This is wrong, I thought to myself.

‘No,’ Casey said quietly, and I saw he had stepped up beside me. ‘This is life.’

I started, realizing with a shock that I must have spoken out loud. I glanced around at the other Pathfinders standing nearby, but none appeared to have overheard me. Or if they had, they weren’t letting on.

‘All this,’ Casey continued, ‘is what happens when you fail to have any kind of contingency plan for a fucking great asteroid coming straight at you. The people living on this alternate could have put the funding into watching the skies, to protecting themselves. But they didn’t.’

I felt a long-suppressed anger bubbling up inside me. ‘We should be helping these people, not treating their deaths like a sideshow.’

‘Helping them?’ Casey chuckled. ‘And what about the next alternate after this one – will you save the people there? Or maybe the next one? Or did you miss the bit where someone explained to you that there’s an infinity of possible timelines? Tell me, Jerry, which one would you pick?’

‘Does that make it any less wrong?’

‘And how would you go about warning them?’ he continued, as if I hadn’t said anything. ‘By showing them a transfer stage? Maybe they’d confiscate it, or decide you were crazy and lock you up to eventually die with the rest of them. Or maybe they’d believe you and still not do a damn thing to help themselves.’

‘We could at least save some of them—’

‘And put them where? And how would you pick who you save, even assuming you could persuade the Authority to consider the idea? I get it, Jerry. You’re the classic bleeding-heart liberal, not a realist. And I already told you – they could have saved themselves, but they didn’t. Fucking idiots.’

I felt my face grow warm. ‘You talk as if they deserve this.’

‘Somewhere real close by this alternate, Jerry, I guarantee there are others just like it, except they actually exercised some forethought. I don’t need to visit those alternates to tell you what they’d be doing right now – celebrating the fact they cheated death, instead of just waiting for it.’

‘Then why the hell don’t we go to those places instead? Doesn’t it strike as you insanely morbid, the way we keep pitching up on all these post-apocalyptic realities?’

‘Who cares why?’ Casey grinned. ‘Didn’t it ever occur to you that getting to travel through the multiverse, to see all these different worlds, regardless of how they pitch up, is an incredible adventure?’

‘You make me sick,’ I said, turning away.

I saw Casey from out of the corner of my eye, regarding me sourly. ‘Man, I’d forgotten what a pussy you were.’