of warning signs; they hurried on—
Zero.
Madison was gone.
Joshua stood in shock, gasping. Sally clutched his arm. They stood in a plain of rubble. Gaunt shapes, fragments of wall sticking out of the ground. A few twisted tangles that must be the remains of reinforced-concrete structures. Dust, dry as hell, choked him immediately. The battered airship hung blindly over these ruins.
Somebody was standing before them. Some guy in a coverall suit, no, a woman, Joshua realized, seeing her face through a dusty visor.
‘We’re here to meet steppers,’ she said, her voice a relay from a speaker. ‘Get out of here. Go straight back.’
Alarmed, shocked, Joshua and Sally stepped hand in hand back to West 1, taking the airship with them. Here, in the bright sunlight, another young woman in a FEMA uniform approached them with a clipboard and data pad. She looked up at the airship, shook her head in disbelief, and said reproachfully, ‘You’re going to have to go through decon. We do post warnings in the neighbouring worlds. Hey, you can’t catch everybody. Don’t worry, you’ve broken no law. I’ll need your names and social security numbers…’ She started to peck at her pad.
Joshua began to take in the surroundings. This parallel Madison was crowded, compared with the last time he was here. Tent cities, feeding hospitals, feeding stations. A refugee camp.
Sally said bitterly, ‘Here we are in the land of plenty, with everything anybody could ever want, multiplied a million times over. Nevertheless somebody wants to start a war. What a piece of work is a man.’
‘But,’ Joshua said, ‘you can’t start a war if nobody turns up. Listen, I need to get to the Home. Or where the Home would be…’
The FEMA official’s phone rang, at her waist. She looked at the screen, seemed puzzled, and glanced at Joshua. ‘Are you Joshua Valiente?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s for you.’ She handed him the phone. ‘Go ahead, Mr Lobsang.’
Acknowledgments
We chose to use Madison, Wisconsin, as a location in this novel partly because as we were developing the book it occurred to us that in July 2011 the second North American Discworld convention was to be held there, and we could get a hell of a lot of research done, as we authors like to say, on the cheap. That convention became in part a kind of mass workshop on the Long Earth. We’re grateful to all the contributors to that discussion, who really are far too numerous to list here, but particularly to Dr Christopher Pagel, owner of the Companion Animal Hospital in Madison, and his wife, Juliet Pagel, who gave up an unreasonable amount of their time to show your authors Madison both primeval and modern, from the Arboretum to Willy Street, and on top of that made an incredibly helpful read-through of a draft of this book. Thank you, Madisonians, and we hereby apologize for what we have done to your lovely city. All errors and inaccuracies are of course our sole responsibility. Our thanks also to Charles Manson, the Tibetan Subject Librarian at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for helping us build Lobsang’s world.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
TERRY PRATCHETT is one of the world’s most popular authors. His acclaimed novels have sold more than 75 million copies worldwide and have been translated into nearly forty languages. In 2009 Queen Elizabeth II knighted Pratchett in recognition of his “services to literature.” Sir Terry lives in England.
STEPHEN BAXTER is an acclaimed, multiple award-winning author whose many books include the Xeelee sequence, the Time Odyssey trilogy (written with Arthur C. Clarke), and
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