Terry Pratchett - The Long Earth

And then he stepped, into West 1, and the reconstruction was gone. The landscape was just as wild as Marshall and Sutter and his buddies had found it when they came to build their sawmill. Or maybe wilder, because there hadn’t even been Indians here before the stepping started. Of course there were other people here today, tourists from Datum Earth looking around the site. There were even a couple of little information plaques. Sutter West and East 1 had already been co-opted into the landmark, as an adjunct to what they had in Datum Earth. Jim smiled at the goggle-eyed foolishness of the few tourists here, their lack of imagination.

As soon as he felt able, when the nausea faded after ten or fifteen minutes, he stepped on further. And again. And again.

He paused in West 5, which he figured was far enough away. Nobody around. He laughed out loud, and whooped. No reply. There was an echo, and a bird called somewhere. He was alone.

He didn’t wait for the nausea to pass. He crouched down by the stream, and dug out his sieve from his pack, breathing deep to settle his stomach. Right here, on January 24, 1848, James Marshall had noticed odd rock formations in the water. Within a day Marshall had been washing gold flakes out of the stream, and the California Gold Rush was on. Jim had dreams of finding the exact same first flake as Marshall had found, which was held by the Smithsonian Institution. What a stunt that would be! But there was no mill here, of course, and so no tailrace, and the river bed hadn’t been disturbed as it had been in Marshall’s day back in Datum Earth, and it seemed unlikely he’d find the identical flake. Well, he’d settle for getting rich.

This was his grand plan. He knew exactly where the Sutter’s Mill gold was, for it had all been discovered and extracted by the miners who had followed Marshall. He had maps of the seams that still lay undisturbed, right here! For in this world, there had been no Sutter, no Marshall, no mill — and no Gold Rush. All that wealth, or a copy of it, still slept in the ground. Just waiting for Jim to take it for himself.

And there was laughter, from right behind him.

He whirled around, tried to stand, and stumbled and splashed back into the stream, getting his feet wet.

A man faced him, wearing rough denim clothes and a broad-brimmed hat. He carried a heavy orange backpack, and some kind of pick. He was laughing at Jim, showing white teeth in a grimy face. Others popped into existence around him: men and women, similarly dressed, grubby and tired-looking. They grinned when they saw Jim, despite the stepping nausea.

‘Not another one?’ said one woman.

She looked attractive under the dirt. An attractive woman, mocking him. Jim looked away, his face hot.

‘Looks like it,’ said the first man. ‘What’s the deal, buddy? You here to make your fortune with the Sutter gold?’

‘What’s it to you?’

The man shook his head. ‘What is it with people like you? You kind of think one move ahead, but not the next, or the next.’ He sounded like a college boy to Jim, smug, sneering. ‘You figured out there’s unmined gold on this spot. Sure there is, you’re right. But what about the same site on West 6 and 7 and 8, and as far out as you can go? What about all the other guys just like you, out there panning the streams on all those stepwise worlds? You didn’t think of that, did you?’ He dug a nugget of gold the size of a pigeon’s egg from his pocket. ‘My friend, everybody else has had the same idea!’

The woman said, ‘Oh, don’t be too hard on him, Mac. He’ll make some money, if he moves fast. Gold hasn’t been totally devalued yet; there hasn’t been much brought back. And he can always sell it as a commodity. It’s just, well, gold isn’t worth its weight in gold any more!’

More laughter.

Mac nodded. ‘Another example of the surprisingly low economic value of all these stepwise worlds. A real paradox.’

That college-boy smugness maddened Jim. ‘If it’s worth nothing, smart ass, what are you guys doing here?’

‘Oh, we’ve been mining too,’ Mac said. ‘We’ve been retracing the steps of Marshall and the rest, just like you. We went further out. We even built a copy of the mill, and a forge to make iron tools, so we could find the gold and extract it the way the pioneers did. It’s history, a reconstruction. It’ll be on Discovery next year; check it out. But we were not there for the gold itself. Here.’ And he threw the egg of gold at Jim. It landed at his feet, and lay in the damp gravel.

‘You assholes.’

Mac’s smile faded, as if in disappointment at his manners. ‘I don’t think our new friend is a very good sport, gents and ladies. Oh, well—’

Jim lumbered at the group, swinging his fists. They kept laughing at him as they disappeared, one by one. He didn’t land a single punch.

FOR SALLY LINSAY, her departure from Datum Earth, a year after Step Day, hadn’t been first step at all. She left the world because her father had gone before her. And before him, most of her family. She was nineteen years old.

She had taken her time about it. Time to get her kit together, to resolve her affairs. After all, she wasn’t planning to come back.

Then, early one morning, she slipped on her sleeveless fisherman’s jacket with all the pockets, and picked up her pack, and left her room in her aunt’s home for the last time. Aunt Tiffany was away, and that suited Sally; she didn’t like goodbyes. She worked her way over to Park Street and strolled through the campus. Nobody around, not even a cleaner; UW was asleep. At that, the early morning was quieter than it used to be, she was sure. Maybe more people had stepped away than she’d thought. At the lake shore she cut past the library, headed west along the Lakeshore Path, and kept walking towards Picnic Point. There were a couple of sailboats out on Lake Mendota, and a hardy windsurfer in a lurid orange wetsuit, and a couple of boats of the UW Rowing Club, their coaches’ bullhorn barks carrying across the water. The horizon was bounded by green.

To some all this was idyllic, the leafy university by the lake. Not to her. Sally liked nature, the real thing. To her the Long Earth wasn’t some new-fangled novelty, a theme park that had opened up on Step Day. She had grown up out there. Now, looking at the rowboats and the surfer, all she could see was disturbance, idiots scaring away the birds. Just as was starting to happen in the other worlds as more idiots stumbled stepwise, slack-jawed. Even this limpid lakewater was just dilute waste to her. At least she had picked a fine day to say goodbye to this place, this city by the lake, where she hadn’t always been entirely unhappy, and the air was fresh. But where she was going it would be fresher.

She found a quiet spot, and walked off the path into the shade of the trees. She checked over her kit, one last time. She carried weapons, up to and including a lightweight crossbow. Her Stepper was in a plastic box of the kind her father had used. As well as the basic apparatus itself it was crowded with spares, fine optician’s tools, a length of solder, printouts of the circuit diagrams. There was the potato, of course, in the middle of the tangle of beat-up electronics. What a smart idea that was, a battery you could eat, if lunch became the priority. It was a professional traveller’s piece of kit. She was nostalgic enough to have plastered the box with a UW sticker.

But the box was a cover. Sally didn’t need a Stepper to step.

She knew the Long Earth, and how to travel across it. Now she was going out there to find her father. And, something that had puzzled her endlessly since she was a little girl playing outside her father’s shed in a stepwise Wyoming, to figure out what it was all for .