‘I can imagine how iron is denser than wood. Do you say “denser”? I don’t know that word.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You could jam in the molecules tighter. But how does that work with gases? If the atoms are all flying around.’

‘Well, it’s something to do with the molecules moving faster when stuff is hotter . . .’ Joshua had never been one to bluff a kid. ‘I don’t know,’ he said honestly. ‘Ask your teacher.’

Paul blew a raspberry. ‘My teacher is a kind lady and all but she doesn’t know squat.’

Joshua had to laugh. ‘I’m sure that’s not true.’

‘If you ask one question and then another she gets unhappy, and the other kids laugh at you, and she says, “Another time, Paul.” Sometimes I can’t even ask the questions – you know – I can kind of see it but I don’t have the words.’

‘That will come in time, when you grow up a bit more.’

‘I can’t wait around for that.’

‘I hope he’s not bothering you.’ The woman’s voice was soft, a little strained.

Joshua turned to see a family approaching, a man and woman about his own age, a toddler in a buggy. The kid seemed distracted; she was singing softly, looking around.

The man stuck out his hand. ‘Tom Wagoner. Pleased to meet you, Mr Valienté.’

Joshua shook. ‘Everybody knows my name, it seems.’

‘Well, you did make quite an entrance last year,’ Tom said. ‘I do hope Paul hasn’t been pestering you.’

‘No,’ Joshua said thoughtfully. ‘Just asking questions I soon realized I had no answer to.’

Tom glanced at his wife. ‘Well, that’s Paul for you. Come on, kiddo, time for supper and bed, and no more questions for the day.’

Paul submitted gracefully enough. ‘Yes, Dad.’ He took his mother’s hand.

After a couple of minutes of pleasantries, the family said goodbye. Joshua watched them go. He became aware that the little girl, introduced as Judy, had kept up her odd singing all the way through the short encounter, and now they’d stopped speaking he could hear her more clearly. It wasn’t so much a song as a string of syllables – jumbled, meaningless maybe, but he kept thinking he heard patterns in there. Complexity. Almost like the trolls’ long call, which Lobsang was determined to decode. But how the hell could a toddler be singing out a message that sounded like greetings from a space alien? Unless she was even smarter than her precocious brother.

Smart kids. That was another odd thing he was always going to remember about Happy Landings.

Enough. He had looked around for a bar, and a place to stay the night. He’d left the next day.

But he hadn’t forgotten Paul Spencer Wagoner.

And he hadn’t forgotten Happy Landings either. And, in the year 2045, he thought of it again, considering Lobsang’s suggestion that out there in the Long Earth there could be incubators of a new kind of people. What would such an incubator be like? What would it feel like?

Like Happy Landings, maybe?

13

A BOARD THE GALILEO the hab module was divided into three levels, and while there were common utilities, such as a galley, toilet and zero-gravity shower, and such universal essentials as closed-loop air and water recycling systems, the designers had assigned a whole level to each of the three crew to serve as his or her personal space. And in the hours and days that followed their booster firing, and their launch into interplanetary space from the Brick Moon, the wisdom of that design was impressed on Frank Wood.

The Galileo’s motley crew wasn’t going to be a particularly sociable bunch.

Oh, they cooperated over their chores. There were shared maintenance duties: clean the dust filters, check the air balance, scrub down the walls to prevent the mould and algal infestations that tended to grow in untended corners in the absence of gravity. Sally and Willis accepted with good enough grace the work rotas Frank volunteered to draw up. They also quickly got used to the routine of meal preparation, most of it based on Russian space cuisine of decades past: there were tins of fish, meat and potatoes, dried soup and vegetable purée and fruit paste, nuts and black bread, and coffee, tea and fruit juice in bulbs . . . Some crews would have invested a lot of energy in coming up with inventive menus with those limited ingredients, Frank knew. Not the crew of the Galileo. Frank also insisted that they all kept up a routine of physical training, to offset the effects of weeks of weightlessness on their performance when they got to Mars. They had a treadmill, and elasticized frames to stress their muscles and bones. This alone occupied hours for each of them every day.

But that left plenty of spare time in each twenty-four-hour cycle – time father and daughter seemed to use, at first anyhow, to get as far from one another as possible.

Willis Linsay immediately disappeared into his own agenda of research and experimentation, using the computer gear and small laboratory he had installed on his personal deck. He seemed entirely unperturbed by being thrown into interplanetary space.

His daughter, meanwhile, a solitary type too, withdrew into herself. She slept a lot, exercised ferociously over and above the required minimum, read for hours using the onboard e-library she’d helped stock. Willis Linsay played a lot of music: Chuck Berry, Simon and Garfunkel. This antique stuff, echoing around the hab module, seemed to disturb Sally. Frank guessed this was the soundtrack of her childhood, and not particularly welcome to have back.

Even though Frank had known Sally from the days of the troll incident at GapSpace years back, he barely got a word out of her, at first. He sensed apprehension in her, however, despite her hard-nut exterior. He had to remind himself that she had actually discovered the Gap in the first place, along with Joshua Valienté and Lobsang. Maybe it was something to do with the fact that she didn’t seem to know why she was here, why her father had brought her along on this jaunt.

As for Frank himself, he was just thrilled to be out here. For the first few days he gave himself up to a kind of triumphant joy. He’d been to the Brick Moon before, a number of times. Now he was in deep space, at last. Going to Mars! A Mars anyhow.

And the scenery, at least at first, was spectacular. Seen from outside, the Brick Moon was a bulbous cluster surrounded by sparking lights and swarming activity – and when the Galileo’s fusion rocket opened up he watched that huge, busy complex fall away like it was dropped down a well. A spectacular sight, yes, but it would always be one of Frank’s biggest regrets that unlike the astronauts of NASA’s heroic age he would never see the Earth itself from space. Of course that was the point. At the Gap you didn’t need to escape from the Earth to reach space, because there was no Earth. But it did kind of diminish the spectacle.

However, after the first few hours, once the Brick Moon was out of sight, he had the consolation of the stars, any direction you looked away from the sun, an infinity of them. Frank liked to sit in his portion of the hab module peering out into that endless drop, letting his ageing eyes become accustomed to the blackness, his pupils widening to their fullest. And he would make out another peculiarity of this particular stepwise reality: a band of soft dusty light spanning the zodiac, the sky’s equator. All this washed past his view, for the whole stack of the ship was rotating on its axis with slow grandeur, a measure taken to equalize the heating of the raw sunlight.

After a couple of weeks, Sally took to emerging from her own space and joining Frank by his windows. Frank was no psychologist, and took a robust view of interpersonal dynamics; in his view it didn’t matter if a crew bonded all the way to Mars or not, just so long as they got there in one piece. And he certainly wasn’t going to get caught up in what looked to him like a very peculiar father-daughter relationship. So, when Sally showed up, Frank would acknowledge her presence with a nod, but kept his own counsel. Let her talk in her own time, or not.