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Joshua sat there, staring at nothing. Do you know, the crackling of your fire now sounds absolutely random Yes. Easy enough to fix. I thought it might put you a little more at your ease. So if I come with you, youll get that congressional review off my back Yes, certainly, I promise. And if I dont choose to go with you, what then Ill deal with the review nonetheless. You did everything you could have done, I believe, and the loss of those people was definitely not your fault. Evidence of this will be presented to the panel. Joshua stood up. Right answer. That night Joshua sat in front of a screen in the Home and read up about Lobsang. Apparently, so it was believed, Lobsang resided in extremely highdensity, fastaccess computer storage at MIT, and therefore not in the premises of transEarth at all. When Joshua read that, he felt a warm certainty that whatever was in a supercooled box in MIT, it wasnt Lobsang, not the whole of Lobsang. If Lobsang were smart, and he was most surely smart, he would have got himself distributed everywhere. A hedge against an off switch. And hed be in a position where nobody could command him, not even his superpowerful partner Douglas Black. There was somebody who knew the rules, Joshua thought.

Joshua switched off the screen. Another rule: Sister Agnes held it as a matter of faith that all lefton computer screens exploded sooner or later. He sat back in the silence, and thought. Was Lobsang human, or an AI aping humanity A smiley, he thought: one curve and two dots, and you see a human face. What was the minimum you needed to see a human being What has to be said, what has to be laughed After all, people are made of nothing but clay well, metaphorically, although Joshua was not too good at metaphors, seeing them as a kind of trick. And you had to admit that Lobsang was pretty good at knog what Joshua was thinking, just as a perceptive human would be. Maybe the only significant difference between a really smart simulation and a human being was the noise they made when you punched them. But the ends of the Long Earth

Was there an end People were saying there must be a whole circle of Earths, because the Stepper box took you either East or West, and everybody believed that East must meet West But nobody knew. Nobody knew what all the other Earths were doing out there in the first place. Perhaps it was time somebody tried to find out. Joshua looked down at the latest Stepper box he had just finished, using a doublepole, doublethrow switch he had bought over the internet. Sitting on the desk beside him it was red and silver and looked very professional, unlike his first box, which had utilized a switch taken off Sister Reginas elderly stairlift. He had carried a Stepper ever since it had dawned on him that since he did not know how he stepped, the sensible thing would be to carry a Stepper box anyway; a talent that had come suddenly and inexplicably might just as easily disappear the same way. And besides, a box was cover. He didnt want to stand out from the stepping crowd.

Turning the box over in his hands, Joshua wondered if Lobsang realized what was the most interesting thing about Stepperbox construction. Hed noticed it on Step Day, and it was obvious when you thought about it; it was a strange little detail nobody seemed to think was important. Joshua always thought that details were important. Officer Jansson noticed details like this. It had to do with follog the instructions. A Stepper would only work for you if you built it yourself, or at least finished its assembly. He drummed his fingers on the box. He could go with Lobsang, or not. Joshua was twentyeight years old; he didnt have to ask anybodys permission. But he did have the damn congressional review hanging over him. And he always liked the idea of being out of reach.

Despite Janssons promises all those years ago, the bad guys had got to him once or twice. There had been that trouble not long after Step Day, when men with badges had pushed their way into the Home and tried to send him to sleep so they could take him away, and Sister Agnes had laid one of them out with a tyre iron, and pretty soon the cops were called, and that meant Officer Jansson showed up, and then the mayor had got involved, and it turned out that one of the kids who were helped by Joshua on Step Day had been his son, and that had been that, the three black anonymous cars had hightailed it out of town That was when the rule was laid down that if anyone wanted to talk to Joshua then they had to talk to Officer Jansson first. Joshua was not the problem, the mayor had said. The problem was crime and escapes from jails and no security left in the world. Joshua, the city council was told, was perhaps a little strange, but also marvellously gifted and, as was testified by Officer Jansson, had already been of great help to the Madison police department. That was the official position.