The Long Earth

33

ON THEY SAILED, leaving the intricate humanoid community far behind. They were travelling east for now, away from the Pacific coast and back into the interior of the continent.

And, almost unobserved, they passed another milestone: a million steps from Datum. There was no dramatic change, no new perception, only the silent turning-over of a new digit on the earthometers. But now they were in the worlds the wavefront pioneers called the High Meggers. Nobody, not even Lobsang, knew for sure if anybody had actually stepped this far before.

The jungle that clad North America gradually grew thicker, denser, steamier. From the air you saw little but a green blanket, punctured here and there by scraps of open water. Lobsang’s aerial surveys suggested that in these worlds there might be forests all the way to the ice-free poles.

As before, every day Lobsang paused to allow Joshua down to explore, and stretch his legs. Joshua would find himself in a dense forest of ferns of all sizes, and trees both unfamiliar and familiar, strung with climbers like honeysuckle and grapevines. The flowers were always a riot of colour. Some days Joshua came back with bunches of grape-like fruit, small and hard compared with domesticated varieties of grape, but still sweet. The dense forest inhibited the growth of large animals, but there were strange hopping animals, a little like kangaroos but with long flexible snouts. Joshua learned to trust these creatures, whose trails, cleared through the undergrowth, led reliably to open water. And he saw aerial creatures in the canopy itself. Giant flapping wings. And, once, a flopping, squirming thing that looked for all the world like an octopus, spinning like a Frisbee through the canopy trees. How the hell had that got there?

He spent a couple of nights outside the ship, just for old time’s sake. It was almost like his sabbaticals, especially if he stepped a world or two away from Lobsang, but his lord and master didn’t approve of that. Still, when he got the chance he would sit by his fire, listening for the Silence. On a good night he thought he could feel the other Earths, vast empty spaces all around him, just beyond the reach of his tiny circle of firelight. Untold possibilities. And then he would climb back up to the airship, leaving behind a whole world with its own unique mysteries barely examined.

On they would travel, to another, and another yet.

And then, after fifty days, more than one and a third million worlds from home, the land and air seemed to shimmer, and the forest melted as the worlds cleared away, to reveal a sea that stretched to the horizon, foam-flecked and glimmering, at the heart of North America.

Still stepping, Lobsang turned the airship south, looking for dry land.

On world after world the sea persisted, teeming with life, the green of algal blooms, pale white shapes that might have been coral reefs, and creatures that jumped and swam that might have been dolphins. Cautious dips to the water level proved that the sea was saline. That didn’t necessarily mean this American Sea was open to the wider world ocean; inland seas could become saline through evaporation. The water samples Lobsang retrieved were full of exotic seaweed strands and crustaceans — exotic to a specialist anyhow. Lobsang stored specimens and images.

At last, heading south, they hit a coastline. Lobsang cut the stepping, and they inspected one particular world of this latest band, selected at random. They came to fog banks first, then huge bird-like forms swooping low over the sea, and then the land itself, where dense forest spilled almost all the way down to the shore. Lobsang thought that the higher land they were approaching might be some relative of the Ozark Plateau.

From here they sailed east until they came to a tremendous valley, perhaps carved by some distant cousin of the Mississippi or the Ohio. They followed this north to an estuary where the river spilled into the inland sea. The fresh water pushing into the saline ocean was visible from a muddy discoloration that persisted miles out from the coast.

And here, in the open, by the banks of the freshwater river, the animals came to drink. As they cruised on, once more stepping through the worlds, Joshua watched herds of tremendous beasts flick into existence and vanish, quadrupeds and bipeds, creatures that might almost have been elephants, others that might almost have been flightless birds, with lesser creatures running at their feet. A few seconds’ glimpse, and then another extraordinary, unearthly scene, and then another.

‘Like a Ray Harryhausen show reel,’ Lobsang said.

Joshua asked, ‘Who’s Ray Harryhausen? And what’s a show reel?’

‘Tonight’s movie will be the original version of Jason and the Argonauts, followed by an illustrated talk. Don’t miss it. But — what a find, Joshua! This American Sea, I mean. All this coastline. What a place to come and colonize! This North America has a second Mediterranean, an enclosed sea, with all the riches and cultural connectivity that promises. As for the potential for colonization, it knocks the Corn Belt into a cocked hat. Why, this could be the seat of a new civilization altogether. Not to mention the opportunities for tourism. Just one of these worlds alone — and we’ve already sailed over hundreds of them.’

Joshua said dryly, ‘Maybe they’ll call it “the Lobsang Belt”.’

If Lobsang got the joke he didn’t reveal it.

Another night, another easy sleep for Joshua.

And when he awoke the next morning the monitor in his room showed what looked like a close-up of a campfire.

Joshua jumped out of bed. Lobsang came into his room when he was pulling on his pants, causing him to pull a little quicker. He would have to teach Lobsang the meaning of the word knock.

Lobsang smiled. ‘Good morning, Joshua, on this auspicious day.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Joshua had no time for Lobsang’s nonsense today. The idea of company, authentic, undeniably human company, was electrifying. Socks, sturdy boots… ‘OK, I’m ready to go down. Lobsang — that fire, whoever built it. Are they human?’

‘Apparently so. You might find her sunbathing among the dinosaurs.’

‘Dinosaurs! Her! Sunbathing!’

‘You’ll have to see for yourself. But be careful, Joshua. The dinosaurs look amiable enough. Well, some of them. But she might bite…’

Apart from the elevator there was now a second means of getting to the ground, a highly technical business which consisted of an old car tire (scavenged from a store of random garbage in the airship’s capacious hold), a length of rope and a simple panic button on Joshua’s chest pack which could call the tire down, or, more importantly, get it moving quickly back up if he were being chased. Joshua felt better for having installed this escape mechanism as a backup after his encounter with the murderous elves, and these days always insisted on having the tire at ground level, ready to run directly towards in an emergency.

Now he was being lowered towards a new Earth, once again. And there was another human here … somewhere. He could feel it. He really could. People made a world feel different, to Joshua.

As was becoming customary for Lobsang, he had decided to land Joshua a little way from the target to allow for a cautious approach, as opposed to a drop from out of the open sky. So the airship floated over the edge of the estuary, a place of scattered trees, scrub, marshland and small lakes. The air was fresh but laden with the smells of salt, and a kind of wet-rot stink from the jungle’s edge — and a subtler, drier scent, Joshua thought as he descended, that he couldn’t quite place. The denser forest lapped to the edge of this muddy plain, tumbling down from the higher land to the south. And that thread of smoke rose up from somewhere inland.

Joshua came down a little way from the water’s edge, in the forest. Once on the ground he walked forward, watchfully, heading for the smoke. ‘I smell … dryness. Rust. It’s like the reptile house in a zoo.’

‘This world may be very different from the Datum, Joshua. We’ve come a long way across the contingency tree.’

The forest cleared away, revealing a stretch of beach, the slow-moving water. And on a bluff of rocks, close to the water, Joshua came upon a group of fat, big, seal-like creatures lazing in the sun, around a dozen including a few infants. Pale blond hair lay streamlined along their heavy bodies, and they had small, almost conical heads with black eyes, and small mouths, and flat nostrils like a chimp’s. They were like seals with 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 tree of the possible, on a planet where dramatic but quasi-random extinction events periodically obliterate much of the family of life, leaving room for evolutionary innovation. On each Earth, however, the outcomes will differ, by a little or a lot… You are close to the campfire now. Head for the water.’

With a crunch of trampled undergrowth a new set of animals moved through the forest clump, heading for the estuary and the fresh water. Through the trees Joshua glimpsed low-slung bodies, horns, tremendous coloured crests. There were several of these animals, the adults taller than Joshua at the shoulder, the calves weaving through the moving pillars of the adults’ legs. Immense beasts, but dwarfed by the big marsupial he’d glimpsed earlier. They were making for the water, so Joshua followed as best he could.

He came to the edge of the forest by a braid of fresh water. Across the estuary’s marshy plain huge flocks of birds, or bird-like creatures, strutted, squabbled and fed. The marsh flowers were a mass of colour under a deep blue sky. Joshua thought he saw the ridged backs of more crocodilians sliding through the deeper water. By the water’s edge, those big crested beasts crowded to drink.

And at the edge of a beach of white sand, upright, bipedal lizards were catching some rays, basking. Smaller specimens chased back and forth across the sand and occasionally dived into the surf, such as it was. They were remarkably human in their playfulness, like Californian teenagers. Then one of the bigger bipeds noticed Joshua and prodded its nearest neighbour. There was an exchange of hissing, after which the miniature dinosaur of the second part returned to snoozing, while the first one sat up and watched Joshua with bright-eyed interest.

‘Fun, aren’t they?’ A woman’s voice.

Joshua whirled around, his heart hammering.

The woman was short, sturdy, her blonde hair tied back in an efficient bun. She wore a useful-looking sleeveless jacket that was all pockets. She looked a little older than Joshua: early thirties, maybe. Her face was square, regular, strong rather than pretty, tanned deep by the weather. She eyed him, appraising.

‘They’re quite harmless unless attacked,’ she said. ‘Smart, too; they have a division of labour and they make things that you might call tools. Digging sticks, at least, for the clams. On top of that, they make crude but serviceable boats, and fairly sophisticated fish traps. That means observation, deduction, cogitation and teamwork, and the concept of mortgaging today for a better tomorrow…’

Joshua was staring.

She laughed. ‘Don’t you think it’s time you closed your mouth?’ She held out her hand.

Joshua looked at it as if it were a weapon of war.

‘I know you. You’re Joshua Valienté, aren’t you? I knew I would run into you some day. Small worlds, don’t you think?’

Joshua was frozen. ‘Who are you?’

‘Call me… Sally.’

In Joshua’s ear the voice of Lobsang insisted, ‘Invite her to the ship! Tempt her! We have superb cuisine, somewhat wasted on you, I must say. Offer her sex! Whatever you do, get her on this damn ship!’

Joshua whispered, ‘Lobsang? You really don’t know anything about human relationships.’

He sounded offended. ‘I have read every treatise on human sexuality ever written. And I had a body once. How do you think that baby Tibetans are made? Look, it doesn’t matter. We must bring this young lady aboard. Think about it! What is a nice girl like her doing in the High Meggers?’

Lobsang had a point. Whoever she was — how had she got here, more than a million steps out? Was she a natural stepper, someone who didn’t get the nausea, like Joshua? Fine. But there were only so many times you could step in a day. He could manage a thousand steps a day unaided. Surely everybody needed to sleep and eat? You could step-hunt an unwary deer once you had the hang of it, but field dressing and cookery couldn’t be hurried, and that slowed you down… It would take years to step out this far.

She was watching him suspiciously. ‘What are you thinking? Who were you talking to?’

‘Umm, the captain of my ship.’ Not exactly a lie, and since the Sisters had always been rather down on lying, Joshua was relieved.

‘Really? You mean that ridiculous floating gasbag, I suppose. And how big is the crew of that monster? Incidentally, Robur the Conqueror, I hope you have no designs on this world. I rather like these little guys.’

Joshua looked down. The miniature dinosaurs had formed a circle around the pair of them and were carefully balancing upright, like meerkats, with curiosity just outweighing caution.

‘The captain would like you to come aboard,’ Joshua managed.

She smiled. ‘Aboard that thing? Not a chance in hell, mister, no offence meant… However,’ she said more hesitantly, ‘do you have any soap? I make my own lye soap, of course, but I wouldn’t say no to something a little more easy on the skin.’

‘I’m sure—’

‘Maybe with rose scent.’

‘Is that all?’

‘And some chocolate.’

‘Of course.’

‘In exchange I offer … information. OK?’

The voice in Joshua’s ear prompted, ‘Ask her what information she can give us that we cannot find out for ourselves.’

When asked, Sally snorted. ‘I don’t know. What can you find out for yourselves? By the look of all those aerials and dishes up there you could probably hack God’s email.’

Joshua said, ‘Look, I’m going back up, and will grab some soap and chocolate, and will come right back down, OK? Just don’t go away.’

To his embarrassment Sally burst out laughing. ‘My-oh-my, a real gentleman. I bet you were a Boy Scout.’

As he rose up to the Mark Twain Lobsang whispered in his ear, ‘If there is a more efficient way of stepping, it is vital that we find out what it is!’

‘I know, Lobsang, I know! I’m working on it.’ But right now a stepping mystery was the last thing on Joshua’s mind.

They ate lunch on the beach: fresh-caught oysters on an open fire.

The encounter fazed Joshua more than somewhat. He wasn’t used to the company of women, not women without wimples anyhow. Back in the Home all the girls were more or less like his sisters, and the nuns were all possessed of laser eyesight and over-the-horizon hearing: when it came to the opposite sex you were under constant surveillance. And if you spent a lot of time out on the new Earths, seldom seeing another person at all, anyone that you did meet was a nuisance, taking up your space.

And, right now, there was the added distraction of a circle of miniature dinosaurs, craning their necks this way and that so as not to miss the action. It was like being watched by a bunch of curious kids. He felt as if he should be offering them a few bucks to take themselves to the movies.

But he needed to talk to this enigmatic Sally. It was a tension within him, a huge unfulfilled need. And, looking at her, he thought she felt the same.

‘Don’t worry about the dinos,’ she said. ‘They’re no threat, though they are pretty smart. And they’re very bright when it comes to keeping clear of the larger dinos and the crocs. I make a point of coming back to see how they’re doing every so often.’

‘How? How did you get here, Sally?’

Sally poked the embers of her fire, and the little creatures jumped back, startled. ‘Well, that’s none of your business. That was the code of the Old West, and it’s sure as shit the same here. These oysters roast up wonderfully, don’t they?’

They did. Joshua had just eaten his fourth. ‘I taste something like bacon, and I’ve seen plenty of pig-like animals, they look like a universal. But this tastes as if it’s got Worcester sauce in it. Am I right?’

‘More or less. I travel prepared.’ Sally looked at him, with the juice of oysters Kilpatrick leaking from her lips. ‘A deal, right? I will be frank with you, and you will be frank with me. Well, within limits. Let me tell you what I already think I know about you. First, that bloody great thing floating up there contains only one person, I’m guessing. Because when you found me, any crew would have been swarming all over me and my little world. And, plus you, that means a crew of two people. Big ship for two people, no? Second, it looks mighty expensive, and since the universities don’t have that kind of money and governments don’t have the imagination, that means some corporation or other. I guess it was Douglas Black?’ She smiled. ‘Don’t blame yourself, you didn’t give anything away. Black is smart, and this is just his style.’

There was silence from Joshua’s earpiece.

She read Joshua’s slight hesitation. ‘No word from headquarters? Oh come on! Sooner or later anyone who has a talent that interests Douglas Black ends up working for him. My own father did. Although in fact the money isn’t really the lure. Because if you’re really good, your friend Douglas will give you a sack of toys to play with, like that airship up there. Isn’t that right?’

‘I’m not an employee of Black.’

‘Just contracting, is that the fig leaf?’ she said dismissively. ‘You know, in their headquarters in New Jersey every employee of the Corporation wears a little earpiece just like yours, so that Douglas himself can talk to them individually whenever he likes. Even his silence is threatening, they say. But one day my father said, “I am not going to wear this thing any more.” And right now, Joshua, you will do me the courtesy of taking yours off. I don’t mind talking to you. I heard about you, how you saved all those kids on Step Day, you’re obviously a decent human being. But take off that modern-day slave bracelet.’

Joshua did so, feeling guilty.

Sally gave a little nod of satisfaction. ‘Now we can talk.’

‘There’s nothing sinister about us,’ Joshua said tentatively — although he wasn’t entirely sure how true that was. ‘We are out here to explore. To look and learn, to map the Long Earth. Well, that’s the expedition’s intention.’ Or was, he thought, before it became focused on the issue of the humanoid migrations, the disturbance they perceived in the Long Earth.

‘Not your intention. You aren’t an explorer, Joshua Valienté, whatever else you are. Why are you here?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m a failsafe, if you want the truth. Hired muscle.’

She grinned at that. ‘Ha!’

He said, ‘You say your father worked for Black.’

‘Yes.’

‘What did he do?’

‘He invented the Stepper. Though that was on his own time.’

‘Your father was Willis Linsay?’ Joshua just stared, thinking of Step Day, and how his own life had been changed by what Linsay had done.

She smiled. ‘All right. You want the full story? I’m from a family of steppers. Natural steppers… Oh, close your mouth, Joshua. My grandfather could step, my mother could step and I can step. My father couldn’t step, however, and that’s why he needed to invent something like the Stepper box. So he did. I first stepped when I was four. And I soon found out that Dad could step if he was holding my hand. They took a photograph of us. I never had any problem with it, the magic-door stuff, because of Mom. Mom was a reader, and she read to me Tolkien and Larry Niven and E. Nesbit and just about everything else. I was home-schooled, needless to say. And I grew up with my own Narnia! To tell the truth, since Step Day I’ve become pissed at having to share my secret place with the rest of the world. But back then Mom explained to me that I shouldn’t ever tell anyone what I could do.’

Joshua listened, dumbfounded. He could barely imagine how it must have been to be part of a family of steppers, a family all like himself.

‘It was pretty good in those days. I often hung out with Dad in his shed, because the shed was in another world — though, of course, I had to lead him in and out of that other Wyoming.

‘But Dad was hardly ever there, because he was always jetting away, wherever the Black people wanted him, and that could be anywhere from MIT to some research lab in Scandinavia or South Africa. Sometimes, late at night, a helicopter might turn up, and he’d get in, and then maybe an hour later he’d be back home and the chopper was flying away. When I asked him what he’d been doing, it was always, “Just some stuff, that’s all.” But that was OK by me because my Dad knew best. He knew everything.

‘I didn’t know anything about his work projects. But I wasn’t surprised when he succeeded in inventing the Stepper. He was an unusual mix of brilliant theoretician and hands-on engineer; I believe he’s come closer than anybody else to figuring out the true nature of the Long Earth… But it did him no good when Mom died. That was one problem he couldn’t untangle with technology. Things got weird after that.’ Sally hesitated. ‘I mean more weird than before.

‘He kept working. But I got the impression that he stopped caring about what he was working on, and what it was for. He’d always been ethical, you know? A hippie from a long line of hippies. Now he didn’t care.

‘But he was living a double life. He kept stuff like the Stepper hidden away. Dad did like hiding things. He said he learned it in his hippie days when he hid his marijuana plantation in the cellar. He showed me once. It had a secret door that would only open if one loose nail was pushed just so far and one of the paint pots was turned ninety degrees, and then a panel would slide, and there was a large space that you couldn’t believe was there, and you could still smell where the plants had been…

‘So that’s my story. I always stepped, I grew up with it; Step Day was just a bump in the road to my family. Whereas you had to discover stepping for yourself, didn’t you, Joshua? I heard you were brought up by nuns. It’s part of your legend.’

‘I don’t want a legend.’

‘Nuns, eh? Did they beat you up, or try anything … funny?’

Joshua narrowed his eyes. ‘There was none of that stuff. Well, apart from Sister Mary Joseph, and Sister Agnes had her out of there in an hour, boy, had she got the wrong number. But, yeah, it was a totally weird place, looking back. But the right kind of weird. Good weird. The nuns had a lot of freedom. We read Carl Sagan before the Old Testament.’

‘Freedom. Well, I can sympathize with that. That’s why my father walked out on Douglas Black. Douglas found out about the Stepper box one day, he somehow forced it out of my Dad. With Mom gone and everything I think Dad was beginning to hate people anyhow. But what Black did was the final straw. One day Dad just disappeared. He took a post at Princeton under phony credentials. But that was kind of high profile, so when he got a sniff of a pursuit by Black he went out to Madison, took a college post under another assumed name. He took the Stepper technology he was developing with him. I followed and went to college out there. Didn’t see much of him. I guess I kept a watching eye on him, however. His real name isn’t Willis Linsay, by the way.’

‘I didn’t think it was.’

‘And that was when he decided, because he suspected the Black Corporation was on his tail again, that he would give stepping to the whole world, so no one could own it or put chains around it, or slap a tax on it. He really didn’t like big industry, and he really didn’t like governments. I think he hoped the world would be a much better place if everybody was able to step out of their grasp. As far as I know he is still alive out here somewhere.’

‘And is that why you’re out here? Looking for him?’

‘One reason.’

There was a curious change in the air. The little dinosaurs stood, stretching, their gaze combing the sky. Joshua looked at Sally. She didn’t react; she was carefully retrieving the last wayward oyster in the pan with a stick.

He asked, ‘Do you think he was right to do what he did? With the Stepper?’

‘Well, maybe. At least he gave people a new option. Although he said people were going to have to learn to think, out there in the Long Earth. He said once, “I am giving mankind the key to endless worlds. An end to scarcity and, may we hope, war. And perhaps a new meaning to life. I leave the exploration of all these worlds to your generation, my dear, though personally I think you will fuck it up royally.” Why are you looking at me like that?’

‘Your father said that to you?’

Sally shrugged. ‘I told you. He was a hippie born of generations of hippies. He was always saying things like that.’

At that moment the loudspeaker voice of Lobsang boomed out over the beach, startling the small dinosaurs again. ‘Joshua! Back to the ship right now! Emergency!’

There was a strange new smell in the air, like burning plastic. Joshua looked at the northern horizon; there was a grey cloud, and it was getting bigger.

‘I call them suckers,’ said Sally calmly. ‘Rather like dragonflies. They pump a venom into anything organic, which breaks down cells remarkably fast, and you become a bag of soup that they suck up, as if through a straw. For some reason they don’t bother the dinosaurs. Your electronic friend is right about the emergency, Joshua. Now run along, there’s a good boy.’

And she disappeared.