The Long Earth

Joshua. Joshua was calm. She looked at him now. He was slim, tall for his age, his face pale but his hair Mediterranean black. He was a calm enigma.

Out loud she said, ‘You know, Joshua, I would have said that, given the stories they’re telling, some of these kids must have been playing with drugs. Except that they were all covered in leaves and scratches. As if they really had been taking a walk in a forest right here in the middle of the city.’

She took another slight step forward, and he took another slight step back.

She stopped moving and lowered her hands. ‘Look, Joshua, I know you’re telling the truth. Because I’ve been there myself. No more games. Talk to me. The box you’re holding looks pretty neat compared with the others. Can I have a look? I mean just put it down and step back, I’m not trying to trick you. I’m just trying to work out why kids all over town are getting stuck in some mysterious forest, frightened they’re going to be eaten by orcs!’

Oddly enough that impressed Joshua. He did put the box down, and did step back. ‘I’d like that back, I haven’t got enough money to go to Radio Shack again.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘You really think orcs?’

‘No. I don’t think orcs. But I don’t know what to think. Look, Joshua, you put your box down for me, so I’m putting my card down here where you can pick it up, OK? My personal number. I have a feeling we should stay in touch, you and I.’ She took a couple of steps back, holding the box. ‘Good workmanship!’

But now another car was coming up, lights blazing. Officer Jansson looked around. ‘Just other policemen checking up,’ she said, ‘don’t worry—’

There was a faint pop.

She looked at the box in her hand, and at the empty pavement. ‘Joshua?’

Joshua realized immediately that he’d left his box behind.

He’d stepped without the box! And, worse, that cop had seen him step without the box. Now he was in trouble.

So he got away. He just kept stepping, away from where he’d been, whatever away meant. He didn’t stop, or slow down. He just kept going, one step after the next, each step like a soft jolt in his gut. One world after another, as if it was a series of rooms. One step after the next away from Officer Jansson. Deeper into this corridor of forest.

As he pressed on there was no more city, no buildings, no lights, no people. Just this forest, but a forest that changed with every step. Trees came out of nowhere with one step and disappeared with the next, like bits of scenery in the plays the kids had to put on in the Home, yet all the trees seemed real, all hard and solid and deep- rooted in the earth. Sometimes it was warmer, sometimes a little colder. But there was always the forest, around him. And it was always dawn. Some things didn’t change, then: the ground, solid under his feet, the dawn sky. That pleased him, to detect order in this new world.

The instructions on the internet had said nothing about stepping without a box, but he was doing it anyhow. The thought gave him a lurching sensation, as if he were standing over a drop. But it was a thrill too, a rule- breaking thrill. Like the time he and Billy Chambers had borrowed a bottle of Bud from the builders who had come to fix the busted window, and had drunk it in a corner of the boiler room, and then smashed the bottle and put it in the recycling bin. He grinned at the memory.

He just kept going, moving aside for the trees when he needed to. But the trees changed, gradually. Now he was surrounded by rougher bark, low branches with narrow prickly leaves. A forest of pine trees. Colder, too. But it was still a forest, and still he pushed on.

And he came to a Wall. A place where he couldn’t step on, no matter how he walked sideways. He even took a few paces back and kind of ran at it, trying to force his way onward. It didn’t hurt, it was like running into a huge upraised palm. But he couldn’t go forward.

If he couldn’t push through this thick forest maybe he could climb above it. He found a tall tree, the tallest around. He pulled himself up to the lowest branches, and scrambled up higher. Pine needles prickled his hands. Every six feet or so he would try stepping sideways, just to see if he could, but the Wall was still there.

And then it worked, suddenly.

He fell forward on to a flat floor, like uneven, smoothed-over concrete, hard and dry and grey. There was no tree, no forest. Just the air, the sky, and this floor. And it was cold, cold through the thin fabric of his jeans over his knees, cold under his bare hands. Ice!

He stood up. His breath steamed around his face. The cold was like daggers probing through his clothes to his flesh. The whole world was covered in ice. He was in a kind of broad gully, carved in the ice, which rose up in hard grey mounds around him. Old ice, dirty ice. The sky was clear, the empty blue-grey of an early dawn. Nothing moved, not a bird, not a plane, and on the ground he didn’t see a building, or a single living thing, not so much as a blade of grass.

He grinned.

Then he stepped back to the pine forest, disappearing with a soap-bubble pop.

5

LOBSANG SAID, ‘Jansson, that police officer, kept an eye on you. You know that, don’t you, Joshua?’

Joshua was jolted back to the present. ‘You know, you’re smart for a vending machine.’

‘You would be amazed. Selena, please take Joshua downstairs, will you?’

The woman looked startled. ‘But Lobsang, we haven’t put Joshua through the security screening yet.’

There was a clank from the drinks machine and a can of Dr Pepper thumped into the hopper. ‘What’s the worst that could happen? I would like our new friend to meet me properly. By the way, Joshua, the can is for you. On the house.’

Joshua stood. ‘No thanks, I lost my taste for soda years ago.’ And if I hadn’t, he thought to himself, I would have done just now, having seen you excrete it.

As they headed towards the stairs Selena said, ‘Good of you to shave, by the way. Seriously, chins are going out of style in these pioneering times. People are so faddy.’ She smiled. ‘I think we were expecting some kind of mountain man.’

‘I used to be like that, I guess.’

This bland deflection evidently annoyed her; she seemed to want more from him.

They reached a landing that consisted of nothing but unmarked metal doors. One of these slid open as she approached, and slid noiselessly shut seconds after he had followed her through and on to another stairway, heading down.

‘Joshua, I have to tell you,’ she said with a kind of brittle humour, ‘I would like to push you down these stairs! And you know why? Because you just walk in and suddenly you have a security rating of zero, a great big oh, which means technically you can be told everything that’s going on here. I on the other hand have a security clearance of five. You outrank me and I have been working for transEarth and its affiliates since the start! Who exactly are you, who can just walk in and be told every secret?’

‘Well, sorry about that. I am just Joshua, I guess. Anyway, what do you mean “since the start”? I was the start! That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Of course. But I suppose every person’s first step is the start, for them …’

6

JIM RUSSO HAD taken his own first step out into what the excited online chatterers were soon calling the Long Earth for ambition. And because, at thirty-eight years old, after a lifetime of bad breaks and betrayals, he figured he was ahead of the pack.

Very soon after Step Day he’d come up with his plan, and worked out what he had to do. He headed straight