The Long Earth

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