That brought a laugh from the onlookers, and red to the faces of the ladies, and the policemen could see now that it was time to break things up. The construction workers were displaced one way, the ladies the other. Bucky and I, watching this, were also attempting to edge away from the scene.
 “Thank God for that,” Bucky was saying, “For a moment there, I feared the need for intervention.”
 “Your concepts of courage and cowardice are most interesting, Bucky,” I grinned.
 “Well, you’re the one with the training. What would you have suggested?”
 “Rule one. Never pick a fight you can’t possibly win.”
 “You advise strategic withdrawal?”
 “There’s a pub just around the corner and I can’t understand why we aren’t already there.”

You see—maybe I better explain—the Blakeslee Field effect occurs when Placet is in the mid-position between Argyle I and Argyle II, the two suns… Halfway between them… is a field in which light rays are slowed down, way down. They move about the speed of sound. The result is that if something is moving faster than sound—as Placet does itself—you can still see it coming after it has 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, there’s an image coming and an image going, and it eclipses itself twice, occulting both suns at the same time. A little further on, it runs into itself coming from the opposite direction—scares you stiff if you’re watching, even when you know it’s not really happening…
    On this planet where the birds fly underground (wrecking the foundations of the buildings) and everything looks exactly like something it is not, our hero tries to make some sort of sensible attempt to propose to the woman he loves.
     Anthologies of any kind have never interested me. The only one in my collection is Out Of This World 1, a gathering of science fiction yarns, which I read and keep only because is it a first edition of the first volume in a very popular series of a very popular genre. Arthur C Clarke and John Wyndham head it up with stories I have mentioned elsewhere, and there is a little ripper by Fredric Brown called Placet is a Crazy Place, about the weird life led on a very strange planet that whirls frantically about two suns, distorting all reality. I liked all the stories, like the book, but it has never inspired me to read another anthology, in that series, or genre, or any other.