A Blink of the Screen: Collected Short Fiction

by Terry Pratchett

  What? Oh, that was just that lot next door again. They’ve found 27 different ways Stonehenge couldn’t possibly have been built. No, I shouldn’t go and look, if I was you. They’ve already lost fifteen villagers, three cameramen, and the Blue Peter outside broadcast unit.

  That site over there? The empty one with the pond? Oh, that’s the Irish Television’s Jurassic Experiment. Yes, I know it’s pretty difficult to find actors 30 foot tall with scaly skins – I suppose they’ll have to, you know, rig up some sort of pantomime horses, only dinosaurs, if you see what I mean. They had to go back to the Jurassic, all the other periods have already been pinched by other companies—

  My word! That was a heavy one! Nearly brought the hut down!

  It was a whole trilithon went over that time. Oh – it’s okay, all it got was a sociologist. Last winter, when we couldn’t go hunting, a whole research team from Keele University disappeared in very mysterious circumstances, nudge nudge, so take my tip and refuse any sausages you get offered by the Bronze Age lot.

  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve just got to do a bit of pottery …

  NOTE: This was followed by a photograph of an ancient-style tent village with arrows and the following captions:

  ‘Anyone see what I did with my library book?’

  ‘Gosh, rat soup, my favourite.’

  ‘Of course the goat is angry. You’re sitting in her seat.’

  ‘Hey, I’ve invented a druid-yourself kit.’

  ‘Only another five months, three weeks, four days to go.’

  ‘After you with the midden.’

  ‘What I miss most is Points West.’

  THE HIGH MEGGAS

  1986

  The short story evolved into The Long Earth. The High Meggas was rather a doodle at first, something to do after I had sent The Colour of Magic to my then publishers, Colin Smythe. I could visualize it minutely and wanted to begin with a series of short stories. I was still playing with the ideas when The Colour of Magic was published and inexplicably became very popular, far more successful than any of my previous books.

  And in those circumstances, what is a humble jobbing author supposed to do? The basis of The Light Fantastic was already dancing in my mind and gathering momentum and so with some reluctance I put The High Meggas, which I had previously thought would one day make the foundation to a great series, under wraps until it was unearthed a few years ago over quail’s eggs at a literary dinner attended by Ralph Vicinanza, my American agent, and Rob Wilkins. My enthusiasm was rekindled and after discussing the ideas with Steve Baxter, who I have always considered to be the UK’s finest writer of hard SF, a new journey began.

  Frankly I’m glad we did it this way; besides it was a lot more fun.

  They said that Daniel Boone would pull up and move on if he could see the smoke from another man’s fire. Compared with Larry Linsay, Boone was pathologically gregarious. There was someone else on this world. His world. It was like finding a fingernail in your soup. It irked. It made the small hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

  Linsay had rigged an array of antennae in the pines at the top of the rise. In the virgin wavebands of this world the tiny blip of an arrival was crystal clear; it stood out on the miniature displays like an Everest among the background molehills. Only one type of person would come up this far into the high meggas. The gumment. In Linsay’s vocabulary the word was as pregnant with meaning as some of the old Chinese words that expressed a whole stream of thought. It meant regulations, and taxes, and questions, and interference. Other people. It had to be the gumment because it took money to get into the high meggas, and generally it was the sort of money that only the gumment could muster. Besides, people didn’t like it this far out, where the tuning had to be so fine and it took several weeks of real-time travel to get to the next human being. People didn’t like being that far from people. But there were other reasons. Things started to be different in the high meggas.

  There was another blip. Two people. Linsay began to feel crowded.

  They had to be from Forward Base. Linsay was annoyed – he went to Forward Base, they didn’t come to him. Hard to think of any reason that would bring them up here. He imagined them looking around in astonishment, unable to find him. The third rule of survival up here was: keep away from your point of arrival.

  He took a bearing to make sure, picked up the rifle that leaned against his chart table, and set off through the scrub. Any watcher would have noticed how Linsay kept to shaded areas, broke cover only when he had to and broke cover fast. But there wasn’t any watcher. If there had been, Linsay would be creeping up behind him.

  People got the wrong idea about Robinson Crusoe. The popular image was of a jolly but determined man, heavily into goatskin underwear and manumission. But someone at Forward Base had loaned Linsay an old, battered copy of the book. Robinson Crusoe was on his island for over twenty-six years, Linsay learned, and had spent most of the time building stockades. Linsay approved of this: the man obviously had his head screwed on right.

  It was late summer here in what was approximately southern France, although the Fist had made such a mess of the coastline that it was barely recognizable. Here there were no longer just the spatter craters that had been such a feature a few tens of Earths back. Up here the Fist had raked across Europe and western Asia, sending major fragments barrelling towards the very core in tongues of plasma. There must have been several years of winter before the atmosphere dropped most of the dust. When it cleared, the seasons were all wrong. The colander that was Europe was slightly nearer the new Equator, the Earth had developed a wobble, and the ice caps were spreading fast.

  Mankind, however, was learning about Agriculture at the time and failed to notice. A pack of rantelopes watched Linsay cautiously. He didn’t hunt on this Earth – it was easy enough to hop back one for that – but all the same they weren’t entirely at ease. The winter following the Fist hadn’t wiped out all the primates, and some baboons in these parts were mean hunters.

  The bull baboon he’d christened Big Yin watched him from his perch on a rock. Linsay waved at him cheerfully. Big Yin had seen the rifle. He didn’t wave back.

  The man was crawling cautiously behind the inadequate cover of an outcrop of fused glass. He moved very much like a man who’d got his ideas about stealth from watching adventure films. He was holding a small handgun. It didn’t look as though it had much stopping power, but Linsay didn’t approve.

  He let off a shot that nicked the rock a few feet from the man’s head.

  ‘Throw the gun this way,’ he suggested.

  He watched shock, panic and resignation chase one another across the man’s face, as it scanned the thicket of anonymous bushes that had just spoken.

  ‘The gun,’ he repeated. He could make out the detail of the man’s belt. Gumment issue, of course, but light duty. That meant he could only have come up from Forward Base.

  ‘Okay, bush,’ said the man. He tossed the gun in Linsay’s general direction and slowly moved his hands …

  A sliver of rock nicked his ear as another round hit the glassy boulder beside him.

  ‘The belt, too,’ said the bush.

  ‘You’re Larry Linsay,’ said the man. ‘They said you were stone paranoid – no offence, you understand.’

  ‘None taken. Move those hands real careful now.’

  The hands moved real careful. ‘You don’t know me, I guess we never met. I’m Joshua Valienté. Security man. From Forward Base, you know?’

  He flinched as Linsay appeared only a few feet away. Approaching someone by movin’ up towards them through an adjacent world was an old trick, but it never failed to disconcert.

  Valienté found himself looking up into a pair of grey-blue eyes that were entirely without mercy. This bastard’d really shoot, he told himself. Don’t even look at your own gun. He’d really shoot you, up here where no one else will ever come. He wouldn’t even have to bury the body.

  ‘Prove it,’ said Li
nsay.

  Valienté shrugged what he hoped was an unaggressive shrug. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘All good security men carry little plastic cards,’ said Linsay. ‘They have little pictures of themselves in case they forget what they look like.’

  ‘Not when they’re off duty. Can I stand up?’

  Linsay stepped back. Possibly that meant yes. Valienté didn’t risk it.

  ‘There isn’t any Forward Base now,’ he said as levelly as he could. ‘The station’s there all right, but there aren’t any people. They’re dead.’ He paused, waiting for the reaction. It was like dropping a brick into a pool of treacle.

  ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I’ve got the gun. You talk.’

  ‘All right, you soulless bastard; someone poisoned them. You know the little spring, where they get the water? In there. I was out hunting. But I saw her when I came back. Smashing up equipment. Then she went movin’. I followed her up here until I caught your beacon.’

  Linsay regarded him for some time.

  ‘I go back to Base once in a while,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen you before. Didn’t even know they had security men.’

  ‘I only came up three weeks ago.’

  ‘I see you’ve been doing a great job,’ said Linsay.

  ‘Look, she’s here. Somewhere. And if we stand here all day then she’ll be at the other end of a trajectory.’

  The chase had taken four days, nearly. The murderer had used the Base’s generator to give an initial boost, but the guard had been bright enough to scavenge for spare charged batteries. They meant a weight penalty, but not for long. There was a trail of burnt-out cells across three thousand alternate Earths, discarded after a series of mind-punishing moves that drained the power and sent the guard pinwheeling across unsuspecting landscapes. Pity about the belt. There had been time either to take one of the more rugged models that were specifically designed for the high meggas, or to find extra batteries and a knapsack to carry them. There hadn’t been time for both.

  There ought to have been time to do something about the bodies. It hadn’t been a subtle poison, just a slow-acting one. There would have to be time later.

  The guard wasn’t very experienced at tacking on the move, but he knew one thing: never flip across alternate worlds without also moving laterally. It’s too easy for the quarry to wait for you right in the place you started from, and then he needn’t even shoot. A heavy stone would be sufficient.

  So the trick was to duck, flip and run, and take the occasional risk by jumping two or three worlds at once. They had both slept sporadically, in odd corners of the landscape. Meat was easy to come by, hard to cook. Once, they had arrived back to back, a few feet from each other. They both fired and flipped, so that two bullets sped away from each other over a deserted landscape, maybe the only artefacts that world would ever see.

  You don’t have to do this, the guard’s conscience kept repeating. No one expects you to do this, you’re not paid for it. Why play Mounties? Even if you win, how will you get back? It’ll take years, if you get back at all. And conscience was pushed against a metaphorical wall and told: because there were five children on the base, the youngest was three, and the poison attacked the nerves and they weren’t quite dead when I got there.

  And so they dodged and tracked across worlds as the microscopic changes began to multiply. Into the high meggas.

  There had been two blips on Linsay’s detector. The second one was lying in a crater, semi-conscious. From here he could see she too was wearing a basic belt, with limited detectors. It must have been like stepping into a well.

  Her gun was lying a few feet away. Linsay scooped it up and shoved it into a pocket, then turned his attention to the woman herself. She was wearing a red jumpsuit, ugly with pockets but highly practical for movin’, where what you couldn’t carry you didn’t take. A lightly built person could tote about sixty pounds of gear before battery drain began to soar. Most of the pockets were empty, but there were still a few unspent batteries. Linsay undid the belt and slung it over one shoulder. He picked up the woman and slung her over the other. Wrong, but there didn’t seem to be any obviously broken bones. If there were, then tough.

  A quarter of a mile away Valienté was tied to a tree and watching a pack of superbaboons. Judging by the sticks they carried they had already mastered the principle of the club and the hammer, and looked about ready to go on to trepanning and disembowelling. There was one that particularly concerned him, a big rangy brute with torn ears and yellow eyes as narrow and vindictive as the bridges of hell. It sat on a rock like a living gargoyle, just watching.

  A bullet kicked up dust at the foot of the rock. The superbaboon turned its muzzle eastwards and snarled soundlessly, bared teeth a row of yellow knives. Then it was gone, scampering ungracefully into the scrub with the rest of the troupe following it.

  Linsay appeared with the woman’s body over one shoulder. By some juggling, as Valienté couldn’t help noticing, the man contrived to untie his ropes without ever quite failing to point the rifle at him.

  ‘They could have killed me.’

  Linsay stepped back. ‘Quite probably,’ he said. ‘Big Yin is learning real fast. I think I might have to do something about him one day.’

  ‘Right now’d be favourite.’

  ‘Maybe I’ve got a soft spot for him.’

  Valienté doubted it; any soft spots of Linsay would still be diamonds.

  ‘He’s one of a kind. I’ve been all through the worlds round here and the same troupe is around, but not him. Maybe he’s some kind of mutant. Maybe the ’boons will inherit the earth.’

  There was something weird about the rifle. Without any apparent effort Linsay managed to keep it pointing towards him like a compass needle.

  ‘Is that necessary?’ said Valienté. ‘Even if you don’t believe my story you’ve still got my gun.’

  ‘Just walk.’

  Earths, untold Earths. More Earths than a computer could count, they said.

  It was hard to talk about them accurately without referring to folded universes and the quantum packet theory. It was even harder to explain to a TV audience how a belt worked; once you invited them to consider the multiplex universe as a rubber sheet the initiative was fumbled. The pack of cards analogy was totally inappropriate, although most people felt at home with it. The universe was in fact a large pack of three-dimensional cards. The belt allowed you to travel up and down the pack, boring, as it were, through the cards themselves.

  A belt was simple enough to build, if you were desperate enough not to worry about safety devices. All over the world, people were. All you needed was the transistor radio you’d earned via your vasectomy, about one hundred metres of copper wire, and blind faith that you wouldn’t emerge inside a tree.

  It was worth the risk. The nearby Earths were identical on all but the microscopic level. California was already sparsely colonized out to several K, and at the far ends was beginning to develop in ways that even Californians thought were nutty. In what remained of the USSR security men were combing nearby worlds for the previous lot of security men.

  The world was crowded, but the universe was empty. It was a gold economy. What was happening would make the Diaspora look like a family outing.

  Of course, some minds couldn’t cope.

  Linsay’s camp was tucked into a small hollow on a south-facing hillside; it was little more than a tent, and a slightly more substantial shed for the instruments. And, of course, there was a stockade. It was not large, and not high, but the thin red wire that ran around the top of it assured all the privacy Robinson Crusoe could have desired.

  Outside the tent was a small solar station and a row of batteries. There was also the usual cage of white mice.

  Linsay disappeared into the tent and laid the unconscious woman on the bed. When he came out Valienté was sitting by the remains of the fire, which was still smouldering. It was well after noon.


  ‘How come she was unconscious?’ Valienté said.

  Linsay hauled the gate into place and hooked a strand of the red wire across the top of it. ‘Neither of you has got the right belt for the high meggas,’ he said.

  ‘Is that an answer?’

  Linsay turned.

  ‘Sure. The normal belts just protect you from coming out inside anything thicker than air. The Low Earths are so similar, that’s all you need. You don’t have to worry about the ground. It’s always there. Where she came out, the Fist had punched the ground away.’

  ‘Fist?’

  ‘Didn’t you see any craters?’

  ‘Yeah, I thought the ground was getting rough.’

  Linsay looked at the mouse cage. A mouse, strapped inside a little belt unit atop a battery pack, could get a message to Forward Base within six hours. Could it get right back to the low numbers? It’d take a week, maybe ten days. There would have to be feed, water – say two more batteries for them. Plus a multiband here-I-am screamer, which meant another battery. Plus four more batteries to give enough power to carry the extra batteries. Plus – forget it …

  ‘Are you human?’ said Valienté. ‘I mean, I was told you were a cold sort, but when you hear that fifty people have been massacred you’re supposed to do something, you know? Like say “How terrible”, or something.’

  ‘Would you like some coffee?’ said Linsay. ‘It’s only black.’

  ‘What?’ Valienté was trembling now, with exhaustion and anger.

  ‘Did you do anything about the goats?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They had a herd of goats at Forward. I never had the patience to trap them here, myself. I expect they’ll need milking. You could at least have let them out of their stockade.’