Terry Pratchett - The Long Earth

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 — 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 …’

All over the nearby Earths, Jansson knew, on worlds becoming sweatshops overnight, people were dreaming of escape, of freedom. As she waited for a coffee Jansson spotted a flyer in Russo’s own in-tray, just a page crudely printed on pulpy paper, about the formation of yet another new Company to go trek up West. Dreams of the new frontier, even here in this minor businessman’s office. Sometimes Jansson, nearing forty now, wondered if she should up sticks and go out herself, and leave the Datum and the increasingly murky Low Earths behind.

DREAMS OF THE Long Earth. Dreams of the frontier. Yes, ten years after Step Day, Jack Green had understood that. Because they had been his wife’s dreams, and Jack had feared they were tearing his family apart.

January 1. Madison West 5. We came to stay at a lodge here for New Year after CristmasChristmas at home but we will have to go bakback to the Datum for school. My name is Helen Green. I am elveneleven years old. My mother (Dr Tilda Lang Green) says I should keep a jurnal jorunaljournal in this bokbook which was a Christmas presntpresent from Aunt Meryl because there mitemight be no electricselectronics this thing have no spellchecker it drive me CRAYZEE!!!..

Jack Green carefully turned the pages of his daughter’s journal. It was like a fat paperback book, though with the pulpy graininess of much of the paper produced here in West 5. He was alone in Helen’s room, on a bright Sunday afternoon. Helen was out playing softball in ParkZone Four. Katie was out too, he wasn’t sure where. And Tilda was downstairs talking with a group of the friends and colleagues she had managed to snag into the idea of forming a Company to go West.

‘… Empires rise and they fall. Look at Turkey. That was a great empire once and you wouldn’t believe it now…’

‘… If you’re middle class you look to the left and see the activists undermining American values, and to the right and you see how free trade has exported our jobs …’

‘… We believed in America. Now we seem to be mired in mediocrity, while the Chinese steam ahead…’

Tilda’s voice: ‘The notion of Manifest Destiny is historically suspect, of course. But you can’t deny the importance of the frontier experience to the making of the American consciousness. Well, now the frontier is opening up again, for our generation and maybe for uncountable generations to follow…’

The group conversation broke up into a general susurrus of noise, and Jack smelled a rich aroma. Time for coffee and cookies.

He returned to the diary. At last he came to an entry that mentioned his son. He read on, skimming over the spelling errors and crossings-out.

March 23. We have moved to our new house in Madison West 5. It will be fun here in the summer. Dad and Mom take it in turns to go back, they have to work on the Datum for the money. And we had to leave Rod again with Auntie Meryl because he is a fobic [she meant phobic, a non-stepper — Jack tripped over that spelling] and can’t step it’s sad I cried this time after we stepped away but Rod didn’t cry unless he did after we had gone. I will write to him in the summer and will go back and see him IT IS SAD because it is fun here in the summer and Rod can’t come…