A Blink of the Screen

if I was you. They’ve already lost fifteen villagers, three cameramen, and the
Blue Peter
outside broadcast unit.
    That site over there? The empty one with the pond? Oh, that’s the Irish Television’s Jurassic Experiment. Yes, I know it’s pretty difficult to find actors 30 foot tall with scaly skins – I suppose they’ll have to, you know, rig up some sort of pantomime horses, only dinosaurs, if you see what I mean. They
had
to go back to the Jurassic, all the other periods have already been pinched by other companies—
    My word! That was a heavy one! Nearly brought the hut down!
    It was a whole trilithon went over that time. Oh – it’s okay, all it got was a sociologist. Last winter, when we couldn’t go hunting, a whole research team from Keele University disappeared in very mysterious circumstances, nudge nudge, so take my tip and refuse any sausages you get offered by the Bronze Age lot.
    Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve just got to do a bit of pottery …
    NOTE: This was followed by a photograph of an ancient-style tent village with arrows and the following captions:
    ‘Anyone see what I did with my library book?’
    ‘Gosh, rat soup, my favourite.’
    ‘Of course the goat is angry. You’re sitting in her seat.’
    ‘Hey, I’ve invented a druid-yourself kit.’
    ‘Only another five months, three weeks, four days to go.’
    ‘After you with the midden.’
    ‘What I miss most is
Points West
.’

THE HIGH MEGGAS

    1986
    The short story evolved into
The Long Earth. The High Meggas
was rather a doodle at first, something to do after I had sent
The Colour of Magic
to my then publishers, Colin Smythe. I could visualize it minutely and wanted to begin with a series of short stories. I was still playing with the ideas when
The Colour of Magic
was published and inexplicably became very popular, far more successful than any of my previous books
.
    And in those circumstances, what is a humble jobbing author supposed to do? The basis of
The Light Fantastic
was already dancing in my mind and gathering momentum and so with some reluctance I put
The High Meggas,
which I had previously thought would one day make the foundation to a great series, under wraps until it was unearthed a few years ago over quail’s eggs at a literary dinner attended by Ralph Vicinanza, my American agent, and Rob Wilkins. My enthusiasm was rekindled and after discussing the ideas with Steve Baxter, who I have always considered to be the UK’s finest writer of hard SF, a new journey began
.
    Frankly I’m glad we did it this way; besides it was a lot more fun
.
    They said that Daniel Boone would pull up and move on if he could see the smoke from another man’s fire. Compared with Larry Linsay, Boone was pathologically gregarious. There was someone else on this world.
His
world. It was like finding a fingernail in your soup. It irked. It made the small hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
    Linsay had rigged an array of antennae in the pines at the top of the rise. In the virgin wavebands of this world the tiny blip of an arrival was crystal clear; it stood out on the miniature displays like an Everest among the background molehills. Only one type of person would come up this far into the high meggas. The gumment. In Linsay’s vocabulary the word was as pregnant with meaning as some of the old Chinese words that expressed a whole stream of thought. It meant regulations, and taxes, and questions, and interference. Other people. It had to be the gumment because it took money to get into the high meggas, and generally it was the sort of money that only the gumment could muster. Besides, people didn’t like it this far out, where the tuning had to be so fine and it took several weeks of real-time travel to get to the next human being. People didn’t like being that far from people. But there were other reasons. Things started to be
different
in the high meggas.
    There was another blip.
Two
people. Linsay began to feel crowded.
    They had to be from Forward Base. Linsay was annoyed – he went to Forward Base, they didn’t come to him. Hard to think of any reason that would bring them up here. He imagined them looking around in astonishment, unable to find him. The third rule of survival up here was: keep away from your point of arrival.
    He took a bearing to make sure, picked up the rifle that leaned against his chart table, and set off through the scrub. Any watcher would have noticed how Linsay kept to shaded areas, broke