The Long Earth

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 un protected. 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 abseiled down the panic rope, the only way to the ground now the winches were jammed.
    Once down, Joshua clambered on top of a bluff for a look around. Under a sunless, clouded-over sky, a dense green ocean lapped reluctantly at a muddy beach. Inland, a bare landscape stretched away to folded hills, far in the distance. But, just to the south of here, there was a tremendous crater,