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5
    LOBSANG SAID, ‘JANSSON , that police officer, kept an eye on you. You know that, don’t you, Joshua?’
    Joshua was jolted back to the present. ‘You know, you’re smart for a vending machine.’
    ‘You would be amazed. Selena, please take Joshua downstairs, will you?’
    The woman looked startled. ‘But Lobsang, we haven’t put Joshua through the security screening yet.’
    There was a clank from the drinks machine and a can of Dr Pepper thumped into the hopper. ‘What’s the worst that could happen? I would like our new friend to meet me properly. By the way, Joshua, the can is for you. On the house.’
    Joshua stood. ‘No thanks, I lost my taste for soda years ago.’ And if I hadn’t, he thought to himself, I would have done just now, having seen you excrete it.
    As they headed towards the stairs Selena said, ‘Good of you to shave, by the way. Seriously, chins are going out of style in these pioneering times. People are so faddy.’ She smiled. ‘I think we were expecting some kind of mountain man.’
    ‘I used to be like that, I guess.’
    This bland deflection evidently annoyed her; she seemed to want more from him.
    They reached a landing that consisted of nothing but unmarked metal doors. One of these slid open as she approached, and slid noiselessly shut seconds after he had followed her through and on to another stairway, heading down.
    ‘Joshua, I have to tell you,’ she said with a kind of brittle humour, ‘I would like to
push
you down these stairs! And you know why? Because you just walk in and suddenly you have a security rating of zero, a great big oh, which means technically you can be told everything that’s going on here. I on the other hand have a security clearance of five. You outrank me and I have been working for transEarth and its affiliates since the start! Who exactly are you, who can just walk in and be told every secret?’
    ‘Well, sorry about that. I am just Joshua, I guess. Anyway, what do you mean “since the start”? I was the start! That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?’
    ‘Yes. Of course. But I suppose every person’s first step is the start, for them …’

6
    JIM RUSSO HAD taken his own first step out into what the excited online chatterers were soon calling the Long Earth for ambition. And because, at thirty-eight years old, after a lifetime of bad breaks and betrayals, he figured he was ahead of the pack.
    Very soon after Step Day he’d come up with his plan, and worked out what he had to do. He headed straight for this corner of California. He brought maps and photographs and such, to locate the exact spot where Marshall had made his find, all those years ago. He was well aware that GPS didn’t work in the stepwise worlds, so everything had to be on paper. But of course you didn’t need a map to find Sutter’s Mill, here on the bank of the South Fork American River, not in Datum Earth anyhow. It was in a State Historic Park. The place was a California Historical Landmark. They’d built a monument to show the site of the original mill, and you could see where James Marshall had first seen gold flakes glittering in the mill’s tailrace. You could stand there, right on the very spot. Jim Russo did so now, the cogs whirring in his head.
    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 I 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