the great German invasion of Russia, spring 1941. Thousands of tanks and aircraft, millions of men. Well, it went well at first, as it generally does for these chaps in Russia.
Chaps?
Hitler. Napoleon. That sort. But Russia, you see, is a big country. Stalin himself retreated to Vladivostok, on the Pacific coast, well out of reach. And then the winter came, as it always does, and the great invasion bogged down in mud, disease and hunger. These chaps never learn. But the fighting ground on, you see, and so did the Germans’ desperation to hit at Stalin and decapitate the Soviets. Similarly the Russians wanted a way to strike back at the Germans on their home soil too. And, as everybody knows, they found a way.
Let me guess. Atomic weapons.
You have it. In the German case, they built fantastic rockets that could deliver the first crude bombs all the way to Vladivostok – technically speaking they used an A-9 A-10 combination with a range of twenty-five hundred miles. Quite remarkable beast for its time. And of course they hit other targets, deep inside Soviet territory and out of reach of the conventional forces. Oil production centres at Baku on the Caspian Sea, more than two thousand miles from Berlin. Manufacturing centres beyond the Urals, such as Sverdlovsk. And so on.
But the Russians hit back. They had done a good espionage job on the German nuclear operation – which was not hard, since the development was all done on Russian soil, where nobody cared about contamination and such. The Russians had no rockets, not then, no planes big enough to carry their crude early bombs – but they managed to smuggle the stuff in anyhow. Little ships arriving at the Baltic ports, trucks carrying the weapons onwards . . . Boom. Bang. Berlin, Munich – just like Moscow, Vladivostok – all blown up to the stratosphere as glowing dust.
This was the spring of 1946. And after that, the Americans, with assistance from us and the Italians, brokered an armistice.
And to the winners, the spoils.
The winners being the British and the Americans?
Long story short – as I said, they got the nuclear physicists, and we got the rocket scientists. Mostly. And we went on from there.
On to the Moon?
Well, that took a few decades of work.
You see, all we got from the wreckage in Russia was the German brains, and a handful of their early war rockets: A-4s, they were called, capable of lifting about a ton to about a hundred miles. They had developed bigger birds, but they had shot off all the big lads at Vladivostok and other points east.
But it was a start. Pretty quickly we set up development and testing grounds – Spadeadam on the Cumberland Fells, High Down on the Isle of Wight – and launch centres, such as in the Shetlands at Saxa Vord, an old RAF aerial farm.
And at Woomera, in Australia, for the big stuff. A few decades later I spent a lot of time out there myself, for my sins. Desolate place called the Nullarbor Plain. It ended up like a small town, with churches and even schools – it was a long-term commitment and people took their families out – but it was always a military base. Lots of drinking, lots of fighting between us and the Aussies, and not for the first time I was glad I had learned how to look after myself at school.
Well, by the 1950s we were flying British rockets – liquid-chemical stuff mostly, at first. Black Knight, really a test bed, and then Blue Streak, a big ugly brute intended as a continental-range missile. Because what remained of Germany still had the bomb, you see, and we hadn’t entirely trusted our Teutonic cousins since 1940. Nor, indeed, did we entirely trust the Russians.
Hence the silos you mentioned.
A
ll along the east coast, a hundred of them, yes, and each stuffed with a Blue Streak or two. I had to consult on upgrades later, in fact. We had placed them on old MOD land, and in the east, so that if war came the prevailing winds would at least have blown the fall-out towards the sea. The theory was their very existence ought to deter any aggression. They certainly scared the hell out of me. Forty-year-old rusty hell-caves by then, they were.
So you had your own atomic weapons, clearly.
Yes! We had technology exchange programmes, you see. We and the Americans tried to keep ourselves closely tied. If only because in the New Age of Empire, as it was called, nobody wanted the solemn calm to be disturbed by any flare-ups between cousins.
No offence. But where I come from that would be a somewhat one-sided fight.
Oh, really? Well, Malenfant, in my Road, when Hitler and Stalin fell, ours was still the world’s greatest empire, with vast resources. We had our own fisheries, food supply, mineral sources – and we built our own ships and aircraft and so forth. You would have picked a fight with us at your peril.
I dare say. Meanwhile, you sent humans into space.
Indeed we did. The first man in space flew in ’63, four years before I was born. The launcher was a Black Prince IV: Blue Streak, with four strap-on Black Knight boosters, a second stage augmented Black Knight, and a final Waxwing solid-propellant third stage – and Bob, as they say, was your uncle. Capable of launching three tons into orbit. Enough for a space capsule, and a pilot, Wing Commander Roly Gough, who had once flown Spitfires in support of the Dunkirk evacuation. What a triumph that must have been, old Roly’s voice calmly calling down from Heaven itself! Scared the rest of the world to death, that’s for sure.
And so you marched on, right? Carrying the Union Jack to the Moon and beyond.
World Engine Page 36
