Terry Pratchett - The Long Earth

It was impossible to believe that in only minutes all this was going to be a cloud of radioactive dust. But now, coming over the car radio, she heard hurried instructions to step, interspersed with the standard announcements. Step and help. Step and help … She smiled. An instant slogan.

Clichy came back with more information. The only warning the police had had was from a kid who had wandered into a district station in Milwaukee, in distress. Fifteen years old. He had run with a crowd of Humanity-Firsters, for the social life, to meet girls. But he was lying to them. He was actually a natural stepper. And when the Firsters found out they had taken him to a doctor, a man on the MPD’s watch list, who had opened up his head and inserted an electrode and burned out brain centres believed to be associated with stepping. It had left the boy blind, whether he could still step or not. So he went to the cops and spilled the beans on what his friends were planning to bring down in Madison.

‘All the kid knows is that the Firsters got hold of what they called a «suitcase nuke». Now, I’m reading my brief here, the only such device ever to have been acknowledged as manufactured by the US is the W54. A SADM, which stands for Special Atomic Demolition Munition. Yield of around six kilotons, which is about a third of Hiroshima. Alternatively they could have got hold of a Russian device, such as an RA-115 — get this, Spooky, it’s thought the old Soviet Union salted some of these things around the mainland US. Just in case, huh.’

She had reached Capitol Square. Most days this was cluttered with art fairs or farmers’ markets, now expanded to feature the exotic produce of a dozen worlds, or else some protest rally or other. Today there was a concentration of cops and Homelands types and FBI officers, some in nuclear-biological-chemical protection suits, as if that would make a difference, and their vehicles, including helicopters hovering overhead. The bravest of the brave, she thought, running towards the bomb. As she ripped around the square Jansson looked down State Street, that linked the main UW campus with the Square in a straight west — east line. State was still full of bustling restaurants, espresso bars and shops, despite the Long Earth recession and the depopulation, still the city’s beating heart. This afternoon it swarmed with students and shoppers. Some were evidently hurrying for shelter, but others sipped their coffees and inspected their phones and laptops. Some were laughing, even though Jansson could clearly hear the echoing voice of a cop loudspeaker urging everybody to get indoors or step away, on top of the sirens’ wail.

‘People aren’t believing it, Chief.’

‘Tell me about it.’

She abandoned the car and, flashing her badge at everyone who got in her way, pushed through the lines to the Capitol mound. The racket of the sirens, echoing from the concrete, was deafening, maddening. Down the four big staircases around the Capitol building itself people were spilling out, members of the State legislature, lobbyists, lawyers, in sharp-pressed business suits. And at the foot of one flight of steps a more ragged group of civilians was sitting, watched over by a loose ring of armed cops and Homelands officers. These folk, it turned out, had been in the Square when the warning came, and had been immediately rounded up, their Steppers confiscated along with their phones and any weapons. Jansson, just outside the perimeter, searched for familiar faces among the resentful, scared crowd of tourists, shoppers, business types. Some of them wore proud-to-be-a-Stepper wrist bands that they brandished at the officers who contained them. I’m no Humanity-Firster! Look at this!

And there was Rod Green, sitting a little way from the rest.

She sat down with Rod. He was eighteen years old, she knew, but looked younger. He wore jeans and a dark jacket, his strawberry-blond hair cut short. He looked like any other student. But there were lines around his mouth, his eyes. Frown lines, lines of resentment and hate.

‘You did this. Didn’t you, Rod?’ She had to yell to make herself heard over the sirens. ‘Come on, kid, you know me. I’ve kept an eye on you for years.’

He eyed her. ‘You’re the one they call Spooky.’

‘You got me. Did you do this?’

‘I helped.’

‘Helped who? Helped how?’

He shrugged. ‘I brought it to the square in a big backpack. I delivered it, but I don’t know where it’s stashed. I also don’t know how it was armed. Or how it can be disarmed.’

Shit, shit. ‘Is this necessary, Rod? Do all these people have to die just so you can get back at Mommy?’

He sneered. ‘Well, that bitch is safe.’

That shocked Jansson. Maybe he didn’t even know that his mother, Tilda Lang Green, off in a colony on some remote Earth, was dead of a cancer. Now wasn’t the time to tell him. ‘Do you even think it’s going to do any good? I know you people have it in your heads that Madison is some kind of stepping hub. But you can’t stop up the Long Earth. Even if you flatten the whole of Wisconsin people will just keep on stepping from wherever—’

‘I only know one thing about the bomb.’

She grabbed his shoulders. ‘What? Tell me, Rod.’

‘I know when .’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Two minutes forty-five seconds. Forty-four. Forty-three…’

Jansson stood up and yelled at the cops, ‘Did you hear that? Report it in. And get these people out of here. Their Steppers — for God’s sake, give them back their Steppers!’

The cops didn’t need telling twice, and their captives rose in a mob, panicked by Rod’s overheard words. But Jansson stayed by Rod’s side.

‘It’s all up for me,’ Rod said. ‘I can’t step. That’s why I came here. It seemed right.’

‘Right, hell.’ Without warning she grabbed him, picking him up under knees and shoulders like a child, and, straining, lifted him off the ground. He was too heavy for her, and she immediately fell under him, but she switched her Stepper before the two of them hit the ground.

And she landed on her back, on green grass. Blue sky overhead, just like on the Datum today. The sirens had gone away. The scaffolding frame that had been erected here in West 1 to interface with the Capitol loomed over her.

Rod, lying on top of her, convulsed, puked over her, and started to froth at the mouth. A paramedic in an orange jumpsuit pulled Rod aside.

‘He’s a phobic,’ Jansson said. ‘He needs—’

‘We know, ma’am.’ The paramedic took a syringe from her pack and shot him up in the neck.

The convulsions eased. Rod looked Jansson in the eye. He said clearly, ‘Two minutes.’ Then his eyes rolled up and he was unconscious.

Two minutes . The word went out across Madison Zero, and its nascent twins to East and West, and around a watching world.

And the stepping began.

Parents carried their children, and went back for their own old folk, and their elderly neighbours. In care homes, some bewildered senior citizens had Steppers slapped on them and were sent East or West for the first time in their lives. In the schools, teachers carried over their students, and big kids carried little kids. In the hospitals the staff and the healthier outpatients found ways to lift and step the heaviest, most immobilized patients, even coma victims and babies in incubators, and went back for more, and then waited as surgeons hurried to close up interrupted operations, and carried those patients over too. All across Madison, the majority of humanity who could step aided the minority who couldn’t. Even extreme phobics like Rod Green who couldn’t tolerate a single step were met by medics who did their best to stabilize them, until they could be hurried away from the danger zone and taken back to the Datum.