look up and see whose foot it was.’
‘Even that would be interesting,’ said Joshua.
As they prepared to leave they sought out Helen Green, who had been the first to greet them here, more or less civilly, and now they wanted to say goodbye to her.
Helen was in the middle of her working day, a bundle of much-read books under her arm: calm, competent, cheerful, getting on with her life, a hundred thousand Earths from where she had been born. She seemed a little flustered, as always around Joshua. But she pushed her hair away from her brow, and smiled. ‘Sorry to see you go so soon. So where are you heading, back on the Datum?’
‘Madison,’ Joshua said. ‘Where you came from too, right? I remember that from your blog. We still have friends there, family…’
But Helen was frowning. ‘Madison? Haven’t you heard?’
51
FOR MONICA JANSSON, Madison’s bad day had started when Clichy called, and she had to leave her UW seminar on demographic impacts of the Long Earth. She got glares from her fellow delegates, save for those who knew she was a cop.
‘Jack? What is it? This better be good—’
‘Shut up and listen, Spooky. There’s a bomb.’
‘A bomb?’
‘A nuke. In central Madison. Believed to be stashed in Capitol Square somewhere.’
This convention centre was a long way north-east of downtown. She was already running, out of the building, heading for her car, and already panting; there were times when she felt every one of her forty-plus years.
An outdoor siren started to wail.
‘A nuke? How the hell—’
‘Some kind of suitcase thing. The warnings are going out. Listen to me. Here’s what you have to do.
‘You got me, Chief.’
‘Tell me you’re heading out of town.’
‘Can’t tell you that, sir.’ Already people were coming out of office buildings, shops, homes, into the sunlight of a bright fall day, looking bewildered. On the other hand others were going indoors, reflexively; Wisconsin did get its share of tornado touchdowns, and people knew to listen to warnings. Another couple of minutes and the roads would be jammed by people trying to get out of town, no matter what the official advice was.
She put her foot down while the road was still relatively clear, started up her siren, and roared south-west towards the Capitol.
‘Damn it, Lieutenant!’
‘Look, sir, you know as well as I do that it’s going to be some fringe Humanity First — type group responsible for this. And that’s my business. If I can be on the spot, maybe I’ll see something. Eyeball one of the usual suspects. Kill this thing.’
‘Or get your sorry lesbian ass fried!’
‘No, sir.’ She patted her waist. ‘I got my Stepper…’
She heard more sirens wail, over the noise of the car. Inside the vehicle emergency messages started popping up, coming via multiple systems: a reverse-911 call on her civilian phone, emails to her tablet, grave Emergency Alert System messages on the radio. None of it was enough, she realized.
‘Listen, Chief. You have to change course on this.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Sounds like everybody’s following the standard plays.
‘You know as well as I do that not everybody can step. Aside from the phobics there are the old, kids, bedridden, hospital patients—’
‘So people help each other. If you can step, do it. But
He was silent a moment. ‘You’ve thought about this, haven’t you, Spooky?’
‘It’s why you gave me the job all those years ago, Jack.’
‘You’re insane.’ A pause. ‘I’ll do it if you turn your damn car around.’
‘Not a chance, sir.’
‘You’re fired, Spooky.’
‘Noted, sir. But I’ll stay on the line even so.’
She hit East Washington, and her view of the Capitol opened up, shining white in the sun. People were milling around, coming out of or going into the offices and shops. Some of them tried to wave her down; they looked annoyed, and probably wanted to complain about the noise of the sirens, wailing on and on apparently without reason. The car ahead of her had a prized old Green Bay Packer licence plate. On the walls she saw posters of Brian Cowley, grave, finger-pointing, like a spreading virus.
It was impossible to believe that in only minutes all this was going to be a cloud of radioactive dust. But now, coming over the car radio, she heard hurried instructions to step, interspersed with the standard announcements.
Clichy came back with more information. The only warning the police had had was from a kid who had wandered into a district station in Milwaukee, in distress. Fifteen years old. He had run with a crowd of Humanity- Firsters, for the social life, to meet girls. But he was lying to them. He was actually a natural stepper. And when the Firsters found out they had taken him to a doctor, a man on the MPD’s watch list, who had opened up his head and inserted an electrode and burned out brain centres believed to be associated with stepping. It had left the boy blind, whether he could still step or not. So he went to the cops and spilled the beans on what his friends were planning to bring down in Madison.
‘All the kid knows is that the Firsters got hold of what they called a “suitcase nuke”. Now, I’m reading my brief here, the only such device ever to have been acknowledged as manufactured by the US is the W54. A SADM, which stands for Special Atomic Demolition Munition. Yield of around six kilotons, which is about a third of Hiroshima. Alternatively they could have got hold of a Russian device, such as an RA-115 — get this, Spooky, it’s thought the old Soviet Union salted some of these things around the mainland US. Just in case, huh.’
She had reached Capitol Square. Most days this was cluttered with art fairs or farmers’ markets, now expanded to feature the exotic produce of a dozen worlds, or else some protest rally or other. Today there was a concentration of cops and Homelands types and FBI officers, some in nuclear-biological-chemical protection suits, as if
‘People aren’t believing it, Chief.’
‘Tell me about it.’
She abandoned the car and, flashing her badge at everyone who got in her way, pushed through the lines to the Capitol mound. The racket of the sirens, echoing from the concrete, was deafening, maddening. Down the four
