‘And if Stan does this – if I give Stan up to you – will he survive?’

Sally sighed. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, he won’t survive.’

Rocky tried to take it all in. ‘Will he be alone?’

‘No,’ Sally said firmly. ‘I can promise you that. Personally.’ And she took hold of Rocky’s hand.

50

THEY WASTED NO time. If it had to be done, they’d decided, it was best done immediately.

It was evening when they got back to the elevator base site. Stan was still on his plinth, with his followers and some of the other workers. His sermon had triggered a bull session that looked like it could go on all night, Sally thought.

Rocky made his way through the crowd towards Stan.

Sally stood back, with Roberta Golding and Stan’s mother.

‘Good,’ Roberta said, watching. ‘Rocky’s doing well. Nice and calm. Just a friend coming to bring Stan home to his family. Not like an arrest at all …’

Martha said dully, ‘The way Rocky’s chatting to the followers as he passes – you’d never know what’s in his soul. He always was a good friend to Stan. But he’s going to have to carry this with him, the memory of what he’s doing, for the rest of his life, isn’t he?’

Impulsively, Roberta hugged her. ‘I guess there’s no greater price a friend can pay.’

Rocky reached Stan. He grinned, accepted a bottle of beer, and pointed to Stan’s mother at the back of the crush. Stan shrugged, looking like he was apologizing to his fan club. Then he picked up his jacket and began to make his way out of the peaceable crowd, Rocky’s arm around his shoulders, with no resistance from his followers.

Roberta murmured, ‘I once told you that you’d lose him, Martha. One way or another. At least this is a good way, a positive way—’

‘No,’ Martha snarled. ‘There is no good way.’ And before the boys got back through the crowd, she broke away from the women and hurried off.

51

ON EARTH WEST 1,217,756, the end game was close, everybody said.

Joshua could sense it. If you stood out in the open on this world, under the streaming sky, you could feel the shuddering of the planet as more and more energy was poured into it by the beetles’ globe-spanning motor. And you could see the quickening spin in the almost perceptible shifting of the shadows, on the rare occasions when the sun was visible through the cloud.

As seen from orbit by the small observation satellites thrown up by the Cowley, the spinning world now looked like Jupiter or Saturn, striped with horizontal bands of cloud. Two-hundred-miles-per-hour hurricanes stalked the oceans and spilled on to the land, battering the already devastated coastal regions. Inland the cores of the once-global forests still stoutly resisted the storms, but only a handful of the furball mammals, living underground or deep in the trunks of trees, had recently been seen.

The day was reduced to less than eight hours. As estimated by Ken Bowring and Margarita Jha of the Cowley, this world’s rotational energy had increased nine-fold, gravity at the equator was down three per cent, and the planet’s flattening as it spun up was now causing crustal distortions of a couple of hundred kilometres – far more than the maximum thickness of the crust itself. Joshua couldn’t believe such numbers. And it was getting worse. Lobsang and George guessed that the beetles’ coupling of Earth to sun was being enhanced by some means more advanced than the obvious Dyson-motor latitudinal viaducts and streaming moon rocks – some means of transferring huge quantities of spin energy and momentum that human observers were not equipped to recognize … But there was no time left to learn.

Joshua, however, didn’t need science measurements to apprehend the unfolding tragedy here. And it seemed to him that the ultimate possibility was at last being taken seriously, among the scientists and military people, Lobsang and his Next allies. The possibility that the goal of the beetles was not the transformation of this world into some new form, but its destruction.

And that made the final decision, about whether to go ahead with the operation the military people had come to call the Cauterizing, an easy one to make.

Team Stan, as the boy himself had called them – Stan, George and Sally – gathered in the lee of Manning Hill, on the north-western periphery. On the summit of the hill still stood the wind-smashed remains of the home George and Agnes had lived in with their adopted son.

The townsfolk had long gone, the Irwins and the Bambers and the Todds and the Claytons and the rest, gone with their dreams, off to build a new home someplace else. Nikos Irwin, who with his dog Rio had first encountered the beetles in their mine working, had gone with his family – but Rio had died a few months back, and left her bones in the ground of this doomed Earth. It was less easy to be sure that the rest of this planet was empty of people too. Before the weather had closed in the Cowley had undertaken spiralling tours of the North American continent, broadcasting warnings, setting up automated radio stations; there was even a comsat flung into orbit, similarly blasting out instructions to step away – as if, Joshua supposed, anybody still struggling to hang on to this spinning-top of a world needed to be told. Well, if anybody stayed for the end game it was their decision, their responsibility; they must be able to guess what was coming.

Whereas Lobsang – George Abrahams, Agnes’s husband – Sally Linsay, and young Stan Berg, who were staying for the end, didn’t need to guess. They would get to see it for themselves.

The final round of goodbyes was ghastly.

Joshua watched Stan Berg, wearing robust military-specification survival gear that almost fit him, trying to deal with his mother Martha, and Roberta Golding, the enigmatic Next woman who seemed so drawn to him. Stan for his part seemed more concerned for Rocky Lewis, the boyhood friend who everybody muttered had ‘betrayed’ Stan.

‘You won’t be forgotten,’ Rocky said thickly, his guilt obvious.

Stan grinned. ‘You betcha. Have a drink on me with the stalk jacks under that freakin’ space cable.’

‘We’ll remember you. Everything you said and did – you had so little time – we’ll remember it all, and pass it on.’

‘Just clean up my jokes, will ya?’

Rocky’s face worked. ‘Stan, I—’

Stan grabbed him, hugged him close, patted his back. ‘Don’t say it. You did what you had to do. You did what was right.’

‘Not everybody sees it that way.’

‘What matters more, what I say or what they say? And I say it’s OK. You remember that.’ He released Rocky.

Now it was his mother’s turn. Unlike Rocky she did not submit to the hug Stan offered. Joshua thought she blazed with anger, a fire visible in her face, her posture. Maybe it was a way of staving off the loss. Stan’s father, Jez, wasn’t here at all; he’d never followed Stan to this place, his Golgotha.

‘Mom, I—’

‘Don’t say it. You’ve said enough. All your words. That’s what they used to take you away from me. First those losers and chancers who surrounded you in Miami. They’re already turning you into a cult, you and your foolishness. A cult and a corporation. Do you know they already registered your image rights? That’s the kind of people they are. And now this.’ She turned and glared at Roberta. ‘These people with their manipulation and their fancy theorizing.’

‘Mom, it’s not just theorizing. I’ve been through it myself, the arguments. I think they’re right about what’s going to become of this world. The Cauterizing might work.’

‘I don’t care. Nothing justifies this, for me—’ Something seemed to break in her. She turned and blundered away.

Stan pursued her. ‘Mom. Mom! …’

Now Agnes came to Joshua, arm in arm with George, the homely elderly-appearing ambulant who had been her husband here – the copy of Lobsang who was going to be left behind here, in New Springfield, with Stan. Agnes was still wearing her pioneer gear, the uniform she had adopted on coming here to build a home on this doomed planet.