The Long War

Robinson admitted, “Look, as for the other usage—the kids don’t seem interested, and the opinion of the town meeting, in this town, is that for mature people it’s OK, but keep the kids off it. Also, I have to tell you, there’s some local stuff—an exotic flower in the woods to the west, native to this world apparently. Wow, that blows your head off. Even a walk in the woods—well.” She was talking too quickly; eventually she ran down, and shrugged. “No offence to you, Captain, seeing as you are, in theory at least, a representative of the government. We have our own set of values here. I mean, we regard ourselves as American, bound by the Constitution. But we don’t believe in any remote authority telling us what we should or should not be doing, or thinking for that matter.”

Maggie said, “I’m a serving Navy officer. I’m not a cop; in fact, traditionally the Navy has specific directives against carrying out internal policing functions. Mayor Robinson, I’m not here to criticize or judge. On the other hand, we in the dirigible fleet are here to offer help. As Captain, I do have a lot of discretion in how I interpret my orders.” She wasn’t sure how convincing that was. The mayor still betrayed that odd nervousness. “Look—is there something else you want to tell me?”

Suddenly the mayor looked as if she’d been caught out doing something bad. “What would you do? I mean, about something serious.”

Maggie repeated deliberately, “I’m not a cop. Maybe we can help.”

Robinson still looked uncertain. But with a nervous defiance she said at last, “There has been… a crime. In fact two crimes. We’re not sure how to handle the situation.”

“Yes?”

“A child was harmed. Drugs. OK—it was drugs. And a murder.”

Maggie felt her stomach turn. But she had thought that garbled defence of the local drug culture had been a little forced.

“Look,” Robinson said, “I don’t want to talk any more out here. We’d better go into my office.”

14

The crew of the USS Benjamin Franklin did not have a specifically military mission, even though the dirigible was a Navy vessel.

The Franklin’s voyage, a long jaunt across the Long Earth, was strictly speaking an exercise in maintaining the integrity of the United States Aegis, the concept of which was still prized in Datum Washington, DC, if nowhere else. Oh, the voyage did have scientific purposes. Every stepwise world was to be logged, every Joker recorded. The crew was to sample novel life forms, geological formations and climatic conditions—and was specifically tasked to search for sapience wherever it could be found. So, a ship fit for such a mission, the Benjamin Franklin was no cargo scow: it was an extremely modern aircraft, bristling with scientific sensors—as well as weapons.

But the true reason for the voyage of the Benjamin Franklin was to travel the stepwise Earths within the footprint of the United States of America and to show the flag to as many of the new colonies out there as it could locate—or indeed discover; many of them had not registered their existence with any Datum authority. It was the job of the Franklin to find, and count, Americans, and to remind them that they were Americans.

The operation had been launched three weeks before, on an April day in Richmond, Virginia, Datum Earth. Maggie Kauffman had stood there in the open, in a downtown park, with her officers and crew, Executive Officer Nathan Boss and ship’s chief surgeon Joe Mackenzie at her side, before an empty stage with an unoccupied podium, a big Stars and Stripes dangling limply to either side, and a huge banner draped above: UNITY IS STRENGTH. This downtown park wasn’t far from the north bank of the James, and, this being Datum Earth, high-rise buildings had loomed out of the smog, some obviously abandoned, their windows boarded up like poked-in eyes.

The hundreds of Navy personnel drawn up here were separated by a barrier from members of the public, lured in from across the Datum city and even neighbouring worlds for the show. And it was quite a show, even if you weren’t too impressed by rows of Navy grunts standing on their hind legs. The twains themselves were a staggering sight, you had to admit that, six brand-new state-of-the-art military-specification airships hanging in the sky, proudly constructed by a consortium of United Technologies, General Electric, the Long Earth Trading Company and the Black Corporation: Shenandoah. Los Angeles. Akron. Macon. Abraham Lincoln. And Benjamin Franklin, thirty-eight-year-old Maggie’s own command. Proud old names on proud new vessels, and the mightiest in the fleet save only for the experimental USS Neil Armstrong, already dispatched on its own exploratory mission into the very remote stepwise West.