The Long Utopia

Lobsang sighed.

Agnes plucked his sleeve. ‘Lobsang. No.’

‘—then we can’t even predict what comes next—’

‘I must speak up,’ Lobsang murmured.

‘George wouldn’t. Sit still.’

‘—we don’t have any kind of handle on any of this—’

‘But I do,’ Lobsang a

Agnes covered her face with her hands. Oliver stared. Ben looked bewildered.

Captain Boss glanced over. ‘I’m sorry, Mr – Abrahams, was it?’

‘George Abrahams. I do know what the beetles are constructing. It’s a Dyson motor.’

‘A what?’

‘Maybe you’d better let me speak to your science people.’ And Lobsang walked past Oliver Irwin, towards the crew, as if taking over. Just as Agnes had dreaded.

Al Todd got to his feet and pointed. ‘Yeah, you do that, Abrahams, you big shot! I always thought there was something not right about you. All our troubles started the day you showed up here. Maybe you should hitch a ride on this Navy tub right back out of here!’

The meeting started to break up, the mood frustrated and angry.

Ben stared up at Agnes, wide-eyed. ‘Agnes? Does Mr Todd mean it?’

‘No, Ben. He’s just upset, is all. He doesn’t mean anything. Now you come with me while George is busy, those chickens won’t feed themselves …’

39

‘DYSON? YOU MEAN Freeman Dyson?’ The man was asking the question even as he shook Lobsang’s hand.

‘Ma

‘Actually I’m a doctor also.’

‘I apologize. Dr George Abrahams, meet Ken Bowring, US Geological Survey. As I said back there Dr Bowring is the team leader of our civilian science cadre.’

‘Freeman Dyson, though. That’s who you meant, isn’t it? Come, walk with me, sir, please. I’d like to show you the data we’re assembling, the interpretations we’re making.’

Margarita Jha didn’t know what to make of this man Abrahams. He was tall, slim, a little elderly for an early generation of such a new community, perhaps. But there was something about him that didn’t quite fit. His accent was basically east coast American, she thought, but not quite pitched right, as if he was forcing it. His handsome but rather unremarkable face seemed expressionless – or rather, it was as if the expressions followed the emotional trigger by a perceptible interval, as if they required some conscious impulse. Maybe this guy Abrahams was just an eccentric. Mankind, splintered across the Long Earth, had begun to diverge, culturally, religiously, even ethnically, and in all that room it seemed to her that what she would once have called ‘eccentrics’ were becoming the norm. But even so, Abrahams puzzled her.

‘So,’ said Bowring, ‘you’re a doctor of—’

‘Engineering. My doctoral research was in communication with trolls. I was sponsored by Douglas Black.’

‘Fascinating, fascinating,’ Bowring said, distracted. ‘With the collapse of the old Datum academic institutions, we must rely increasingly on the generosity of figures like Black to fund our research. Still, the work gets done. You know Black himself?’

‘I’ve met him. Before he became a recluse. Or so it’s said …’

Jha, and others of the crew, had been involved in another twain mission that had taken Black, in secret and at his own request, to a refuge much further away than either Bowring or Abrahams imagined, probably. She kept her counsel.

They came to the rough work station Bowring and his team had set up, in the shadow of the twain hovering above. Trestle tables were laden with tablets and heaps of paper, meteorological charts, maps; there were samples too of the local flora and fauna. All this was a pale imitation of the more extensive science suite up on the twain itself.

Bowring said now, ‘It’s certainly a pleasure to find you here, Dr Abrahams. Coming in cold to a situation like this, there’s only so much progress we can make in a fixed time. No offence to the people here; your neighbours seem a smart, decent, very fine bunch of people. But to have had a scientifically educated man on the spot for some years—’

‘I understand.’

‘Tell me about a “Dyson motor”.’

‘Do you have a map of the world? Or any kind of global view …’

The Navy crew had toured the continent in the twain, and had sent up sounding-rockets for a higher-altitude view. There was even a clutch of simple orbiting satellites, though they had yet to complete a full planetary survey. There were various ways of viewing the result; they had maps on paper, electronic images, photographic surveys. Jha’s favourite was a globe you could handle: a basketball borrowed from the crew on to which a projected photographic mosaic had been glued. It looked pretty much like a globe of any stepwise Earth, save for a peculiar local readjustment of the continents: that gap between South and North America, the global seaway that ran from the Atlantic coast through the Mediterranean and out through Arabia to the south. That and the ubiquitous green of forests that stretched all the way to the polar regions, north and south.

But on this globe there were also false-colour markings of anomalies. Lurid orange bands around the coasts of the continents showed tsunami damage. Peculiar fractures circled the Pacific, divided the Atlantic lengthways, and spa

Abrahams picked up the basketball and traced the silver lines with a finger. ‘I have seen some of these. I took my own twain journey to the south; I saw enough for me to infer the rest. You’ll be able to look it up for yourself. Freeman Dyson was a twentieth-century engineer who thought big. He worked on Project Orion, on how to use military-specification H-bombs to drive a spacecraft. And he came up with at least one conceptual scheme of how to spin up a world.’ He pointed to the latitudinal bands. ‘You wrap the world in conducting straps, and run an electrical current through them to generate a shaped magnetic field around the planet, a field shaped like a toroid, a doughnut. You have another electric current ru

‘Spacecraft?’

‘They need only be simple. Massive, but simple. Lumps of moon rock, for example, wrapped in some kind of conducting blanket. On my own twain journey, we reached the equator. I saw such rocks in the sky. You must have too.’

‘Yes. We’ve also been observing the moon, from where projectiles of that type are evidently being launched.’

‘And have been for years – since my wife and I first arrived here. The physics is trivial. The flyby rocks come in, they are dragged by the Earth’s new magnetic field, and, thus coupled, they pull at the Earth. Each rock speeds up the planet’s spin, just by a fraction. Then, when they reach their lowest orbit, they start to push against the planet’s magnetic field to spiral back out of there again – and, again, they give the planet another minute shove. Theoretically, it’s as if the Earth has been made the armature of a huge electric motor.’ He looked at their faces, seeking understanding.

Jha said, ‘I think I get it. Metaphorically anyhow. I have a daughter. When she was little, in the park in our home town back on West 5, there was a roundabout, a simple thing, a wooden disc with hand rails spi