The Long Earth

that would only open if
one
loose nail was pushed just so far and
one
of the paint pots was turned ninety degrees, and then a panel would slide, and there was a large space that you couldn’t believe was there, and you could still smell where the plants had been …
    ‘So that’s my story. I always stepped, I grew up with it; Step Day was just a bump in the road to my family. Whereas you had to discover stepping for yourself, didn’t you, Joshua? I heard you were brought up by nuns. It’s part of your legend.’
    ‘I don’t want a legend.’
    ‘Nuns, eh? Did they beat you up, or try anything … funny?’
    Joshua narrowed his eyes. ‘There was none of that stuff. Well, apart from Sister Mary Joseph, and Sister Agnes had her out of there in an hour, boy, had she got the wrong number. But, yeah, it was a totally weird place, looking back. But the right kind of weird. Good weird. The nuns had a lot of freedom. We read Carl Sagan before the Old Testament.’
    ‘Freedom. Well, I can sympathize with that. That’s why my father walked out on Douglas Black. Douglas found out about the Stepper box one day, he somehow forced it out of my Dad. With Mom gone and everything I think Dad was beginning to hate people anyhow. But what Black did was the final straw. One day Dad just disappeared. He took a post at Princeton under phony credentials. But that was kind of high profile, so when he got a sniff of a pursuit by Black he went out to Madison, took a college post under another assumed name. He took the Stepper technology he was developing with him. I followed and went to college out there. Didn’t see much of him. I guess I kept a watching eye on him, however. His real name isn’t Willis Linsay, by the way.’
    ‘I didn’t think it was.’
    ‘And that was when he decided, because he suspected the Black Corporation was on his tail
again
, that he would give stepping to the whole world, so no one could own it or put chains around it, or slap a tax on it. He really didn’t like big industry, and he really didn’t like governments. I think he hoped the world would be a much better place if everybody was able to step out of their grasp. As far as I know he is still alive out here somewhere.’
    ‘And is that why you’re out here? Looking for him?’
    ‘One reason.’
    There was a curious change in the air. The little dinosaurs stood, stretching, their gaze combing the sky. Joshua looked at Sally. She didn’t react; she was carefully retrieving the last wayward oyster in the pan with a stick.
    He asked, ‘Do you think he was right to do what he did? With the Stepper?’
    ‘Well, maybe. At least he gave people a new option. Although he said people were going to have to learn to
think
, out there in the Long Earth. He said once, “I am giving mankind the key to endless worlds. An end to scarcity and, may we hope, war. And perhaps a new meaning to life. I leave the exploration of all these worlds to your generation, my dear, though personally I think you will fuck it up royally.” Why are you looking at me like that?’
    ‘Your father said
that
to you?’
    Sally shrugged. ‘I told you. He was a hippie born of generations of hippies. He was always saying things like that.’
    At that moment the loudspeaker voice of Lobsang boomed out over the beach, startling the small dinosaurs again. ‘Joshua! Back to the ship right now! Emergency!’
    There was a strange new smell in the air, like burning plastic. Joshua looked at the northern horizon; there was a grey cloud, and it was getting bigger.
    ‘I call them suckers,’ said Sally calmly. ‘Rather like dragonflies. They pump a venom into anything organic, which breaks down cells remarkably fast, and you become a bag of soup that they suck up, as if through a straw. For some reason they don’t bother the dinosaurs. Your electronic friend is right about the emergency, Joshua. Now run along, there’s a good boy.’
    And she disappeared.

34
    AS SHE STEPPED away, Joshua took a step back, to the East, away from the direction of travel of the airship. That was the instinctive way when you were in danger, to step back into the world you’d just arrived from, because the world downstream might be even worse. Now he was in a timber world, fairly standard stuff, nothing but endless trees as far as he could see – which was only a hundred yards or so, because of the aforesaid trees. No girl, no dinosaurs, no airship.
    He could see a little more light than average to his