The Long Earth Read Free Page A

Jansson, filed just after Step Day itself. About the mysterious boy who
came back
, bringing the other children with him. Quite the little pied piper, weren’t you? Once upon a time you would have been called a celebrity.’
    ‘And,’ Lobsang put in, ‘once upon another time you’d have been called a witch.’
    Joshua sighed. Was he ever going to live that day down? He had never wanted to be a hero; he didn’t like people looking at him in that funny way. Or, indeed, in any way. ‘It was a mess, that’s all,’ he said. ‘How did you find out?’
    ‘The police reports, like Jansson’s,’ said the drinks machine. ‘The thing about the police is that they keep everything on file. And I just love files. Files tell me things. They tell me who your mother was, for instance, Joshua. Maria was her name, was it not?’
    ‘My mother’s none of your business.’
    ‘Joshua, everybody is my business, and everybody is on file. And the files have told me all about you. That you may be very special. That you were there on Step Day.’
    ‘
Everybody
was there on Step Day.’
    ‘Yes, but
you
felt at home, didn’t you, Joshua? You felt as if you’d
come
home. For once in your life you knew you were in the right place …’

3
    STEP DAY. FIFTEEN years ago. Joshua had been just thirteen.
    Later, everybody remembered where they were on Step Day. Mostly they were in the shit.
    At the time, nobody knew who had uploaded the circuit diagram for the Stepper on to the web. But as evening swept like a scythe around the world, kids everywhere started putting Steppers together, dozens in the neighbourhood of the Home in Madison alone. There had been a real run on Radio Shack. The electronics seemed laughably simple. The potato you were supposed to install at the heart of it seemed laughable too, but it was important, because it was your power supply. And then there was the switch. The switch was vital. Some kids thought you didn’t need a switch. Just twist wires together. And they were the ones who ended up screaming.
    Joshua had put his first Stepper together
carefully
. He always did things meticulously. He was the kind of boy who always, but always, paints before assembly, and then assembles the pieces in the right order, with every single component laid out with care before commencing. Joshua always
commenced
things. It sounded more deliberate than starting. In the Home, when he worked on one of the old and worn and incomplete jigsaw puzzles, he would always sort out the pieces first, separating sky and sea and edge, before putting even two pieces together. Sometimes afterwards, if the puzzle was incomplete, he would go into his little workshop and very carefully shape the missing pieces out of hoarded scrap wood and then paint them to fit. If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t believe that the puzzle had ever had holes. And sometimes he would cook, under the supervision of Sister Serendipity. He would collect all the ingredients, prepare them all in advance meticulously, and then work through the recipe. He even cleaned up as he went. He liked cooking, and liked the approval it won him in the Home.
    That was Joshua. That was how he did things. And that was why he wasn’t the first kid to step out of the world, because he’d not only varnished his Stepper box, he’d waited for the varnish to dry. And that was why he was certainly the first kid to get back without wetting his pants, or worse.
    Step Day. Kids were disappearing. Parents scoured the neighbourhoods. One minute the kids were there, playing with this latest crazy toy, and the next moment they weren’t. When frantic parent meets frantic parent, frantic becomes terrified. The police were called, but to do what? Arrest who? To look where?
    And Joshua himself stepped, for the first time.
    A heartbeat earlier, he had been in his workshop, in the Home. Now he stood in a wood, heavy, thick, the moonlight hardly managing to reach the ground. He could hear other kids