‘More than that. If “this thing” fails I expect you to bring me home.’
‘You’re insane.’
‘Quite possibly. But we have a contract.’
A blue door slid open, and, to Joshua’s blank astonishment, Lobsang showed himself in person — or rather, in ambulatory unit. ‘Welcome again! I thought I would dress for the occasion of our maiden voyage.’ The automaton was male, slim and athletic, with movie star looks and a wig of thick black hair, and it wore a black lounge suit. It looked like a waxwork of James Bond, and when it moved, and worse when it smiled, it did nothing to dispel the artifice.
Joshua stared, struggling not to laugh.
‘Joshua?’
‘Sorry! Pleased to meet you in person …’
The deck vibrated as engines bit. Joshua felt oddly thrilled at the prospect of the voyage in a small-boy kind of way. ‘What do you think we’re going to find out there, Lobsang? I guess anything is possible if you go far enough. What about dragons?’
‘I would suggest we might expect to find anything that
‘Sounds a little drab.’
‘However, I would not be human if I did not acknowledge one important factor, which is that I might be totally wrong. And
‘Well, we’ll find out — if this thing actually steps.’
Lobsang’s synthetic face folded into a smile. ‘Actually we’ve been stepping for the last minute or so.’
Joshua turned to a window and saw that it was true. The construction site had cleared away; they must have passed out of the sheaf of known worlds in the first few steps — although that word ‘known’ was something of a joke. Even the stepwise worlds right next to the Datum had barely been explored; humans were colonizing the Long Earth in thin lines stretched across the worlds. Anything could be living out back in the woods… And he, evidently, was going deeper into those woods than anybody before him.
‘How fast will this thing go?’
‘You’ll be pleasantly surprised, Joshua.’
‘You’re going to change the world with this technology, Lobsang.’
‘Oh, I know that. Up to now the Long Earth has been opened up on foot. It’s been medieval. No, worse than that, we haven’t even been able to use horses. Stone Age! But of course, even on foot humans have been moving out since Step Day. Dreaming of a new frontier, of the riches of the new worlds …’
13
MONICA JANSSON HAD always understood very well that it was the promise of the riches of the new worlds that drew the likes of Jim Russo out into the Long Earth to try their luck, over and over, with the law seeming at times no more than a minor obstacle in the face of their ambition.
On her first visit to Portage East 3, ten years after Step Day, it had taken Jansson a minute or two, even after she’d gotten over the step sickness, to figure out what was familiar about the place. This new Portage had big steam-driven sawmills with chimney stacks belching smoke, and foundries with a burned-metal smell. She heard the cries of the workers, the steam hooters, the steady clank of the smiths’ hammers. It was like something out of a certain kind of fantasy novel that she’d read as a kid. Oh, in no novel she’d ever read would there have been teams of labourers hauling twelve-yard lengths of timber up on to their shoulders, and then vanishing. But she could testify that on this particular world, the modestly named Long Earth Trading Company was turning a corner of a stepwise Wisconsin into a steampunk theme park.
And here came the man who was driving it all.
‘Sergeant Jansson? Thank you for stepping over to see my little enterprise.’
Jim Russo was shorter than she was. He wore a crumpled grey suit, and had well-tended hair of a suspiciously vivid brown hue, and a broad grin between cheeks that might or might not have had a little help to stay perky. She knew Russo was forty-five years old, had been declared bankrupt three times before but had always bounced back, and had now mortgaged his own home for seed-corn money for this new inter-world enterprise.
‘No need to thank me, sir,’ she said. ‘You know we have a duty to investigate complaints.’
‘Ah, yes, more anonymous whining from the hired hands. Well, it’s par for the course.’ He led her over the muddy ground, evidently hoping to impress her with the scale of his operation here. ‘Although I think I would have expected a visit from the Portage PD. That’s the local department.’
‘Your registered office is in Madison.’ And besides, ‘Spooky’ Jansson was often called into the more high- profile cases involving Long Earth issues around wider Wisconsin.
They paused to watch another team of handlers pick a tremendously long-looking log off a heap; a foreman called out a countdown — ‘three, two, one’ — and away they stepped, with a soft implosion.
‘You can see this is a busy place, Sergeant Jansson,’ Russo said. ‘We started with nothing, of course. Nothing more than we could carry over, and no iron tools. In the early days the foundries were a high priority, after the sawmills. Now we have a flow of high-quality iron and steel, and soon we’ll be building steam-driven harvesters and collectors, and then you’ll see us rip through these forests like a hot knife through butter. And all this timber is stepped back to the Datum, to waiting fleets of flatbed trucks.’ He brought her to an open-front log cabin that served as a kind of showroom. ‘We’re expanding into a lot of areas other than just raw materials. Look at this.’ It was a kind of shotgun that gleamed like brass. ‘No iron parts at all, meant for the new pioneer market.
‘I know the opening up of the Long Earth has knocked us into an economic dip, but that’s short term. The loss of a percentage of the low-grade workforce, a glut of some precious metals — that will pass. Back on Datum Earth the US went from colonial days to the moon in a few centuries. There’s no reason we can’t do the same again, on any number of other Earths. Personally I’m very excited. It’s a new age, Sergeant Jansson, and with products and commodities like these I mean to be in on the ground floor …’
As did hundreds, thousands of other needy entrepreneur types, Jansson knew. And most of them were younger than Russo, smarter, not yet weighed down by previous failures, in Russo’s case beginning with a comically naive attempt to go mine a stepwise copy of Sutter’s Mill for gold, almost a cliche of a misunderstanding of the economic realities of the new age.
‘It’s a problem, isn’t it, Mr Russo, to balance the profit you make against the pressure on your labour force?’
He smiled easily, prepared for the question. ‘I’m not building pyramids here, Sergeant Jansson. I’m not whipping slaves.’
But neither was he running a philanthropic foundation, Jansson knew. The workers, mostly young and ill- educated, often had no real idea of what was going on out in the Long Earth before they came out here to work in places like this. As soon as they realized that they could be using their strength to build something for themselves, they tended to start agitating to join one of the new Companies and go trekking off into the deep crosswise to colonize — or else, as it dawned on them that there was an infinity of worlds out there none of which were owned by people like Jim Russo, they simply walked away, into the endless spaces. Some people just seemed to keep walking and walking, living off the land as best they could. Long Earth Syndrome, they called it. And that was where the complaints about Russo were coming from. He was said to be tying his workers up with punitive contracts to keep them from straying, and then going after them with hired muscle if they reneged.
She had the sudden instinct that this man was going to fail, as he had before. And when it all started going belly-up he was going to be cutting even more corners.
‘Mr Russo, we need to get down to the specifics of the complaints against you. Is there somewhere we can talk privately?’
‘Of course …’
