Читать онлайн «The Long War»

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On an alternate world, two million steps from Earth:

The troll female was called Mary by her handlers, Monica Jansson read on the rolling caption on the video clip. No one knew what the troll called herself. Now two of those handlers, both men, one in a kind of spacesuit, faced Mary as she cowered in a corner of what looked like a high-tech laboratory—if a beast built like a brick wall covered in black fur could be said to cower at all—and she held her cub to her powerful chest. The cub, itself a slab of muscle, was similarly dressed up in its own silvery spacesuit, with wires dangling from sensors attached to its flat skull.

“Give him back, Mary,” one of the men could be heard to say. “Come on now. We’ve been planning this test for a long time. George here will haul him over into the Gap in his spacesuit, he’ll float around in vacuum for an hour or so, and then he’ll be right back here safe and sound. He’ll even have fun. ”

The other man stayed ominously silent.

The first approached Mary, a step at a time. “No ice cream if you keep this up. ”

Mary’s big, very human hands made gestures, signs, a blur. Rapid, hard to follow, but decisive.

As the incident had been replayed over and over there had been a lot of online speculation about why Mary hadn’t just stepped away at this point. Probably it was simply that she was being held underground: you couldn’t step into or out of a cellar, into the solid rock you’d find stepwise.

The theory of what these men were trying to do was much discussed too. They were in a world next door to the Gap—a step away from vacuum, from space, from a hole where an Earth ought to be. They were building a space programme out there, and wanted to see if troll labour, highly useful across the Long Earth, could be exploited in the Gap. Not surprisingly adult trolls were very reluctant to step over into that drifting emptiness, so the GapSpace researchers were trying to habituate the young. Like this cub.

“We haven’t got time for this,” said the second man. He produced a metal rod, a stunner. He walked forward, holding the rod out towards Mary’s chest. “Time for Mommy to say goodnight for a while—”

The adult troll grabbed the rod, snapped it in two, and jammed the sharp, broken end into the second man’s right eye.

Every time you saw it, it was shocking.

The man fell back screaming, blood spilling, very bright red. The first guy pulled him back, out of shot. “Oh my God! Oh my God!”

Mary, holding her cub, her fur splashed with human blood, repeated the gestures she had made, over and over.

Things happened quickly after that. These space cadets had tried to put down this troll, this mother, immediately. They even pulled a gun on her. But they’d been stopped by an older guy, more dignified, who looked to Jansson like a retired astronaut.