They quickly introduced each other. Sister Georgina shook hands with Paul and his father, who looked out of place, almost embarrassed.

Paul grinned up at Joshua. ‘Good to see you again, Mr Valienté.’

‘I suppose you deduced I’d be here.’

Paul laughed. ‘Of course. Everybody knows your story, about where you grew up. I thought I’d come visit now we live here too, in Madison.’

‘Really?’ Joshua glanced at the father. ‘I thought Happy Landings is a place people generally end up in, rather than leave.’

Tom Wagoner shrugged. ‘Well, it got a little uncomfortable for me, Mr Valienté—’

‘Joshua.’

‘My wife was the Happy Lander. Born there, I mean. Not me. She’s one of the Spencers. There are these big sprawling families in Happy Landings, the Spencers, the Montecutes. But she came to college on the Datum, in Minnesota, where I grew up. We fell in love, married, wanted kids, moved back to Happy Landings to be closer to her family . . .’

Sister Georgina prompted, ‘So what happened?’

‘Well, Happy Landings isn’t what it was, Sister. Not as happy a landing place, you might say. I think it’s been building up since Step Day. Before then it was a kind of refuge, a place where people who had kind of got lost would drift in, and stick. There were the trolls, too, which was always kind of weird to me, but you got used to them hanging around. But these last few years, with everybody stepping all over the place, people kept stumbling upon Happy Landings, and there were just too many strangers. The numbers were getting too high as well, and the trolls don’t like too many people. And newcomers – people like me – just didn’t fit any more.’

‘So you left.’

‘It was more me than Carla. She was with her family there, after all. It put us under a lot of pressure, to tell the truth. We came here, got jobs – I’m an accountant, and this is the place for jobs just now, Madison West 5 is growing fast since the nuke – but our marriage is going down a rocky road.’ He patted Paul’s head. ‘Oh, it’s OK. He knows all about it. Knows too damn much to be comfortable sometimes.’ He forced a laugh.

Now Sister Georgina touched Paul’s cheek, his eye. The boy flinched. ‘These injuries are recent,’ she said. ‘So what happened to you?’

‘School,’ Paul said simply.

Tom said, ‘Well, the butchered haircut was given him by a neighbourhood boy. The cheek was the other kids at school. The eye was one of the teachers.’

‘You’re kidding,’ Joshua said.

‘Afraid not. Guy got sacked. Didn’t help Paul. I keep telling him, nobody likes a smartass.’

‘It’s frustrating at school, Mr Valienté,’ Paul said, apparently more puzzled than distressed. ‘The teachers always make me wait for the other kids.’

Tom smiled wistfully. ‘His headmaster says he’s like a young Einstein, ready to take on relativity. But his teachers can’t teach him beyond long division. Not their fault.’

‘Mostly I sit and read. But I can’t keep quiet when I see people making mistakes. The other kids in class, or the teacher. I know I should keep quiet.’

‘Hmm,’ Sister Georgina said. ‘And these bruises are your reward.’

‘It’s like people care more about their pride than about what’s correct, about the truth. What kind of sense does that make?’

‘We’ve had worse than bruises actually,’ Tom said now. ‘Some of the parents have asked for Paul to be removed from the school. Not just because he’s disruptive, though he is, if I’m honest. Because they’re – well, they’re scared of him.’

Sister Georgina cast a concerned look at Paul.

Tom said, ‘Look, don’t worry, we can speak frankly. He understands all this better than I do.’

‘I have been reading about people,’ Paul said in a matter-of-fact way. ‘Psychology.’ He pronounced it puh-sike-ology. ‘I don’t know a lot of the words, and that slows me down. But I get some of it. People are scared of strange stuff. They think I’m not like them. Well, I’m not. But I’m not that different. One woman said I was like a cuckoo in the nest. And there was the man who said I was like a changeling, left by the elves. Not a human at all.’ He laughed. ‘One kid said I was E.T. Not from this world.’

Sister Georgina frowned. ‘Well, look – this is a time when people are scared anyhow. The coming of stepping was a big change for all of us. And now we’ve had the nuclear attack and everybody’s been affected by that. At times like this people want scapegoats, somebody they can comfortably hate. Anybody different will do. That was why people blew up Madison.’

Joshua nodded. ‘When I was a kid I always tried to keep my own step ability hidden. I felt the same, I knew how people would react if they knew, if they thought I was different. Sister Georgina here can tell you about that; she was there. And that was on the Datum. Out in the Long Earth, I’ve seen it for myself, you have a lot of small, isolated communities. People are growing up superstitious, more than in the big Datum cities—’

To Joshua’s surprise, Paul’s response was angry, almost a snarl. ‘At least in Happy Landings there were other kids like me. Smart, I mean. Not here. Here they’re all dumb. Well, I’d rather take a few punches from the kids at school than be like them.’

Tom took his son’s hand. ‘Come on, we did what we came for, you said hello to Mr Valienté, now we need to let these good people get on with their day . . .’

Joshua said Paul could come and see him any time he could find him, wherever he ‘deduced’ where Joshua was. And Sister Georgina offered Tom any support the Home could give him, and his unhappy family.

When they’d gone, Joshua and Sister Georgina exchanged a look. The Sister said, ‘This place Happy Landings has always sounded odd to me, from your descriptions. Whatever’s going on there, I hope our modern generation of witch-hunters don’t find it any time soon . . .’

19

THE TWO GLIDERS, Woden and Thor, sat side by side on the red dust of Mars.

The gliders were spindly constructions, supremely lightweight. Their wings were long – fifty or sixty feet, each wing longer than the entire fuselage – wings surprisingly narrow and sharply curved, which was something to do, Sally learned, with managing the flow of the very sparse Martian air. But the slender hulls of the gliders had been intelligently designed, Sally discovered as they got the ships loaded up, with a lot of room for food and water, surface exploration gear, inflatable domes for temporary shelter, spares and tools to maintain the gliders themselves – and some items that surprised her, such as emergency pressure bubbles, each big enough for one human, and little drone aircraft to act as eyes in the sky.

And, poking around the hulls, Sally discovered that each ship carried a whole stack of Stepper boxes, ready to be fitted out with Martian cacti.

Willis was proud of the design, and bragged about it at length. ‘You can guess the design principle. These gliders will be our equivalent of twains back on the Long Earth. We’ll ride in the sky as we step, safely above any discontinuities on the ground – ice, flood, quakes, lava flows, whatever. Airships would be no use in this thin air – they’d have to be too big to be practical, and we don’t have the lift gas anyhow. But the gliders are based on designs that have successfully flown at ninety thousand feet on the Datum, which is about the air pressure on the local Mars – higher on this Mars, of course . . . The gliders will only step the way twains step – a controlling sapient does the stepping, that is the pilot, metaphorically carrying each ship stepwise. We probably won’t travel too far laterally. We’ll do a lot of circling. That way, if we crash, there’s at least a chance that we could step on foot back to the MEM. Another failsafe option. Right, Frank?’