The Long Earth

humanoid faces. The parrot on Joshua’s shoulder, repaired since being used as a club, whirred as lenses panned and zoomed.
    The seal-beasts noticed the visitor long before he got close. They looked up, ape heads swivelling, and with hoots of alarm they clambered off their rocks and slithered over the sand towards the water, the calves scuttling after the adults. Joshua saw that their limbs were a kind of compromise between ape-like arms and legs and true flippers, with stubby hands and feet that had webbing stretched between fingers and toes. They slid easily into the water, evidently much more graceful in the sea than on land.
    But then there was a flurry of spray, and an upper jaw the size of a small boat came levering out of the water. The seal-beasts scattered in panic, squealing and thrashing.
    ‘Crocodile,’ Joshua muttered. ‘Every damn place you go.’ He picked up a flat stone and headed for the water’s edge.
    ‘Joshua, be careful—’
    ‘Hey, you!’ He hurled the stone as hard as he could, skipping it over the water. He was gratified to see it slam into the croc’s right eye. The beast turned in the water, rumbling.
    And it came bursting out of the sea, upright, on powerful-looking hind legs. The croc must have been twelve yards long; it was as if some amphibious craft had suddenly raced out of the water. He could feel the very ground shudder as the croc’s footsteps slammed into the earth. And it was coming for him, enraged.
    ‘
Shit
.’ Joshua turned and ran.
    He reached the cover of another forest clump, and pushed his way into the trees’ damp shadow. Excluded by the trees the beast roared, turned its huge head, baffled – and then bounded away along the beach, after some other prey.
    Joshua leaned on a tree, breathing hard. There were flowers on the trees around him, and on the ground; the place was full of colour, despite the shade. And there was noise everywhere, calls echoing around the forest: squeaking cries from the canopy, deeper grumbles from further away.
    ‘You were lucky with that super-croc,’ Lobsang said. ‘Stupid, but lucky.’
    ‘But if he’s snacking on those humanoids right now, it’s my fault. They
were
humanoids, weren’t they, Lobsang?’
    ‘I would say so. But they’re only part-adapted – two million years isn’t long enough to turn a bipedal ape into a seal. These humanoids are like Darwin’s flightless cormorants …’
    Shadows shifted, huge. Something passed across Joshua’s sky, a tremendous mass, like a building on the move. A foot slammed down, round like an elephant’s – a leg, thick as an oak trunk and taller than he was. He squinted, not daring to break out of the cover of the trees, and peered up at a body, the skin heavy and wrinkled and pocked with old scars, crater-like, as if inflicted by artillery shells.
    Then a predator came running, out of nowhere, like a tyrannosaur maybe, with massive hind legs, smaller clawed forearms, a head like an industrial crusher, a beast itself the size and speed of a steam locomotive. Joshua flinched back into deeper cover. The hunter leapt up at the giant beast, closed vast jaws and ripped away a chunk of flesh the size of Joshua’s torso. The big beast bellowed, a distant noise like a supertanker’s foghorn. But it kept moving, as oblivious to the huge wound as Joshua might have been to a flea bite.
    ‘Lobsang.’
    ‘I saw it. I
see
it. Jurassic dining.’
    ‘More like snacking,’ Joshua said. ‘Have we found dinosaurs, Lobsang?’
    ‘
Not
dinosaurs. Though I suspected you would use the name. In this case there has surely been too
much
evolution for that. Some of these are the much-evolved descendants, perhaps, of the Cretaceous-age reptiles, in a sheaf of worlds where the dinosaur-killer asteroid never fell. There was a dinosaur kisser here, perhaps, a gentle brush with death … But the picture is not simple, Joshua. The big herbivore that almost stepped on you is not reptilian at all, but a mammal.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘It was a female – a kind of marsupial, I think. If you’d had the chance you would have seen an infant the size of a carthorse carried in her pouch. I will show you the images later. On the other hand, the morphology – really big herbivores preyed upon by really ferocious predators –
was
common in the dinosaur era and may be another universal.
    ‘Joshua, always remember, you have not travelled back in time, or forward. You have travelled far across the contingency