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.