“Like I said last night, the lower tier needs turning—gotta bring up that fertile soil. My tractor’s broke down, but all you’ll need to do is dig it up with a fork.”
Jack went into his kitchen. As he rummaged through unfamiliar drawers in the dark, he accidentally woke the residents of a few houses arranged in and around the cabinets. Without apologizing he went back into the main room and knelt down by the Treels’ farm. Grampa strutted back and forth on the long porch, pointing to the area that needed turning
“A job like that would take us two days,” he said. “Let’s see how long it takes you. Skim off about a foot of soil and just, you know, flip it over.”
“A foot?” Jack said.
Treel cackled. “Oh… glad you caught me there. Guess it’d be about a fraction of an inch to you.”
Jack raised the fork and leaned close enough to see tiny stones and the weeds that grew around them. He had just prodded the field with the tines of his fork when a cry went up from elsewhere on the wall
“You better call him off, Treel! That’s a violation of the cross-scale labor laws!”
“Oh, stuff a pipe in it,” Grampa bellowed through his bullhorn. This instrument sounded loud to Jack; it must have been deafening to the Treels’ samesize neighbors. “You go right ahead, Jack.”
Jack sat back and took a look at the walls. All around the Treel place, other tiny farmers had come out of their barns to watch. Expressions of anger were writ large on every minute face.
“You gonna help the rest of us when you’re through there?” cried a relatively tall, plump farmer.
“Well, I…” Jack began.
“You’re not paying him,” yelled Grampa Treel. “He’s got plenty of work to do around my place.”
“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.