The Long Earth

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 cliché 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