The Long War

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.