Extreme Difference Read Free Page A

those who enter them never return.
    ‘The sand itself is not so innocent as it might at first appear. There are creatures who live in it, and are not adverse to sampling human flesh if they can get their teeth into it. I have never seen them, but I did know someone who was taken by them. All that was left was a small blood stain on the sand to mark where the incident had happened, and no one has seen any trace of him since.
    ‘The only time you can safely walk on the sand is when it is frozen, or very hot from the sun, and then you must protect your feet with wrappings. We assume the creatures can’t tolerate the extremes of temperature, and go down to a lower level.’ Here Nan paused to see if Sandy was absorbing what was said, which gave him the chance to ask, ‘What’s on the other side of these mountains, as you call them? And why do you stay here if it’s so inhospitable?’
    ‘As far as we know, there’s no way through the mountains. We can’t climb over the top, it’s too high, and the rock gets more shiny and slippery the higher you climb. In the past, there have been several attempts to see what’s on the other side, but no one has ever found out.
    ‘There may be nothing on the other side anyway, so we would be no better off even if we could get there. It would seem that here is where we are meant to be, so there’s little point in trying to go anywhere else, not that there’s anywhere else to go, as far as we can tell.’
    ‘Oh, come on, you can’t have a sand bowl ringed with a mountain chain, and nothing on the other side of it,’ Sandy interjected quickly, ‘there’s got to be some land, or something on the other side. Anyway, where did you get the idea that you’re meant to be here, who said so?’
    ‘It has always been so. We arrive on the sands, and are taken into whichever group gets to us first.’ Nan’s face hardened, and he continued in a defensive tone. ‘None of us has a memory of being anywhere before, so we must be created here, by some superior force or being. We are the servants of that greater force, here for a purpose, it is intended we remain here to do whatever the greater force wants’
    ‘What a load of crap,’ Sandy exploded, ‘you’ve been here too long, and you’re beginning to believe your own myths.
    ‘Just think about it, you arrive here with a usable language which you all understand, you grow food, make things, you know how to organize yourselves into working groups, and you really think some benign being created you and filled your heads with all this information and abilities just to watch you running around like a lot of scruffy bloody hermits living in caves? You’ve got to be joking, or seriously off your heads.’
    Nan’s face darkened thunderously, and drawing himself up to his full height, he pointed a long shaking finger at Sandy.
    ‘You’ve been here a few hours, and you have the gall to make fun of us and the purpose we’ve been created for. How dare you!’ He spat out angrily, his mouth continued to flap open and shut silently, having run out of words to say.
    ‘All right,’ Sandy replied, ‘think about this, where did you get the concept of ‘a few hours’ from? I don’t see any clocks here, so that idea must have come from somewhere else.’
    Slowly Nan’s anger subsided, and he looked confused for a moment, opening his mouth several times to speak, but closing it again as he rethought what he wanted to say.
    ‘Come on,’ said Sandy, ‘what do you know of time? How long is an hour, or for that matter, a day? How many hours in a day?’
    ‘Twent.....twentyeight,’ stuttered Nan, ‘but how do I know that? I don’t know what a clock is, do you?’
    ‘Yes, of course,’ began Sandy, and then found he was unable to recall it. A look of confusion spread over his face.
    ‘I’m sure I did know, but for the moment it eludes me.’
    The two men stood staring at each other for some moments, neither wanting to be the first to speak