The Long Earth

into the Pentagon hadn’t got his distances and angles right, and his makeshift bomb was triggered in a corridor, the only fatality being its creator. The British terrorist had clearly paid more attention in geometry class, and appeared slap (and instantly) bang in the chamber of the House of Commons – but had failed to finish his homework, so that the last thing
he
ever saw was five Members of Parliament debating a rather insignificant bill about herring fishing. Had he thought to make his appearance in the Commons bar, he would have reaped a greater harvest of souls.
    Nevertheless, both of the explosions echoed around the world, and authority panicked. There was concern among private individuals too; it didn’t take a genius to figure out that, suddenly, anybody could step into your house while you slept. And where there is panic, profit isn’t far behind. Instantly anti-stepper devices were being developed in workshops and private homes everywhere, some of them clever, many of the worst stupid – and quite a few deadly, more often than not to their owner rather than any would-be thief. Attempts to criss-cross the empty spaces of an unoccupied room with anti-stepping hazards ended up trapping children’s fingers and maiming pets. The most effective deterrent, as people soon worked out, was simply to cram a room with furniture, Victorian-style, to leave no room for steppers.
    In truth, the threat of wholesale burglaries-by-stepping was more about urban fears than reality. Oh, a lot of people jumped worlds to avoid debts, obligations or revenge, and there were plenty of agents who would follow them – and there would always be a few who stole and raped and killed their way across the worlds, until somebody shot them. But in general crime was low, per capita, out in the Long Earth, when the social pressures that sparked so much crime and disorder on the Datum were largely absent.
    Of course governments weren’t too happy with their tax-payers stepping out of reach. But only Iran, Burma and the United Kingdom had ever actually tried to
ban
stepping. Initially most governments in the free world adopted some equivalent of the US aegis plan, demanding sovereignty of their country’s footprint down all the endless worlds. The French, for example, declared that all the French footprints were available for colonization by anybody who wanted to
be
French, and was prepared to accept a carefully put together document which outlined what being French
meant
. It was a brave idea, slightly let down by the fact that despite a nationwide debate it appeared that no two Frenchmen could agree exactly on what being French did mean. Although another school of thought held that arguing about what made you French was
part
of what made you French. In practice, though, whatever regime was imposed, it didn’t take you long to step out to a place where the government had no say, simply because the government wasn’t there, benevolent or not.
    And the people? They just stepped, here, there and everywhere, heading not so much
to
where they wanted to be, as, quite often,
from
where they emphatically didn’t want to be any more. Inevitably many went out unprepared and without forethought, and many suffered as a consequence. But gradually people absorbed the lessons learned by folk like the Amish long ago, that what you needed was other people, and preparation.
    Fifteen years on, there were successful communities thriving far out across the empty landscapes of the Long Earth. The emigration push was thought to be starting to decline, but it was estimated that fully a fifth of Earth’s population had walked away to find a new world – a demographic dislocation comparable to a world war, it was said, or a massive pandemic.
    But it was still early days, in Jansson’s opinion. In a way, mankind was only slowly beginning to adjust to the idea of infinite plenty. For without scarcity, of land or resources, entirely new ways of living became available. On television the other night Jansson had watched a theoretical anthropologist work her way through a thought experiment. ‘Consider this. If the Long Earth really is effectively endless, as it is beginning to look, then
all mankind
could afford to live
for ever
in hunter-gatherer societies, fishing, digging clams, and simply moving right along whenever you run out of clams, or if you just feel like it. Without agriculture Earth could support perhaps a million people in such a way. There