The Long Earth

Now show me your Stepper.’

One by one, pop after pop, the lost boys and girls disappeared.

When the last of those near by had gone, there were still voices further away in the forest, maybe beyond. There was nothing Joshua could do for them. He wasn’t even sure he’d done the right thing now. He stood alone in the stillness, and listened. Aside from the distant voices there was no sound but the skinny drone of mosquitoes. People told you that mosquitoes could kill a horse, in time.

He held his own carefully constructed Stepper, and moved the switch.

He was instantly back in the Home, by Sarah’s bed, in her tiny cluttered room, just in time to see the back of the last girl he’d led home, still quite hysterical, disappearing into the hallway. And he heard the shrill sound of the Sisters’ voices calling his name.

He hastily moved the switch again, to stand alone in the solitude of the forest. His forest.

There were more voices now, closer by. Sobbing. Screaming. One kid saying very politely, ‘Excuse me. Can anybody help me?’ And then a retch. Vomiting.

More new arrivals. He thought, why are they all sick? That was the smell of Step Day, when he remembered it later. Everyone had thrown up. He hadn’t.

He set off into the dark, looking for the latest calling kid.

And after that kid there was another. And another, who had broken her arm, it looked like, falling from some upper storey. And then another. There was always another kid.

The first hint of dawn filled the forest clump with birdsong and light. Was it dawn back home too?

There were absolutely no sounds of humanity now, except for the sobbing of the latest lost boy, who had speared his leg on a jagged length of wood. There was no way the kid would be able to operate his own Stepper, which was a shame, because in the sallow light Joshua admired the craftsmanship. The kid had evidently spent some time in Radio Shack. A sensible kid, but not sensible enough to bring a flashlight, or mosquito repellent.

Carefully, Joshua bent, picked up the kid in his arms, and stood straight. The boy moaned. One-handed, Joshua groped for the switch on his own Stepper, glad once more he’d followed the instructions exactly.

This time, when they stepped over, there were lights glaring in his face, and within seconds a City of Madison police car screeched to a halt before him. He stood stock still.

Two cops got out of the car. One, a younger man in a fluorescent jacket, gently took the injured boy from Joshua, and laid him on the grass. The other officer stood before him. A woman, smiling, hands open. This made him nervous. It was the way a Sister smiled at a Problem. Arms outstretched in welcome could quickly become arms that grabbed. Behind the officers, there were lights everywhere, like a movie set.

‘Hello, Joshua,’ the woman officer said. ‘My name is Monica Jansson.’

4

FOR MPD OFFICER JANSSON it had all started even earlier, the day before: the third time in the last few months she’d come out to the burned-out Linsay house, just off Mifflin Street.

She wasn’t sure why she had come back here. There hadn’t been a call-out this time. Yet here she was poking once more through the heaps of ash and charcoal that used to be furniture. Crouching over the smashed remains of an elderly flatscreen TV. Stepping gingerly over a carpet scorched and soaked and stained with foam, marked by the heavy footprints of firemen and cops. Leafing again through the charred relics of what must once have been an extensive set of notes, handwritten mathematical equations, an indecipherable scrawl.

She thought of her partner, Clancy, drinking the day’s fifth Starbucks out in the cruiser, thinking she was an idiot. What could be left to find, after the detectives had crawled over everything and forensics had done their stuff? Even the daughter, that oddball college student Sally, had taken it all in without surprise or concern, calmly nodding when told that her father was wanted for questioning over suspected arson, incitement to terrorism, and animal cruelty, not necessarily in that order. Just nodding, as if all that was an everyday occurrence in the Linsay household.

Nobody else cared. Soon the place would be released as a crime scene, and the landlord could start the clean-up and the arguments with his insurance company. It wasn’t as if anybody had got hurt, not even Willis Linsay himself, for there was no sign he’d died in the pretty feeble fire. It was all just a puzzle that would likely never be resolved, the kind experienced cops came across all the time, said Clancy, and you had to know when to let it go. Maybe at twenty-nine Jansson was still too green.

Or maybe it was because of what she’d seen when they’d responded to that first call a few months back. Because the first call had come from a neighbour who had reported seeing a man carrying a goat into this single- storey house, here in the middle of Madison.

A goat? Cue predictable banter between Clancy and the dispatcher. Maybe goats gave this guy the horn — et cetera, et cetera, ha ha. But the same neighbour, an excitable woman, said she’d also seen the man on other occasions push calves in through his front door, and even a foal. Not to mention a cage of chickens. Yet there was no report of noise, no barnyard stinks. No evidence of live animals in there. What was the guy doing, screwing them or cooking them?

Willis Linsay turned out to have been living alone since the death of his wife in a road accident some years before. There was one daughter, called Sally, eighteen years old, a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, living with an aunt. Linsay had been some kind of scientist, and had even once held a theoretical physics post at Princeton. Now he earned his money as a peripatetic tutor at UW, and with the rest of his time — well, nobody quite knew what he did with the rest of his time. Though Jansson had found traces in the records that he’d done some work for Douglas Black, the industrialist, under another name. That was no great surprise. These days almost everybody ended up working for Black one way or another.

Whatever Linsay was up to, he wasn’t keeping goats in his living room. Maybe it had been malicious all along, some busybody neighbour trying to make trouble for the oddball guy next door. You got that sometimes.

But the next call had been different.

Somebody posted online a plan for a gadget he or she called a ‘Stepper’. You could customize the design, but it would be a portable gadget with a big three-position switch on top, and with various electronic components within, and with a power lead plugged into … a potato?

The authorities noted this, and became alarmed. It looked like the kind of thing a suicide bomber would strap to his chest, before taking a stroll down State Street. It also looked like the kind of thing that would appeal to every kid in the world who could knock one up from spare parts in his or her bedroom. Everybody thought the word ‘potato’ must be a cover word for something else, like a slab of Semtex.

But by the time a car had been dispatched to the Linsay place, due to rendezvous with Homeland officers at the scene, a third call had come in, entirely separate: the house was on fire. Jansson had been part of the response to that. And Willis Linsay was nowhere to be found.

It was arson. Forensics had found the oily rag, the cheap cigarette lighter, the heap of papers and smashed- up furniture that had started it. The purpose of the fire seemed to have been to destroy Linsay’s heaps of notes and other materials. The perp could have been Linsay, or else somebody out to get him.

Jansson had the feeling it had been Linsay himself. She’d never met the man, never so much as seen a photograph. But her tangential contact with him had left impressions in her mind. He was clearly ferociously intelligent. You didn’t get to do physics at Princeton otherwise. But there was something missing. His home had been a disorderly jumble. The neither-one-thing-nor-the-other fire attempt fitted too.

But what she didn’t understand was what it was all for. What had he been up to?

Now Jansson found Linsay’s own Stepper, the prototype, presumably. It was in the living room, sitting on the mantelpiece above a fire that hadn’t been lit in decades. Maybe he’d purposefully left it behind to be found. The forensics guys had seen it and abandoned it, heavily dusted for prints. It would probably be taken into store once the crime scene was broken down.