A clicking sliding noise.
Horn thought swiftly, but calmly. How will it be in the future with Polly and me and Py at home and people coming over for a cocktail party? How will it be?
Suddenly he knew how it would be and the thought of it filled him with a great awe and a sense of credulous faith and time. They would live in the same white house on the same quiet, green hill, with a high fence around it to keep out the merely curious. And Dr. Wolcott would come to visit, park his beetle in the yard below, come up the steps and at the door would be a tall slim White Rectangle to meet him with a dry martini in its snakelike hand.
And in an easy chair across the room would sit a Salt White Oblong with a copy of Nietzsche open, reading, smoking a pipe. And on the floor would be Py, running about. And there would be talk and more friends would come in and the White Oblong and the White Rectangle would laugh and joke and offer little finger sandwiches and more drinks and it would be a good evening of talk and laughter. That's how it would be. Click.
The humming noise stopped. The hood lifted from Horn. It was all over.
They were in another dimension. He heard Polly cry out. There was much light. Then he slipped from the table, stood blinking. Polly was running. She stopped and picked up something from the floor.
It was Peter Horn's son. A living, pink-faced, blue-eyed boy, lying in her arms, gasping and blinking and crying.
The pyramidal shape was gone. Polly was crying with happiness.
Peter Horn walked across the room, trembling, trying to smile himself, to hold on to Polly and the child, both at the same time, and weep with them.
"Well!" said Wolcott, standing back. He did not move for a long while. He only watched the White Oblong and the slim White Rectangle holding the Blue Pyramid on the opposite side of the room. An assistant came in the door.
"Shhh," said Wolcott, hand to his lips. "They'll want to be alone awhile. Come along." He took the assistant by the arm and tiptoed across the room. The White Rectangle and the White Oblong didn't even look up when the door closed.
THE WOMEN
It was as if a light came on in a green room.
The ocean burned. A white phosphorescence stirred like a breath of steam through the autumn morning sea, rising. Bubbles rose from the throat of some hidden sea ravine.
Like lightning in the reversed green sky of the sea, it was aware. It was old and beautiful. Out of the deeps it came, indolently. A shell, a wisp, a bubble, a weed, a glitter, a whisper, a gill. Suspended in its depths were brainlike trees of frosted coral, eyelike pips of yellow kelp, hairlike fluids of weed. Growing with the tides, growing with the ages, collecting and hoarding and saving unto itself identities and ancient dusts, octopus-inks and all the trivia of the sea.
Until now—it was aware.
It was a shining green intelligence, breathing in the autumn sea. Eyeless but seeing, earless but hearing, bodyless but feeling. It was of the sea. And being of the sea it was—feminine.
It in no way resembled man or woman. But it had a woman's ways, the silken, sly, and hidden ways. It moved with a woman's grace. It was all the evil things of vain women.
Dark waters flowed through and by and mingled with strange memory on its way to the gulf streams. In the water were carnival caps, horns, serpentine, confetti. They passed through this blossoming mass of long green hair like wind through an ancient tree. Orange peels, napkins, papers, eggshells, and burnt kindling from night fires on the beaches; all the flotsam of the gaunt high people who stalked on the lone sands of the continental islands, people from brick cities, people who shrieked in metal demons down concrete highways, gone.
It rose softly, shimmering, foaming, into cool morning airs.
The green hair rose softly, shimmering, foaming, into cool morning airs. It lay in the swell after the long time of forming through darkness.
It perceived the shore.
The man was there.
He was a sun-darkened man with strong legs and a cow body.
Each day he should have come down to the water, to bathe, to swim. But he had never moved. There was a woman on the sand with him, a woman in a black bathing suit who lay next to him talking quietly, laughing. Sometimes they held hands, sometimes they listened to a little sounding machine that they dialed and out of which music came.
The phosphorescence hung quietly in the waves. It was the end of the season. September. Things were shutting down.
Any day now he might go away and never return.
Today he must come in the water.
They lay on the sand with the heat in them. The radio played softly and the woman in the black bathing suit stirred fitfully, eyes closed.
The man did not lift his head from where he cushioned it on his muscled left arm. He drank the sun with his face, his open mouth, his nostrils. "What's wrong?" he asked.
"A bad dream," said the woman in the black suit.
"Dreams in the daytime?"
"Don't you ever dream in the afternoon?"
"I never dream. I've never had a dream in my life."
She lay there, fingers twitching. "God, I had a horrible dream."
"What about?"
"I don't know," she said, as if she really didn't. It was so bad she had forgotten. Now, eyes shut, she tried to remember.
"It was about me," he said, lazily, stretching.
"No," she said.
"Yes," he said, smiling to himself. "I was off with another woman, that's what."
"No."
"I insist," he said. "There I was, off with another woman, and you discovered us, and somehow, in all the mix-up, I got shot or something."
She winced involuntarily. "Don't talk that way."
"Let's see now," he said. "What sort of woman was I with? Gentlemen prefer blondes, don't they?"
"Please don't joke," she said. "I don't feel well."
He opened his eves. "Did it affect you that much?"
She nodded. "Whenever I dream in the daytime this way, it depresses me something terrible."
"I'm sorry." He took her hand. "Anything I can get you?"
"No."
"Ice-cream cone? Eskimo pie? A Coke?"
"You're a dear, but no. I'll be all right. It's just that, the last four days haven't been right. This isn't like; it used to be early in the summer. Something's happened."
"Not between us," he said.
"Oh, no, of course not," she said quickly. "But don't you feel that sometimes places change? Even a thing like a pier changes, and the merry-go-rounds, and all that. Even the hot dogs taste different this week."
"How do you mean?"
"They taste old. It's hard to explain, but I've lost my appetite, and I wish this vacation were over. Really, what I want to do most of all is go home."
"Tomorrow's our last day. You know how much this extra week means to me."
"I'll try," she said. "If only this place didn't feel so funny and changed. I don't know. But all of a sudden I just had a feeling I wanted to get up and run."
"Because of your dream? Me and my blonde and me dead all of a sudden."
"Don't," she said. "Don't talk about dying that way!"
She lay there very close to him. "If I only knew what it was."
"There." He stroked her. "I'll protect you."
"It's not me, it's you," her breath whispered in his ear. "I had the feeling that you were tired of me and went away."
"I wouldn't do that; I love you."
"I'm silly." She forced a laugh. "God, what a silly thing I am."
They lay quietly, the sun and sky over them like a lid.
"You know," he said, thoughtfully, "I get a little of that feeling you're talking about. This place has changed. There is something different."