Terry Pratchett - The Long Mars

IT WAS THE end of August, and the return of the Navy airships USS Neil A . Armstrong II and USS Eugene A . Cernan from their expedition into the remote Western reaches of the Long Earth, that precipitated the crisis for the Next children in their prison-hospital at Hawaii. Because Captain Maggie Kauffman and her crew brought home the ‘Napoleons’ who had destroyed the Armstrong I . Monsters who were immediately identified as Next.

Nelson suspected it was simply the image of the rogues’ leader, who called himself only David, that did the most damage to the cause of the Next. This was not some institutionalized, broken child, like Paul Spencer Wagoner and the rest. David was an adult, tall, arrogant, commanding, defiant as he stared out of the cage into which his captors put him, gazed into the lenses of the news cameras. A Napoleon indeed, a daunting superman.

Around David and his kind, inchoate fears crystallized. Something had to be done about the Next. The question was, what?

A conference call was hastily set up, involving senior staff at the Pearl Harbor base as well as administration officials in such secure locations as had survived across the post-Yellowstone continental US. On Hawaii, the meeting was projected in a complicated hologrammatic conference room, an expensive piece of kit.

It seemed inevitable to Nelson that even in the mid twenty-first century, even after the huge dislocation of the last few decades, most of the delegates were white, middle-aged men.

Nelson himself wasn’t allowed to contribute unless specifically invited in the course of the discussion, but he was allowed to watch from a glass-walled booth. To his surprise he found himself sharing the booth with Roberta Golding, who he knew had come to Hawaii supposedly on her own fact-finding mission. He had met her in person once before, at a party thrown by Lobsang just before the Yellowstone eruption. But they had not spoken then; she had been very young. Now she had played a part in arranging his own cover here. He supposed it was coincidental that Roberta was here in person when the Armstrong crisis blew up. But then he reminded himself that Golding herself was from Happy Landings . . . Maybe it was no coincidence at all. Secrets colliding with secrets. What was her true role? How much did she believe he knew of all this?

As they took their seats Nelson introduced himself; Roberta responded coolly, but pleasantly enough.

‘Quite a set-up,’ Roberta said, as they watched the conference delegates file in, or coalesce from clouds of pixels.

‘Yes. I imagined you’d be in there with them.’

‘Oh, this is far above my pay grade. And it’s mostly military, you’ll notice. The President’s Science Adviser is chairing the session, and she’s one of the few not in uniform.’

‘Indeed. Reminds me of nothing so much as a Cold War military bunker. Oh, sorry.’ Golding was only around twenty years old herself – only a little older than Paul Spencer Wagoner, he reflected. ‘Maybe that’s too dated a reference for you.’

‘No, no. I have studied the period. Perhaps the most perilous of all manifestations of dim-bulb madness.’

Her obviously deliberate use of the Next term ‘dim-bulb’ startled him, and he looked at her with his perceptions of her shifting rapidly.

The Science Adviser called the meeting to order. She announced that the group had been convened by President Cowley as a ‘Special Contingency Task Group’, in response to the evidence returned by the crews of the Armstrong and Cernan , and other data relating to the Next, including the study of the internees here at Hawaii. The objective of the session was to make recommendations to the administration concerning next steps.

Admiral Hiram Davidson, chief of USLONGCOM, was head of the chain of command that had controlled the mission of those Navy ships, and he spoke first, giving a brief rehash of what Captain Kauffman and her crew had found out there in the reaches of the Long Earth, and what they’d done about the ‘ragged-trousered Hitlers’, as he put it, that they’d shipped home. ‘As to what’s going on in this base right here, for a summary of that I want to bring in Lieutenant Louise Irwin . . .’

Irwin spoke well, concisely, intelligently, even with a degree of compassion. She briefed the delegates on what had been learned of the Next in the time they’d been under surveillance in this controlled facility, and – as she reported more cautiously, under pressure of follow-up questioning – what had been surmised of their potential. Apparently unawed by the stuffed shirts around her, she neither condemned nor supported the Next; rather she gave a cool assessment of their intellect, their psychology, their capabilities. Even so, Nelson thought – or perhaps because of her analytical tone – she made the Next children sound pretty scary.

Roberta murmured, ‘I’ve spoken with Irwin a few times. The inmates here have been lucky to have her around.’

‘I’d second that,’ Nelson said.

‘Anyhow, so much for the background briefings. Now the debate begins . . .’

Somewhat to Nelson’s surprise, the next speaker, the head of DARPA, an advanced research agency responsible to the Department of Defense, spoke quite passionately in favour of protecting the Next. He was a stout, red-faced man, a classic desk-jockey type; his rather visionary words didn’t fit his image, Nelson thought, as he began to speak.

‘Before we convened I consulted some colleagues here, including representatives of the National Science Foundation, NASA, and also some members of the President’s Science Advisory Committee.’ DARPA nodded to other wise heads present. ‘And we all agree there are potentially great scientific benefits to be derived from this situation. If there is some kind of speciation event going on here – and that very much remains to be demonstrated – well, consider how much we might learn of humanity, our common genetic heritage, the nature of natural selection.

‘And if these “Next” individuals do indeed have intellectual capacities considerably above the norm, then who knows what we might learn from them directly? I don’t just mean new technologies and so forth, advanced mathematical techniques maybe . . . I mean ideas . Remember, even human history shows that what may seem an “obvious” discovery to one culture may bypass another altogether, such as the discovery of writing, or the use of the wheel. As an example, think about this. With open mind and simple but systematic observations of the natural world, one of the ancient Greeks or Romans, Pliny for example, could easily have come upon the theory of natural selection – a simple but brilliant idea. Instead we had to wait two millennia for Darwin and Wallace. Who knows what progress we might have made if Pliny had got there first? And who knows what other obvious-in-hindsight notions we have missed?’

A representative of the Department of Defense grunted at that. ‘Pliny? Who the hell was he? I always said you guys in DARPA are a waste of money. Listen, I’ll tell you the only thing we’ll learn from these screwed-up wiseacres, if we give them a chance. And that’s how to serve them.’

A CIA chief responded, ‘Well, that’s not necessarily true, General. Not if we can control them. Imagine the defence applications of super-brains.’

‘ If we can control them.’

‘Granted,’ said CIA. ‘And there are options to achieve that. They’ve already been chipped. I mean, implanted with trackers.’

Nelson stiffened; he hadn’t known that, and he was sure the inmates hadn’t known either.

DoD grinned. ‘Ought to implant them with weaponized chips. That’s the way to control them.’