The Long War

stepwise direction but not the other. She could step out into vacuum, I guess, to try to reach the cub. She isn’t stapled, is she?’
    ‘I don’t think so. But she must recoil from the vacuum instinctively. Also they’re using that noise to keep her confused and unhappy. You should meet Gareth Eames, the supervisor here. A Brit. What a slimeball. For some reason he hates the trolls with a passion. He has a background in acoustics, and he said he started his own interaction with them when he found out how to drive them away with discords. Now he’s developed that into a weapon, a trap, a cage. But the other thing that’s holding her here . . . Come see.’
    A little further along the corridor was another locked door, this one with a small window. When she looked through this time, Jansson saw something like a crude nursery, or maybe a chimp enclosure at a zoo, with climbing bars, ropes, big chunky toys. There was a solitary troll in there, a cub, playing in a desultory fashion with a big plastic truck. He wore an odd silvery suit, with his head, hands and feet bare.
    ‘Mary’s infant.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Sally. ‘The handlers call him Ham. You can see what they’re doing. That’s some kind of experimental pressure suit he’s wearing. You saw the images. They wanted to use him as a test subject.’
    ‘They didn’t mean to harm him—’
    ‘No. But Mary must have had some sense of the danger they were taking him into – the Gap is surely a place a troll would avoid – which is why she protested.’
    Jansson knew Sally well enough by now. ‘You have a plan, don’t you?’
    ‘We’re only going to get one chance.’
    Expecting the answer, dreading it, Jansson asked, ‘To do what?’
    ‘To bust them out of here. We take this kid to his mother, we all step away—’
    ‘And then what?’
    ‘We go on the run. Hide out somewhere, until we can find a proper sanctuary. Maybe wherever the rest of the trolls are going.’
    ‘I knew you were going to say something like that.’
    Sally grinned. ‘And I know you’re going to help me. All cops want to cross over to the dark side once in their lives, don’t they?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Anyhow I need you, Jansson.’
    ‘To do what?’
    ‘To begin with, to get these doors open. You were a cop; you can do that. Look, I don’t know how much time we have. Can you open this door, or not?’
    Jansson could, and she did, and she was committed.

36
    T HREE WEEKS AFTER Sally’s stunt, when the news of it percolated back through the outernet to Datum Earth, Lobsang summoned Joshua for a face-to-face meeting. Their first for years, the first since Agnes’s funeral, in fact.
    Lobsang .
    As was his way, Joshua spent twenty-four hours thinking about it.
    Then, reluctantly, he went along.
    The transEarth Institute facility to which Joshua was directed, a couple of miles from the footprint of Madison on Earth West 10, turned out to be a low, blocky, sprawling structure of the ubiquitous Low-Earth-architecture stone and timber, standing alone on a deserted stretch of road that cut through banks of prairie flowers. Of course Lobsang would have set up this office of his own part-owned subsidiary of the Black Corporation at a stepwise Madison, to be close to Agnes and the Home. A Low Earth it might be, but this was still a different world, with a subtly different late-afternoon sky. Back on the Datum, on a June day like this, the horizon would have been tinted orange-grey, the beautiful and deadly colours of combustion. Not here; this sky was a deep, flawless blue. In a way such comparative emptiness, such cleanliness, even so close to the Datum, gave Joshua a renewed sense of the sheer immensity of the corridor of worlds that was the Long Earth.
    Inside the facility, Joshua encountered the usual office clutter: deceptively uncomfortable chairs, stricken rubber plants, and a determinedly pleasant young lady who did everything but check his chest X-rays before allowing him to pass on. There seemed to be a camera in every angle of the walls, each watching him steadily.
    At last he was directed through a self-opening door into a white-walled corridor. As Joshua followed the corridor another camera swivelled, following him, its lens glittering with paranoia.
    The door at the far end of the corridor opened and a woman stepped out. ‘Mr. Valienté? So glad you could make it.’ She was small and dark, Asiatic, and wore the largest spectacles Joshua had ever seen. She held out her