Runaway World

The Expedition

     "So," said Bill Tembo two weeks later. "How did they persuade you to change your mind."

     Andrew sighed and paced across the floor of the garage. His rover stood beside him, gleaming like new. Its new cockpit window reflected the LED clusters that lit the underground chamber. The cleats that lined each two metre wheel looked sharp enough to pick a finger on and the underside of the hull, about level with his head, was smooth and shiny in contrast to the rest of the hull that was dulled by a thousand tiny pits and scratches. Best of all, the entire rover had had a complete thousand day service at absolutely no cost to himself.

     "They just kept on and on," he said, glancing across at his wife who stared down at her feet in amused embarrassment. "Wearing me down a little bit at a time. I suppose it was the kids in the end. How the other kids in school are treating them." He looked at where they were walking around the rover, frowning critically as they studied the repairs from all angles. "The bullying stopped, but they keep telling me about subtle things. Sideways glances at them. Conversations stopping when they come close. They're being excluded from teenage social life and that's bad for their development. Maybe worse, in the long run, than the danger posed by remainers. The remainers have always done their best not to harm anyone, so long as they think they can get what they want peacefully." Tembo nodded solemnly.

     "The biggest danger, I think," Andrew continued, "will be if we successfully gather the dysprosium and are bringing it back to the city. They'll be desperate, maybe willing to take more extreme measures, but I'm going to insist that the disprosium isn't carried on our rover. If they destroy a rover to scupper the mission, it'll be a cargo rover with no-one aboard. I'm more than willing to hire one."

     "Sounds like a sensible precaution," Tembo agreed. "And you won't have to pay to hire one. The city will supply it."

     Andrew nodded gratefully. "Will there be other children on the expedition?"

     "All the other families are just as wary of remainers as you are. The trouble is finding people we can trust. We just have to take a gamble, I'm afraid, but there is one family we're sure we can trust. The Badgers."

     Andrew nodded and felt a great wave of relief inside himself. Joe Badger, Philip Badger's seventeen year old son, had been tied up and gagged by Fox when he'd originally stolen the dysprosium from the Sellafield dig site. The Historian had had to physically overpower the teenager to stop him from raising the alarm. That meant that his father almost certainly felt the same way, and having someone on the expedition that he knew he could trust was a great weight off Andrew's mind. Philip Badger was a large, physically intimidating man. Having a man like that on his side made him feel a lot better about the whole thing.

     "What about the other two families?" asked Susan. The number of families who ventured up to the surface was still quite small. They were bound to be people they'd heard of.

     "The Yangs and the Inyosis," Tembo replied. "You've worked with them before."

     Andrew nodded. "On the Tate Gallery dig. Good, solid workers. That was before Malina was discovered, of course. Before The Return existed as a possibility. I haven't spoken to anyone from either family since so I've got no idea what they think about the idea."

     "We do. We've been talking to all their friends and colleagues trying to get a handle on what they think about The Return. They've both been openly sceptical about it, which I take to be a good sign. If they were returners hoping to be recruited into a position where they could take a hand in preventing it they'd have been saying it was the best idea ever."