The Long Earth (3 page)

That was Joshua. That was how he did things. And that was why he wasn’t the first kid to step out of the world, because he’d not only varnished his Stepper box, he’d waited for the varnish to dry. And that was why he was certainly the first kid to get back without wetting his pants, or worse.

Step Day. Kids were disappearing. Parents scoured the neighbourhoods. One minute the kids were there, playing with this latest crazy toy, and the next moment they weren’t. When frantic parent meets frantic parent, frantic becomes terrified. The police were called, but to do what? Arrest who? To look where?

And Joshua himself stepped, for the first time.

A heartbeat earlier, he had been in his workshop, in the Home. Now he stood in a wood, heavy, thick, the moonlight hardly managing to reach the ground. He could hear other kids everywhere, throwing up, crying for their parents, a few screaming as if they were hurt. He wondered why all the distress.
He
wasn’t throwing up. It was creepy, yes. But it was a warm night. He could hear the whine of mosquitoes. The only question was, a warm night
where
?

All the crying distracted him. There was one kid close at hand, calling for her mother. It sounded like Sarah, another resident of the Home. He called out her name.

She stopped crying, and he heard her voice, quite close: ‘Joshua?’

He thought it over. It was late evening. Sarah would have been in the girls’ dormitory, which was about twenty yards away from his workshop. He had not
moved
, but he was clearly in a different place. This wasn’t Madison. Madison had noises, cars, airplanes,
lights
, while now he was standing in a forest, like something out of a book, with not a trace of a streetlight anywhere he looked. But Sarah was here too, wherever this was. The thought constructed itself a piece at a time, like an incomplete jigsaw. Think, don’t panic. In relation to where you are, or were, she will be where she is, or was. You just have to go down the passage to her room. Even though, here and now, there is no passage, no room. Problem solved.

Except that to get to her would mean walking through the tree right in front of him. An extremely big tree.

He worked his way around the tree, pushing through the tangled undergrowth, the briars, the fallen branches of this very wild wood. ‘Keep talking,’ he said. ‘Don’t move. I’m coming.’

‘Joshua?’

‘Look, I’ll tell you what. Sing. Keep singing. That way I’ll be able to find you in the dark.’ Joshua switched on his flashlight. It was a tiny one that fitted into a pocket. He always carried a flashlight at night. Of course he did. He was Joshua.

She didn’t sing. She started to pray. ‘Our Father, who art in heaven …’

He wished people would do what he told them, just sometimes.

From around the forest, from the dark, other voices joined in. ‘Hallowed be thy name …’

He clapped his hands and yelled, ‘Everybody shut up! I’ll get you out of here. Trust me.’ He didn’t know why they should trust him, but the tone of authority worked, and the other voices died away. He took a breath and called, ‘Sarah. You first. OK? Everybody else, go towards the prayer. Don’t say anything. Just head towards the prayer.’

Sarah began again: ‘Our Father, who art in heaven …’

As he worked his way forward, hands outstretched, pushing through briars and climbing over roots, testing every step, he heard the sounds of people moving all around him, more voices calling. Some were complaining about being lost. Others were
complaining
about a lack of cellphone signal. Sometimes he glimpsed their phones, little screens glowing like fireflies. And then there was the desolate weeping, even moans of pain.

The prayer ended with an amen, which was echoed around the forest, and Sarah said, ‘Joshua? I’ve finished.’

And I thought she was clever, thought Joshua. ‘Then start again.’

It took him minutes to get to her, even though she was only half the length of the Home away. But he could see this forest clump was actually quite small. Beyond, in the moonlight, he saw what looked like prairie flowers, like in the Arboretum. No sign of the Home, though, or Allied Drive.

At last Sarah stumbled towards him and clamped herself on him. ‘Where are we?’

‘Somewhere else, I guess. You know. Like Narnia.’

The moonlight showed him the tears pouring down her face and the snot under her nose, and he could smell the vomit on her nightdress. ‘I never stepped into no wardrobe.’

He burst out laughing. She stared at him. But because he was laughing, she laughed. And the laughter started to fill this little clearing, for other kids were drifting this way, towards the flashlight glow, and for a moment that held back the terror. It was one thing to be lost and alone, quite another to be lost in a crowd, and laughing.

Somebody else grabbed his arm. ‘Josh?’

‘Freddie?’

‘It was terrible. I was in the dark and I
fell down
, down to the ground.’

Freddie had a tummy bug, Josh remembered. He’d been in the sanatorium, on the Home’s first floor. He must have just fallen, through the vanished building. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘No … Josh? How do we get home?’

Joshua took Sarah’s hand. ‘Sarah, you made a Stepper?’

‘Yes.’

He glanced at the mess of components in her hand. It wasn’t
even
in a box, not even a shoebox or something, let alone a box that had been carefully made for the purpose, like his. ‘What did you use for a switch?’

‘What switch? I just twisted the wires together.’

‘Look. It definitely said to put in a centre-off switch.’ He very carefully took her Stepper in his hands. You always had to be very careful around Sarah. She wasn’t a Problem, but problems had happened to her.

At least there were three wires. He traced back the circuitry by touch. He’d spent hours staring at the circuit diagram; he knew it by heart. He separated the wires and put the ragged tangle back in her hands. ‘Listen. When I say go, press that wire and that one together. If you find yourself back in your room, drop the whole thing on the floor and go to bed. OK?’

Sniffing, she asked, ‘What if it doesn’t work?’

‘Well, you’ll still be here, and so will I. And that won’t be so bad, will it? Are you ready? Come on. Let’s do a countdown from ten. Nine, eight …’

On zero she disappeared, and there was a pop, like a soap bubble bursting.

The other kids stared at where she’d been, and then at Joshua. Some were strangers: as much as he could see any faces at all, there were plenty he couldn’t recognize. He’d no idea how far they’d walked in the dark.

Right now he was king of the world. These helpless kids would do anything he told them. It wasn’t a feeling he liked. It was a chore.

He turned to Freddie. ‘OK, Freddie. You next. You know Sarah. Tell her not to worry. Tell her a lot of kids are coming home via her bedroom. Tell her Joshua says it’s the only way to get them home, and please don’t get angry. 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.