They passed through a ripped-open dome into another cylindrical tank. “Here we stored oxidants. Though of course much of the oxidant was drawn from the air.”

“A ramjet,” Malenfant said to Nemoto.

McCann came to a tangle of what looked like crude electrical equipment, valves and relays, so badly corroded it was an inseparable mass. “Control gear,” he said. “For the pumps and valves and so forth.” They passed through a more solid bulkhead, supported by heavy ribs, and arrived in what appeared to have been habitable quarters. There had been several decks, separated by two or three yards — but now tipped over, so the floors and ceilings had become walls. A fireman’s pole ran along the length of this section, passing neatly through holes in the floors, horizontal now.

McCann pointed out highlights with his stick. “Stores.” Malenfant saw the crumpled remnants of bulky machines, perhaps recycling and cleansing devices for air and water, and refrigerated stores for food, but damaged by fire and gutted; they lay in the dark of the rocket’s hull like foetuses in unhatched dinosaur eggs. “Infirmary, galley, sleeping quarters and such.” Little was left here save a bare frame that might have held bunk beds, a heavy table bolted to the tilted over floor and fitted with leather restraints, perhaps intended for surgery, and the nubs of pipes and flues showed where galley equipment had been ripped out or salvaged.

“And the bridge.” At the nub of the ship, this had been lined with polished oak panels, now scuffed, broken and covered by lichen and moss. Brass portholes bore only fragments of the thick glass that had once lined them. There were heavy couch frames bolted to the floor, long since stripped of their soft coverings. Malenfant could make little of what must once have been instrument panels; now they were just rectangular hollows in the fascia, though he glimpsed tangles of wires behind.

McCann saw him looking. “Once we realized the old lady wasn’t serviceable we stripped out what we could. We built a succession of radio transmitters and heliographs. We got replies, of course, as long as the Earth — I mean, my Earth — still hovered in the sky. That, and promises of rescue, which assurances I have no doubt would have been fulfilled. We kept on trying even after Earth had gone, until the last generator seized up. Powered by a bicycling Runner, incidentally.”

“I’m sorry,” Malenfant said. “She must have been a beautiful ship.”

“Oh, she was. Help me.” Leaning on Malenfant’s arm, he clambered stiffly up the hull wall, using gaping porthole sockets as hand and footholds.

Malenfant followed him. Soon the two of them stood side by side on the outer hull of the habitable section, surrounded by gashes and treacherous-looking rents. But McCann was confident in his step.

From here Malenfant could make out the full sweep of the ship’s length, a slim spear that must have been two hundred yards long. Its lovely back was broken; and green tendrils clutched at the ship, as if pulling it into the belly of the Moon that had killed it. But still a solitary fin poked out of the greenery, crumpled but defiant. The fin bore a faded roundel that reminded Malenfant of the logo of the Royal Air Force.

The Ham man, Thomas, walked beside the ship close to McCann, keeping his eyes on the Englishman.

“He is loyal,” said Malenfant. “He looks out for you all the time.”

“He knows I have done my best to improve the lot of his people.”

Even if it didn’t need improving, Malenfant thought. “But he seems to be having trouble looking at the rocket.”

“The bar-bar mind is rigid, Malenfant. Conservative beyond imagining, they are utterly resistant to the new. At the beginning we had a devil of a battle to keep them from destroying our gear — even when tamed, a bar-bar still harbours destructive tendencies.”

Malenfant recalled the fate of his shoulder camera. He said, “That almost seems superstitious.”

“Oh, not that. There is no superstition among the bar-bars: there is no magic in their world, no sense of the numinous. To them the surface of the world is everything; they do not see hidden meanings, nor seek deeper explanations.”

“They have no gods, then.”

“Nor can they even conceive of the possibility.” McCann smiled. “And what a loss that is. I am sure they are well spared propitiations to the savage and bloody gods of the jungle. But they cannot know the Mercy of the one true God. You understand, it is not merely that they do not know Him — they cannot. And without God, there is no order to their lives, no meaning — save what we provide.” He tapped Malenfant on the chest with the worn head of his walking stick. “I know you are uncomfortable with our relationship to these barbarians, Malenfant. I see it in your eyes. I’ve seen it in Africa, when men of conscience go among the Kaffirs there. But can’t you see it is our duty to provide them with a Johannen way of life — even if they can’t comprehend its meaning? — just as the philosophers and theologians have been proposing since the first steel clippers found these bar-bars” cousins running wild in the New World.”

Malenfant studied Thomas’s face, but could see no hint of reaction to McCann’s sermonizing.

McCann began to talk briskly about the horsepower generated by the “Darwin engines” that had once powered the ship. “I know your little tub came gliding in like a bat. We applied a little more brute force. In the last stages of its descent the redoubtable was intended to land upright on Earth or Moon, standing on its rocket exhaust. And it should have taken off in the same manner.”

“Direct ascent,” Malenfant said. It was a mode that had been considered for Apollo’s lunar landings, a whole ship traversing back and forth between Earth and Moon. But aside from the greater expense compared to the final Lunar Module design, landing such a giant ship with rockets would have posed stability problems, like an ICBM landing on its tail.

From McCann’s descriptions, it sounded as if that had been the downfall of the Redoubtable.

“She was a veteran,” McCann said softly. “She had done the Earth-Moon round trip a dozen times or more. But now we were dealing with a new Moon, you see. Well, we hastily modified her for her new mission. She landed on her fins well enough on the fields at Cosford, but this crater floor is no tarmacadam strip in Shropshire. She was top-heavy, and—” He fell silent, studying the ruined carcass of the ship. “I was navigator; I must share responsibility for the disaster that followed. Most of us got out, by the Mercy of God.” He clapped Malenfant on the back, forcing a laugh. “And since then our lovely ship has been scavenged to make cooking pots.”

“Erasmus Darwin,” Nemoto called.

Malenfant looked down.

Nemoto was standing in the ruins of the habitable compartment, peering up at him. Her face was like a brown coin in the gloom. “The Darwin drive,” she said. “Grandfather of Charles, who is probably the Darwin you’re thinking of, Malenfant. In the 1770s he sketched a simple liquid-fuel rocket engine, along with a ramjet. In our world, the sketch languished unnoticed in his notebooks until the 1990s. But in Mr McCann’s world—”

McCann nodded. “The design was the seed around which a new generation of rockets and missiles grew. After the pioneering work of Congreve, the Brunels, father and son, became involved in the development of craft capable of carrying heavy loads into the atmosphere. The first dummy load was orbited around the Earth before the death of Victoria, Empress of the Moon, and the first manned flight beyond the atmosphere was launched from Ceylon in 1920… Ah, but none of this happened in your world, did it, Malenfant? It is a divergence of history. In your world Darwin was ignored or forgotten, his ideas no doubt rediscovered by some other, more vigorous nation.”

“Something like that.”