Even now Stan was grinning, though he winced as he massaged his arm. ‘Not without my winnings.’ He swept his chips into a pouch he carried under his Stepper box.
Marvin winked at him. ‘Good luck with cashing them.’
Stan shrugged. ‘There’ll be other games. See you around.’
‘Oh, you will,’ Marvin said, sounding oddly enigmatic to Rocky’s ears.
It turned out the kobold, a kind of twisted-up humanoid, had got itself trapped on the other side of the beanstalk facility, in the concrete shell of what was to be a liquid oxygen store. Following the crowd, Rocky and Stan jogged that way.
It was just after noon now, under a bright, washed-out Florida spring sky. If you didn’t look too closely, Rocky thought, all you saw was people on a dirt plain roughly drained and cleared, surrounded pretty much by emptiness. But, rising from this desolate plain and up into the Florida sky, the spine of the beanstalk was already in place, a double thread electric blue and marked with flags, anchored to the uncompromising concrete block that was its temporary ground station: perfectly straight but at a distinct slant, rising until it was lost in the glare, heading for its orbital anchor.
Most stepwise Floridas were empty, at least in Low Earths like this, there being easier places in the footprint of the North American continent to kick-start a new colony. They weren’t even particularly close to the coast, unlike Cape Canaveral on the Datum, which Rocky had visited once to see the shrunken space facility still launching comsats and weather satellites and such into a post-Yellowstone volcano-winter sky. But the geographic logic of the location was just the same on all the worlds. Florida was the lowest-latitude terrain in the footprint of the continental United States in thousands of worlds across the Long Earth, and for conventional space operations the closer to the equator you were the better, because of the boost you got from the Earth’s spin.
And that applied, too, if you were building a ladder to space: the further south the better.
It really would be one enormous elevator system, an elevator that would lift you to orbit, and a hell of a lot cheaper to run and more reliable than the big old rocket boosters that even now were still flying out of Datum Canaveral. The whole thing had been under construction since Rocky and Stan had been eight years old, and the boys had met in the improvised schools they set up here for children of the workers, the ‘stalk jacks’.
It was all ancient history to Rocky, who, like Stan, had been born in the very year Yellowstone blew. But he knew that this place, once a decent small town, had pretty much become a refugee camp, set up in haste in the days and weeks after the eruption, when folk had come flooding out of the Datum and overwhelmed the primitive communities of the Low Earths. Many of the refugees had been Datum urban types before the eruption and were pretty helpless out in the wilds, and they had just got stuck in the camps they had been put in. The camps, becoming permanent, had turned sour. ‘Everybody became an expert at waiting in line,’ his mother would say. So, after a few more years, along had come another government initiative, to turn such camps back into decent functioning towns – and that meant providing the people with work, such as this tremendous beanstalk construction, right here. In had come federal government officials, along with the prime contractor, the Long Earth Trading Company – LETC.
But in recent months the project had slowed down, for reasons beyond Rocky’s primitive grasp of politics and economics. There had been lay-offs and slowdowns of the work schedules. For now, despite the existence of that line up to the sky, there was no flow of people and goods to and from space, as promised: nothing down here but this drained, trampled ground, with the blocky accommodation buildings, and the half-finished shells of factories and stores for materials and fuel and machinery, and the gantries for the conventional boosters that were still needed to complete the erection of the beanstalk. Today, nobody moved here save workers come to protest, or just with nowhere else to go since the latest shutdown.
The only excitement was the crowd that had gathered before the unfinished lox plant, drawn by the prospect of some spiteful fun. Rocky and Stan were closing on the plant now, and Rocky could see a knot of people, mostly men, gathered around something, a shambolic figure that flickered and returned, as if slightly out of focus in the bright sunlight: the kobold, trapped and frightened.
And, distracted by the commotion, Rocky had got separated from Stan. He could lay a decent bet where his friend was going to be found: where the trouble was.
Rocky ran forward more urgently, through the heat of the day.
The kobold was surrounded by a ring of men in LETC hard hats and orange coveralls. He kept trying to step away, but each time he vanished he came stumbling straight back, sometimes clutching his face or his belly. Evidently there were more workers in the neighbouring worlds to either stepwise side, ready to beat him up or steal his stuff to force him back.
The kobold was short, squat, heavily built, with triangular teeth that showed in his grins of terror. He had powerful-looking hands, and his bare feet ended in toes with claws; he looked like some kind of mole rebuilt to a human scale – and some said that was how the kobolds had once lived out in the Long Earth, ape-folk who had retreated underground. But today he wore grubby shorts and a kind of waistcoat and even a baseball cap, a dismal parody of human garb. And he had a belt slung over one shoulder like a sash, laden with knick-knacks that glistened and shone – bits of jewellery, plastic toys, sparkly gadgets. This was how the kobolds made their living, swapping stuff like this with humans, and trading it among themselves.
The kobold was a humanoid, evidently a relative of mankind whose ancestors had split off the main line about the time some uppity chimp had figured out that banging two rocks together was a good idea. Like other humanoids such as elves and trolls, the kobolds had evolved out there in the Long Earth. Unlike most of their cousins, however, the kobolds had continued to have some contact with humanity, and that had shaped them. They fed off scraps of human culture. They were more like magpies or jackdaws than human traders, it was said: more like kids swapping cards and game tokens in a playground, than like merchants working for profit. Yet people traded with them. And some of the kobolds, at least, were brave enough to come venturing deep into the Low Earths.
But something had gone wrong for this one. Maybe he’d said the wrong thing, made a bad trade. Maybe he’d just come up against another Alexei, Rocky thought, somebody bored by the lack of work and looking for a bit of fun, a diversion.
The mood still seemed playful enough. But Rocky saw a couple of young people, a man and a woman in the green uniform of Arbiters, move forward, evidently in anticipation of trouble.
Now one guy snatched the sash with the trade goods off the kobold’s shoulder, draped it over his own, and paraded around, drawing laughs and catcalls from his buddies.
The kobold was mortified, and tried to grab the sash back. ‘Mmmine mine mine … C-cruel to poor Bob-Bob-mm … Mm-mine …’
The guy who’d robbed him faced him. ‘Muh-muh-mine, Bob-Bob-Bob? Who says so?’
‘Mm-mine … I tr-rrade … You want? Look, pretty mm-mirror, pretty jewel-ss …’
The guy held the sash out of the kobold’s reach. ‘Ooh, look at me, I’m Bob-Bob-Bob-Bob-Bob-Bob … Hey, Fred, what do you think? Maybe LETC should employ this guy.’
‘Yeah, Mario, he’s smarter than Jim Russo.’
‘You’d make a damn fine CFO, Bob-Bob-Bob …’
And there was Stan, right in the middle of it all, just where Rocky knew he would be.