The Long Earth

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 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.