The Long Earth (4 page)

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.

Jansson bent to inspect it. It was just a clear plastic box, a cube, about four inches on a side. Forensics thought the box might once have contained antique three-and-a-half-inch floppy discs. Linsay was evidently the kind of man who kept junk like that. Through the clear walls you could see electrical components, capacitors and resistors and relays and coils, connected with twisted and soldered copper wire. There was a big three-way switch on the lid, the positions labelled by hand with a black marker pen:

WEST – OFF – EAST

Right now the switch was set to
OFF
.

The rest of the box’s volume was occupied by … a potato. Just a potato, no Semtex or acid vial or nails or any other element of the modern terror arsenal. One of the forensics boys had suggested it might be used as a power source, like the classic potato-run clock. Mostly people thought it was just a symptom of lunacy, or maybe some bizarre practical joke. Whatever it was, this was what kids all around the planet were racing to assemble right now.

The Stepper had been found holding down a bit of paper on which had been scrawled, in the same marker pen, the same hand, TRY ME. Very Alice in Wonderland. Linsay’s parting shot. It occurred to Jansson that none of her colleagues had actually followed the instruction on the paper scrap: TRY ME.

She took the box, held it; it weighed nothing. She opened the lid. Another scrap of paper, headed FINISH ME, had simple instructions, what looked like a draft of the circuit diagram that had finished up on the net. You were supposed to use no iron parts, she read; that was underlined. She had to finish winding a couple of coils of copper wire, and then set contacts to tune the coils, somehow.

She got to work. Winding the coils was an oddly pleasant activity, though she couldn’t have explained why. Just her and the bits of kit, like a kid assembling a crystal radio. Finding the tuning was easy too; she kind of felt it when she got the sliding contact set right – though again she couldn’t have explained this, and didn’t look forward to trying to write this up in her report.

When she was done she closed the lid and took hold of the switch, tossed a coin in her head, and turned the switch
WEST
.

The house vanished in a rush of fresh air.

Prairie flowers, all around, waist deep, like a nature reserve.

And it was like she had been punched in the stomach. She doubled over, grunting, dropping the box. Earth under her feet, her polished shoes on grass. The air in her nostrils fresh, sharp, the stink of ash and foam gone.

Had some perp jumped her? She grabbed for her gun. It was in its holster, but it felt odd; the Glock’s polymer frame and magazine body looked OK, but the thing
rattled
.

Cautiously she straightened up. Her stomach was still bad, but she felt nauseous rather than bruised. She glanced around. There was nobody here, threatening or otherwise.

Nor were there four walls around her, no house just off Mifflin Street. Just prairie flowers, and a stand of hundred-foot-tall trees, and a blue sky clear of contrails and smog. It was like the Arboretum, the Herculean prairie reconstruction inside Madison’s city limits. An Arboretum that had swallowed the city itself. Suddenly here she was, in the middle of all this.

She opined, ‘Oh’. This response seemed inadequate in itself. After some consideration, she added, ‘My.’ And she concluded, although in the process she was denying a lifelong belief system of agnosticism shading to outright atheism, ‘God.’

She put away her gun and tried to think like a cop. To
see
like a cop. She noticed litter on the ground at her feet, beside the Stepper she’d dropped. Cigarette butts. What looked like a cowpat. So was
this
where Willis Linsay had gone? If so, there was no sign of him, or of his animals …

The very air was different. Rich. Heady. She felt like she was getting high on it. It was all magnificent. It was impossible. Where
was
she? She laughed out loud, for the sheer wonder of it all.

Then she realized that every kid in Madison was soon going to have one of these boxes. Every kid everywhere else, come to that. And they were all going to start turning the switches. All around the world.

And
then
it occurred to her that getting home might be a good plan.

She grabbed the Stepper box from the ground, where she’d dropped it. It still had fingerprint dust on it. The switch had snapped back to
OFF
. With trepidation, she grabbed the switch, closed her eyes, counted down from three, and turned it
EAST
.

And she was back in the Linsay house, with what looked like metallic components of her gun on the ruined carpet at her feet. There was her badge, and name tag, even her tie clip, lying on the carpet. More bits of metal she hadn’t noticed she was missing.

Clancy was waiting out in the car. She started figuring how she was going to explain all this to him.

When she got back to base, station manager Dodd’s tracking board showed missing person calls coming in, one or two per neighbourhood. Slowly the whole board was lighting up.

Then the alerts came in from across the country.

‘And all around the world,’ Dodd said, wondering, after he’d flicked on CNN. ‘A missing persons plague. Even China. Look at that.’

Then the night got more complicated, for all of them. There was a rash of burglaries, even one from a strongroom in the Capitol building. The MPD had trouble just fielding the call-outs. That
was
before the directives started coming in from Homeland Security and the FBI.

Jansson managed to collar the sergeant in charge. ‘What’s going on, sarge?’

Harris turned to her, his face grey. ‘You’re asking me? I don’t know. Terrorists? Homeland are jumping up and down about that possibility. Space aliens? That’s what some guy in a tinfoil hat out in the lobby insists is causing it all.’

‘So what should I do, sarge?’

‘Do the job in front of you.’ And he hurried on.

She thought that over. If she were a citizen out there, what would she most care about? The missing kids, that’s what. She left the station and got to work.

And she found the kids, and spoke to them, some of them in the hospital, and every other kid talked about one particular kid who was calm, a hero, leading them to safety, like Moses – only he was called Joshua, not Moses.

Joshua backed away from the cop.

‘You are Joshua, aren’t you? I can tell. You’re the one kid that isn’t dribbling vomit.’

He said nothing.

‘They tell me Joshua saved them. They tell me he picked them up and carried them back home. You’re a regular catcher in the rye. You ever read that book? You should. Although maybe it’s banned in the Home. Yes, I know about the Home. But how did you do it, Joshua?’

‘I didn’t do anything wrong. I’m not a Problem,’ he said, backing further away.

‘I know you’re not a Problem. But you did something different. I just want to know what you did. Tell me, Joshua.’

Joshua hated it when people kept repeating his name. It was what they did to calm you down when they thought you were a Problem. ‘I followed the instructions. That’s all.
People
don’t understand. You just follow the instructions.’

‘I want to understand,’ she said. ‘Just tell me. You don’t have to be afraid of me.’

‘Look,’ said Joshua, ‘even if you make a simple wooden box you have to varnish it, otherwise it gets damp and everything swells and that can pull things apart. Whatever you do you have to do it right. You have to follow the instructions. That’s what they’re there for.’ He was saying too much, too fast. He shut up. Shutting up nearly always worked. Anyway what could he say?

Joshua baffled Jansson. Everybody had been panicking in the dark, evidently, the kids screaming and throwing up and tripping over and crapping their pants and being eaten by mosquitoes and walking into trees. But not 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 round. ‘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.