The Long Earth

He lay, listened, waited. Nothing.

He knew what they’d do, for he would do the same. They’d wait for minutes, a half-hour, an hour, maybe even more. Then they’d start to fret that something had gone wrong, so they’d split up and run home. They would blab in the end, and everybody would drive out to the dump, and Dad would scream at the others to tell him where the damn fridge was, and he’d pull off the garbage with his bare hands…

The trouble was, that could be hours away. The air was already starting to feel thick, it strained his chest to breathe. He panicked again. He pulled at the wreck of the Stepper until it started to come apart in his hands. He screamed, and banged the hull of the fridge, and pissed his pants. He started to cry.

Then, exhausted, he lay back down again, and felt over the wreck of his Stepper in the dark: the potato, the power lead, the bits of circuit board. He shouldn’t have pulled it about like that. He should have tried to fix it. Maybe if he remembered how he’d made it in the first place he could put it back together now. He remembered the circuit diagram, as it had first come up glowing on the screen of his phone. He had a good memory for stuff like that. He thought his way around the diagram, the coils, the tuning, and he—

And he fell, a foot or so, and landed with a thump on soft ground. Suddenly there was sky above him, dazzling bright, and the air rushed into his lungs.

Out! He got to his feet, trembling. Bits of the Stepper fell to the ground. He was dizzy with the richness of the air. As if he’d been dead, and was alive again. His pants were damp, to his shame.

He looked around. He was in a thick forest clump, but he could see lights through the trees: Austin East 1 or West 1, whichever. He had to get home. How? The Stepper was even more of a mess than before. Still, he walked a couple of paces from where the fridge would be—

And he was standing on a heap of smashed-up, stinking debris, beside a big mound that had to be the fridge with its covering of junk. He’d stepped back, to the Datum. He didn’t get it. This time he hadn’t even touched the Stepper. He didn’t even feel nauseous.

He didn’t care. He was home! He ran off, away from the fridge. Maybe his parents wouldn’t have missed him yet. Elated, he started planning how he would get back his phone and brag to his friends.

Unfortunately for Jared, he had been missed. His parents had already called the cops, one of whom was bright enough to notice the smashed Stepper, and ask the crucial question: how had Jared managed to step between the worlds without a Stepper? To Jared’s dismay he was kept off school for medical checks, and counselling by ‘experts’ in stepping and in the Long Earth, such as they were, a physicist and a psychologist and a neurologist.

The story made it into a local news site before it was pulled. After that the incident took some covering up, but the US government, an old hand at such assignments, was able to deny the whole thing, discredit the witnesses including Jared himself, and bury the whole thing in classified files.

Of course Lobsang was fully aware of the contents of those files.

Joshua asked, ‘So why do people need Steppers at all?’

‘Perhaps in a more indirect way than is imagined, Joshua. The brief notes Linsay left insist that the placing of every component is crucial and needs pin-sharp care, so that the builder’s attention is totally wrapped up in the task. The need to align the two home-wound coils reminds me of the tuning of early metal detectors. As for the other components, they appear to be there for the look of the thing, and the look can be very important. The winding of the coils themselves is especially hypnotic. If I may be Tibetan for a moment, I believe that what we have here is a kind of technological mandala, designed to tilt the mind into a subtly different state, disguised as a bit of everyday western technology. It is the act of making a Stepper that enables one to step, you see, not the gadget itself. I myself went through the physical process of constructing a Stepper, via an ambulant unit. I might venture to suggest that it is unlocking a door within us that most of us don’t know exists. But as Jared Orgill’s story illustrates — or even your own — some people are finding they don’t need the Steppers at all, when they step accidentally with a broken box, or step in a panic without a box at all.’

‘We’re all natural steppers,’ Joshua said, wondering. ‘It’s just that most of us don’t know it. Or we need this aid to make those muscles in the head work.’

‘Something like that. But not all, you’re wrong about that. Enough steppers have been studied now to draw up some rough statistics. Perhaps a fifth of mankind are thought to be natural steppers, to whom the Long Earth is as accessible as a city park — without any aids at all, perhaps with a little coaching, or mental disciplines of the kind Jared inadvertently came across when visualizing his circuit diagram. On the other hand, perhaps another fifth can never leave the Datum at all, unless humiliatingly carried by somebody else.’

Joshua pondered the implications. Suddenly humanity was fundamentally divided — even if it didn’t know it yet.

25

JOSHUA WATCHED WORLDS pass like the turning pages of a picture book. And, heading steadily geographical west, they passed a boundary marker of their own: the Ural mountains, a north — south band of crumpled landscape that endured across most of the worlds.

But the worlds were different now. Both Ice Belt and Mine Belt were far behind them. Now the Earths below were Corn Belt worlds, as the American scouts and trek captains liked to call them: rich, warm worlds, and at least in North America covered with grassland and prairie littered with familiar-looking trees and scrub and dense with herds of healthy-looking animals. Worlds ripe for farming. The Earths below now numbered over a hundred thousand on Lobsang’s earthometer. It took trekkers nine months to come out as far as this, on foot. The airship had made it in four days.

Whenever they stopped, Lobsang scanned for short-wave radio transmissions, which ought to carry around the curve of any Earth with an ionosphere. They paused at a couple of Corn-Belt-worlds to listen, one being West 101,754, where they got a long and chatty news update from a colony in a stepwise New England: some kid, originally from Madison as it happened, blogging by reading from her journal. One of a whole trail of such hopeful townships, Joshua imagined, scattered thin across the continents of the Long Earth. And each, he supposed, would have its own story to tell…

Hi, my loyal listeners, Helen Green here, your low-tech blogger clogging up the airwaves again. This bit’s from three years ago. It was July 5 — which, as you will be aware, is the day after July 4. Here goes…

Is this what they call a hangover?

Oh! My! God!

Yesterday was Independence Day! Yay. We’ve been here eight months, and nobody’s dead yet, yay! That’s an excuse for a party if ever there was one. We’re Americans, and this is officially America, and it was July 4, and that was that.

Though to look at us, this first summer, you’d imagine we were Indians. We’re all living in lean-tos and tepees and benders and big square communal houses, and some folk are still using their trek tents. There are chickens and puppy dogs that people carried here on their backs, running around everywhere. We ain’t farming. Next year will be the first harvest. We have a rota clearing the fields — burn, slash, haul away the rocks, all brute labour, nothing but human muscle available to do it. For the future we’ve brought seeds, corn and beans and flax and cotton, enough to survive years of failed crops if necessary. Oh, we’ve already planted pumpkins and squash and beans in the cleared ground near the houses, in our ‘gardens’.

But for now we’re hunter-gatherers! And it’s a rich country to hunt and gather in. In the winter we got bass from the river. In the forest we took things that look like rabbits and things that look like deer and some of those funny little horses, though we were all a bit squeamish about that, it was like eating a pony. Now in the summer we’re spending more time at the coast, where we’re fishing and collecting clams.

You do feel like you’re out in the wild. Back home on the Datum I was living on top of centuries of other people’s efforts to tame everything. Here the forest has never been cleared, the swamps never drained, the river never dammed or leveed. It’s strange. And dangerous.

I think my Dad thinks some of the people are dangerous too. We’re all learning more about each other, but