Terry Pratchett - The Long War

“I wish I could say I did,” she said sadly.

“It’s a re-engineered S-IVB. That is, a Saturn V third stage. You know, the old moon rockets? Old technology but reliable as hell. This is just a test article; we’re reworking it in steppable materials.

“Here’s the beauty of the Gap. From the Datum, you needed a thing the size of the Saturn V itself to get to the moon and back. Right? Because of the need to escape Earth’s gravity. In the Gap, all you’d need to get anywhere, Mars even, is no bigger than this . We’ve already launched one test shot, a mission to Venus with a ship we called the Kingfisher . In future we’re looking at nuclear rockets, which will offer a much better delta-vee. That is—”

“I believe you. I believe you!”

He stared at her, and laughed. “I think we’re going to get on, you and I, Lieutenant Jansson. Sorry. I know I get carried away. Look—did you ever read Robert Heinlein? Basically it’s like that here. You really can build a backyard rocket ship and fly to Mars. What’s not to love about that? All these worlds are ours, including Europa… Sorry again. Another nerdy reference.

“Listen, Ms. Jansson. Given the reason you’ve come out all this way—you mustn’t think badly of the young guys here. They are mostly guys, they mostly lack social skills, they’re kind of driven. Many of them have some kind of personality disorder, probably. But their hearts are in the right place, generally speaking. They may be thoughtless to trolls, but they aren’t deliberately cruel.” He looked distracted. “By contrast—have you ever met anybody who was? I mean, a really bad person. I served in the Air Force. I saw some sights, in postings overseas.”

“I was a cop,” she said in answer.

He glanced over and grinned. “‘Was’? So when you flashed your badge at me, Lieutenant Jansson—”

“OK, you got me. Call me Monica, by the way.”

His grin widened. “Monica.”

A guy in a Bart Simpson cap came wandering over. “You’re Lieutenant Jansson?”

“That’s me.”

“Your friend Sally Linsay sent me to fetch you. Oh, and she had a message.”

“What message?”

“‘The trolls are gone.’”

“That’s it?”

The guy shrugged. “You coming, or not?”

Jansson was escorted over to the big admin block, where Sally waited for her, and—Jansson couldn’t quite figure out how she did it—within thirty seconds Sally had given Bart Simpson the slip.

They hurried through cramped, badly lit, roughly walled corridors. “Come on,” Sally said. “There’s things you need to see in this dump.”

They passed what looked like offices, study rooms, labs, even a kind of computer centre. A few people glanced at them, curiously or not, but nobody stopped them or questioned them. They must be used to strangers here. Jansson was getting the impression that this was indeed a loose organization, a bunch of fan types getting together, and no doubt with people coming and going as enthusiasm or other commitments allowed. No security at all.

They came to a staircase that led them down into an underground complex, a warren of roughly walled corridors and rooms. Jansson remembered what Frank had said about safety bunkers. And she remembered, too, the speculation about why Mary the troll hadn’t just stepped away from her tormentors; keeping her underground would be the simplest way, so she couldn’t step at all.

And now, as they hurried along, Jansson started to hear music, of a jagged, discordant kind.

“So,” Jansson said. “‘The trolls are gone.’ What does that mean?”

“Just that,” said Sally grimly. “Not from here, particularly, not yet, but I bet the drift away has started—here like everywhere else—they’re abandoning the Long Earth in general. Look—you know about the long call. All the trolls everywhere sharing information. Well, it seems they’ve reached some kind of tipping point.”

“Tipping point about what?”

“About us. About humans. Our relationship with them. All over the Long Earth, they’re leaving —leaving the human colonies anyhow, it seems, any world where there’s a significant human presence. They’re not dumb animals, you see. They learn, and they modify their behaviour. And now, they’ve learned all they need to know about us.”

Jansson barely understood this, couldn’t comprehend an event of such strangeness, of such magnitude. “Where are they going?”

“Nobody knows.”

Jansson didn’t bother asking how Sally knew about any of this. She’d seen herself how Sally could move around the Long Earth, and she was somehow tuned into the trolls too, and their long call. To Jansson Sally was like a homespun embodiment of some all-pervasive intelligence agency, or a ubiquitous corporate presence, like the Black Corporation maybe. Naturally Sally Linsay knew what was going on, across all the worlds.

And Jansson knew Sally held the cause of the trolls close to her heart—well, they wouldn’t be here otherwise. So she was cautious when she asked, “Does it really matter?”

Sally winced, but stayed civil. “Yes, it matters. The trolls are the Long Earth, as far as I’m concerned. Its soul. They’re also integral to the ecology. Not to mention damn useful. This fall, on a thousand farming worlds, without troll labour they’ll be struggling to bring in the harvest.”

“So,” Jansson said, “of course we’re going to do something about it.”

“Of course we are,” said Sally, grinning fiercely.

“Starting with what?”

“Starting with right here. This is the place…”

They had come to a door with a jokey hand-painted sign: SPACE JAIL. The discordant music, if you could call it that, leaked out of the room, sharp, unpleasant, and Jansson resisted the temptation to cover her ears. And when Jansson looked through a spyhole in the door she saw, cowering in the corner, a troll, a bulky female. She sat slumped, immobile, yet somehow the misery seeped out of her. She had nothing in there save a bowl of water.

“Mary,” Jansson breathed.

“Our heroine. I will not .” Sally made the signs as she spoke.

“Well, we’re underground.” She thought about what Frank had told her. “But we are at the Gap. Solid rock in one 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.”