Sylvia came back looking frightened.
“It’s the same in front,” she said. “The garden’s there, and half the width of the sidewalk then there’s just that stuff. And half the garage has gone.”
I raised the window sash and looked out to the right. From that angle I could look down on the garage roof. It looked usual enough. Then I saw what she meant.
“It’s half the Gunners” garage that’s gone,” I said.
And it had. The roof of their garage climbed to within an inch or two of the ridge, and then stopped as if it had been sliced clean off. Where the rest of it should have been and where the Gunners' house should have been tussocks of grass waved in a light wind.
“Thank goodness,” said Sylvia. Not uncharitably, you understand, but after all, we had only our new convertible a couple of weeks.
“We must be dreaming,” I said, a little shakily.
“We can’t both be,” she objected.
That, of course, was debatable, but this was scarcely the moment, so I said: “Well, am I dreaming you, or are you dreaming me?”
I let her have it: I ought to have known better than to ask the question in the first place.
I hurried on some clothes and went outside to see what 1 could make of it. The front was just as Sylvia had said. I walked down the path, opened the gate, and stepped out onto the half-width of sidewalk. The edge where the sandy soil began looked just as if it had been trimmed off with a sharp knife. I bent over to look at it more closely and caught myself a sharp crack on the head.
It was so unexpected that I recoiled slightly. Then I put up a hand to see what had done it. My fingers met a smooth surface which was neither hot nor cold and seemed as solid as rock. I raised the other hand, and felt across several square feet of it. It scared me a bit because, though it was unfamiliar, it was only a step on from the quite familiar. One just had to imagine plate glass with a perfectly nonreflecting surface…
I could not touch the sandy soil and the grass beyond. The transparent wall rose from the very line where normal things ended. As I stood there looking through it in bewilderment I noticed an odd thing: the grass beyond was waving, yet I could not feel even a stir in the air around me.
After a moment’s thought I went to the garage. There I chose my heaviest hammer and found an old can half full of sludgy kerosene. Outside again, I threw the contents of the can at the transparent wall. It was queer the way the stuff splattered suddenly in midair and began to trickle down. Then I took a grip on the hammer, and hit hard. The thing rebounded, and the shaft stung my fingers so that I dropped it. There was no other perceptible result.
When I investigated at the back of the house I found that the same invisible barrier terminated what remained of the garden and with increased bizarre effect, for there it appeared to bisect the plum tree so that, seen from as nearly to the side as I could get, the whole trunk and spread was flat-backed like a piece of a stage scenery. I wished I could crane around to see what the devil it looked like from the back, but the wall itself prevented that.
In a rough survey I estimated that the area of normalcy enclosed by these walls would be an approximate square of seventy yards. Beyond this in all directions stretched the featureless dunes, featureless, that is, save for the hills in the distance which occupied just the same position that hills usually occupied in our view. Not much wiser, I went back to the house.
Sylvia, who feels able to face most things better on a cup of coffee, was cursing the cooker for not heating.
“Oh, there you are. Can’t you fix that fuse?” she demanded.
“Well” I began doubtfully. Then I went and looked in the box. As I had expected, the fuses were okay. I said so.
“Nonsense,” said Sylvia. “Nothing goes on.”
“On the contrary, quite a lot goes on,” I said. “Though just what. Anyway, the point is, where would the power come from?”
“How would I?” she began. Then she got the idea. She opened her mouth again, failed to find anything to say, and stood looking at me.
I shook my head. “I’ll go and see the Saggitts,” I said.
It was not that I expected either Saggitt to be much help, but one began to have a feeling that some company 143 would be acceptable. Still, I get along all right with Doug Saggitt althought he’s quite a bit older than I am forty-seven, forty-eight, maybe. He’s getting thin some places and grey in others, and though he’s not fossilising yet, it’s hard to see why Rose married him, she being only twenty-one, and quite a whistle rouser. It seems to me that some girls, maybe when they’re half awake one morning, get a kind of nudge from the lifeforce. “Hey?” says the lifeforce. “Time you were getting married.”
“What, me?” says the girl. “Sure, you and someone else, of course,” says the lifeforce. “But I mean to have a lot of fun first,” says the girl. “Maybe but then maybe not.” says the If ominously. “It could be you’ll come out in spots tomorrow, or lose a leg in a car accident, or And after it’s gone on this way for a bit it has the girl so paralytic with fright she flies off wildly, and marries a Doug Saggitt. After a bit she finds that she doesn’t have spots and does have two legs, that she doesn’t have a lot of fun and does have Doug Saggitt, and she begins to wonder whether Doug Saggitt was just what the lifeforce had in mind, after all. Mind you, that’s only a theory, but it does save me having to say “I can’t think why she married him,” the way the rest of the people in the road do every time they see her.
Anyway, I went over to their house, and pressed the bell. It looked as if, whatever it was, we and the Saggitts were in it together and alone, for the transparent barrier on the side beyond them passed through the Drury’s house, including in our area simply the side wall and a depth of perhaps six inches beyond it which looked extremely dangerous though it showed no sign of falling. Looking at it while I waited, I reckoned that it, like the plum tree and the other things the barrier cut across, must be clamped to the invisible surface by a kind of magnetism.
I gave a second long chime on the bell. Presently I heard feet on the stairs. The door opened. A hand thrust out some coins wrapped in a scrap of writing paper. It moved impatiently when I didn’t accept the offer. The door opened a little more, and Rose’s head appeared.
“Oh,” she said. “I thought you were the milk. What’s the?” She cut off abruptly. Her eyes widened as she saw the view behind me.
“What’s happened?” she stuttered.
“That’s what I want to see Doug about,” I told her.
“He’s still asleep,” she said vaguely, still staring where the other side of the road ought to be.
“Well” I began. Then Sylvia came hurrying across. “George,” she said, with a note of accusation. “The gas doesn’t work, either.”
“Is that surprising? Look where the gasworks was,” I said, and pointed away across the dunes.
“But how can I possibly cook breakfast?”
“You can’t,” I admitted.
“But that’s ridiculous. You’ll have to do something about it, George.”
“Now what in heck do you suppose I can do?”
Sylvia regarded me, and then turned to Rose with an expression of sisterly suffering.
“Aren’t men helpless?” she asked, in a voice needing no answer.
Rose was still looking round in resentful bewilderment.
“If you’ll rout Doug out, we can at least hold a conference about this,” I said.
Sylvia and I waited in the lounge. It wasn’t a comfortable wait. Sylvia was doing her hedgehog act she kind of rolls into a bail of silence, with all the spines sticking out. I used to be the fool terrier in that game, but not now. I don’t know which irritates her most.