The Long Earth

to deal with this contingency of the extra Earths. Our plans in the short, medium and long term. A version will go up to federal level too. And the chief is bearing down on me because, as he points out, we don’t
have
any plans, either short, medium or long term. So far we’ve just been reacting to events.’
    ‘And that’s why I’m here?’
    ‘Let me find the files …’ He tapped at the keyboard.
    Christopher’s radio crackled, and he murmured in response. Cellphones wouldn’t work over here, of course. Conventional radio transmitters and receivers were OK so long as they were customized to exclude iron components, so they could be carried over intact. There was talk of laying down some kind of network of old-fashioned phone lines, copper wire.
    ‘Here we go.’ Clichy swivelled the laptop so that Jansson could see the screen. ‘I got case logs here, snippets of video. I’m trying to make sense of it all. Your name kept on coming up, Jansson, which is why I called you in.’
    She saw links to her reports on the fire at the Linsay residence, the first-night panic over the missing teenagers.
    ‘So we had a tough first few days. Those missing kids, and the ones that came back with broken bones from falling through high-rise buildings, or with chunks bitten out of them by some critter or other. Prison escapes. A wave of absenteeism, from the schools, businesses, the public services. The economy took an immediate hit, nationwide, even globally. Did you know that? I’m told it was like an extra Thanksgiving break, before the assholes drifted back to work, or most of them …’
    Jansson nodded. Most of those first-day Steppers had come quickly back. Some had not. The poor tended to be more likely to stay away; rich people had more to give up back in Datum. So, out of cities like Mumbai and Lagos, even a few American cities, flocks of street kids had stepped, bewildered, unequipped, into wild worlds, but worlds that didn’t already belong to somebody else, so why shouldn’t they belong to you? The American Red Cross and other agencies had sent care teams after them, to sort out the
Lord of the Flies
chaos that followed.
    That was the main thing about the Long Earth, in Jansson’s mind. Joshua Valienté’s behaviour had shown it right from the beginning. It offered
room
. It offered you a place to escape – a place to run, endlessly as far as anybody knew. All over the world there was a trickle of people just walking away, with no plan, no preparation, just walking off into the green. And back home there were already reports of problems with the desolate, resentful minority who found they couldn’t step at all, no matter how fancy their Steppers.
    Lieutenant Clichy’s priority, of course, was the way the new worlds were being used against Datum Earth.
    ‘Look at the log,’ he said. ‘After a few days people start to figure out this shit, and we get more calculated crimes. Elaborate burglaries. A rash of suicide bombers in the big cities. And the Brewer assassination, or the attempt. Which is where your name started to get flagged up, Officer Jansson.’
    Jansson remembered. Mel Brewer was the estranged wife of a drug baron, who had cut a deal with the DA to testify against her husband, and was headed for witness protection. She barely escaped the first attempt on her life by a stepping assassin. It had been Jansson who had come up with the idea of stashing her in a cellar. On the stepwise worlds, West 1 and East 1, the space the cellar occupied was solid ground, so you couldn’t step straight in. You’d either have to dig a parallel hole, or else come in at ground level and fight your way down. Either way, the element of surprise was lost. By the following morning the belowground facilities in all the police stations, even in the Capitol building, were being fitted out as refuges.
    ‘You weren’t the only one to figure that out, Jansson. But you were
among
the first, even nationally. I hear the President herself sleeps in some bunker under the White House now.’
    ‘Glad to hear it, sir.’
    ‘Yeah, yeah. Then it started getting more exotic.’
    ‘Odd to hear you using that term without the word “dancer” attached to it, sir.’
    ‘Don’t push it, Jansson.’ He showed her reports of various religious nuts. Apocalypse-minded types had gone flooding into the ‘new Edens’, believing their sudden ‘appearance’ was a sign of the End of Days. One Christian sect believed Christ must