The Long Earth

24

THE NEXT DAY Joshua, almost shyly, asked Lobsang for more information about natural steppers. Others like himself, and his mother. ‘Not legends from history: modern-day examples. I imagine you have plenty of material.’

So Lobsang told Joshua the story of Jared Orgill, one of the first natural steppers to come to the attention of the authorities.

It had been just another game of Jack in the Box: that was what they called it in Austin, Texas, although kids had independently invented variants of the game across the planet, with lots of different names. And this particular day it was the turn of Jared Orgill, ten years old, to be Jack.

They’d found an old fridge on the illegal garbage dump, Jared and his friends. A big slab of stainless steel, lying on its back amid the garbage. ‘It looks like a robot’s coffin,’ remarked Debbie Bates. Once they’d pulled out the shelves and plastic boxes and stuff it was more than big enough to take one of them.

Jared wasn’t bullied into going into the box, though his parents would later protest otherwise. In fact he would have fought the others for his turn. He handed his cellphone to Debbie — you never took in a phone, of course — climbed in and lay down. It wasn’t comfortable, with the bumps and ridges of the fridge’s inner fittings poking into him, and there was a stink of some chemical or other. The big heavy lid slammed down, shutting out the sky, the grinning faces. It didn’t bother him, it would only be for a few minutes. For a while he heard bumps and bangs and scrapes, as the others followed the usual routine of heaping up garbage on top of the fridge to pin down the lid.

Then there was a moment of quiet, a few more scrapes — and the fridge started rocking. The other kids had thought of a better way of pinning him in there. It took them a minute to get organized, but soon the half-dozen of them were lined up, heaving at the heavy fridge, rocking it a little further with each pull. The fridge rolled over, and fell forward so its weight trapped the door closed. Jared, buffeted by the rolling in the dark, landed face down on the inside of the door … and he heard something crunch. His Stepper, at his waist, was just a plastic box full of a jumble of components, tied on to his belt with string. Kind of fragile.

The game was that he would wait five minutes, ten — maybe as long as an hour. Of course he couldn’t tell the time. Then he would step out to West 1 or East 1, move aside from the fridge, and step back — ta-da! — there would be Jack, out of the box.

But he’d fallen on his Stepper.

It might still work. He didn’t try it, not straight away. He didn’t want to look chicken by coming out too soon. Also, he didn’t want to know that the Stepper was broken, and that he was stuck.

He didn’t know how long he waited. The air already felt hot, stuffy. Maybe it was ten minutes, maybe more.

He felt for the sliding switch on the Stepper, closed his eyes, pulled it over to East. Nothing. Only the stuffy dark. Fear stabbed again. He pulled the slider to West, with no result. He yanked the slider this way and that, until it broke off in his hand. He tried not to scream. He turned on his back and pummelled at the fridge carcass. ‘Help! You guys! Get me out! Debbie! Mac! Help, get me out!’

He lay, listened, waited. Nothing.

He knew what they’d do, for he would do the same. They’d wait for minutes, a half-hour, an hour, maybe even more. Then they’d start to fret that something had gone wrong, so they’d split up and run home. They would blab in the end, and everybody would drive out to the dump, and Dad would scream at the others to tell him where the damn fridge was, and he’d pull off the garbage with his bare hands…

The trouble was, that could be hours away. The air was already starting to feel thick, it strained his chest to breathe. He panicked again. He pulled at the wreck of the Stepper until it started to come apart in his hands. He screamed, and banged the hull of the fridge, and pissed his pants. He started to cry.

Then, exhausted, he lay back down again, and felt over the wreck of his Stepper in the dark: the potato, the power lead, the bits of circuit board. He shouldn’t have pulled it about like that. He should have tried to fix it. Maybe if he remembered how he’d made it in the first place he could put it back together now. He remembered the circuit diagram, as it had first come up glowing on the screen of his phone. He had a good memory for stuff like that. He thought his way around the diagram, the coils, the tuning, and he—

And he fell, a foot or so, and landed with a thump on soft ground. Suddenly there was sky above him, dazzling bright, and the air rushed into his lungs.

Out! He got to his feet, trembling. Bits of the Stepper fell to the ground. He was dizzy with the richness of the air. As if he’d been dead, and was alive again. His pants were damp, to his shame.

He looked around. He was in a thick forest clump, but he could see lights through the trees: Austin East 1 or West 1, whichever. He had to get home. How? The Stepper was even more of a mess than before. Still, he walked a couple of paces from where the fridge would be—

And he was standing on a heap of smashed-up, stinking debris, beside a big mound that had to be the fridge with its covering of junk. He’d stepped back, to the Datum. He didn’t get it. This time he hadn’t even touched the Stepper. He didn’t even feel nauseous.

He didn’t care. He was home! He ran off, away from the fridge. Maybe his parents wouldn’t have missed him yet. Elated, he started planning how he would get back his phone and brag to his friends.

Unfortunately for Jared, he had been missed. His parents had already called the cops, one of whom was bright enough to notice the smashed Stepper, and ask the crucial question: how had Jared managed to step between the worlds without a Stepper? To Jared’s dismay he was kept off school for medical checks, and 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.