Terra's World Read Online Free PDF

Those will have been for me, she thought.
    After a few seconds. ‘You all right, Bill? How was the movie?’
    ‘Dad. You know you always told me to think of life as an adventure?’
    ‘Yes?’ A note of trepidation.
    ‘Well, I think the adventure’s starting, Dad. I can’t quite explain, but I won’t be home for a while.’
    ‘Are you okay, Bill? You’re not in trouble, are you?’
    ‘No. No, I’m not in trouble, Dad. But I’m off on a journey, and I know you’d be okay about it if you knew where I was going.’
    ‘You can’t tell me? You can’t tell me where you’re going?’ Not panic, just intense curiosity.
    Billy swallowed hard. He stood up and went to the porthole. Earth was a tiny blue sliver of light. ‘Look up, Dad. Just . . . look up.’
    Silence, except the gentle hum of the gravity engines.
    ‘I’m losing signal, Dad. I love you.’
    Billy wasn’t sure he’d actually ever said that before.
    ‘I love you too, Bill.’
    The comm beeped. The keypad disappeared, replaced by a jumble of strange symbols. Billy looked through the porthole. Earth was a blue dot.
    ‘You’d better sit back down,’ said Terra, as a high-pitched whirring sound started to come up through the floor. ‘That’s the neutrino shunt kicking in – we’re about to go infra-light.’
    ‘Like in Star Wars ?’
    ‘Bit of a confession, Billy – I still haven’t seen Star Wars .’
    Billy scrambled into his chair. ‘Don’t bother with the prequels,’ he said.
     

 
     
     
    1.7
     
     
     
    P hil ‘Sparky’ Sparks was in pain, and annoyed. Annoyed with himself at forgetting one of his own golden rules ( ALWAYS pay one last visit to the gents’ before the pub closes; even if you don’t feel like you need it now, you will the minute the door shuts behind you). Annoyed with the Duke’s Arms for selling such weak lager so cheaply. Annoyed with his friends for having bought him quite so much of it, and just annoyed in general that there didn’t seem to be any public toilets in this country any more.
    With a mounting sense of urgency, Sparky surveyed his surroundings. His bleary eyes darted left and right, desperate to see an open late-night café, kebab shop, 24-hour garage, anywhere he might be able to empty his straining bladder in warmth and comfort and without fear of arrest. No such refuge was to be found. Sighing, and wincing, Sparky abandoned all thoughts of propriety and dignity and hobble-shuffle-scampered into the back entry behind the cinema.
    Having looked over his shoulder to check that he had put enough distance and darkness between himself and the street, Sparky now peered into the gloom of the alley in order to pick the least appalling spot in which to perform the necessary. He spied a pile of bin bags, split, teetering, disgorging their fetid contents onto the concrete. Ah, well, he thought, that corner already stinks.
    Sparky put one hand out to steady himself against the wall and set the other to work fiddling with his zip. His foot shifted, nudging the bin bags. The bin bags nudged back.
    Sparky paused with his zip-fiddling, the pain in his bladder suddenly overruled by curiosity. His eyes struggled to pierce the darkness. Was there someone under the bin bags?
    He reached out. His hand touched cold plastic, searched below, found . . . bone? . . . shell?
    The pile of bin bags exploded outwards. He saw something – alive, man-sized, but very definitely NOT human. He glimpsed claws, shiny, segmented limbs, eyes. A glimpse was all he needed. Sparky fled, wailing, into the street, having forgotten all about why he went into the alley in the first place, and only dimly aware of a spreading warmth that told him it was too late to worry about that now, anyway.
    * * *
     
    David Crew was a kindly but serious-minded individual. In particular, he took his responsibilities as a police officer extremely seriously. Even when off duty, he maintained an instinctive level of vigilance. He was ‘never off ’, as