The Long War (23 page)

It seemed to her that Marjorie, the female, was looking at her sorrowfully, with soulful brown eyes. With extreme care, a hand like a leather shovel gently touched Maggie’s. Maggie felt she had no choice but to move closer, and she felt huge arms close around her.

Carl, meanwhile, got hold of the ocarina and experimented until he found a way to say, ‘Peppermint.’

That was how Maggie was found in the morning, coming awake as a crewman very, very gingerly unwound his Captain from the snoring trolls.

Breakfast was somewhat embarrassing. Every last crew member knew how she’d spent the night. But she never had been one for standing on her dignity.

She spent a day letting the crew experiment with the troll-call, under supervision. And she had Gerry Hemingway from Science study its workings, or anyhow its inputs and outputs.

That night she had to order the crew to put the call away, to leave the exhausted trolls to their slumbers on the observation deck.

Then, at breakfast the next day, she called the crew together. She looked carefully around them, and picked out Jennifer Wang, one of the marine detachment, whose grandparents, she knew, had come from China. ‘Jennifer, you spent a long time with Jake yesterday. What did he say to you?’

Wang looked around, somewhat embarrassed. But she cleared her throat and said, ‘A lot I couldn’t understand. But it was along the lines of, “far from home”. It creased me up! I mean, I’m a Chinese American and proud to be a citizen, but it’s in the blood. How did the big guy know?’

‘Because he’s smart,’ Maggie said. ‘He’s intuitive. He’s
sapient
.

‘You know, people, we were sent out here to find sapience in the Long Earth, among other goals. Right? And now here it is, on this ship, living among us: sapience. And that, by the way, will be my defence at the court-martial.

‘I’m proud of you all for how you’re dealing with your new shipmates. But if this room isn’t cleared and you’re not at your posts in two minutes, you’re all on a charge. Dismissed.’

T
HE LAST STEP
across was a sudden transition from a dune field, just inland from a grey ocean, the local copy of the Irish Sea, into what looked like a rudimentary industrial park, a place of gleaming tanks, rusty gantries, smoke stacks, blocky concrete buildings. There was nothing very space-age about it as far as Jansson could see at first glance.

‘Come on.’ Sally shifted her pack and led the way.

Jansson followed, walking steadily across grass-covered ground that gradually gave way to lumpy dunes. The morning was dry and bright in this world, one step away from the Gap. She could smell salt and rotting seaweed in the wind off the sea. She tried to visualize where she was: tried to imagine that there was vacuum, space, a void, just one tap of the Stepper at her waist away from this mundanity. Tried and failed.

They hadn’t covered a hundred yards when the landscape was illuminated by a blinding light, coming from the rim of the development ahead, like a droplet of sunlight brought down to the Earth.

Without hesitating Jansson pushed Sally to the ground, lay on top of her, and pulled her jacket hood over her own head. Jansson had been in the world next door when the Madison nuke went off; she hadn’t forgotten. The noise of the explosion hit them, then a hot wind, and the ground itself shuddered. But it passed over quickly.

Cautiously Jansson rolled off Sally, wincing as her enfeebled body protested with a chorus of aches. They both sat up and looked west. A cloud of white smoke and vapour was rising up from the explosion site.

‘Not a nuke,’ Sally said.

‘Not this time. Some kind of chemical factory blowing up? Sorry to jump you.’

‘Don’t be.’ Sally got up and brushed away sandy soil. ‘This place is going to be a playground for tech-boy nutjobs, who may or may not know what the hell they are doing. Let’s watch our backs.’

‘Agreed.’

They walked on, eyes wide open, alert for more problems. A fire guttered at the destroyed plant; as they approached they could see steam rising from amateurish-looking attempts to douse it.

There was no security here that Jansson could see, not even a fence. But as they entered the sprawling facility they were noticed. Jansson saw workers staring at them.

At length a man walked out to greet them. In his fifties perhaps, he was not tall but very upright, wiry, tanned, with greying crew-cut hair. He wore a blue jumpsuit with a faded NASA logo and a name tag:
WOOD, F
. He grinned at them, welcoming enough. ‘Ladies.’

‘Gentleman,’ Sally snapped back.

‘The name’s Frank Wood. Formerly of NASA, and now of – well, whatever you want to call us here. GapSpace will do; we’re incorporated under that name. Can I ask why you’re here? We don’t get too many casual visitors this far out. Are you volunteers? If so, give me a hint of your technical specialities and I’m sure you’ll fit right in. Journalists?’ Ruefully he glanced over his shoulder at the rising cloud of steam and smoke. ‘You’ll see we just had an incident with a lox storage tank, but that’s not so unusual.’

Jansson flashed her badge and warrant card. ‘I’m police. Madison, Wisconsin, specifically.’ He glanced at it, but she put it away before he had a chance to figure out she was long retired, and shouldn’t have kept the shield anyhow.

‘Oh.’ He looked disappointed in her. ‘Frankly, Lieutenant Jansson, that kind of Datum authority doesn’t have a lot of purchase out here. Even if we were in the US Aegis, which we’re not. I guess you’re here about the troll thing, right?’

‘Afraid so, Mr. Wood.’

‘Call me Frank . . .’

‘I think I recognize you,’ Sally said.

‘You do?’

‘The video clips. It was you who stopped that tech guy putting the troll down on the spot.’

He actually blushed, and looked away. ‘Well, I never wanted to be famous. Look, the guy you want to see about all that is called Gareth Eames. Nearest thing to a chief executive we got here. English guy. If I’m honest with you, if not for the fuss in the outernet – yes, we get the news even out here – the troll
would
have been put down by now. But even guys like us take notice when we’re in the middle of a flame war. Come on, I’ll take you to Eames—’

‘No need,’ Sally said briskly. ‘I’ll find the way.’

Wood looked dubious, then shrugged. ‘OK.’ He pointed to a low, squat concrete building. ‘That’s the admin block, or the nearest we have to it. We build everything like a blockhouse here; living with rockets you learn to be cautious. You’ll find Gareth in there. And that’s where we’re holding the troll too, in the calaboose.’

‘Great.’ Sally turned to Jansson, and whispered, ‘Let me get over there and scout it out, without Buck Rogers here hovering over me.’

Jansson was doubtful, but this was Sally’s modus operandi, she was learning. Always keep the other guy off balance. ‘OK. And as for me—’

‘Distract this guy. Let him show you his toy spaceships, or whatnot. I think he has his eye on you, by the way.’

‘Garbage. Also, let me remind you, my personal rocket ship takes off from a different launch pad.’

‘So he’s no more perceptive than most men.’ Sally winked. ‘Undo a button or two and he’s your slave for life. See you later.’

‘W
E DON’T THINK
of this world as Earth West Two Million Plus Change, or whatever,’ Frank Wood said. ‘We think of it as Gap East 1. Because the Gap is the centre of our universe, not the Datum. And a strange kind of world this is, right? Almost empty of humans. Whole continents nobody’s even set foot on. We basically live off fishing and a bit of hunting – while we build spaceships. We’re a tribe of hunter-gatherers with a space programme! . . .’

As Frank Wood rambled on, Jansson inspected GapSpace. The facility was like a fannish reconstruction of a half-remembered Cape Canaveral, she thought, having visited that old wonderland once as a tourist – and it was there, at the Cape, it turned out, that the GapSpace people had recruited Frank Wood himself. She recognized basic facilities such as kilns churning out bricks baked from the local clay, and forges, and manufacturing plants. Then there were the traditional attributes of a space centre, like huge spherical tanks whose walls were frosted because, Frank told her, they held great volumes of super-cold liquid fuels. The company even had its own logo, a roundel with a thin crescent Earth cupping a star field, the GapSpace name below, and above, a corporate slogan:

THERE IS SUCH A THING AS A FREE LAUNCH

Joshua had once told Jansson that that was a line of Lobsang’s. And, most thrilling of all, even to a hardened old heart like Jansson’s, there were spacecraft. There was one capsule-like craft that stood on four robust-looking legs, and a gantry that held a rocket booster, a tank maybe sixty feet tall topped by a flaring nozzle that pointed oddly
up
into the sky, as if the rocket were preparing for a launch down into the Earth. It was a stand for static test firing, Frank explained.

The workers here were mostly male, mostly around thirty to forty years old, mostly overweight. Some were dressed in protective gear, or coveralls like Frank’s, but others wore shorts, sandals, and T-shirts bearing slogans from long-forgotten TV shows and movies:

YOU DIDN’T HEAR ABOUT THE POLAR BEAR?

One guy bearing a sheaf of blueprints came right up to Jansson, looked her in the face, and said, ‘Neo, huh? It’s like one unending con here, man. Am I in heaven?’ And he walked off before she had a chance to reply.

Frank raised his eyebrows, as if sharing a joke with Jansson. ‘Look, this isn’t a corporate operation. Not yet. You can see that. These guys are all volunteers. Hobbyists. We have amateur rocketeers, radio hams, astronomers, and disappointed space cadets, like me, I guess. A few folks back home are funding us privately. The big corporations don’t yet see the value of this. Why go to all the trouble of crossing space to some desert world like Mars when there are a billion habitable Earths a walk away? But they’ll learn, and no doubt they’ll muscle in when we start getting results.’

‘And you’ll all get rich.’

‘Maybe. Anyhow, as you’ll have guessed, social skills aren’t exactly high on the list of selection criteria here. You’ll get used to it . . .’

For Frank Wood, she learned, the Gap had turned out to be his chance to recover the Dream.

Before he was recruited by Gareth Eames, Frank hadn’t even heard of GapSpace. But he had been working at the Kennedy Space Center, what was left of it, and it was sad. In the rocket garden, the open-air museum, they weren’t even taking care of the precious relics any more, he told her. You could see corrosion from the salty air eating its way into papery cylindrical hulls, gaping rocket nozzles. They still flew unmanned satellite launches, but for a man who would have flown in space himself such routine shots had all the drama of a garage sale.

Frank remembered when he was a kid and watched bright-eyed men on TV explaining how they were going to put mass drivers on the moon, and break up asteroids for their metals, and build tin-can worlds in space, and set up beanstalks, ladders into the sky from the surface of the Earth. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?

And then the Steppers were invented. Frank was thirty-one years old on Step Day, already an Air Force veteran, and had just been accepted into NASA’s astronaut corps. But now you had the Steppers, and the Long Earth. Mankind suddenly had all the space it wanted, a cheap and easy route to a trillion Earths.

Once Frank Wood had dreamed of flying to the planets, if not the stars. Now the spaceships of the future stayed on the launch pad of the imagination, and as he worked towards retirement in what was left of KSC, an astronaut candidate reduced to driving a tourist bus, he had felt like an early mammal scuttling around the bones of the last dinosaurs.

Then Gareth Eames, a smooth-talking Brit, had shown up, gabbling about something called the Gap. A kind of Long Earth loophole for space cadets, it seemed to Frank, who at first had barely understood.

And then Eames showed Frank a photograph of a spaceship.

What struck Jansson most in this brief tour wasn’t the space technology, nor the nerdish workers, but the trolls. They were everywhere, labouring in the factories beside clunky assembly-line robots, lugging heavy loads to and fro – such as enigmatic structures of brick, arches and dome segments – and, in one place, mixing and laying down concrete to build what was evidently going to be a broad apron, like a landing pad. This particular party were singing as they worked, and she strained to hear; their song, softly sung, was a round based on what sounded like some old pop song with lyrics about wishing you were a spaceman, the fastest guy alive . . . No doubt they’d picked it up from the local nerd population.

Frank Wood didn’t even mention the trolls, as if they were invisible to him.

After their walkabout Wood led her to a kind of rough open-air coffee bar, beside the big inverted rocket booster. Jansson sat with relief.

‘This is a genuine space launch facility,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you figured out that much. But we’re in a unique position here, next to the Gap, and the way we work is like nothing that’s ever been done before.’

She instinctively liked Frank Wood, but she was quickly growing tired of the fan-boy bragging. ‘It seems simple enough to me. All I have to do is take one more step and I’ll be in space. Right?’

‘True,’ he nodded. ‘In the vacuum. Of course you’d be dead in under a minute if you weren’t in a pressure suit. Then you’d find yourself being flung off into space at hundreds of miles an hour.’

‘Really?’ She tried to visualize why, failed.

‘The Earth’s rotation,’ he said. ‘
This
Earth. If you’re standing at the equator you’re being rushed around at a thousand miles an hour. The gravity holds you down,
here
. Step next door, and the gravity’s gone, but you take that momentum over with you. It’s like I whirled you around my head on a rope, and the rope broke, and you just went flying off into space. Of course we can use that velocity vector if we’re clever, but mostly it’s just a nuisance. The only stationary points are at the poles, and it’s not convenient to work there. That’s why we’re at a relatively high latitude, here in England. The further north the better. Or south, of course.’