Earth Is The Strangest Planet

by Robert Silverberg

  “That’s the same long of a word,” he said in a low aside to himself. But he was doubtful. “What am I, a White Man, a burr-tailed jack, a new kind of nut to think it will work?” he asked. “I have to laugh at me. Oh, well, we see.”

  He threw the rest of the bark and the leaves on the fire, and he hollered the wrong word out again.

  And he was answered by a dazzling sheet of summer lightning.

  “Skidi!” Clarence Big-Saddle swore. “It worked. I didn’t think it would.”

  Clarence Big-Saddle lived on his land for many years, and he paid no taxes. Intruders were unable to come down to his place. The land was sold for taxes three times, but nobody ever came down to claim it. Finally, it was carried as open land on the books. Homesteaders filed on it several times, but none of them fulfilled the qualification of living on the land. ‘

  Half a century went by. Clarence Big-Saddle called his ” son.

  “I’ve had it, boy,” he said. “I think I’ll just go in the house and die.”

  “Okay, Dad,” the son Clarence Little-Saddle said. “I’m going in to town to shoot a few games of pool with the boys. I’ll bury you when I get back this evening.”

  So the son Clarence Little-Saddle inherited. He also lived on the land for many years without paying taxes.

  There was a disturbance in the courthouse one day. The place seemed to be invaded in force, but actually there were but one man, one woman, and five children. “I’m Robert Rampart,” said the man, “and we want the Land Office.”

  “I’m Robert Rampart Junior,” said a nine-year-old gangler, “and we want it pretty blamed quick.”

  “I don’t think we have anything like that,” the girl at the desk said. “Isn’t that something they had a long time ago?”

  “Ignorance is no excuse for inefficiency, my dear,” said Mary Mabel Rampart, an eight-year-old who could easily pass for eight and a half. “After I make my report, I wonder who will be sitting at your desk tomorrow.”

  “You people are either in the wrong state or the wrong century,” the girl said.

  “The Homestead Act still obtains,” Robert Rampart insisted. “There is one tract of land carried as open in this country. I want to file on it.

  Cecilia Rampart answered the knowing wink of a beefy man at the distant desk. “Hi,” she breathed as she slinked over. “I’m Cecilia Rampart, but my stage name is Cecilia San Juan. Do you think that seven is too young to play ingenue roles?”

  “Not for you,” the man said. “Tell your folks to come over here.”

  “Do you know where the Land Office is?” Cecilia asked.

  “Sure. It’s the fourth left-hand drawer of my desk. The smallest office we got in the whole courthouse. We don’t use it much any more.”

  The Ramparts gathered around. The beefy man started to make out the papers.

  “This is the land description,” Robert Rampart began. “Why, you’ve got it down already. How did you know?”

  “I’ve been around here a long time,” the man answered.

  They did the paper work, and Robert Rampart filed on the land.

  “You won’t be able to go onto the land itself, though,” the man said.

  “Why won’t I?” Rampart demanded. “Isn’t the land description accurate?”

  “Oh, I suppose so. But nobody’s ever been able to get to the land. It’s become a sort of joke.”

  “Well, I intend to get to the bottom of that joke,” Rampart insisted. “I will occupy the land, or I will find out why not.”

  “I’m not sure about that,” the beefy man said. “The last man to file on the land, about a dozen years ago, wasn’t able to occupy the land. And he wasn’t able to say why he couldn’t. It’s kind of interesting, the look on their faces after they try it for a day or two, and then give it up.” The Ramparts left the courthouse, loaded into their camper, and drove out to find their land. They stopped at the house of a cattle and wheat farmer named Charley Dublin. Dublin met them with a grin which indicated he had been tipped off.

  “Come along if you want to, folks,” Dublin said. “The easiest way is on foot across my short pasture here. Your land’s directly west of mine.”

  They walked the short distance to the border.

  “My name is Tom Rampart, Mr. Dublin.” Six-year-old Tom made conversation as they walked. “But my name is really Ramires, and not Tom. I am the issue of an indiscretion of my mother in Mexico several years ago.”

  “The boy is a kidder, Mr. Dublin,” said the mother Nina Rampart, defending herself. “I have never been in Mexico, but sometimes I have the urge to disappear there forever.”

  “Ah, yes, Mrs. Rampart. And what is the name of the youngest boy here?” Charley Dublin asked.

  “Fatty,” said Fatty Rampart.

  “But surely that is not your given name?”

  “Audifax,” said five-year-old Fatty.

  “Ah, well, Audifax, Fatty, are you a kidder too?”

  “He’s getting better at it, Mr. Dublin,” Mary Mabel said. “He was a twin till last week. His twin was named Skinny.

  Mama left Skinny unguarded while she was out tippling, and there were wild dogs in the neighborhood. When Mama got back, do you know what was left of Skinny? Two neck bones and an ankle bone. That was all.”

  ‘‘Poor Skinny,” Dublin said. “Well, Rampart, this is the fence and the end of my land. Yours is just beyond.”

  “Is that ditch on my land?” Rampart asked.

  “That ditch is your land.”

  “I’ll have it filled in. It’s a dangerous deep cut even if it is narrow. And the other fence looks like a good one, and I sure have a pretty plot of land beyond it.”

  “No, Rampart, the land beyond the second fence belongs to Holister Hyde,” Charley Dublin said. “That second fence is the end of your land.”

  “Now, just wait a minute, Dublin! There’s something wrong here. My land is one hundred and sixty acres, which would be a half mile on a side. Where’s my half-mile width?”

  “Between the two fences.”

  “That’s not eight feet.”

  “Doesn’t look like it, does it, Rampart? Tell you what— there’s plenty of throwing-sized rocks around. Try to throw one across it.”

  “I’m not interested in any such boys’ games,” Rampart exploded. “I want my land.”

  But the Rampart children were interested in such games. They got with it with those throwing rocks. They winged them out over the little gully. The stones acted funny. They hung in the air, as it were, and diminished in size. And they were small as pebbles when they dropped down, down into the gully. None of them could throw a stone across that ditch, and they were throwing kids.

  “You and your neighbor have conspired to fence open land for your own use,” Rampart charged.

  “No such thing, Rampart,” Dublin said cheerfully. “My land checks perfectly. So does Hyde’s. So does yours, if we knew how to check it. It’s like one of those trick topological drawings. It really is half a mile from here to there, but the eye gets lost somewhere. It’s your land. Crawl through the fence and figure it out.”

  Rampart crawled through the fence, and drew himself up to jump the gully. Then he hesitated. He got a glimpse of just how deep that gully was. Still, it wasn’t five feet across.

  There was a heavy fence post on the ground, designed for use as a corner post. Rampart up-ended it with some effort. Then he shoved it to fall and bridge the gully. But it fell short, and it shouldn’t have. An eight-foot post should bridge a five-foot gully.

  The post fell into the gully, and rolled and rolled and rolled. It spun as though it were rolling outward, but it made no progress except vertically. The post came to rest on a ledge of the gully, so close that Rampart could almost reach out and touch it, but it now appeared no bigger than a match stick.

  “There is something wrong with that fence post, or with the world, or with my eyes,” Robert Rampart said. “I wish I felt dizzy so I could blame it on that.
”

  “There’s a little game that I sometimes play with my neighbor Hyde when we’re both out,” Dublin said. “I’ve a heavy rifle and I train it on the middle of his forehead as he stands on the other side of the ditch apparently eight feet away. I fire it off then (I’m a good shot), and I hear it whine across. It’d kill him dead if things were as they seem. But Hyde’s in no danger. The shot always banks into that little scuff of rocks and boulders about thirty feet below him. I can see it kick up the rock dust there, and the sound of it rattling into those little boulders comes back to me in about two and a half seconds.

  A bull-bat (poor people call it the night-hawk) raveled around in the air and zoomed out over the narrow ditch, but it did not reach the other side. The bird dropped below ground level and could be seen against the background of the other side of the ditch. It grew smaller and hazier as though at a distance of three or four hundred yards. The white bars on its wings could no longer be discerned, then the bird itself could hardly be discerned; but it was far short of the other side of the five-foot ditch.

  A man identified by Charley Dublin as the neighbor Hollister Hyde had appeared on the other side of the little ditch. Hyde grinned and waved. He shouted something, but could not be heard.

  “Hyde and I both read mouths,” Dublin said, “so we can talk across the ditch easy enough. Which kid wants to play chicken? Hyde will barrel a good-sized rock right at your head, and if you duck or flinch you’re chicken.”

  “Me! Me!” Audifax Rampart challenged. And Hyde, a big man with big hands, did barrel a fearsome jagged rock right at the head of the boy. It would have killed him if things had been as they appeared. But the rock diminished to nothing and disappeared into the ditch. Here was a phenomenon: things seemed real-size on either side of the ditch, but they diminished coming out over the ditch either way.

  “Everybody game for it?” Robert Rampart Junior asked.

  “We won’t get down there by standing here,” Mary Mabel said.

  “Nothing wenchered, nothing gained,” said Cecilia. “I got that from an ad for a sex comedy.”

  Then the five Rampart kids ran down into the gully. Ran down is right. It was almost as if they ran down the vertical face of a cliff. They couldn’t do that. The gully was no wider than the stride of the biggest kids. But the gully diminished those children, it ate them alive. They were dollsized. They were acorn-sized. They were running for minute after minute across a ditch that was only five feet across.

  They were going deeper in it, and getting smaller. Robert Rampart was roaring his alarm, and his wife Nina was screaming. Then she stopped. “What am I carrying on so loud about?” she asked herself. “It looks like fun. I’ll do it too.”

  She plunged into the gully, diminished in size as the children had done, and ran at a pace to carry her a hundred yards away across a gully only five feet wide.

  That Robert Rampart stirred things up for a while then. He got the sheriff there, and the highway patrolmen. A ditch had stolen his wife and five children, he said, and maybe had killed them. And if anybody laughs, there may be another killing. He got the colonel of the State National Guard there, and a command post set up. He got a couple of airplane pilots. Robert Rampart had one quality: when he hollered, people came.

  He got the newsmen out from T-Town, and the eminent scientists, Dr. Velikof Vonk, Arpad Arkabaranan, and Willy McGilly. That bunch turns up every time you get on a good one. They just happen to be in that part of the country where something interesting is going on.

  They attacked the thing from all four sides and the top, and by inner and outer theory. If a thing measures half a mile on each side, and the sides are straight, there just has to be something in the middle of it. They took pictures from the air, and they turned out perfect. They proved that Robert Rampart had the prettiest hundred and sixty acres in the country, the larger part of it being a lush green valley, and all of it being half a mile on a side, and situated just where it should be. They took ground-level photos then, and it showed a beautiful half-mile stretch of land between the boundaries of Charley Dublin and Hollister Hyde. But a man isn’t a camera. None of them could see that beautiful spread with the eyes in their heads. Where was it?

  Down in the valley itself everything was normal. It really was half a mile wide and no more than eighty feet deep with a very gentle slope. It was warm and sweet, and beautiful with grass and grain.

  Nina and the kids loved it, and they rushed to see what squatter had built that little house on their land. A house, or a shack. It had never known paint, but paint would have spoiled it. It was built of split timbers dressed near smooth with ax and draw knife, chinked with white clay, and sodded up to about half its height. And there was an interloper standing by the little lodge.

  “Here, here what are you doing on our land?” Robert Rampart Junior demanded of the man. “Now you just shamble off again wherever you came from. I’ll bet you’re a thief too, and those cattle are stolen.”

  “Only the black-and-white calf,” Clarence Little-Saddle said. “I couldn’t resist him, but the rest are mine. I guess I’ll just stay around and see that you folks get settled all right.”

  “Is there any wild Indians around here?” Fatty Rampart asked.

  “No, not really. I go on a bender about every three months and get a little bit wild, and there’s a couple Osage boys from Gray Horse that get noisy sometimes, but that’s about all,” Clarence Little-Saddle said.

  “You certainly don’t intend to palm yourself off on us as an Indian,” Mary Mabel challenged. “You’ll find us a little too knowledgeable for that.”

  “Little girl, you might as well tell this cow there’s no room for her to be a cow since you’re so knowledgeable. She thinks she’s a short-horn cow named Sweet Virginia. I think I’m a Pawnee Indian named Clarence. Break it to us real gentle if we’re not.”

  “If you’re an Indian where’s your war bonnet? There’s not a feather on you anywhere.”

  “How you be sure? There’s a story that we got feathers instead of hair— Aw, I can’t tell a joke like that to a little girl! How come you’re not wearing the Iron Crown of Lombardy if you’re a white girl? How you expect me to believe you’re a little white girl and your folks came from Europe a couple hundred years ago if you don’t wear it? There are six hundred tribes, and only one of them, the Oglala Sioux, had the war bonnet, and only the big leaders, never more than two or three of them alive at one time, wore it.”

  “Your analogy is a little strained,” Mary Mabel said. “Those Indians we saw in Florida and the ones at Atlantic City had war bonnets, and they couldn’t very well have been the kind of Sioux you said. And just last night on the TV in the motel, those Massachusetts Indians put a war bonnet on the President and called him the Great White Father. You mean to tell me that they were all phonies? Hey, who’s laughing at who here?”

  “If you’re an Indian where’s your bow and arrow?” Tom Rampart interrupted. “I bet you can’t even shoot one.”

  “You’re sure right there,” Clarence admitted. “I never shot one of those things but once in my life. They used to have an archery range in Boulder Park over in T-Town, and you could rent the things and shoot at targets tied to hay bales. Hey, I barked my whole forearm and nearly broke my thumb when the bow-string thwacked home. I couldn’t shoot that thing at all. I don’t see how anybody ever could shoot one of them.”

  “Okay, kids,” Nina Rampart called to her brood. “Let’s start pitching this junk out of the shack so we can move in. Is there any way we can drive our camper down here, Clarence?”

  “Sure, there’s a pretty good dirt road, and it’s a lot wider than it looks from the top. I got a bunch of green bills in an old night charley in the shack. Let me get them, and then I’ll clear out for a while. The shack hasn’t been cleaned out for seven years, since the last time this happened. I’ll show you the road to the top, and you can bring your car down it.”

  “Hey, you old Indian, you lied!” Ce
cilia Rampart shrilled from the doorway of the shack. “You do have a war bonnet. Can I have it?”

  “I didn’t mean to lie, I forgot about that thing,” Clarence Little-Saddle said. “My son Clarence Bare-Back sent that to me from Japan for a joke a long time ago. Sure, you can have it.”

  All the children were assigned tasks carrying the junk out of the shack and setting fire to it. Nina Rampart and Clarence Little-Saddle ambled up to the rim of the valley by the vehicle road that was wider than it looked from the top.

  “Nina, you’re back! I thought you were gone forever,” Robert Rampart jittered at seeing her again. “What— where are the children?”

  “Why, I left them down in the valley, Robert. That is, ah, down in that little ditch right there. Now you’ve got me worried again. I’m going to drive the camper down there and unload it. You’d better go on down and lend a hand too, Robert, and quit talking to all these funny-looking men here.”

  And Nina went back to Dublin’s place for the camper.

  “It would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for that intrepid woman to drive a car down into that narrow ditch,“ the eminent scientist Dr. Velikof Vonk said.

  “You know how that camel does it?” Clarence Little-Saddle offered, appearing of a sudden from nowhere. “He just closes one of his own eyes and flops back his ears and plunges right through. A camel is mighty narrow when he closes one eye and flops back his ears. Besides, they use a big-eyed needle in the act.”

  “Where’d this crazy man come from?” Robert Rampart demanded, jumping three feet in the air. “Things are coming out of the ground now. I want my land! I want my children! I want my wife! Whoops, here she comes driving it. Nina, you can’t drive a loaded camper into a little ditch like that! You’ll be killed or collapsed!”

  Nina Rampart drove the loaded camper into the little ditch at a pretty good rate of speed. The best of belief is that she just closed one eye and plunged right through. The car diminished and dropped, and it was smaller than a toy car. But it raised a pretty good cloud of dust as it bumped for several hundred yards across a ditch that was only five feet wide.