The Long Earth

world the townsfolk had built their church on the highest point. Right in the way.’
    ‘Go on.’
    ‘I think these creatures were stepping. Gathered on the hilltop, heading East, fleeing away from the worlds further West, like the trolls. Stampeding.’
    Lobsang asked, ‘Stampeding from
what
? That’s a question we will have to answer before we can go home, Joshua.’
    ‘Suddenly they found themselves
here
, in this enclosed space, with all these humans. They panicked. More and more of them piled in … They killed everybody in here, they broke out, they hunted down everybody else.’
    ‘From what we know of them, Joshua, trolls wouldn’t do that. Consider how they treated Private Percy. They could have killed him easily.’
    ‘Perhaps not. But these weren’t trolls.’
    ‘I would like to suggest we label these creatures
elves
. I’m drawing on more mythology, partial records of more tentative, misunderstood encounters, with mysterious, slender, human-like creatures who passed through our world, ghost-like. The existence of a variety of stepping humanoids could justify a large body of mythology, Joshua.’
    ‘And no doubt you’re drawing on other encounters out in the Long Earth you haven’t told me about,’ Joshua said dryly.
    ‘That too. By the way,’ Lobsang said more urgently, ‘I’ve spotted something else. Maybe a quarter-mile west of your position.’
    ‘Humans? Trolls? What?’
    ‘Go see.’

29
    HE HURRIED OUT of the church, relieved to be in the open air, away from the stink of blood.
    A quarter-mile west, Lobsang had said. Joshua glanced at the position of the sun, turned and ran that way. Before he had gone a couple of hundred yards he heard the moaning.
    It was a humanoid, lying in the dirt, on her back. Not a troll, perhaps a variant of elf, given Lobsang’s definition based on what he had found in the temple, but not identical to the one he’d inspected there – at any rate another species new to Joshua. Maybe five feet tall, skinny, coated with hair, she was a stretched, upright-posture chimp with a hauntingly human face, despite her flat, chimp-like nose. And, unlike the beast in the temple, her head seemed to bulge, the cranium outsized for her body to Joshua’s eyes – the brain was evidently larger even than a human’s. And she was in trouble. She was heavily pregnant. Barely conscious, she moaned and thrashed, and tore at the fur over her swollen belly, and watery blood leaked out between her legs.
    As Joshua bent over her, her eyes opened. She had big slanting eyes, like a cartoon alien’s, but ape-brown, lacking the whites of a human’s. Eyes that widened in alarm, briefly, and looked at him imploringly.
    He felt the creature’s stomach. ‘She’s close to term. Something’s wrong. The baby should have been born by now.’
    Lobsang murmured, ‘I would have hazarded that the big head of this creature’s baby would make it impossible for her to deliver it.’
    ‘What did you put in this pack?’ Before Lobsang had a chance to reply he had the pack on his chest open and was rummaging inside it for the first-aid box. ‘And, Lobsang? Get that ship down here. I’m going to need more supplies before we’re done.’
    ‘Done with what?’
    ‘I’m going to get that baby out.’ He stroked the cheek of the female. His own mother had once lain alone in a world, in the throes of labour. ‘Too posh to push, are we? Let’s do it the American way.’
    ‘You’re going to perform a caesarean?’ Lobsang asked. ‘You don’t have the capacity to do that.’
    ‘Maybe not, but I’m quite certain you do. And we’re going to do this together, Lobsang.’ He dumped out the contents of the med kit, trying to think. ‘I’ll need morphine. Sterilizing fluid. Scalpels. Needles, thread …’
    ‘We’re very far from home. You’ll exhaust our medical supplies on this stunt. I have the facility to manufacture more, but—’
    ‘I need to do this.’ He could do nothing for the Victims, but he could do something for this elf female – or at least he could try. It was Joshua’s way of fixing the world, just a little bit. ‘Help me, Lobsang.’
    An aeons-long pause. Then: ‘I have of course full records of most major medical procedures. Even obstetrics, though I scarcely imagined it would be needed on this trip.’
    Joshua fixed the parrot so Lobsang could see what he was doing, and spread out his tools. ‘Lobsang. Speak to me. What’s first?’
    ‘We must consider