But the guy to the right reacted to that by grabbing Stan’s arm with a fist like a claw hammer. ‘You’re not going anywhere, you little prick. Not with my dough in your back pocket.’
The other players froze. Rocky was relieved that there were no hands reaching under the table for concealed weapons; these were space industry workers, not movie gangsters. But one or two of the spectators on the fringe of the crowd stepped away from trouble with pops of displaced air, elusive flickers at the edge of Rocky’s vision.
Rocky said, ‘Let him go. Listen, he’s one of you. He’s an apprentice, like me. His parents work for LETC – both of them.’
‘So maybe they taught him to work the cards, huh?’
The dealer, Marvin, held up his hands. ‘Folks, please. We’re just having a friendly game here.’ He eyed Stan. ‘I know he’s no cheat. He’s too smart to cheat. And he’s too smart to need to cheat. Face it, Alexei, he’s just a better player than you. It happens.’
Somehow these bland words, blandly delivered, cooled the situation, Rocky saw. Marvin seemed to have a kind of natural authority, like an adult stepping into a circle of squabbling kids; you calmed down automatically. Rocky had observed that the Arbiters, local amateur peacekeepers, could be like that too.
But still the guy, Alexei, was steaming. ‘He’s a dumb punk kid is what he is.’ He was still holding Stan’s arm, and squeezing harder.
Stan, however smart, was small, dark, slim for his age, and he wouldn’t be strong enough to break away. His teeth clenched as the grip became painful. Rocky held his breath. This could still end badly for Stan. He heard muttering about calling in an Arbiter.
But then somebody shouted out, ‘Hey! They got a kobold! Over by the oh-two plant. Come see …’
The crowd around the table started to break up and make for the fresh morsel of entertainment. Marvin grabbed back his cards. ‘Keep your chips, folks, you can settle up between yourselves when you’re ready.’
Rocky took the chance to drag Stan’s arm out of Alexei’s grip, and pulled his friend to his feet. ‘Now let’s get out of here.’
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.