400 Boys and 50 More (21 page)

“That’s unfair competition, Treel! You ever stop to think about the samesizes you’re putting out of work? I don’t suppose you happened to arrange this little deal with the Labor Bureau? Is he paying you scale, giant?”

Jack looked to Grampa Treel for direction. The little old man beckoned him close and shouted without benefit of bullhorn: “Ignore them, Jack. You just turn that soil.”

“Are you sure it’s all right?” Jack said.

"Why wouldn’t it be? They’re just jealous I got you first, that’s all. Damn Labor Bureau doesn’t bother with folks like us.”

Jack addressed the general neighboring community: “I’ll be more than happy to help out where I can in this room.”

“No, no, no, no, no!” wailed Grampa Treel. “You work for me!”

“In this room, eh?” said the tall plump farmer. “What about the next room, and the next? Are we supposed to start digging for our neighborlings? You gonna ask your giants to do your dirty work?”

The tone of his voice angered Jack, who gripped his fork anew and was just about to plunge it in the wall when the bedroom door opened and Liss came out, blinking.

“Jack? Did I hear voices?”

“Bunch of reactionaries,” he grunted. “Go back to sleep.”

He jabbed the tines deep into the wall.

Too deep—

Grampa Treel screamed, “Hold on!”

Startled, Jack wrenched out the fork and a tiny storm of dirt exploded over his fingers. The field began to crumble away, spilling onto the floor. Squeaks rose up from all the neighborlings. The aphid-cattle mewed in fright as their vines rustled and came undone in the growing avalanche. Tier slid over tier, then suddenly the ramshackle Treel farmhouse began to collapse. The inhabitants dashed for safety, throwing themselves onto sagging vines. Then the house flopped over and fell right through the fields before Jack could do anything to catch it. It crashed to the floor in a shower of splinters and glass.

“My God!” Liss cried. She leaped at the wall in time to rescue young Mrs. Treel and her baby, who were poised at the edge of a dissolving precipice where the nursery had been. She set them down on a safer portion of the wall.

Jack dropped the fork, stumbling backward. As the dirt-slide ceased and the dust settled, Grampa Treel appeared atop a rocky mound that had formed in an instant at the base of the wall. He slapped his shirtfront with his ragged hat, coughing and cursing, then narrowed his eyes and pointed a finger at Jack.

“You damn fool! Look what you did to the family farm!”

“I—I’ll get a broom,” Jack said.

“It’s your own fault, Treel!” cried the tall plump farmer whose fields had survived the catastrophe. “You’re going to jail right along with him!”

“Jail?” Jack whispered. “But . . . but . . .”

He turned to Liss for comfort, for advice, but she had gone to the window and was staring out at the world of the giants, one level up from their own. Jack heard a terrible sound, a bone-freezing, petrifying banshee wail that grew louder and louder until he thought his eardrums would explode—

And then there were thundering knocks on Narmon Cate’s door. They heard the farmer apologizing for the state of his house as he let some giants inside. Jack covered his ears, but he couldn’t block out the giants’ voices: “We got a call from the Labor Bureau. That’s the house; that one right there.”

“That? But they’re new tenants, officer. They seem like cute enough folks anyway.”

“They’re never as cute as they look, Mr. Cate. These are criminal types.”

“Criminals? On my wall?”

“It can happen to anyone. Seems they were setting up to cut across scale labor regulations, doing work that’s zoned for samesizes. One lazy giant can put a whole wallful of skilled low-level workers out of a job. There’s just no way the tinies can compete. Sometimes we have to stop them with force.”

“Go right ahead, officer,” said the giant farmer.

An enormous bloodshot eye pressed up to the window and blinked in at Liss and Jack. The capillaries were as big around as Jack’s arm. Liss put her arms around him. “Jack, I think you’re in trouble. Big trouble.”

“It looks that way.”

Jack shivered and looked at the farming walls. The irate neighborlings showered him with insulting gestures and obscenities: “Go ahead, you big jerk! Take what you’ve got coming!”

After a moment, someone knocked sharply on the door. It sounded too precise to be a giant. Liss opened the door, revealing two samesizes in police uniforms. The giant officer had set them on the porch. One of the cops carried a stunstick; the other held a tiny box decorated with the official infinite-staircase design of the Plenary Police.

“Name?” said the cop with the stunner.

“J-Jack Greenpeach.”

The officer with the box stepped inside, his eyes drawn to the damaged section of farming wall. “There it is,” he said. He knelt down by the recent avalanche and opened his official box. Out of it stepped two tiny officers, diminutive twins of the ones in Jack’s house. With tiny motions, they signaled for Grampa Trecl to descend from his mound. Their voices were too small for Jack to discern, but he had no doubt they were saying something very like what the same-size officer was saying to him:

“You are under arrest for violation of scale statutes and for damaging private and public property. You will accompany us for sentencing.”

Liss wept on his neck. He felt numb, but he couldn’t look away from the two little cops who were leading Grampa Treel back into their box. Once they were inside, the uplevel officer locked the box, picked it up, and tucked it under his arm. The neighboring farmers were cheering all the while.

“I’ll call you as soon as I can,” Jack told Liss.

“Don’t worry, I know a lawyer. We'll have you out right away.”

He didn’t have the strength to force a smile, but he managed to nod. “I’m sure you will.” He gave her a kiss. "I love you.”

Just outside, the giant cop was waiting with an upscale version of the police box that now contained Grampa Treel. The officers led Jack inside, strapped him into a seat, and then secured themselves. Soon they were swinging through space. Muttering like thunder rumbled above them as the giant cops debated whether to stop for doughnuts. When Jack’s stomach growled, he gave thanks that he hadn’t eaten breakfast. This was worse than any carnival ride.

* * *

They took his clothes and dropped him naked into a tall glass jar capped with a perforated lid. The jar sat on a shelf along with dozens of others. From this vantage, Jack could look out at a vast ledge crowded with giant officials going about their titanic yet tedious business. That ledge opened onto an even greater one where the giants two levels up were also busy at their work. And that ledge was a mere recess in yet another ledge, where thrice-large giants moved like mountains, their features scarcely discernible. And beyond those were dark slow blurs, the grumble of a hive, inconceivable bulks like planets clipping past each other in vast gulfs of artificial light.

Above the racks of jars, Jack could just make out a small alcove where neighborling officials were hard at work: it was the ledge within this ledge, with ledges within ledges within it. Thus the halls of criminal justice continued in either direction, perhaps to infinity. He wondered if somewhere in that infinity, someone just like him had unwittingly committed a crime like his own and waited now in a jar resembling this one, but astronomically tinier or microscopically more huge. If so, would that fellow’s emotions be any greater or lesser than Jack’s? Did scale apply to human feelings?

Someone rapped on the wall of the jar next to Jack’s. He looked up and saw a pale samesize looking in at him. The voice scarcely carried: “What’re you in for?”

Jack shrugged. He didn’t feel like talking.

“I’m a murderer,” the fellow said, pulling at his hair. “You like that? Murder! All I did was scrape my walls, stamped out those filthy little buggers that’re always yelling at me day in, day out, to clean up this mess, take a shower, bugging me, bugging me, know what I mean? And they call that murder? Those things aren’t even human, know what I mean? They’re roaches. Germs. Give me some insecticide. . . .”

Jack moved to the far side of his space. The jar was bad but the company was worse.

He wasn’t sure how long he had waited when a giant lifted the lid of his jar, dropped in a pair of gray overalls, and then carried him away. He scarcely had time to dress before the jar came down none too gently on a vast tabletop scored with pencil lines and littered with office desks. Liss and a man in a business suit were waiting for him.

“Jack!” Liss cried. She ran up and put her hands on the glass. Her blue eyes were full of tears. “Jack, I brought Tyler Mashaine. He’s your lawyer now.”

The man gave Jack a nod. “Good evening, Mr. Greenpeach. I’ve studied your case and spoken through intermediaries to citizen Treel and several witnesses of this morning’s event. I think the best we can do is ask for a minimum period of confinement, a moderate fine, and a period of probation in keeping with your past record as a person of honest character. I’ll stress the fact that you were ignorant of cross-scale labor regulations when you went into business for the farmers.”

“You know the laws, I guess,” Jack said with a shrug. Mashaine grimaced. "Well, I know better than to cross scale without a permit.”

Jack blushed. “What exactly did I do, Mr. Mashaine?”

Mashaine crossed his arms and looked down at Jack’s bare feet. “Mr. Greenpeach, our society, our very environment, is based on principles of strict order. The integrity of scale, perfect compression, relativity . . . these are fundamental. When we came to the levels, we traded a disorderly world for a realm engineered from pure thought. Unfortunately, when we made the transition, human nature remained basically unchanged. We must conform to logical rules if we wish to exist here; even a minor functional infraction can greatly affect the purity of form. But our nature is sloppy. We evolved in a sloppy locale. We can be taught to obey—well, to fear and then obey—the laws necessary to our safety and sanity. I believe the judge will rule that you do not have a proper respect for the principles of proportion and must therefore submit to them for a time not to exceed, say, ninety days.”

“Ninety days?” Jack cried.

“I'll visit you every one of them,” Liss promised.

“That could be difficult, Liss,” said Mashaine. “I’m afraid Mr. Greenpeach will have to cross scale. There’s no getting around that. It’s one of the ways the penal system has of enforcing conformation to scalar law. Form following function, you understand. It’s also, more broadly, a security precaution.”

“You mean, they think I’d try to escape? I’m not a hardened criminal, Mr. Mashaine. I’m—I’m—this is small-time stuff!”

“I know you wouldn’t try anything, Mr. Green- peach, but the courts are very consistent on this matter. There were problems in the past—on Earth, I suppose—with overcrowding, and this has proved to be the most effective way of using space while stretching penal resources.”

“Crossing scale,” Jack repeated. It was a possibility he had never considered. I he’d spent all his life on one level He was meant to be this size.

Liss stared at him, stunned, her fingers tangled in her golden red hair. “This doesn’t change anything, Jack. Between us, I mean.”

He tried to smile. “I didn’t mean it when I said this was all your idea. I mean, it wasn’t your fault. I was stupid.”

“Nice meeting you, Mr. Greenpeach,” said Tyler Mashaine. “Let’s hope this is the last time you need my services.”

Liss blew him a kiss. They whisked him away in his jar, and for a time he sat on a shelf. Later, the expected news was delivered by a frowning giant: he’d received ninety days’ confinement, a thousand-dollar fine, a year’s probation.

His term began the moment he crossed scale.

They shook him out of the jar and into the center of a small, round stage. He was bathed in sapphire light for five minutes. When it faded, the dimensions of the stage had increased by incredible proportions. What had once been no broader than his shoulders now seemed an endless plain. As he surveyed the featureless wasteland, a shadow fell from the sky, an endless pole tipped with a huge fleecy pad. It poked the plain beside him and swept gently in his direction. Jack fled, overcome by pointless terror, the panic of a fly that sees the swatter falling. The fleecy pad brushed him from behind, like a huge hand caressing him from head to toe. Apparently it was impregnated with a dry adhesive to which he found himself completely glued. This was a good thing, for the pad-tipped pole lifted him straight into the sky for what seemed like miles. He soon wearied of screaming. Besides, he was allergic to the adhesive. By the time they set him down and gently scraped him onto a floor, he was limp with exhaustion. He found himself in a cell whose dimensions nearly approached his own. The walls were bare, devoid of neighborlings, and the cell had no ceiling. There was no reason anyone his size would want to clamber out. He would only be squashed or otherwise exterminated by inconceivably monstrous wardens.

Twice a day, a samesize guard checked to make sure that he had food and water. The bed and other furniture were all a bit too small, which convinced him that the downscaling had not been entirely precise. In the mornings he was allowed to stretch in a corridor between other cells. There was nothing to see except the roofless cubical buildings. There was no one to talk to, no human face aside from the warden’s. After a while he realized that he missed having neighborlings—tiny lives to watch, tiny miseries to share or sympathize with, tiny problems he could be grateful weren’t his own. He’d never really appreciated them before. Now he was smaller by far than his neighborlings. He’d have been a speck under their shoes, small enough to inhabit the dustmotes that fell through their long afternoons.

Loneliness propelled him into a strange kind of trance, a numbed isolation that left him lying on his back day after day, staring up at the blurry sky with his arms crossed behind his head for a pillow on the undersized bed. Time passed differently here: it went very slowly. After a while he forgot the life he’d left behind. Even in his dreams he had always been here. He was adrift, cut free from anything familiar.