‘It means that exactly what happened here is still a mystery. We don’t know where the people went, or why, or how. There are no corpses, nothing but a few smoking holes in the ground in the middle of nowhere where somebody dropped nukes. But there’s nothing remotely communicable in the air or the water or the food chain, or anywhere else we can identify. Whatever did for the people here is, we hope, long gone. Besides, we’ve been here a good couple of years, and nothing’s happened to us.’

‘There must be records here somewhere on this alternate,’ I said. ‘Something that would make sense of where all the people went. Somebody must have written something, left some kind of clue.’

‘Sure. Maybe they did, and we just haven’t found it yet. But from what we can tell, it happened fast, Jerry – real fast.’

I looked at Nadia. ‘You said this is Easter Island. That’s the one with all the statues?’

Nadia nodded. ‘They’re called moai,’ she said. I knew the island’s original inhabitants had left monolithic carved stone figures of revered ancestors scattered all across their land. ‘It’s worth taking a drive out to see them.’

But why are we here, I wondered, on this remote island of all places? A thousand more questions crowded my lips, but I felt sure that for every one of them that might be answered, a hundred more were waiting to be born.

Even so, there was one in particular that overrode all the rest.

‘Why me?’ I asked. The wind blew across the island’s slopes, singing through the wire fence surrounding the compound. ‘Why go to all the effort of finding me and bringing me here? You told Tony I was the “new Pathfinder”. What the hell does that mean?’

‘The Pathfinders are advance scouts,’ Yuichi explained. ‘We’re Pathfinders – people like you, me and Nadia. We’re the first people to go in and explore new alternates and assess their dangers on behalf of the Authority. When we’re not carrying out research and reconnaissance, we search for technology and data, most often from alternates more advanced than the Authority’s own.’

‘What if there isn’t a transfer stage on the other side?’ I asked.

‘Depends,’ said Yuichi. ‘We either take a portable stage through and set that up as soon as we arrive, or we can bring someone back at a prearranged time so long as they make sure they’re on the exact same spot where they arrived. That last one’s a little tricky, though, so we prefer not to do it too often.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘And “people like us” – what did you mean by that?’