The Long War

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