The Long Earth Read Online Free PDF Page B

‘You really think orcs?’
    ‘No. I don’t think orcs. But I don’t know what to think. Look, Joshua , you put your box down for me, so I’m putting my card down here where you can pick it up, OK? My personal number. I have a feeling we should stay in touch, you and I.’ She took a couple of steps back, holding the box. ‘Good workmanship!’
    But now another car was coming up, lights blazing. Officer Jansson looked round. ‘Just other policemen checking up,’ she said, ‘don’t worry—’
    There was a faint
pop
.
    She looked at the box in her hand, and at the empty pavement. ‘Joshua?’
    Joshua realized immediately that he’d left his box behind.
    He’d stepped without the box! And, worse, that cop had
seen
him step without the box. Now he was in trouble.
    So he got away. He just kept stepping, away from where he’d been, whatever
away
meant. He didn’t stop, or slow down. He just kept going, one step after the next, each step like a soft jolt in his gut. One world after another, as if it was a series of rooms. One step after the next away from Officer Jansson. Deeper into this corridor of forest.
    As he pressed on there was no more city, no buildings, no lights, no people. Just this forest, but a forest that changed with every step. Trees came out of nowhere with one step and disappeared with the next, like bits of scenery in the plays the kids had to put on in the Home, yet all the trees seemed real, all hard and solid and deep-rooted in the earth. Sometimes it was warmer, sometimes a little colder. But there was always the forest, around him. And it was always dawn. Some things didn’t change, then: the ground, solid under his feet, the dawn sky. That pleased him, to detect order in this new world.
    The instructions on the internet had said nothing about stepping without a box, but he was doing it anyhow. The thought gave him a lurching sensation, as if he were standing over a drop. But it was a thrill too, a rule-breaking thrill. Like the time he and Billy Chambers had borrowed a bottle of Bud from the builders who had come to fix the busted window, and had drunk it in a corner of the boiler room, and then smashed the bottle and put it in the recycling bin. He grinned at the memory.
    He just kept going, moving aside for the trees when he needed to. But the trees changed, gradually. Now he was surrounded by rougher bark, low branches with narrow prickly leaves. A forest of pine trees. Colder, too. But it was still a forest, and still he pushed on.
    And he came to a Wall. A place where he couldn’t step on, no matter how he walked sideways. He even took a few paces back and kind of ran at it, trying to force his way onward. It didn’t hurt, it was like running into a huge upraised palm. But he couldn’t go forward.
    If he couldn’t push through this thick forest maybe he could climb above it. He found a tall tree, the tallest around. He pulled himself up to the lowest branches, and scrambled up higher. Pine needles prickled his hands. Every six feet or so he would try stepping sideways, just to see if he could, but the Wall was still there.
    And then it worked, suddenly.
    He fell forward on to a flat floor, like uneven, smoothed-over concrete, hard and dry and grey. There was no tree, no forest. Just the air, the sky, and this floor. And it was
cold
, cold through the thin fabric of his jeans over his knees, cold under his bare hands. Ice!
    He stood up. His breath steamed around his face. The cold was like daggers probing through his clothes to his flesh. The whole world was covered in ice. He was in a kind of broad gully, carved in the ice, which rose up in hard grey mounds around him. Old ice, dirty ice. The sky was clear, the empty blue-grey of an early dawn. Nothing moved, not a bird, not a plane, and on the ground he didn’t see a building, or a single living thing, not so much as a blade of grass.
    He grinned.
    Then he stepped back to the pine forest, disappearing with a soap-bubble