The Long Earth

thoughtful. He prompted, ‘What are you thinking, Sally?’

‘That it’s all far-fetched. And yet… I mean, I’m like you, I’ll go into a city for a purpose, but while I’m in one I’m nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I can’t wait to get out, it pushes me out, back out into the empty worlds. Where I feel more comfortable.’

‘But you don’t run, right? And you don’t notice it the rest of the time. The way fish don’t notice water.’

Surprisingly, Sally smiled. ‘That’s very Zen. Almost Lobsang.’ She looked at him carefully. ‘And what about you?’

She knows, he thought. She knows all about me. And yet still he hesitated before answering.

Then he spoke to them, on this rushing airship, more freely than he ever had to anybody, even to Sister Agnes or Officer Jansson, about his own inner sensations.

He told them about the peculiar pressure in his head he felt every time he went back to the Datum. A reluctance, that eventually turned into a physical revulsion. ‘It’s something in my head. It’s like, you know how as a kid if you have to go to some party where everybody else is going to fit in, except you? Like you physically can’t take another step, like some magnetic field is pushing you away.’

Sally shrugged. ‘I never went to many parties.’

‘And you’re antisocial, Joshua,’ Lobsang said. ‘I think we knew that. What’s your point?’

‘Here’s the thing. Whatever it means, whatever causes this, I’ve been feeling something like it here. On the airship. A pressure, making it harder to go on.’ He closed his eyes. ‘And it’s getting worse, the further West we go. I feel it now. Like a repulsion, deep inside. I can stand it when we stay still, but it’s harder to bear when we travel, and it worsens.’

Lobsang asked, ‘Something out in the far West, pushing you away?’

‘Yes.’

Sally asked angrily, ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before? You let me blab about the soft places, about my family’s secrets. I opened up to you,’ she said almost with a snarl. ‘And all the time you were hiding this?’

He just looked at her. He hadn’t told her because you kept your weaknesses to yourself, in the Home, and in most places he’d had to survive in since then. ‘I’m telling you now.’

She backed down with an effort. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I believe you. So this is all real. I admit it now. I am officially scared.’

Lobsang sounded excited. ‘Now can you see why I am so eager to bring on this encounter? We are pursuing a mystery, Joshua, Sally! A mystery from the ends of the Long Earth!’

Joshua ignored him and kept his attention on Sally. ‘We’re both scared. But we’re going to face this, right? You won’t run away. Animals flee. The trolls have to flee. We keep on going, trying to find out what scares us, and deal with it. That’s what humans do.’

‘Yeah. Until it kills us.’

‘There is that.’ He stood up. ‘Shall I get some coffee?’

Later, Joshua realized he should have been paying attention, especially in the final few minutes. The last couple of hundred worlds, worlds where the calm green below was broken up by craters punched like great footprints into the ground. Should have stayed alert, despite the gathering pressure in his head. Should have raised the alarm.

Should have halted the journey, long before the airship fell into the Gap.

45

SUDDENLY JOSHUA WAS falling. He was rising up into the air, off the floor. The observation deck was still around him, its frame, the big windows, but the glistening display panels on the walls were fritzing out one by one. Through the windows he could see the bulk of the airship, its envelope damaged, torn silvery cloth fragments spilling away from the skeletal frame.

Beyond that was only the sun, dazzling bright, against blackness. The sun was just where it had been before, but it was all that was left of the outside world now, as if the rest, the blue sky, the green world, was a stage set that had been ripped away to reveal darkness. But now even the sun was drifting slowly to the right. Maybe the gondola was rolling.

Lobsang was silent, his ambulant unit fixed to the deck but still as a statue, apparently not functioning. The cat was in mid-air, paddling with her limbs, an expression of apparent fear on her small synthetic face. And there was a hand on Joshua’s shoulder: Sally, floating in the air, her hair, loose, rising around her head like a space station astronaut’s.

The deck creaked. Joshua thought he heard a hiss of escaping air. He couldn’t seem to think. His chest ached when he tried to take a breath.

Then the gravity came back, and blue sky unfolded.

They all hit the floor, which was, for the moment, the wall. A kettle full of water spun its way across the deck, much to the apparent terror of Shi-mi the cat, who scrambled to her feet and fled into a compartment. All above and below and around them was a symphony of high technology parting company with itself.

Joshua said, ‘We found the Joker of Jokers, didn’t we?’ And then his stomach convulsed and he threw up. He straightened, embarrassed. ‘I’ve never got nauseous after stepping before.’

‘I don’t think it was the stepping.’ Sally rubbed her own stomach. ‘It was the weightlessness. And then the sudden return of gravity. It was like falling.’

‘Yeah. It really happened, didn’t it?’

‘I think so,’ Sally said. ‘We found a gap. A Gap in the Long Earth.’

The gondola slowly righted, but now the deck’s lights went out, leaving only the daylight. Joshua could hear the sound of spinning metal things gradually ceasing to spin, worryingly.

Lobsang suddenly came to life: his head, his face, though his body remained inanimate. ‘Chak pa!’

Sally looked at Joshua. ‘What did he say?’

‘Tibetan swearing, I think. Or possibly Klingon.’

Lobsang sounded oddly cheerful. ‘Oh boy, is my face red! So to speak. Well, to err is human. Is anyone hurt?’

Sally said, ‘What have you run us into, Lobsang?’

‘We have run into nothing, Sally, pure nothing. Vacuum. I stepped back in a hurry, but it seems the Mark Twain has taken a beating. Some systems are inoperative. Fortunately the gas sacs are intact, but some of my personal systems are compromised. I am checking, but it doesn’t look good.’

Sally was furious. ‘How did you manage to hit a vacuum on Earth?’

Lobsang sighed. ‘Sally, we stepped into a place where there is no Earth. A total vacuum, interplanetary space. At some point in time there was an Earth there, I suspect, but presumably some catastrophe destroyed it. An impact, probably. A big one, one that would make the dinosaur-killer look like pea- shooter fire bouncing off an elephant. One that would dwarf even the Big Whack, the moon impact.’

‘Are you saying you anticipated this?’

‘As a theoretical possibility.’

‘But you went plummeting into the dark anyhow? Are you crazy?’

Lobsang cleared his throat. He was getting better at that with practice, Joshua noticed absently. ‘Yes, I anticipated it. I made a study of likely contingencies based on perturbations of Earth’s history, and took sensible precautions. Which included the automatic step-back module that appears to have worked almost perfectly. Regrettably, however, leaving us with a sea of problems.’

‘Are we stuck here?’

‘ “Stuck” in comparative safety, Sally. You are breathing perfectly good air. This world, though right next door to the Gap, is a perfectly healthy one, it seems. However, my ambulant unit is largely inoperable; I cannot access its auto-repair function. I assure you, all is not lost. Back in the Low Earths, the Corporation’s airship development