The Second Fredric Brown Megapack

Placet Is a Crazy Place

Even when you’re used to it, it gets you down sometimes. Like that morning—if you can call it a morning. Really it was night. But we go by Earth time on Placet because Placet time would be as screwy as everything else on that goofy planet. I mean, you’d have a six-hour day and then a two-hour night and then a fifteen-hour day and a one-hour night and—well, you just couldn’t keep time on a planet that does a figure-eight orbit around two dissimilar suns, going like a bat out of hell around and between them, and the suns going around each other so fast and so comparatively close that Earth astronomers thought it was only one sun until the Blakeslee expedition landed here twenty years ago.

You see, the rotation of Placet isn’t any even fraction of the period of its orbit and there’s the Blakeslee Field in the middle between the suns—a field in which light rays slow down to a crawl and get left behind and—well—

If you’ve not read the Blakeslee reports on Placet, hold on to something while I tell you this:

Placet is the only known planet that can eclipse itself twice at the same time, run headlong into itself every forty hours, and then chase itself out of sight.

I don’t blame you.

I didn’t believe it either and it scared me stiff the first time I stood on Placet and saw Placet coming head-on to run into us. And yet I’d read the Blakeslee reports and knew what was really happening and why. It’s rather like those early movies when the camera was set up in front of a train and the audience saw the locomotive heading right toward them and would feel an impulse to run even though they knew the locomotive wasn’t really there.

But I started to say, like that morning, I was sitting at my desk, the top of which was covered with grass. My feet were—or seemed to be—resting on a sheet of rippling water. But it wasn’t wet.

On top of the grass of my desk lay a pink flowerpot, into which, nose-first, stuck a bright green Saturnian lizard. That—reason and not my eyesight told me—was my pen and inkwell. Also an embroidered sampler that said, “God Bless Our Home” in neat cross-stitching. It actually was a message from Earth Center which had just come in on the radiotype. I didn’t know what it said because I’d come into my office after the B. F. effect had started. I didn’t think it really said, “God Bless Our Home” because it seemed to. And just then I was mad, I was fed up, and I didn’t care a holler what it actually did say.

You see—maybe I’d better explain—the Blakeslee Field effect occurs when Placet is in mid-position between Argyle I and Argyle II, the two suns it figure eights around. There’s a scientific explanation of it, but it must be expressed in formulas, not in words. It boils down to this; Argyle I is terrene matter and Argyle II contraterrene, or negative matter. Halfway between them—over a considerable stretch of territory—is a field in which light rays are slowed down, way down. They move at about the speed of sound. The result is that if something is moving faster than sound—as Placet itself does—you can still see it coming after it has passed you. It takes the visual image of Placet twenty-six hours to get through the field. By that time, Placet has rounded one of its suns and meets its own image on the way back. In midfield, there’s an image coming and an image going, and it eclipses itself twice, occulting both suns at the same time. A little farther on, it runs into itself coming from the opposite direction—and scares you stiff if you’re watching, even if you know it’s not really happening.

Let me explain it this way before you get dizzy. Say an old-fashioned locomotive is coming toward you, only at a speed much faster than sound. A mile away, it whistles. It passes you and then you hear the whistle, coming from the point a mile back where the locomotive isn’t any more. That’s the auditory effect of an object traveling faster than sound; what I’ve just described is the visual effect of an object traveling—in a figure-eight orbit—faster than its own visual image.

That isn’t the worst of it; you can stay indoors and avoid the eclipsing and the head-on collisions, but you can’t avoid the physio-psychological effect of the Blakeslee Field.

And that, the physio-psychological effect, is something else again. The field does something to the optic nerve centers, or to the part of the brain to which the optic nerves connect, something similar to the effect of certain drugs. You have—you can’t exactly call them hallucinations, because you don’t ordinarily see things that aren’t there, but you get an illusory picture of what is there.

I knew perfectly well that I was sitting at a desk the top of which was glass, and not grass; that the floor under my feet was ordinary plastiplate and not a sheet of rippling water; that the objects on my desk were not a pink flowerpot with a Saturnian lizard sticking in it, but an antique twentieth century inkwell and pen—and that the “God Bless Our Home” sampler was a radiotype message on ordinary radiotype paper. I could verify any of those things by my sense of touch, which the Blakeslee Field doesn’t affect.

You can close your eyes, of course, but you don’t—because even at the height of the effect, your eyesight gives you the relative size and distance of things and if you stay in familiar territory your memory and your reason tell you what they are.

So when the door opened and a two-headed monster walked in, I knew it was Reagan. Reagan isn’t a two-headed monster, but I could recognize the sound of his walk.

I said, “Yes, Reagan?”

The two-headed monster said, “Chief, the machine shop is wobbling. We may have to break the rule not to do any work in midperiod.”

“Birds?” I asked.

Both of his heads nodded. “The underground part of those walls must be like sieves from the birds flying through ’em, and we’d better pour concrete quick. Do you think those new alloy reinforcing bars the Ark’ll bring will stop them?”

“Sure,” I lied. Forgetting the field, I turned to look at the clock, but there was a funeral wreath of white lilies on the wall where the clock should have been. You can’t tell time from a funeral wreath. I said, “I was hoping we wouldn’t have to reinforce those walls till we had the bars to sink in them. The Ark’s about due; they’re probably hovering outside right now waiting for us to come out of the field. You think we could wait till—”

There was a crash.

“Yeah, we can wait,” Reagan said. “There went the machine shop, so there’s no hurry at all.”

“Nobody was in there?”

“Nope, but I’ll make sure.” He ran out.

That’s what life on Placet is like. I’d had enough of it; I’d had too much of it. I made up my mind while Reagan was gone.

When he came back, he was a bright blue articulated skeleton.

He said, “O.K., Chief. Nobody was inside.”

“Any of the machines badly smashed?”

He laughed. “Can you look at a rubber beach horse with purple polka dots and tell whether it’s an intact lathe or a busted one? Say, Chief, you know what you look like?”

I said, “If you tell me, you’re fired.”

I don’t know whether I was kidding or not; I was plenty on edge. I opened the drawer of my desk and put the “God Bless Our Home” sampler in it and slammed the drawer shut. I was fed up. Placet is a crazy place and if you stay there long enough you go crazy yourself. One out of ten of Earth Center’s Placet employees has to go back to Earth for psychopathic treatment after a year or two on Placet. And I’d been there three years, almost. My contract was up. I made up my mind, too.

“Reagan,” I said.

He’d been heading for the door. He turned. “Yeah, Chief?”

I said, “I want you to send a message on the radiotype to Earth Center. And get it straight, two words: I quit.”

He said, “O.K., Chief.” He went on out and closed the door.

I sat back and closed my eyes to think. I’d done it now. Unless I ran after Reagan and told him not to send the message, it was done and over and irrevocable. Earth Center’s funny that way; the board is plenty generous in some directions; but once you resign they never let you change your mind. It’s an ironclad rule and ninety-nine times out of a hundred it’s justified on interplanetary and intragalactic projects. A man must be 100 per cent enthusiastic about his job to make a go of it, and once he’s turned against it, he’s lost the keen edge.

I knew the midperiod was about over, but I sat there with my eyes closed just the same. I didn’t want to open them to look at the clock until I could see the clock as a clock and not as whatever it might be this time. I sat there and thought.

I felt a bit hurt about Reagan’s casualness in accepting the message. He’d been a good friend of mine for ten years; he could at least have said he was sorry I was going to leave. Of course there was a fair chance that he might get the promotion, but even if he was thinking that, he could have been diplomatic about it. At least, he could have—

Oh, quit feeling sorry for yourself, I told myself. You’re through with Placet and you’re through with Earth Center, and you’re going back to Earth pretty soon now as soon as they relieve you, and you can get another job there, probably teaching again.

But damn Reagan, just the same. He’d been my student at Earth City Poly, and I’d got him this Placet job and it was a good one for a youngster his age, assistant administrator of a planet with nearly a thousand population. For that matter, my job was a good one for a man my age—I’m only thirty-one myself. An excellent job, except that you couldn’t put up a building that wouldn’t fall down again and—Quit crabbing, I told myself; you’re through with it now. Back to Earth and a teaching job again. Forget it.

I was tired. I put my head on my arms on top of the desk, and I must have dozed off for a minute.

I looked up at the sound of footsteps coming through the doorway; they weren’t Reagan’s footsteps. The illusions were getting better now, I saw. It was—or appeared to be—a gorgeous redhead. It couldn’t be, of course. There are a few women on Placet, mostly wives of technicians but—

She said, “Don’t you remember me, Mr. Rand?” It was a woman; her voice was a woman’s voice, and a beautiful voice. Sounded vaguely familiar, too.

“Don’t be silly,” I said; “how can I recognize you at mid-per—”

My eyes suddenly caught a glimpse of the clock past her shoulder, and it was a clock and not a funeral wreath or a cuckoo’s nest, and I realized suddenly that everything else in the room was back to normal. And that meant midperiod was over, and I wasn’t seeing things.

My eyes went back to the redhead. She must be real, I realized. And suddenly I knew her, although she’d changed, changed plenty. All changes were improvements, although Michaelina Witt had been a very pretty girl when she’d been in my extra-terrestrial Botany III class at Earth City Polytech four—no, five years ago.

She’d been pretty, then. Now she was beautiful. She was stunning. How had the teletalkies missed her? Or had they? What was she doing here? She must have just got off the Ark, but—I realized I was still gawking at her. I stood up so fast I almost fell across the desk.

“Of course I remember you, Miss Witt,” I stammered. “Won’t you sit down? How did you come here? Have they relaxed the no-visitors rule?”

She shook her head, smiling. “I’m not a visitor, Mr. Rand. Center advertised for a technician-secretary for you, and I tried for the job and got it, subject to your approval, of course. I’m on probation for a month, that is.”

“Wonderful,” I said. It was a masterpiece of understatement. I started to elaborate on it: “Marvelous—”

There was the sound of someone clearing his throat. I looked around; Reagan was in the doorway. This time not as a blue skeleton or a two-headed monster. Just plain Reagan.

He said, “Answer to your radiotype just came.” He crossed over and dropped it on my desk. I looked at it. “O.K. August 19th,” it read. My momentary wild hope that they’d failed to accept my resignation went down among the widgie birds. They’d been as brief about it as I’d been.

August 19th—the next arrival of the Ark. They certainly weren’t wasting any time—mine or theirs. Four days!

Reagan said, “I thought you’d want to know right away, Phil.”

“Yeah,” I told him. I glared at him. “Thanks.” With a touch of spite—or maybe more than a touch—I thought, well, my bucko, you don’t get the job, or that message would have said so; they’re sending a replacement on the next shuttle of the Ark.

But I didn’t say that; the veneer of civilization was too thick. I said, “Miss Witt, I’d like you to meet—”

They looked at each other and started to laugh, and I remembered. Of course, Reagan and Michaelina had both been in my botany class, as had Michaelina’s twin brother, Ichabod. Only, of course, no one ever called the redheaded twins Michaelina and Ichabod. It was Mike and Ike, once you knew them.

Reagan said, “I met Mike getting off the Ark. I told her how to find your office, since you weren’t there to do the honors.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Did the reinforcing bars come?”

“Guess so. They unloaded some crates. They were in a hurry to pull out again. They’ve gone.”

I grunted.

Reagan said, “Well, I’ll check the ladings. Just came to give you the radiotype; thought you’d want the good news right away.”

He went out, and I glared after him. The louse. The—

Michaelina said, “Am I to start work right away, Mr. Rand?”

I straightened out my face and managed a smile. “Of course not,” I told her. “You’ll want to look around the place first. See the scenery and get acclimated. Want to stroll into the village for a drink?”

“Of course.”

We strolled down the path toward the little cluster of buildings, all small, one-story, and square.

She said, “It’s—it’s nice. Feels like I’m walking on air, I’m so light. Exactly what is the gravity?”

“Point seven four,” I said. “If you weigh—umm, a hundred twenty pounds on Earth, you weigh about eighty-nine pounds here. And on you, it looks good.”

She laughed, “Thank you, Professor—Oh, that’s right; you’re not a professor now. You’re now my boss, and I must call you Mr. Rand.”

“Unless you’re willing to make it Phil, Michaelina?”

“If you’d call me Mike; I detest Michaelina, almost as much as Ike hates Ichabod.”

“How is Ike?”

“Fine. Has a student-instructor job at Poly, but he doesn’t like it much.” She looked ahead at the village. “Why so many small buildings instead of a few bigger ones?”

“Because the average life of a structure of any kind on Placet is about three weeks. And you never know when one is going to fall down—with someone inside. It’s our biggest problem. All we can do is make them small and light, except the foundations, which we make as strong as possible. Thus far, nobody has been hurt seriously in the collapse of a building, for that reason, but—Did you feel that?”

“The vibration? What was it, an earthquake?”

“No,” I said. “It was a flight of birds.”

“What?”

I had to laugh at the expression on her face. I said, “Placet is a crazy place. A minute ago, you said you felt as though you were walking on air. Well, in a way, you are doing just exactly that. Placet is one of the rare objects in the Universe that is composed of both ordinary and heavy matter. Matter with a collapsed molecular structure, so heavy you couldn’t lift a pebble of it. Placet has a core of that stuff; that’s why this tiny planet, which has an area about twice the size of Manhattan Island, has a gravity three-quarters that of Earth. There is life—animal life, not intelligent—living on the core. There are birds, whose molecular structure is like that of the planet’s core, so dense that ordinary matter is as tenuous to them as air is to us. They actually fly through it, as birds on Earth fly through the air. From their standpoint we’re walking on top of Placet’s atmosphere.”

“And the vibration of their flight under the surface makes the houses collapse?”

“Yes, and worse—they fly right through the foundations, no matter what we make them of. Any matter we can work with is just so much gas to them. They fly through iron or steel as easily as through sand or loam. I’ve just got a shipment of some specially tough stuff from Earth—the special alloy steel you heard me ask Reagan about—but I haven’t much hope of it doing any good.”

“But aren’t those birds dangerous? I mean, aside from making the buildings fall down. Couldn’t one get up enough momentum flying to carry it out of the ground and into the air a little way? And wouldn’t it go right through anyone who happened to be there?”

“It would,” I said, “but it doesn’t. I mean, they never fly closer to the surface than a few inches. Some sense stems to tell them when they’re nearing the top of their ‘atmosphere.’ Something analogous to the supersonics a bat uses. You know, of course, how a bat can fly in utter darkness and never fly into a solid object.”

“Like radar, yes.”

“Like radar, yes, except a bat uses sound waves instead of radio waves. And the widgie birds must use something that works on the same principle, in reverse; turns them back a few inches before they approach what to them would be the equivalent of a vacuum. Being heavy-matter, they could no more exist or fly in air than a bird could exist or fly in a vacuum.”

While we were having a cocktail apiece in the village, Michaelina mentioned her brother again. She said, “Ike doesn’t like teaching at all, Phil. Is there any chance at all that you could get him a job here on Placet?”

I said, “I’ve been badgering Earth Center for another administrative assistant. The work is increasing plenty since we’ve got more of the surface under cultivation. Reagan really needs help. I’ll—”

Her whole face was alight with eagerness. And I remembered. I was through. I’d resigned, and Earth Center would pay as much attention to any recommendation of mine as though I were a widgie bird. I finished weakly, “I’ll—I’ll see if I can do anything about it.”

She said, “Thanks—Phil.” My hand was on the table beside my glass, and for a second she put hers over it. All right, it’s a hackneyed metaphor to say it felt as though a high-voltage current went through me. But it did, and it was a mental shock as well as a physical one, because I realized then and there that I was head over heels. I’d fallen harder than any of Placet’s buildings ever had. The thump left me breathless. I wasn’t watching Michaelina’s face, but from the way she pressed her hand harder against mine for a millisecond and then jerked it away as though from a flame, she must have felt a little of that current, too.

I stood up a little shakily and suggested that we walk back to headquarters. Because the situation was completely impossible, now. Now that Center had accepted my resignation and I was without visible or invisible means of support. In a psychotic moment, I’d cooked my own goose. I wasn’t even sure I could get a teaching job. Earth Center is the most powerful organization in the Universe and has a finger in every pie. If they blacklisted me—

Walking back, I let Michaelina do most of the talking; I had some heavy thinking to do. I wanted to tell her the truth—and I didn’t want to.

Between monosyllabic answers, I fought it out with myself. And, finally lost. Or won. I’d not tell her—until just before the next coming of the Ark. I’d pretend everything was O.K. and normal for that long, give myself that much chance to see if Michaelina would fall for me. That much of a break I’d give myself. A chance, for four days.

And then—well, if by then she’d come to feel about me the way I did about her, I’d tell her what a fool I’d been and tell her I’d like to—No, I wouldn’t let her return to Earth with me, even if she wanted to, until I saw light ahead through a foggy future. All I could tell her was that if and when I had a chance of working my way up again to a decent job—and after all I was still only thirty-one and might be able to—

That sort of thing.

Reagan was waiting in my office, looking as mad as a wet hornet. He said, “Those saps at Earth Center shipping department gummed things again. Those crates of special steel—aren’t.”

“Aren’t what?”

“Aren’t anything. They’re empty crates. Something went wrong with the crating machine and they never knew it.”

“Are you sure that’s what those crates were supposed to contain?”

“Sure I’m sure. Everything else on the order came, and the ladings specified the steel for those particular crates.” He ran a hand through his tousled hair. It made him look more like an Airedale than he usually does.

I grinned at him. “Maybe it’s invisible steel.”

“Invisible, weightless and intangible. Can I word the message to Center telling them about it?”

“Go as far as you like,” I told him, “Wait here a minute, though. I’ll show Mike where her quarters are and then I want to talk to you a minute.”

I took Michaelina to the best available sleeping cabin of the cluster around headquarters. She thanked me again for trying to get Ike a job here, and I felt lower than a widgie bird’s grave when I went back to my office.

“Yeah, Chief?” Reagan said.

“About that message to Earth,” I told him. “I mean the one I sent this morning. I don’t want you to say anything about it to Michaelina.”

He chuckled. “Want to tell her yourself, huh? O.K. I’ll keep my yap shut.” I said, a bit wryly, “Maybe I was foolish sending it.”

“Huh?” he said. “I’m sure glad you did. Swell idea.”

He went out, and I managed not to throw anything at him.

The next day was a Tuesday, if that matters. I remember it as the day I solved one of Placet’s two major problems. An ironic time to do it, maybe.

I was dictating some notes on greenwort culture—Placet’s importance to Earth is, of course, the fact that certain plants native to the place and which won’t grow anywhere else yield derivatives that have become important to the pharmacopoeia. I was having heavy sledding because I was watching Michaelina take the notes; she’d insisted on starting work her second day on Placet.

And suddenly, out of a clear sky and out of a muggy mind, came an idea. I stopped dictating and rang for Reagan. He came in.

“Reagan,” I said, “order five thousand ampoules of J-17 Conditioner. Tell ’em to rush it.”

“Chief, don’t you remember? We tried the stuff. Thought it might condition us to see normally in midperiod, but it didn’t affect the optic nerves. We still saw screwy. It’s great for conditioning people to high or low temperatures or—”

“Or long or short waking-sleeping periods,” I interrupted him. “That’s what I’m talking about, Reagan. Look, revolving around two suns, Placet has such short irregular periods of light and dark that we never took them seriously. Right?”

“Sure but—”

“But since there’s no logical Placet day and night we could use, we made ourselves slaves to a sun so far away we can’t see it. We use a twenty-four hour day But midperiod occurs every twenty hours, regularly. We can use conditioner to adapt ourselves to a twenty-hour day—six hours sleep, twelve awake—with everybody blissfully sleeping through the period when their eyes play tricks on them. And in a darkened sleeping room so you couldn’t see anything, even if you woke up. More and shorter days per year—and nobody goes psychopathic on us. Tell me what’s wrong with it.”

His eyes went bleak and blank and he hit his forehead a resounding whack with the palm of his band.

He said, “Too simple, that’s what’s wrong with it. So darned simple only a genius could see it. For two years I’ve been going slowly nuts and the answer so easy nobody could see it. I’ll put the order in right away.”

He started out and then turned back. “Now how do we keep the buildings up? Quick, while you’re fey or whatever you are.”

I laughed. I said, “Why not try that invisible steel of yours in the empty crates?”

He said, “Nuts,” and closed the door.

And the next day was a Wednesday and I knocked off work and took Michaelina on a walking tour around Placet. Once around is just a nice day’s hike. But with Michaelina Witt, any day’s hike would be a nice day’s hike. Except, of course, that I knew I had only one more full day to spend with her. The world would end on Friday.

Tomorrow the Ark would leave Earth, with the shipment of conditioner that would solve one of our problems—and with whomever Earth Center was sending to take my place. It would warp through space to a point a safe distance outside the Argyle I-II system and come in on rocket power from there. It would be here Friday, and I’d go back with it. But I tried not to think about that.

I pretty well managed to forget it until we got back to headquarters and Reagan met me with a grin that split his homely mug into horizontal halves. He said, “Chief, you did it.”

“Swell,” I said. “I did what?”

“Gave me the answer what to use for reinforcing foundations. You solved the problem.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“Yeah. Didn’t he, Mike?”

Michaelina looked as puzzled as I must have. She said, “He was kidding. He said to use the stuff in the empty crates, didn’t he?”

Reagan grinned again. “He just thought be was kidding. That’s what we’re going to use from now on. Nothing. Look, Chief, it’s like the conditioner—so simple we never thought of it. Until you told me to use what was in the empty crates, and I got to thinking it over.”

I stood thinking a moment myself, and then I did what Reagan had done the day before—hit myself a whack on the forehead with the heel of my palm.

Michaelina still looked puzzled.

“Hollow foundations,” I told her. “What’s the one thing widgie birds won’t fly through? Air. We can make buildings as big as we need them, now. For foundations, we sink double walls with a wide air space between. We can—”

I stopped, because it wasn’t “we” anymore. They could do it after I was back on Earth looking for a job.

And Thursday went and Friday came.

I was working, up till the last minute, because it was the easiest thing to do. With Reagan and Michaelina helping me, I was making out material lists for our new construction projects. First, a three-story building of about forty rooms for a headquarters building.

We were working fast, because it would be midperiod shortly, and you can’t do paperwork when you can’t read and can write only by feel.

But my mind was on the Ark. I picked up the phone and called the radiotype shack to ask about it.

“Just got a call from them,” said the operator. “They’re warped in, but not close enough to land before midperiod. They’ll land right after.”

“O.K.,” I said, abandoning the hope that they’d be a day late.

I got up and walked to the window. We were nearing mid-position, all right. Up in the sky to the north I could see Placet coming toward us.

“Mike,” I said. “Come here.”

She joined me at the window and we stood there, watching. My arm was around her. I don’t remember putting it there, but I didn’t take it away, and she didn’t move.

Behind us, Reagan cleared his throat, He said, “I’ll give this much of the list to the operator. He can get it on the ether right after midperiod.” He went out and shut the door behind him.

Michaelina seemed to move a little closer. We were both looking out the window at Placet rushing toward us. She said, “Beautiful, isn’t it, Phil?”

“Yes,” I said. But I turned, and I was looking at her face as I said it. Then—I hadn’t meant to—I kissed her.

I went back, and sat down at my desk, She said, “Phil, what’s the matter? You haven’t got a wife and six kids hidden away somewhere, or something, have you? You were single when I had a crush on you at Earth Polytech—and I waited five years to get over it and didn’t, and finally wangled a job on Placet just to—Do I have to do the proposing?”

I groaned. I didn’t look at her. I said, “Mike, I’m nuts about you. But—just before you came, I sent a two-word radiotype to Earth. It said, ‘I quit.’ So I’ve got to leave Placet on this shuttle of the Ark, and I doubt if I can even get a teaching job, now that I’ve got Earth Center down on me, and—”

She said, “But, Phil!” and took a step toward me.

There was a knock on the door, Reagan’s knock. I was glad, for once, of the interruption. I called out for him to come in, and he opened the door.

He said, “You told Mike yet, Chief?”

I nodded, glumly.

Reagan grinned. “Good,” he said; “I’ve been busting to tell her. It’ll be swell to see Ike again.”

“Huh?” I said. “Ike who?”

Reagan’s grin faded. He said, “Phil, are you slipping, or something? Don’t you remember giving me the answer to that Earth Center radiotype four days ago, just before Mike got here?”

I stared at him with my mouth open. I hadn’t even read that radiotype, let alone answered it. Had Reagan gone psychopathic, or had I? I remembered shoving it in the drawer of my desk. I jerked open the drawer and pulled it out. My hand shook a little as I read it: REQUEST FOR ADDITIONAL ASSISTANT GRANTED. WHOM DO YOU WANT FOR THE JOB?

I looked up at Reagan again. I said, “You’re trying to tell me I sent an answer to this?”

He looked as dumbfounded as I felt.

“You told me to,” he said.

“What did I tell you to send?”

“Ike Witt.” He stared at me. “Chief, are you feeling all right?”

I felt so all right something seemed to explode in my head. I stood up and started for Michaelina. I said, “Mike, will you marry me?” I got my arms around her, just in time, before midperiod closed down on us, so I couldn’t see what she looked like, and vice versa. But over her shoulder, I could see what must be Reagan. I said, “Get out of here, you ape,” and I spoke quite literally because that’s exactly what he appeared to be. A bright yellow ape.

The floor was shaking under my feet, but other things were happening to me, too, and I didn’t realize what the shaking meant until the ape turned back and yelled, “A flight of birds going under us, Chief! Get out quick, before—”

But that was as far as he got before the house fell down around us and the tin roof hit my head and knocked me out. Placet is a crazy place. I like it.