Earth Is The Strangest Planet

by Robert Silverberg

  By the end of the first week, the bird was visible through any fair-sized telescope. The story snowballed, and in its rolling picked up the oddments lying in its path. A character who introduced himself as a member of the Fortean Society—whatever that is—came to the office armed with a thick volume in which he pointed out to us a dozen paragraphs purporting to prove that similar dark objects had been seen in the skies above various parts of the world over a period of several hundred years.

  The central council of the P.T.A. issued a plaintive statement deploring scare-journalism and its evil effects on the youth of our nation. The Daughters of the American Revolution passed a resolution branding the strange image a new secret weapon of the Kremlin’s lads, and urging that immediate steps—undefined but drastic—be taken by the authorities. A special committee of the local ministers’ association called to advise us that the story we had originated tended to undermine the religious faith of the community; they demanded that we print a full retraction of the hoax in the earliest possible edition.

  Which was, by this time, a complete impossibility. Before the end of the second week, the black dot in the skies could be viewed with binoculars. By the middle of the third week it had reached the stage of naked-eye visibility. Crowds gathered in the streets when this became known, and those with good eyesight professed to be able to discern the rhythmic rise and fall of those tremendous wings, now familiar to all because of the scores of photographs which by this time had appeared in every newspaper and magazine of any importance.

  The cadenced beating of those monstrous wings was but one of the many inexplicable—or at least unexplained— mysteries about the creature from beyond. Vainly a few diehard physicists pointed out that wings are of no propulsive help in airless void, that alate flight is possible only where there are wind currents to lift and carry. The thing flew. And whether its gigantic pinions beat, as some men thought, on an interstellar atmosphere unguessed by Earthly science, or whether they stroked against beams of light or quantum bundles, as others contended, these were meaningless quibbles in the face of that one, stark, incontrovertible fact: the thing flew.

  With the dawning of the fourth week, the bird from outer space reached Jupiter and dwarfed it—an ominous black interloper equal in size to any cosmic neighbor man had ever seen.

  I sat alone with Abramson in his office. Abramson was tired and, I think, a little ill. His smile was not a success, nor had his words their hoped-for jauntiness.

  “Well, I got what I wanted, Flaherty,” he admitted. “I wanted swift action, and got it. Though what good it is, I don’t know. The world recognizes its danger now, and is helpless to do anything about it.”

  “It has hurdled the asteroids,” I said. “Now it’s approaching Mars, and is still moving sunward. Everyone is asking, though, why doesn’t its presence within the system raise merry hob with celestial mechanics? By all known laws it should have thrown everything out of balance. A creature of that size, with its gravitational attraction—

  “You’re still thinking in old terms, my boy. Now we are confronted with something strange and new. Who knows what laws may govern the Bird of Time?”

  “The Bird of Time? I seem to have heard that phrase.”

  “Of course.” He quoted moodily. “ The Bird of Time has but a little way to fly—and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.’ ”

  “The Rubaiyat,” I remembered.

  “Yes. Omar was an astronomer, you know, as well as a poet. He must have known—or guessed—something of this.” Abramson gestured wanly skyward. “Indeed, many of the ancients seem to have known something about it. I’ve been doing a lot of research during these past weeks, Flaherty. It is amazing how many references there are in the old writings to a great bird of space—statements which until recently did not seem to be at all significant or important, but which now hold a greater and graver meaning for us.”

  “Such as?”

  “Culture myths,” he said. “Legends. The records of a hundred vanished races. The Mayan myth of the space-swallow, the Toltec quetzlcoatl, the Russian firebird, the phoenix of the Greeks.”

  “We don’t know yet,” I argued, “that it is a bird.”

  He shrugged.

  “A bird, a giant mammal, a pterodactyl, some similar creature on a cosmic scale—what does it matter? Perhaps it is a life-form foreign to anything we know, something we can only try to name in earthly terms, describe by earthly analogies. The ancients called it a bird. The Phoenicians worshiped the ‘bird that was, and is again to be.’ The Persians wrote of the fabulous roc. There is an Aramaic legend of the giant bird that rules—and spawns—the worlds.”

  “Spawns the worlds?”

  “Why else should it be coming?” he inquired. “Does its great size mean nothing to you?” He stared at me thoughtfully for a moment. Then: “Flaherty,” he asked strangely, “what is the earth?”

  “Why,” I replied, “the world we live on. A planet.”

  “Yes. But what is a planet?”

  “A unit of the solar system. A part of the sun’s family.”

  “Do you know that? Or are you simply parroting things you were taught in school?”

  “The latter, of course. But what else could it be?”

  “Our earth could be,” he answered reluctantly, “no part of the sun’s family at all. Many theories have been devised, Flaherty, to explain earth’s place in this tiny segment of the universe we call the solar system. None of them are prov-ably inaccurate. But on the other hand, none are demonstrably true.

  “There is the nebular hypothesis: the theory that earth and its sister planets were born of a contracting sun. Were, in fact, small globules of solar matter left to cool in orbits deserted by their condensing parent. A late refinement of this theory makes us the product of materials derived from a sister sun, once twin to our own orb.

  “The planetesimal and tidal theories each are based on the assumption that unfathomable eons ago another sun bypassed our own, and that the planets are the offspring of that ancient, flaming rendezvous in space.

  “Each of these theories has its proponents and its opponents; each has its verifications and denials. None can be wholly proved or refuted.

  “But” —he stirred restlessly—“there is another possibility which, to the best of my knowledge, has never been expounded. Yet it is equally valid to any I have mentioned. And in the light of that which we now know, it seems to me more likely than any other.

  “It is that earth and its sister planets have nothing whatever to do with the sun. That they are not, nor ever were, mere members of its family. That the sun in our skies is simply a convenience.

  “Convenience?” I frowned. “Convenience for what?”

  “For the bird,” said Abramson unhappily. “For the great bird which is our parent. Flaherty, can you conceive that our sun may be a cosmic incubator? And that the world on which we live may be merely—an egg?”

  I stared at him. “An egg! Fantastic!”

  “You think so? You can look at the pictures, read the stories in the magazines, see the approaching bird with your own eyes, and still think there exists anything more incredible than that which has befallen us?”

  “But an egg! Eggs are egg-shaped. Ovoid.”

  “The eggs of some birds are ovoid. But those of the plover are pear-shaped, those of the sand-grouse cylindrical, those of the grebe biconical. There are eggs shaped like spindles and spears. The eggs of owls, and of mammals, are generally spheroid. As in the earth.”

  “But eggs have shells!”

  “As does our earth. Earth’s crust is but forty miles thick —a layer for a body of its size comparable in every respect to the shell of an egg. Moreover, it is a smooth shell. Earth’s greatest height is Mount Everest, some thirty thousand feet; its greatest depth is Swire Deep in the Pacific, thirty-five thousand. A maximum variation of about twelve miles. To feel these irregularities on a twelve-inch model of the earth you would need the delicate fingers of the blind, because
the greatest height protrudes but the hundred and twentieth part of an inch, and the lowest depth is but one hundredth part of an inch below its surface.”

  “Still,” I argued desperately, “you can’t be right. You’ve overlooked the most important fact. Eggs hold life! Eggs contain the fledglings of the creature that spawned them. Eggs crack open and—”

  I stopped abruptly. Abramson nodded, creaking back and forth in his ancient swivel chair, the creaking a monotonous rhythm to his nodding. There was sadness in his eyes and in his voice.

  “Even so,” he said wearily. “Even so . . {

  So that was the second great story which I broke. I was still fool enough to get a bang out of it at the time; I don’t feel the same way about it now. But, then, I don’t feel the same about anything any more. I guess you can understand that. The coming of the bird was such a big thing, such a truly big thing, that it dwindled into insignificance all the things we used to consider great, important, worldshaking.

  World-shaking!

  I’ll make it brief. There’s so little purpose to my telling of this story. But there may be in it, here and there, a fact you do not know. And I’ve got to do something—anything —to keep myself from thinking.

  You remember that grim fourth week, and the steady approach of the bird. We had settled for calling it that by then. We were not sure if it was bird or winged beast, but men think—and give names to things—in terms of familiar objects. And that slim black shape with its tremendous wings, its taloned legs and long, cruel, curving beak, looked more like a bird than an animal.

  Besides, there was Abramson’s world-egg theory to be considered. The people, hearing this, doubted it with a furious hope—but feared it might be true. Men in high positions asked what could be done. They sent for Abramson, and he advised them. He could be wrong, he acknowledged. But if he was right, there was only one hope for salvation. The life within Earth must be stilled.

  “I believe,” he told a special emergency committee appointed by the President, “the bird has come to hatch the brood of young it deposited God knows how many centuries ago about that incubating warmth which is our sun. Its wisdom or its instinct tells it that the time of emergence is now; it has come to help its fledglings shed their shells.

  “But we know that mother birds, alone and unaided, do not hatch their young. They will aid a struggling chick to crack its shell, but they will never begin the liberating action. With an uncanny second sense, they seem to know which eggs have failed to develop life within them. Such eggs they never disturb.

  “Therein, gentlemen, lies our only hope. The shell of Earth is forty miles in thickness. We have our engineers and technicians; we have the atomic bomb. If mankind is to live, the host to which we are but parasites must die. That is my only conclusion. I leave the rest to you.”

  He left them, still wrangling, in Washington, and returned home. He saw little hope, he told me the next day, of their reaching any firm decision in sufficient time to act. Abramson, I think, had already resigned himself to the inevitable, had with a wan grimace surrendered mankind to its fate. He said once that bureaucracy had achieved its ultimate destiny. It had throttled itself to death with its own red tape.

  And still the bird moved sunward. On the twenty-eighth day it made its nearest approach to Earth, and passed us by. I don’t know—nor can the scientists explain—why our globe was not shattered by the gravitational attraction of that gigantic mass. Perhaps because the Newtonian theory is, after all, simply a theory, and has no actuality in fact. I don’t know. If there were time it would be good to resurvey the facts and learn the truth about such things. At any rate, all things considered, we suffered very little from its nearness. There were high tides and mighty winds; those sections of earth subject to earthquakes suffered some mild tremors. But that is all.

  Then we won a respite. You remember how the bird paused in its headlong flight to hover for two full days about that tiniest of the solar planets—the one we call Mercury. Briefly, as if searching for something, it flew in a wide circle in an orbit between Mercury and the sun.

  Abramson believed it was looking for something. For something it could not find because it was no longer there. Astronomers believed, said Abramson, that at one time there had been another planet circling between Mercury and the sun. Some watchers of the sky had seen this as late as the eighteenth century, and had called it Vulcan. Vulcan had disappeared; perhaps had fallen into the sun. So thought Abramson. And so, apparently, the bird decided, too, for after a fruitless search it winged its way outward from the sun to approach the closest of its brood still remaining intact.

  Must I remind you of that dreadful day? I think not. No man alive will ever forget what he saw then. The bird approaching Mercury, pausing to hover motionless above a planet which seemed a mote beneath the umbra of those massive wings. Men in the streets saw this. I saw more, for I stood beside Abramson in the university observatory, watching that scene with the aid of a telescope.

  I saw the first thin splitting of Mercury’s shell, and the curious fluid ichor which seeped from a dying world. I watched the grisly emergence of that small, wet, scrawny thing—raw simulacrum of its monstrous parent—from the egg in which it had lain for whatever incalculable era was the gestation period of a creature vast as space and old as time. I saw the mother bird stretch forth its giant beak and help its fledgling rid itself of a peeling, needless shell; stood horrified to watch the younger bird emerge and flap its new, uncertain wings, drying them in the burning rays of the star which had been its incubator.

  And I saw the shredded remnants of a world spiral into the sun which was its pyre.

  It was then, at last, that mankind woke to action. The doubters were finally convinced, those who had argued against the “needless expense” and folly of Abramson’s plan were silenced. Forgotten now were selfishness and greed, political differences and departmental strife. The world it infested trembled on the brink of doom—and a race of vermin battled for its life.

  In the flat desertland of America was frantically thrown together the mechanism for mankind’s greatest project— Operation Life. To this desert flew the miners, the construction engineers, the nuclear physicists, the men skilled in deep-drilling operations. There they began their task, working night and day with a speed which heretofore had been called impossible. There they are working now, this minute, as I write, fighting desperately against each passing second of time, striving with every means and method they know to reach and destroy, before the bird comes, the life within our world.

  A week ago the bird moved on to Venus. Throughout these seven days we have watched its progress there. We cannot see much through the eternal veil of mist which surrounds our sister planet, so we do not know what has for so gratefully long a time occupied the bird. Whatever it is, we are thankful for it. We wait and watch. And as we watch, we work. And as we work, we pray… .

  So there is no real ending to this story. As I said before, I don’t know why I’m bothering to write it. The answer is not ready to be given. If we succeed, there will be ample time to tell the tale properly—the whole great story, fully documented, of the battle being waged on the hot Arizona sands. And if we fail—well, then there will be no reason for this writing. There will be none to read it.

  The bird is not the greatest of our fears. If when it comes from Venus it finds here a quiet, lifeless, unresponsive shell, it will move outward—we believe and pray—to Mars, then Jupiter, and thence beyond.

  That is the end we hope to bring about. Soon, now, our probing needles will penetrate Earth’s shell, will dip beneath the crust and into the tegument of that horror which sleeps within us.

  But we have another more tormenting fear. It is that before the mother bird approaches us the fledgling may awake and seek to gain its freedom from the shell encasing it. If this should happen, Abramson has warned, our work must then proceed at lighting speed. For let that fledgling once begin to knock, then it must die—or all mankind is do
omed.

  That is the other reason why I write. To keep from thinking thoughts I dare not think. Because:

  Because early this morning, Earth began to knock.

  NARROW VALLEY

  R. A. Lafferty

  This man Lafferty, who lives in Tulsa, surely must have the most fertile, original, and altogether bizarre mind in all the northeast Oklahoma, at the very least. Who but Lafferty could fit 160 acres of good farmland into a five-foot gully? Who but Lafferty could dream up so ingenious a story to go with that extraordinary situation? Why, no one could … no one but Lafferty, and, luckily for us, Lafferty did.

  * * *

  In the year 1893, land allotments in severalty were made to the remaining eight hundred and twenty-one Pawnee Indians. Each would receive one hundred and sixty acres of land and no more, and thereafter the Pawnees would be expected to pay taxes on their land, the same as the White Eyes did.

  “Kitkehahke!” Clarence Big-Saddle cussed. “You can’t kick a dog around proper on a hundred and sixty acres. And I sure am not hear before about this pay taxes on land.” Clarence Big-Saddle selected a nice green valley for his allotment. It was one of the half dozen plots he had always regarded as his own. He sodded around the summer lodge that he had there and made it an all-season home. But he sure didn’t intend to pay taxes on it.

  So he burned leaves and bark and made a speech:

  “That my valley be always wide and flourish and green and such stuff as that!” he orated in Pawnee chant style. “But that it be narrow if an intruder come.”

  He didn’t have any balsam bark to burn. He threw on a little cedar bark instead. He didn’t have any elder leaves.

  He used a handful of jack-oak leaves. And he forgot the word. How you going to work it if you forget the word?

  “Petahauerat!” he howled out with the confidence he hoped would fool the fates.