Fredric Brown - Placet Is a Crazy Place

Even when youre used to it, it gets you down sometimes. Like that morningif 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, youd have a six-hour day and then a two-hour night and then a fifteen-hour day and a one-hour night andwell, you just couldnt 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 isnt any even fraction of the period of its orbit and theres the Blakeslee Field in the middle between the sunsa field in which light rays slow down to a crawl and get left behind and if youve 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 dont blame you.

I didnt believe it either, and it scared me stiff the first time I stood on Placet and sate Placet coming head-on to run into us. And yet Id read the Blakeslee reports and knew what was really happening, and why. Its 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 wasnt 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 wereor seemed to beresting on a sheet of rippling water. But it wasnt wet.

On top of the grass of my desk lay a pink flowerpot, into which, nose first, stuck a bright green Saturnian lizard. Thatreason and not my eyesight told mewas 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 didnt know what it said because Id come into my office after the B. F. effect had started. I didnt think it really said God Bless Our Home because it seemed to. And just then I was mad, I was fed up, and I didnt care a holler what it actually did say.

You seemaybe Id better explainthe Blakeslee Field effect occurs when Placet is in midposition between Argyle I and Argyle II, the two suns it figure-eights around. Theres 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 is contraterrene, or negative matter. Halfway between themover a considerable stretch of territoryis 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 soundas Placet itself doesyou can still see it coming after its 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, theres 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 directionand scares you stiff if youre watching, even if you know its 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 isnt any more. Thats the auditory effect of an object traveling faster than sound; what Ive just described is the visual effect of an object travelingin a figure-eight orbitfaster than its own visual image.

That isnt the worst of it; you can stay indoors and avoid the eclipsing and the head-on collisions, but you cant 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 cant exactly call them hallucinations, because you dont ordinarily see things that arent 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 penand 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 doesnt affect.

You can close your eyes, of course, but you dontbecause 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 isnt 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 midperiods.

Birds? I asked.

Both of his heads nodded. The underground part of those walls must he like sieves from the birds flying through em, and wed better pour concrete quick. Do you think those new alloy reinforcing bars the Arkll 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 cant tell time from a funeral wreath. I said, I was hoping we wouldnt have to reinforce those walls till we had the bars to sink in them. The Arks about due; theyre 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 theres no hurry at all.

Nobody was in there?

Nope, but Ill make sure. He ran out.

Thats what life on Placet is like. Ive had enough of it: Id 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 its an intact lathe or a busted one? Say, chief, you know what you look like?

I said, If you tell me, youre fired.

I dont 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 Centers Placet employees has to go back to Earth for psychopathic treatment after a year or two on Placet. And Id been there three years, almost. My contract was up. I made my mind up, too.

Reagan, I said.

Hed 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. Id done it now. Unless I ran after Reagan and told him not to send the message, it was done and over and irrevocable. Earth Centers funny that way; the board is plenty generous in some directions, but once you resign they never let you change your mind. Its practically an iron-clad rule and ninety-nine times out of a hundred its justified on interplanetary and intragalactic projects. A man must be a hundred percent enthusiastic about his job to make a go of it, and once hes turned against it, hes lost the keen edge.