Read Online The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett, Stephen Baxter - Free Book Online
Authors: Terry Pratchett, Stephen Baxter
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pretzels. I want you to be point man on this. You understand? I want you to take a lead, both on the individual incidents, and the patterns behind them. For sure those rascals out there are going to keep figuring out more ways to use this shit against us. I want you to be my Mulder, Officer Jansson.’
She smiled. ‘Scully would be more appropriate.’
‘Whatever. Look, I’m not promising you anything in return. It’s an unconventional assignment. Your contribution will be hard to reflect in your record. I’ll do my best, however. You might end up spending a lot of time away from home. A lot of time alone, even. Your personal life—’
She shrugged. ‘I’ve a cat. She looks after herself.’
He tapped a key, and she knew he must be studying her personnel file. ‘Twenty-eight years old.’
‘Twenty-nine, sir.’
‘Born in Minnesota. Parents still there. No siblings, no kids. A failed gay marriage?’
‘I’m mostly celibate these days, sir.’
‘Jansson, I sincerely do not want to know. OK, go back to Datum Earth, rework your assignments with your sergeant, figure out what you need to set up in this station and the one in East 1 – hell, just go look busy for the mayor, Officer.’
‘Yes, sir.’
All in all Jansson had been pleased with the meeting, looking back on it, and her new assignment. It told her that guys like Clichy, and those in power above him, were handling this extraordinary phenomenon, the sudden opening up of the Long Earth, about as well as they could be expected to. Which wasn’t true, she had learned from the news and other sources, in every country in the world.
10
‘SURELY, PRIME MINISTER , we could just ban stepping? It is a manifest security risk!’
‘Geoffrey, we might as well outlaw breathing. Even my own mother has stepped!’
‘But the population is fleeing. The inner cities are ghost towns. The economy is collapsing. We must do
something
…’
Hermione made a tactful minute of the exchange.
Hermione Dawes was extremely good at taking minutes. She prided herself on the skill; it was an art to sift what people meant from what they said, and she had been practising this art quite sat-is factorily for almost thirty years, for political masters of all hues. She had never married, and appeared to be quite comfortable with that fact, laughingly telling her fellow secretaries that her gold ring, which she wore all the time, was intended as a chastity belt. She was trustworthy, and trusted, and the only tiny flaw that her bosses had detected was that she owned every single track that Bob Dylan had ever cut.
Nobody she worked with knew her, she felt. Not even the gentlemen who, periodically, when she was known to be working, broke into her flat and searched it, always very carefully, no doubt sharing a little smile as they carefully replaced the tiny sliver of wood she pushed between the front door and its frame every day. Very similar to her own little smile when she noted that their big flat feet had once again crushed the scrap of meringue that she always dropped on the carpet just inside the living room door, a scrap they never ever noticed.
Since she never took off her gold ring, no one but she and God knew that inscribed, quite expensively, around the inner surface of the ring was a line from a Dylan song called ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’. She wondered, these days, if any of the busy little bodies she worked with, including most of the ministers, would even recognize where the quote came from.
And now, a few years after Step Day, as the latest panicky discussion went on in the Cabinet Office, she wondered if she was too old to get a job with the masters, as opposed to the fools.
‘Then they should be licensed. Stepper boxes. The Long Earth is a sink as far as the blessed economy is concerned, but penalizing the use of the boxes you need to access it would yield some tax revenue, at least!’
‘Oh, don’t be absurd, man.’ The Prime Minister
She smiled. ‘Scully would be more appropriate.’
‘Whatever. Look, I’m not promising you anything in return. It’s an unconventional assignment. Your contribution will be hard to reflect in your record. I’ll do my best, however. You might end up spending a lot of time away from home. A lot of time alone, even. Your personal life—’
She shrugged. ‘I’ve a cat. She looks after herself.’
He tapped a key, and she knew he must be studying her personnel file. ‘Twenty-eight years old.’
‘Twenty-nine, sir.’
‘Born in Minnesota. Parents still there. No siblings, no kids. A failed gay marriage?’
‘I’m mostly celibate these days, sir.’
‘Jansson, I sincerely do not want to know. OK, go back to Datum Earth, rework your assignments with your sergeant, figure out what you need to set up in this station and the one in East 1 – hell, just go look busy for the mayor, Officer.’
‘Yes, sir.’
All in all Jansson had been pleased with the meeting, looking back on it, and her new assignment. It told her that guys like Clichy, and those in power above him, were handling this extraordinary phenomenon, the sudden opening up of the Long Earth, about as well as they could be expected to. Which wasn’t true, she had learned from the news and other sources, in every country in the world.
10
‘SURELY, PRIME MINISTER , we could just ban stepping? It is a manifest security risk!’
‘Geoffrey, we might as well outlaw breathing. Even my own mother has stepped!’
‘But the population is fleeing. The inner cities are ghost towns. The economy is collapsing. We must do
something
…’
Hermione made a tactful minute of the exchange.
Hermione Dawes was extremely good at taking minutes. She prided herself on the skill; it was an art to sift what people meant from what they said, and she had been practising this art quite sat-is factorily for almost thirty years, for political masters of all hues. She had never married, and appeared to be quite comfortable with that fact, laughingly telling her fellow secretaries that her gold ring, which she wore all the time, was intended as a chastity belt. She was trustworthy, and trusted, and the only tiny flaw that her bosses had detected was that she owned every single track that Bob Dylan had ever cut.
Nobody she worked with knew her, she felt. Not even the gentlemen who, periodically, when she was known to be working, broke into her flat and searched it, always very carefully, no doubt sharing a little smile as they carefully replaced the tiny sliver of wood she pushed between the front door and its frame every day. Very similar to her own little smile when she noted that their big flat feet had once again crushed the scrap of meringue that she always dropped on the carpet just inside the living room door, a scrap they never ever noticed.
Since she never took off her gold ring, no one but she and God knew that inscribed, quite expensively, around the inner surface of the ring was a line from a Dylan song called ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’. She wondered, these days, if any of the busy little bodies she worked with, including most of the ministers, would even recognize where the quote came from.
And now, a few years after Step Day, as the latest panicky discussion went on in the Cabinet Office, she wondered if she was too old to get a job with the masters, as opposed to the fools.
‘Then they should be licensed. Stepper boxes. The Long Earth is a sink as far as the blessed economy is concerned, but penalizing the use of the boxes you need to access it would yield some tax revenue, at least!’
‘Oh, don’t be absurd, man.’ The Prime Minister
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