Suddenly angry, she turned away. ‘Whatever you say.’

‘Agnes, you have any garlic?’

‘There’s some dried in the store. We’ve seeded it to grow wild but it hasn’t taken yet …’

That evening they finished loading the Shillelagh. Lobsang and Joshua said their goodbyes to Ben, and Joshua made a gentle fuss of the cat.

The next day they rose at dawn. The boy was still asleep. Agnes, indoors, sitting with a coffee, heard a hiss of gas filling the buoyancy bags, and a whir of turbines. She went to a window, and saw the twain lift.

Soon the ship was lost in the immensity of the sky.

She went back to bed, though she knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep again, in what was left of this truncated night.

27

THEY HEADED ROUGHLY south. Running at less than thirty miles per hour, Joshua figured it would take much of the day to reach the Atlantic coast, depending on the precise details of the local geography of this footprint of Maine. Joshua and Lobsang sat side by side in the ship’s battered gondola, which was more like a travel trailer than the spacious liner-like elegance of the Mark Twain, the prototype airship aboard which, more than a quarter of a century before, the two of them had been the first to explore the reaches of the Long Earth, to the High Meggers and beyond.

And under the ship’s prow endless forested landscapes washed by.

‘Trees,’ Joshua said thoughtfully. ‘Lots and lots of trees. You know, the first thing I discovered on Step Day, when I took my own first step out of Datum Madison, out of the Home, was—’

‘Trees.’

‘Yeah. The Long Earth’s big winner, trees.’ The forest purred away below the twain. ‘You say there are trolls here?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Lobsang said.

‘Makes you think. To the trolls the Long Earth must appear as all one forest, a world wide and a million steps deep.’

‘I think they are rather smarter than that, Joshua.’

‘That Madison forest was mainly oak – nothing like this.’

‘The Ice Belt worlds are a lot cooler than this,’ Lobsang said. ‘Here, it’s trees from the poles to the equator.’

‘You know that for sure, do you? You’ve seen it for yourself?’

‘Well, you know that’s not true. What I described to you is our best understanding of a typical member of this particular band of worlds.’

‘OK. But this world evidently isn’t so typical after all, is it? And here we are crawling around the globe like an ant on the rind of a pumpkin. I’m not sure what you’re expecting to find.’

‘Well, think about it, Joshua.’ Lobsang looked up into a blue sky, an apparently serene sun. ‘Even Agnes’s sundials and pendulums have been enough to demonstrate that the spin of this particular Earth is speeding up. And it is just this one, by the way; I ran some checks in the stepwise neighbours, and they’re unaffected …’

‘Why do the New Springfielders stick around, then? Agnes says they go wandering stepwise anyhow. If the neighbouring worlds are still comfortable to live on – and I guess they must be getting steadily out of synch with this one as the days grow shorter …’

Lobsang smiled. ‘But this is the centre, Joshua. This is their world, where the founders ended their trek. According to the records they stopped here because of a particularly rich seam of iron ore, not shared with neighbouring worlds, and I’ve a tentative theory that that is a by-product of this world’s peculiar stepwise linkage …’

Joshua nodded. ‘I get it. A pioneer’s sheer stubbornness.’

‘A stubbornness I feel I share – despite the magnitude of the storm that’s breaking here.’

‘Magnitude?’

‘If this world really is speeding up its spin, that’s a pretty largescale effect. Already the planet’s spin kinetic energy must have been upped by ten per cent.’

‘Ten per cent? Wow. OK. So if it is these silver beetles who are somehow responsible—’

‘It seems an unlikely coincidence if they’re not.’

‘Then they must be mounting some kind of global operation.’

‘That’s my theory,’ Lobsang said. ‘I figure we’ll recognize it when we see it. Even from the perspective of an ant on a pumpkin rind.’

‘Hmm. I’ll tell you the first thing I noticed that was odd, Lobsang. The moon. On my very first night, something woke me. I looked out the window, there was the crescent moon – and I saw a flash, coming out of the dark side. Like something was being fired out. I figured I’d been disturbed by an earlier flash; this was a second one.’

‘Joshua, you sleep lightly if a silent flash in the sky was enough to wake you.’

‘I spend a lot of my time alone in the deep Long Earth, Lobsang. I’ve been living like that for decades now. Believe me, you sleep lightly, because sooner or later along will come an oddity that won’t trouble to wake you before it eats you. Anomalies on the moon: you can’t get much bigger than that, can you? But Agnes says she’s been noticing these things since you arrived here – what, three years ago? And you took no notice.’

‘I told you. I wasn’t here for that, for astronomical-scale anomalies.’

‘Even so, don’t you think you took your eye off the ball? Lobsang, the day here is too short. There’s something wrong with the moon … How much more obvious could it be?’

‘What do you want me to say? I came here for Ben and Agnes. Anyhow we’re here now, seeking answers.’

‘OK. So we’re looking for something big. Might take us a while to find it at this pace, even so.’

Lobsang dug into his pocket and held up a memory stick. ‘Fear not. We have movies.’

‘What you got?’

‘The classics. Blues Brothers. Contact. Galaxy Quest—’

‘Nothing with Julie Andrews?’

‘Let it lie, Joshua.’

The forest rolled under the prow of the Shillelagh, apparently infinite, without interruption.

‘So how about brunch?’

‘Will you do the honours, Joshua? I took the liberty of loading aboard all the ingredients for clam chowder – we trade with a couple of communities at the coast, a few worlds over. I’ve no idea what the galley is like aboard this tub of yours.’

‘I can play it like a fiddle. Happily not the way I’ve heard you play a fiddle …’

By late afternoon they were approaching the Atlantic coast. From high altitude they could already see the ocean, in the distance.

Joshua checked their latitude. All their instruments were inertial, based on dead-reckoning, and kept in heavily insulated cases; Lobsang had told Joshua that the many magnetic storms on this world screwed up most electronics. They were going to cross the coast, Joshua figured, somewhere over the footprint of Portland, Maine.

And beneath the ship’s prow, Joshua thought the forest stock was changing. Perhaps there were tree species better adapted to the fresher air here, the salt breezes off the sea, a subtly different climate. It would be interesting to go down there, he thought, and sample the local wildlife, see if the populations of furball tree-dwellers and ground-burrowers, and the big birds and crocs that preyed on them, were any different from those around Lobsang’s home in the denser forest. But it wasn’t that kind of trip; they weren’t looking on that kind of scale.

And as they neared the coast, the forest started to show extensive damage. From the air Joshua saw swathes of trees laid out flat, their great trunks lying parallel on the ground, as if combed. Elsewhere there were huge blackened scars, the relics of fires presumably sparked by lightning. The mark of strong winds, of storms.

Then, at the coast itself, Joshua saw a denuded coastal strip, like a beach, marked with black parallel lines: he thought the lines were sea wrack, driftwood, seaweed maybe. But as they descended for a closer look he realized that he had entirely misjudged the scale of what he was seeing. That ‘beach’ was maybe a mile deep, and the ‘driftwood’ was made up of whole trunks, complete root systems: thousands of mature trees uprooted as a child would pluck daisies, and flung down in rows.