Terry Pratchett - The Long Earth

And what about his weapons? He checked the pistol at his belt. All that was left of that was the wooden stock. Again, why? Steal a pistol, yes, but you would have a devil of a job to use it without the stock. It made no sense. But then, what did? Where, on the western front, had good sense ever played a part?

The Russians watched, silent, apparently baffled by his fiddling about with all this stuff.

Memory came trickling back from whatever foxhole it had been hiding in.

Private Percy had been seconded to the camouflage corps after his leg wound. This was because, amazingly enough, the Army had recognized that he had once been a draftsman, and sometimes this Army who needed men who could hold a gun, and even more men who could take a bullet, also needed men who could wield a pencil, and select from God’s good rainbow just the right hue of paint to turn a Mark I tank into a harmless haystack, albeit with a wisp of smoke coming out of it if the lads were having a quick drag behind it. He’d been happy for the respite. And that was why he carried a paint box, for colour matching, and for bits of fine work after the usual application of daubs of camouflage green.

What else could he remember? The very last thing before the shelling? Oh yes, the sergeant roasting the new kid because he had one of those wretched Testaments that fitted into his breast pocket, the kind of thing mothers and sweethearts sent to the front in the hope that the holy words would keep their boys safe, and maybe, if words alone did not do the trick, then the gunmetal coating might achieve what mere faith could not. And Percy, packing up his gear to go on to the next job, remembered the sergeant was apoplectic, waving the offending article in front of the kid and screaming, ‘You bloody, bloody idiot, ain’t your bloody mother ever heard of shrapnel? There was a sapper once, a good lad, and a round hit his bloody iron Testament and it drove the living heart right out of his body, poor devil!’

And then he had been rudely interrupted by the shelling. Why had the red-faced kid and the sergeant disappeared into the incandescence of a bomb which hit only a little way away from Percy, who was now sitting here in this peaceful world, in the company of these friendly-looking Russians, and still managing to hear the wonderful birdsong? Deep inside, Percy knew he was never going to get answers to such questions.

Best not to ask, then.

The Russians, sitting there in the green, watched him patiently as he struggled to climb out of the black pit inside his head.

When the two Russian hunters returned, one of them was carrying a freshly killed deer, a big floppy animal, with apparent ease.

Having the carcass of a deer dropped right in front of him by a huge furry Russian might have perplexed a lesser man. But Private Percy’s brief adolescence as a poacher, and years of near malnutrition on the front line, combined firmly around one purpose. The butchery was a messy job without steel, but the button rod in his small pack was thin brass and helped a little, and so did smashing the bottle that had contained the last of his rum ration to make a few more cutting edges.

He was disconcerted by the way the Russians ate with their bare hands, and carefully picked out the creature’s guts and the lungs, what Percy had grown up calling the lights, and crammed them into their mouths, but he took the charitable view that the poor souls probably knew no better. He saw no steel, and certainly not any rifles, and that was odd. After all, the Russians had come to fight alongside the English, yes? Surely they would have had guns of some sort, because what was a soldier without a weapon?

Light dawned, for Private Percy. Of course, some might say that he was a deserter, although heaven only knew what had really happened to him. Maybe these Russians were deserters. They had surely flung their weapons away and kept only their enormous hairy greatcoats. And if that was so, why should Percy worry? That was their business, and the Czar’s.

So he took a venison steak for himself, diplomatically walked away to avoid staring at the Russians’ table manners, found some dry grass, pulled some dried twigs off some half-rotted branches of a fallen tree, and used one more precious lucifer to light another fire.

Five minutes later, as the steak cooked, they were sitting around him as if he had become King himself.

And later, when they walked away with him, singing as they went, he regaled them with every music-hall song he knew.

‘HOW DO YOU KNOW all this, Lobsang?’

‘About Private Percy? Mostly from that chronicle of the unexplained, the Fortean Times . The December 1970 issue recounted the story of an elderly man wearing antiquated British battledress being admitted to a French hospital some years before. He appeared to be trying to communicate by whistling. According to the British Army pay-book still in his blouse he was Private Percy Blakeney of a Kent regiment, recorded as missing in action after the battle of Vimy Ridge. Nevertheless, he appeared well nourished and in good, if somewhat puzzled spirits — although severely injured, having been run over by the tractor driven by the farmer who brought him into the hospital. The farmer protested to the police that the man had just stood there in the middle of the field, as if he’d never seen such a vehicle before, and the farmer had been unable to stop in time.

‘Despite the efforts of the hospital staff, Percy died of wounds from the collision. An ironic end! But not before one of the nurses who spoke English heard him say something like, «In the end I told the Russians that I wanted to go back, to see how the war was getting on. They were good lads, found me a way home. Good lads, loved singing. Very kind…» And so forth.

‘The fact that the man was wearing the remains of a British Army uniform and mentioned the word «Russians» raised sufficient security concerns to cause the gendarmerie to be called to investigate. Well, according to the British Legion, there was indeed a Percy Blakeney involved in the fighting on Vimy Ridge, who was reported missing after the opening bombardment. There appears to have been no attempt at an official explanation as to why his pay-book should show up decades later in the hands of a mysterious itinerant now buried in a graveyard in central France.’

‘But you have an explanation, I take it.’

‘I’m sure you can see it, Joshua.’

‘He stepped there? Into the forest with his Russians?’

‘Possibly,’ said Lobsang, ‘or perhaps one of the trolls found itself in the trenches by accident, and helped him away.’

‘ «Trolls»?’

‘That seems the mythological term that best describes these creatures, extrapolating from legends that must derive from even older sightings: creatures glimpsed in our world only to vanish again, entirely misunderstood, the seeds of legend … a term that already has become current in some parts of the Long Earth, Joshua. Percy’s wasn’t the only sighting.’

‘So you anticipated finding these — stepping humanoids, did you?’

‘From logical extrapolation. And I anticipated the singing from Percy’s own account. Consider: humans can step; chimps can’t — there have been experiments to establish that. But perhaps our hominid relatives of the past, or rather their modern descendants, were, or are , able to step. Why not? To have encountered such beings so early in our journey is of course the achievement of a major goal. And we must expect, we must hope at least, to meet many more such groups as we continue. What an intellectual thrill this is, Joshua!’

‘So they kept Percy alive, all those years?’

‘It seems so. These «Russians» found Percy wandering in a France which had no Frenchmen living in it, and they were kind to him, for decades. Over several of their generations, perhaps. Remarkable. As far as I know, he never understood the truth about his friends. But Percy probably had never seen anybody from another country before being shipped to France, and, of course, being English and unlettered, was probably half prepared to believe that a foreigner could look like just about anything. Why shouldn’t a Russian look like a big hairy ape?