The Long Earth

and as far out as you can go? What about all the other guys just like you, out there panning the streams on all those stepwise worlds? You didn’t think of that, did you?’ He dug a nugget of gold the size of a pigeon’s egg from his pocket. ‘My friend, everybody else has had the same idea!’
    The woman said, ‘Oh, don’t be too hard on him, Mac. He’ll make some money, if he moves fast. Gold hasn’t been totally devalued yet; there hasn’t been much brought back. And he can always sell it as a commodity. It’s just, well, gold isn’t worth its weight in gold any more!’
    More laughter.
    Mac nodded. ‘Another example of the surprisingly low economic value of all these stepwise worlds. A real paradox.’
    That college-boy smugness maddened Jim. ‘If it’s worth nothing, smart ass, what are you guys doing here?’
    ‘Oh, we’ve been mining too,’ Mac said. ‘We’ve been retracing the steps of Marshall and the rest, just like you. We went further out. We even built a copy of the mill, and a forge to make iron tools, so we could find the gold and extract it the way the pioneers did. It’s history, a reconstruction. It’ll be on Discovery next year; check it out. But we were
not
there for the gold itself. Here.’ And he threw the egg of gold at Jim. It landed at his feet, and lay in the damp gravel.
    ‘You assholes.’
    Mac’s smile faded, as if in disappointment at his manners. ‘I don’t think our new friend is a very good sport, gents and ladies. Oh, well—’
    Jim lumbered at the group, swinging his fists. They kept laughing at him as they disappeared, one by one. He didn’t land a single punch.

7
    FOR SALLY LINSAY , her departure from Datum Earth, a year after Step Day, hadn’t been her first step at all. She left the world because her father had gone before her. And before him, most of her family. She was nineteen years old.
    She had taken her time about it. Time to get her kit together, to resolve her affairs. After all, she wasn’t planning to come back.
    Then, early one morning, she slipped on her sleeveless fisherman’s jacket with all the pockets, and picked up her pack, and left her room in her aunt’s home for the last time. Aunt Tiffany was away, and that suited Sally; she didn’t like goodbyes. She worked her way over to Park Street and strolled through the campus. Nobody around, not even a cleaner; UW was asleep. At that, the early morning was quieter than it used to be, she was sure. Maybe more people had stepped away than she’d thought. At the lake shore she cut past the library, headed west along the Lakeshore Path, and kept walking towards Picnic Point. There were a couple of sailboats out on Lake Mendota, and a hardy windsurfer in a lurid orange wetsuit, and a couple of boats of the UW Rowing Club, their coaches’ bullhorn barks carrying across the water. The horizon was bounded by green.
    To some all this was idyllic, the leafy university by the lake. Not to her. Sally liked nature, the real thing. To her the Long Earth wasn’t some new-fangled novelty, a theme park that had opened up on Step Day. She had
grown up
out there. Now, looking at the rowboats and the surfer, all she could see was disturbance, idiots scaring away the birds. Just as was starting to happen in the other worlds as more idiots stumbled stepwise, slack-jawed. Even this limpid lakewater was just dilute waste to her. At least she had picked a fine day to say goodbye to this place, this city by the lake, where she hadn’t always been entirely unhappy, and the air was fresh. But where she was going it would be fresher.
    She found a quiet spot, and walked off the path into the shade of the trees. She checked over her kit, one last time. She carried weapons, up to and including a lightweight crossbow. Her Stepper was in a plastic box of the kind her father had used. As well as the basic apparatus itself it was crowded with spares, fine optician’s tools, a length of solder, printouts of the circuit diagrams. There was the potato, of course, in the middle of the tangle of beat-up electronics. What a smart idea that was, a battery you could eat, if lunch became the priority. It was a professional traveller’s piece of kit. She was nostalgic enough to have plastered the box with a UW sticker.
    But the box was a cover. Sally didn’t need a Stepper to step.
    She knew the Long Earth, and how to travel across it. Now she was going out there to find her father. And, something that had puzzled her