Terry Pratchett - The Long Earth

WEST — OFF — EAST

Right now the switch was set to OFF.

The rest of the box’s volume was occupied by … a potato. Just a potato, no Semtex or acid vial or nails or any other element of the modern terror arsenal. One of the forensics boys had suggested it might be used as a power source, like the classic potato-run clock. Mostly people thought it was just a symptom of lunacy, or maybe some bizarre practical joke. Whatever it was, this was what kids all around the planet were racing to assemble right now.

The Stepper had been found holding down a bit of paper on which had been scrawled, in the same marker pen, the same hand, TRY ME. Very Alice in Wonderland. Linsay’s parting shot. It occurred to Jansson that none of her colleagues had actually followed the instruction on the paper scrap: TRY ME.

She took the box, held it; it weighed nothing. She opened the lid. Another scrap of paper, headed FINISH ME, had simple instructions, what looked like a draft of the circuit diagram that had finished up on the net. You were supposed to use no iron parts, she read; that was underlined. She had to finish winding a couple of coils of copper wire, and then set contacts to tune the coils, somehow.

She got to work. Winding the coils was an oddly pleasant activity, though she couldn’t have explained why. Just her and the bits of kit, like a kid assembling a crystal radio. Finding the tuning was easy too; she kind of felt it when she got the sliding contact set right — though again she couldn’t have explained this, and didn’t look forward to trying to write this up in her report.

When she was done she closed the lid and took hold of the switch, tossed a coin in her head, and turned the switch WEST.

The house vanished in a rush of fresh air.

Prairie flowers, all around, waist deep, like a nature reserve.

And it was like she had been punched in the stomach. She doubled over, grunting, dropping the box. Earth under her feet, her polished shoes on grass. The air in her nostrils fresh, sharp, the stink of ash and foam gone.

Had some perp jumped her? She grabbed for her gun. It was in its holster, but it felt odd; the Glock’s polymer frame and magazine body looked OK, but the thing rattled .

Cautiously she straightened up. Her stomach was still bad, but she felt nauseous rather than bruised. She glanced around. There was nobody here, threatening or otherwise.

Nor were there four walls around her, no house just off Mifflin Street. Just prairie flowers, and a stand of hundred-foot-tall trees, and a blue sky clear of contrails and smog. It was like the Arboretum, the Herculean prairie reconstruction inside Madison’s city limits. An Arboretum that had swallowed the city itself. Suddenly here she was, in the middle of all this.

She opined, ‘Oh.’ This response seemed inadequate in itself. After some consideration, she added, ‘My.’ And she concluded, although in the process she was denying a lifelong belief system of agnosticism shading to outright atheism, ‘God.’

She put away her gun and tried to think like a cop. To see like a cop. She noticed litter on the ground at her feet, beside the Stepper she’d dropped. Cigarette butts. What looked like a cowpat. So was this where Willis Linsay had gone? If so, there was no sign of him, or of his animals…

The very air was different. Rich. Heady. She felt like she was getting high on it. It was all magnificent. It was impossible. Where was she? She laughed out loud, for the sheer wonder of it all.

Then she realized that every kid in Madison was soon going to have one of these boxes. Every kid everywhere else, come to that. And they were all going to start turning the switches. All around the world.

And then it occurred to her that getting home might be a good plan.

She grabbed the Stepper box from the ground, where she’d dropped it. It still had fingerprint dust on it. The switch had snapped back to OFF. With trepidation, she grabbed the switch, closed her eyes, counted down from three, and turned it EAST.

And she was back in the Linsay house, with what looked like metallic components of her gun on the ruined carpet at her feet. There was her badge, and name tag, even her tie clip, lying on the carpet. More bits of metal she hadn’t noticed she was missing.

Clancy was waiting out in the car. She started figuring how she was going to explain all this to him.

When she got back to base, station manager Dodd’s tracking board showed missing person calls coming in, one or two per neighbourhood. Slowly the whole board was lighting up.

Then the alerts came in from across the country.

‘And all around the world,’ Dodd said, wondering, after he’d flicked on CNN. ‘A missing persons plague. Even China. Look at that.’

Then the night got more complicated, for all of them. There was a rash of burglaries, even one from a strongroom in the Capitol building. The MPD had trouble just fielding the call-outs. That was before the directives started coming in from Homeland Security and the FBI.

Jansson managed to collar the sergeant in charge. ‘What’s going on, sarge?’

Harris turned to her, his face grey. ‘You’re asking me? I don’t know. Terrorists? Homeland are jumping up and down about that possibility. Space aliens? That’s what some guy in a tinfoil hat out in the lobby insists is causing it all.’

‘So what should I do, sarge?’

‘Do the job in front of you.’ And he hurried on.

She thought that over. If she were a citizen out there, what would she most care about? The missing kids, that’s what. She left the station and got to work.

And she found the kids, and spoke to them, some of them in the hospital, and every other kid talked about one particular kid who was calm, a hero, leading them to safety, like Moses — only he was called Joshua, not Moses.

Joshua backed away from the cop.

‘You are Joshua, aren’t you? I can tell. You’re the one kid that isn’t dribbling vomit.’

He said nothing.

‘They tell me Joshua saved them. They tell me he picked them up and carried them back home. You’re a regular catcher in the rye. You ever read that book? You should. Although maybe it’s banned in the Home. Yes, I know about the Home. But how did you do it, Joshua?’

‘I didn’t do anything wrong. I’m not a Problem,’ he said, backing further away.

‘I know you’re not a Problem. But you did something different. I just want to know what you did. Tell me, Joshua.’

Joshua hated it when people kept repeating his name. It was what they did to calm you down when they thought you were a Problem. ‘I followed the instructions. That’s all. People don’t understand. You just follow the instructions.’

‘I want to understand,’ she said. ‘Just tell me. You don’t have to be afraid of me.’

‘Look,’ said Joshua, ‘even if you make a simple wooden box you have to varnish it, otherwise it gets damp and everything swells and that can pull things apart. Whatever you do you have to do it right. You have to follow the instructions. That’s what they’re there for.’ He was saying too much, too fast. He shut up. Shutting up nearly always worked. Anyway what could he say?

Joshua baffled Jansson. Everybody had been panicking in the dark, evidently, the kids screaming and throwing up and tripping over and crapping their pants and being eaten by mosquitoes and walking into trees. But not Joshua. Joshua was calm. She looked at him now. He was slim, tall for his age, his face pale but his hair Mediterranean black. He was a calm enigma.

Out loud she said, ‘You know, Joshua, I would have said that, given the stories they’re telling, some of these kids must have been playing with drugs. Except that they were all covered in leaves and scratches. As if they really had been taking a walk in a forest right here in the middle of the city.’