The Long War

34

‘WE 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.’

‘Of course,’ Jansson said uncertainly.

‘Which is opposite to the wisdom of launching from the Datum, where the lower the latitude the better, to get a boost from that rotation . . . What you have to do is step over in a spaceship.’ He pointed to the capsule she’d spotted before, like an Apollo command module on four legs. ‘That is our shuttle. Adapted from twain technology, a stepping vehicle, but wrapped in a rocket ship re-engineered from the old SpaceX Dragon. All iron and steel components excluded, right? What you do is step over into the Gap – you have to pick the right time of day, when the turning Earth brings you to just the right spot – and the shuttle fires its rockets to take off the spin velocity and bring you to relative rest. Then you dock at the Brick Moon.’

‘The what?’

‘That’s what we’re calling the permanent station we’re building at the location of the Earth, in the Gap. Brick and concrete are easy to make over here, and easy to step in great sections over there, as long as you use mortar and stuff that can withstand the conditions of the vacuum. Even trolls can churn out great chunks of it.’ Which was the very first time he had even mentioned the humanoids. ‘The station is going to be a kind of honeycomb of sub-spheres in a cluster two hundred feet across. Quick and dirty, but we can do what we like here, whatever we can carry over, you haven’t got to cram everything into the nose-cone of a converted ICBM and subject it to multiple gravities . . . A brick structure won’t take pressure, but we can install inflatables or ceramic shells within the frame. When it’s done, that is where we’re going to launch our space missions from.’ He pointed now at the inverted booster. ‘I guess you recognize this baby.’

‘I wish I could say I did,’ she said sadly.

‘It’s a re-engineered S-IVB. That is, a Saturn V third stage. You know, the old moon rockets? Old technology but reliable as hell. This is just a test article; we’re reworking it in steppable materials.

‘Here’s the beauty of the Gap. From the Datum, you needed a thing the size of the Saturn V itself to get to the moon and back. Right? Because of the need to escape Earth’s gravity. In the Gap, all you’d need to get anywhere, Mars even, is no bigger than this. We’ve already launched one test shot, a mission to Venus with a ship we called the Kingfisher. In future we’re looking at nuclear rockets, which will offer a much better delta-vee. That is—’

‘I believe you. I believe you!’

He stared at her, and laughed. ‘I think we’re going to get on, you and I, Lieutenant Jansson. Sorry. I know I get carried away. Look – did you ever read Robert Heinlein? Basically it’s like that here. You really can build a backyard rocket ship and fly to Mars. What’s not to love about that? All these worlds are ours, including Europa . . . Sorry again. Another nerdy reference.

‘Listen, Ms. Jansson. Given the reason you’ve come out all this way – you mustn’t think badly of the young guys here. They are mostly guys, they mostly lack social skills, they’re kind of driven. Many of them have some kind of personality disorder, probably. But their hearts are in the right place, generally speaking. They may be thoughtless to trolls, but they aren’t deliberately cruel.’ He looked distracted. ‘By contrast – have you ever met anybody who was? I mean, a really bad person. I served in the Air Force. I saw some sights, in postings overseas.’

‘I was a cop,’ she said in answer.

He glanced over and grinned. ‘“Was”? So when you flashed your badge at me, Lieutenant Jansson—’

‘OK, you got me. Call me Monica, by the way.’

His grin widened. ‘Monica.’

A guy in a Bart Simpson cap came wandering over. ‘You’re Lieutenant Jansson?’

‘That’s me.’

‘Your friend Sally Linsay sent me to fetch you. Oh, and she had a message.’

‘What message?’

‘“The trolls are gone.”’

‘That’s it?’

The guy shrugged. ‘You coming, or not?’