‘Look, I’m sorry,’ Randall continued, ‘but all I’ve ever wanted to do is to find my way to some place like the world I was living in before everything fell to shit. I don’t care if I’ve changed, or it’s changed, or it’s completely different or their tacos taste funny, or whatever.’ He bared his teeth. ‘I want to find myself some little town, with ordinary people walking around the streets, with hardware stores and farms and ice-cream parlours and beer on tap, with absolutely zero fucking prospect of asteroids falling on it or military germ-warfare turning everyone into monsters. I want some place with cable sports and pretty girls serving you whisky and country and western dances every Friday night. I want, more than anything,’ he continued, clenching his fists, ‘to live somewhere where every day is exactly the same as every other and I am gloriously, joyously bored out of my fucking skull.’

‘Amen,’ said Selwyn, quietly.

No one really seemed to have anything to say to that.

‘Well, if we’re going to try out those coordinates,’ I said eventually, ‘we probably shouldn’t wait around.’

Chloe glanced back at the hangar. ‘I don’t think they’re going to let us just walk in there and use the stage,’ she said. ‘But you’re not talking about that, are you?’

‘You think maybe they haven’t done anything yet about the stage hidden in the trawler?’ suggested Yuichi.

I shook my head. ‘I think they’ve got too much on their hands to worry about it just yet. But it won’t stay there forever, not now Mayer and the rest know about it.’

‘Then that’s it,’ said Randall. ‘We drive back out there again and use Haden’s coordinates.’

I glanced to one side, seeing Winifred’s tight-lipped expression. ‘I know you don’t want to hear this,’ she said, ‘but we still don’t know where those coordinates really lead, or what Haden’s motives really are.’

‘I don’t care,’ said Randall. ‘I’m prepared to take that chance.’

‘What do you think, Jerry?’ Yuichi asked me. ‘It was you he gave them to, after all.’

I thought for a moment. ‘I’m convinced he was trying to help us.’ I looked around the rest of them. ‘Anyone else apart from Randall and Selwyn want to test these out?’

‘Consider me undecided,’ said Yuichi, ‘for the same reasons as Winifred. That’s not to say I wouldn’t want to take a look, at least, if I thought the coordinates would really work.’

‘Randall,’ I said, ‘are you really willing to be a guinea pig on this one?’

He nodded tightly. ‘I am.’