The Long War

probably got the movie . . . Everything that can happen must happen somewhere, right? Bellos, or copies of it, came swimming out of the dark, and completely missed uncounted billions of Earths. A few, like this one, were close enough to its path to be sideswiped by fragments, and suffered varying amounts of damage.’
    ‘Like what?’
    ‘Like splattering new craters over the moon. Like stripping away lots of atmosphere from the Earth. Or changing the pole positions. Or messing with continental shift. Generally making the extinction of the dinosaurs look like a street fight. But not wiping out the planet altogether.’
    Jansson nodded. ‘I can see where the story is going. And one Earth—’
    ‘One Earth was taken out entirely.’
    Jansson whistled. The idea seemed to frighten her. ‘It could have hit us ,’ she said.
    ‘Datum Earth was way up the other end of the probability curve.’
    ‘Yes, but if it hadn’t been – even if we’d been living on one of these nearby worlds—’
    ‘Earthquakes, tidal waves, that kind of fun. Oh, the dust winter would probably have killed us off. Us, or our primate ancestors, more likely, it was that long ago.’
    ‘Nasty.’
    ‘No, it’s just statistics. It happened, that’s all.’ Sally poured more coffee. ‘It couldn’t happen now , at least. Not that way. The extinction of mankind, I mean. We’ve spread out. The Long Earth is an insurance policy. Even a Bellos couldn’t take out all of us.’
    ‘OK. And this Gap is useful because—’
    ‘Because you can just step into space. You see, on world Gap Minus One, you put on a spacesuit, step over – and there you are, gently orbiting the sun. No need to ride a rocket the size of a skyscraper to fight Earth’s gravity, because there ain’t no Earth there. And once you’re out there, you can go anywhere. That’s the dream, anyhow. Access to space.’
    Jansson’s head was drooping. ‘Can’t wait to see it. In the morning, yes?’
    ‘In the morning. You sleep. I’ll put the tent up before it gets dark. Are you hungry?’
    ‘No, thanks. And I took my meds.’ She lay down again, pulling the blankets over her.
    ‘Goodnight, then.’
    ‘Goodnight, Sally.’
    As Jansson slipped back into sleep Sally sat silently, perhaps the only awake, sapient mind on this planet.
    And as the light dimmed, and the battered moon brightened, she felt as if someone had knocked out the walls of her mind. The landscape, a grassy hillside stretching away before her, seemed to acquire depth, otherness in a direction she could almost see. It was bottomless, multi-dimensional, endless. She had once dreamed that she had found out how to fly; it was absurdly easy, all you had to do was jump into the air and jump again when you were up there . Now she chased the tantalizing feeling that all she needed was the trick of it and she could step away, not into one world at a time, but spread across the Long Earth, a whole thick band of worlds, all at once. The very air around her felt prickly, the land as insubstantial as smoke.
    But then Jansson coughed, and moaned softly in her sleep. Sally’s infinity high evaporated as quickly as it had come.

32
    S LOWLY THE CREW of the Franklin got used to their troll crewmates.
    That didn’t apply to all the colonies they visited, though.
    New Melfield was a grubby and unprepossessing farming community in the Corn Belt. The whole township turned out when the Franklin descended – and seemed uniformly astonished when a family of trolls followed the human crew down the lowered gangway.
    The trolls and the rest strolled around while Maggie chatted to the local mayor, passed over Datum documentation, and generally engaged the man and put him at his ease. Indeed he evidently needed his ease putting at, for her briefing had pegged this place as yet another nasty little locus of spite towards trolls, not to mention humans and other dumb animals. Well, change had to start by degrees.
    So by mid-morning this mayor had three trolls in his office, actually sitting on chairs; trolls just loved chairs, especially if they swivelled. And when Maggie had finished the coffee she’d been offered, she said clearly, ‘Wash up, please, Carl.’
    The young troll, holding the mug like an heirloom, looked around the room, spotted the open door to the little coffee station and sink area in the room next door, carefully washed the mug in the sink, and placed it just as carefully in a rack. Then he walked back to