The Long Earth

counselling by ‘experts’ in stepping and in the Long Earth, such as they were, a physicist and a psychologist and a neurologist.
    The story made it into a local news site before it was pulled. After that the incident took some covering up, but the US government, an old hand at such assignments, was able to deny the whole thing, discredit the witnesses including Jared himself, and bury the whole thing in classified files.
    Of course Lobsang was fully aware of the contents of those files.
    Joshua asked, ‘So why do people need Steppers at all?’
    ‘Perhaps in a more indirect way than is imagined, Joshua. The brief notes Linsay left insist that the placing of every component is crucial and needs pin-sharp care, so that the builder’s attention is totally wrapped up in the task. The need to align the two home-wound coils reminds me of the tuning of early metal detectors. As for the other components, they appear to be there for the
look
of the thing, and the look can be very important. The winding of the coils themselves is especially hypnotic. If I may be Tibetan for a moment, I believe that what we have here is a kind of technological mandala, designed to tilt the mind into a subtly different state, disguised as a bit of everyday western technology. It is the act of making a Stepper that enables one to step, you see, not the gadget itself. I myself went through the physical process of constructing a Stepper, via an ambulant unit. I might venture to suggest that it is unlocking a door within us that most of us don’t know exists. But as Jared Orgill’s story illustrates – or even your own – some people are finding they don’t need the Steppers at all, when they step accidentally with a broken box, or step in a panic without a box at all.’
    ‘We’re all natural steppers,’ Joshua said, wondering. ‘It’s just that most of us don’t know it. Or we need this aid to make those muscles in the head work.’
    ‘Something like that. But not
all
, you’re wrong about that. Enough steppers have been studied now to draw up some rough statistics. Perhaps a fifth of mankind are thought to be natural steppers, to whom the Long Earth is as accessible as a city park – without any aids at all, perhaps with a little coaching, or mental disciplines of the kind Jared inadvertently came across when visualizing his circuit diagram. On the other hand, perhaps another fifth can never leave the Datum at all, unless humiliatingly carried by somebody else.’
    Joshua pondered the implications. Suddenly humanity was fundamentally divided – even if it didn’t know it yet.

25
    JOSHUA WATCHED WORLDS pass like the turning pages of a picture book. And, heading steadily geographical west, they passed a boundary marker of their own: the Ural mountains, a north–south band of crumpled landscape that endured across most of the worlds.
    But the worlds were different now. Both Ice Belt and Mine Belt were far behind them. Now the Earths below were Corn Belt worlds, as the American scouts and trek captains liked to call them: rich, warm worlds, and at least in North America covered with grassland and prairie littered with familiar-looking trees and scrub and dense with herds of healthy-looking animals. Worlds ripe for farming. The Earths below now numbered over a hundred thousand on Lobsang’s earthometer. It took trekkers nine months to come out as far as this, on foot. The airship had made it in four days.
    Whenever they stopped, Lobsang scanned for short-wave radio transmissions, which ought to carry around the curve of any Earth with an ionosphere. They paused at a couple of Corn-Belt worlds to listen, one being West 101,754, where they got a long and chatty news update from a colony in a stepwise New England: some kid, originally from Madison as it happened, blogging by reading from her journal. One of a whole trail of such hopeful townships, Joshua imagined, scattered thin across the continents of the Long Earth. And each, he supposed, would have its own story to tell …
    Hi, my loyal listeners, Helen Green here, your low-tech blogger clogging up the airwaves again. This bit’s from three years ago. It was July 5 – which, as you will be aware, is the day after July 4. Here goes …
    Is this what they call a hangover?
    Oh! My! God!
    Yesterday was Independence Day! Yay. We’ve been here eight months, and nobody’s dead yet, yay! That’s an excuse for a party if ever there was one. We’re Americans, and this is