The Long Earth

programme has continued. The Mark Trine should be completed by now and would be able to reach us within a matter of days at full step.’

More lights had come back on now. Joshua started tidying up the debris. From here, apart from the furnishings and some of the crockery everything looked shipshape, but he worried very much about what damage had been done beyond Lobsang’s blue doors. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘the operators of the Trine, even assuming it’s flightworthy, will not be aware of our predicament. Will they, Lobsang?’

Relatively calmly, Sally said, ‘So we are stuck here?’

Lobsang asked silkily, ‘Are you concerned, Sally? What about all those famous soft places? And what are you thinking, Joshua?’

Joshua hesitated. ‘The bigger picture hasn’t changed, it seems to me. We must still investigate the migraine monster. You say that the gasbag is OK, yes? Then can you step?’

‘Yes. But I cannot steer, geographically I mean, and power is limited. The solar-cell surfaces appear to be intact, but much of the infrastructure — The problem, aside from rupture of gas sacs and pipelines, was the boiling-away of lubricants—’

Joshua nodded. ‘Fine. Then step forward. Let’s go on.’

‘Across the Gap?’ Sally asked.

‘Well, why not? We know the trolls and the elves have been fleeing through this area. Some at least must survive. They must be able to jump the Gap in some way — you know, a two-step. Stepping takes no time at all.’ He grinned. ‘We will be back in atmosphere long before our eyes explode and dribble down our faces.’

‘That’s a particularly graphic imagination you have there, mister.’

But Lobsang smiled glassily. ‘I’m glad to see you were paying attention during 2001, Joshua.’

‘We’ve come this far,’ Joshua said. ‘I vote we continue, even if that means we have to do it eventually on foot.’ He took Sally’s hand. ‘Are you ready?’

‘Are you kidding? Now?’

‘Before we talk ourselves out of it again. Double-step us please, Lobsang.’

Joshua was never able to make much sense of the memory of what came next. Did he really feel the stinging cold of space? Did he really hear the soughing of the wind of oblivion between the galaxies? Nothing seemed real. Not until he found himself gazing out at a clouded-over sky, and heard rain beating at the gondola windows.

They gave themselves a day to recover, to patch up the airship as best they could.

Then the Mark Twain stepped on, heading ever Westward, cautiously now, one world at a time every few seconds, maybe half their old cruising speed, and only in daylight.

After twenty or thirty worlds they stopped seeing the crater features that littered the worlds around the Gap, perhaps traces of chance near-misses of the object that had caused the Gap itself in nearby realities. They were somewhere beyond Earth two million by now. The worlds here were bland, uniform. In these deep footprints of America this was still the Pacific coast, and they stuck mostly to the coastal strip, trying to avoid the perils of the deep forest, and indeed of the ocean itself. It seemed a dull band of worlds to Joshua, lacking colourful flowers and insects and birds, and with the vegetation dominated by huge tree-like ferns. But at the sea’s edge they sometimes glimpsed spectacular fishing creatures, agile bipedal runners with big sickle-shaped claws on their arms that they dipped into the water to scoop out big fish, one after another, throwing them high up the beach.

Days passed. The character of the worlds began to change further. The forest retreated from the sea, leaving wider coastal bands of scrub and scattered trees. The sea changed too, becoming greener, Joshua thought. Stiller, as if the water itself had become glutinous, denser. They didn’t speak much. None of the coffee percolators would work, despite their experimental smartness, causing Sally’s mood to deteriorate quickly.

And Joshua found it increasingly difficult to endure the stepping.

Sally patted his arm. ‘Getting close to that teenage party, are we, Joshua?’

He always resented people seeing any weakness in him. ‘Something like that. Don’t you feel anything?’

‘No. I wish I did. I told you, I’m jealous, Joshua. You have some kind of real talent there.’

That evening, as they relaxed as best they could while the ship stepped cautiously on, Lobsang startled Joshua by talking about access to space.

‘I’ve been thinking. What an opportunity the Gap represents!’

Since the galley was mostly inoperative, Joshua was hammering a grill out of a defunct piece of equipment. ‘An opportunity for what?’

‘Space travel! You could just put on a pressure suit and step off, into space. None of that messy business of climbing out of Earth’s gravity well on rockets. You’d presumably be in solar orbit, just as Earth is. Once you had some kind of infrastructure in place in the Gap itself, you could simply sail off. It would be a great deal more energy-efficient to get to Mars, say…

‘You know, I was always a space buff. Even back in Tibet. I personally have invested some money in the Kennedy Space Center, where they’re not even taking care of the museum-piece rockets any more. Our pathetic handful of microgravity orbital factories gives the illusion that we are still a space-going species, but the dream has gone — gone even before the Long Earth was opened up. As far as we know there is nowhere else in the universe where a human being can exist unprotected. And now, with millions of Earths available to us, who wants to go up into the cold, scorching emptiness in a spacesuit smelling faintly of urine? We could have been out there, applying to join the galactic federation, not slashing and burning our way across endless copies of the same old planet.’

Sally said, ‘But you’re leading the slashing and the burning, Lobsang.’

‘Well, I don’t see why I can’t have both. And, don’t you see, if we can develop the Gap, maybe we can find a way to do all that after all. From the Gap the solar system is your oyster Kilpatrick. Don’t forget this conversation, Joshua. When you get back to the Datum, stake a claim to the Earths on either side of the Gap before the rush starts, and mankind finds that there is such a thing as a free launch. Think what might be out there! Not just the other worlds of our solar system — though surely a universe that has manufactured the Long Earth has manufactured the Long Mars as well? Think about that.’

Joshua tried. It made his head spin. He concentrated on finishing his grill. The galley ovens were out, but he planned to barbecue most of what, had it been on Earth, might have been called a deer, the result of some brisk hunting by Sally.

The ship stopped stepping, without warning.

And Joshua heard…

It wasn’t a voice. Something wormed inside his brain, a sensation clear and sharp, and offering no hint of anything other than its existence.

Only that it was calling to him.

He managed to say, ‘Lobsang, can you hear anything? On the radio frequencies, I mean?’

‘Of course I can. Why do you think I halted the stepping? We’re being pinged, with coherent signals at a range of frequencies. It appears to be an attempt at the language of the trolls. I will concentrate on the decoding, if you will excuse me.’

Sally looked from one to the other. ‘What’s happening? Am I the only one who isn’t hearing anything? Is it coming from that thing underneath us?’

‘What thing?’ Joshua looked out of a galley window at the ocean below.

‘That thing.’

‘Lobsang,’ Joshua asked, ‘is your port camera working?’

46

JOSHUA AND SALLY rappelled down the panic rope, the only way to the ground now the winches were