The Long Earth

you’re really good, your friend Douglas will give you a sack of toys to play with, like that airship up there. Isn’t that right?’
    ‘I’m not an employee of Black.’
    ‘Just contracting, is that the fig leaf?’ she said dismissively. ‘You know, in their headquarters in New Jersey every employee of the Corporation wears a little earpiece just like yours, so that Douglas himself can talk to them individually whenever he likes. Even his silence is threatening, they say. But one day my father said, “I am not going to wear this thing any more.” And right now, Joshua, you will do me the courtesy of taking yours off. I don’t mind talking to
you
. I heard about you, how you saved all those kids on Step Day, you’re obviously a decent human being. But take off that modern-day slave bracelet.’
    Joshua did so, feeling guilty.
    Sally gave a little nod of satisfaction. ‘Now we can talk.’
    ‘There’s nothing sinister about us,’ Joshua said tentatively – although he wasn’t entirely sure how true that was. ‘We are out here to explore. To look and learn, to map the Long Earth. Well, that’s the expedition’s intention.’ Or was, he thought, before it became focused on the issue of the humanoid migrations, the disturbance they perceived in the Long Earth.
    ‘Not
your
intention. You aren’t an explorer, Joshua Valienté, whatever else you are. Why are
you
here?’
    He shrugged. ‘I’m a failsafe, if you want the truth. Hired muscle.’
    She grinned at that. ‘Ha!’
    He said, ‘You say your father worked for Black.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘What did he do?’
    ‘He invented the Stepper. Though that was on his own time.’
    ‘Your father was
Willis Linsay
?’ Joshua just stared, thinking of Step Day, and how his own life had been changed by what Linsay had done.
    She smiled. ‘All right. You want the full story? I’m from a family of steppers. Natural steppers … Oh, close your mouth, Joshua. My grandfather could step, my mother could step and I can step. My father
couldn’t
step, however, and that’s why he needed to invent something like the Stepper box. So he did. I first stepped when I was four. And I soon found out that Dad could step if he was holding my hand. They took a photograph of us. I never had any problem with it, the magic-door stuff, because of Mom. Mom was a reader, and she read to me Tolkien and Larry Niven and E. Nesbit and just about everything else. I was home-schooled, needless to say. And I grew up with my own Narnia! To tell the truth, since Step Day I’ve become pissed at having to share
my
secret place with the rest of the world. But back then Mom explained to me that I shouldn’t ever tell anyone what I could do.’
    Joshua listened, dumbfounded. He could barely imagine how it must have been to be part of a family of steppers, a family all like himself.
    ‘It was pretty good in those days. I often hung out with Dad in his shed, because the shed was in another world – though, of course, I had to lead him in and out of that other Wyoming.
    ‘But Dad was hardly ever there, because he was always jetting away, wherever the Black people wanted him, and that could be anywhere from MIT to some research lab in Scandinavia or South Africa. Sometimes, late at night, a helicopter might turn up, and he’d get in, and then maybe an hour later he’d be back home and the chopper was flying away. When I asked him what he’d been doing, it was always, “Just some stuff, that’s all.” But that was OK by me because my Dad knew best. He knew
everything
.
    ‘I didn’t know anything about his work projects. But I wasn’t surprised when he succeeded in inventing the Stepper. He was an unusual mix of brilliant theoretician and hands-on engineer; I believe he’s come closer than anybody else to figuring out the true nature of the Long Earth … But it did him no good when Mom died. That was one problem he couldn’t untangle with technology. Things got weird after that.’ Sally hesitated. ‘I mean more weird than before.
    ‘He kept working. But I got the impression that he stopped caring about what he was working on, and what it was for. He’d always been ethical, you know? A hippie from a long line of hippies. Now he didn’t care.
    ‘But he was living a double life. He kept stuff like the Stepper hidden away. Dad did like hiding things. He said he learned it in his hippie days when he hid his marijuana plantation in the cellar. He showed me once. It had a secret door