The Long Mars Read Online Free PDF

stepwise worlds. You’ve got people building farms and homes from nothing, with their bare hands. And all those animals nobody ever saw before. No, I’d say we have to be humble, not just claim that it’s all ours.’
    David said, ‘That does sound wise, Eileen—’
    ‘I feel angry sometimes,’ Eileen said bluntly. ‘Oh, just as angry as that fellow Boyd on the TV, probably. I sometimes think this place, Datum Earth, is so foul and messed up that it’s the source of all evil. That all the innocent worlds of the Long Earth would be better off if this place could be stoppered up, somehow. Like a big old bottle.’
    David said gently, ‘You can see why I asked for your help, Nelson. People do get superstitious, you know, in apocalyptic times like these.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Over in Much Nadderby, there have been mutterings about a case of witchcraft.’
    ‘Witchcraft!’
    ‘Or possibly a demonic possession. A little boy who was brighter than the rest – eerily so. One tries to calm things down, of course. But now this nonsense from the Vatican!’ He shook his head. ‘Sometimes I feel we’re so foolish we deserve all the suffering we get.’
    And Nelson, who had become a close ally of Lobsang – or, as Lobsang had put it, a ‘valuable long-term investment’ – knew that Lobsang, at least some of the time, would agree.
    ‘This is what I’d like you to do. Go with her, Nelson. Go out with Eileen, at least for a while. God knows I’m too old. But you . . . Go with her. Bless her. Bless the land she and her children settle in. Baptize them anew, if they wish. Whatever it takes to reassure her that God is with her, wherever she takes her children. And whatever the wretched Pope says.’
    Nelson smiled. ‘Of course.’
    David stood up. ‘Thank you. I’ll fetch us another pot of tea.’
    Lobsang longed for his friends.
    At least, in the aftermath of Yellowstone, they had been drawn back to the Datum, like emergency workers rushing towards the fire. Lobsang had welcomed their company, even when, like Joshua Valienté, they seemed to have little time for him. But as the years had worn away since the eruption, and the situation stabilized, they came back less and less, they resumed their own lives, far away once more.
    Sally Linsay, for instance. Who, four years after the eruption, could have been found on a parallel world some one hundred and fifty thousand steps away from Datum Earth. Although Sally Linsay was always very, very hard to find . . .
    You could call it Sally’s mission in life to be hard to find. Although in fact her life was full of missions, especially when it came to the flora and fauna of the Long Earth, about which she was quite passionate.
    Which was why, in this late fall of 2044, she had come to an otherwise unremarkable settlement, in the middle of the Corn Belt, in a stepwise Idaho: a place called Four Waters City.
    And why she was carefully placing the gagged and bound body of a hunter by the back door of the sheriff’s office.
    The guy was awake while she was doing it, his piggy eyes staring at her in alarm. He didn’t know his luck, she thought. He probably didn’t feel all that lucky, but given the kind of bad luck you sometimes got when it came to the ears of Sally Linsay that you had killed a troll – a female, a mother, and about to give birth . . . At least she hadn’t cut off his trigger finger for him. At least he was still alive. And the itching that was agonizing him now, induced by the venomous spines of a very useful plant she’d discovered up in the High Meggers, was probably going to subside, oh, in a couple of years, no more. Plenty of time for him to reflect on his sins, she thought. Call it tough love.
    And it was precisely because she was so hard to find that places she was known to call at – like Four Waters City, even though her visits were not frequent and certainly not regular – were so useful for getting in touch with Sally if you really,