Doug made his appearance in a dressing gown, with his chin bristling and his hair on end what there was of it. Rose followed. For some reason she had chosen to put on a hostess gown.
“What the hell’s supposed to be going on?” Doug demanded.
“Listen,” I said. “Before we go any further, will everybody quit barking at me as though I’d done it. You can see what’s happened, and you know about as much as I do.”
“There’s no power and no gas,” muttered Sylvia, aggrievedly.
“And the milkman’s late,” added Rose.
“Late”!” I repeated helplessly, and sat down.
“Well, if you men won’t do anything” said Sylvia, and laid hold of the telephone.
I watched, fascinated. Have you ever seen a woman grossly insulted by a perfectly silent instrument? It’s good. Her mouth clamped, and she marched out of the room with a kind of Amazonian determination to fight something. There was a pause while I looked at Doug and he looked at me. At last: “What is going on?” he said bemusedly. He waved a hand at the window. “What is this, George? Where’s” Then he was interrupted by Sylvia’s return. Her eyes were watering slightly, and she was holding a handkerchief to her nose. Her anger had given place to bewilderment. She was even a little scared.
“There’s a wall there only you can’t see it,” she said.
“Wall? Rubbish,” said Doug.
“How dare you?” snapped Sylvia, recovering quickly.
Doug went outside to look for himself.
“Now,” I said when he came back, “you know just as much as I do. What do we do next?”
There was a pause.
“I’m out of bread, and I suppose the baker won’t be coming either,” Rose said miserably.
“I think we’ve got an extra loaf, dear,” Sylvia told her consolingly.
“That’s sweet of you, Sylvia but are you sure you’ll be able to spare?”
“For heaven’s sake!” I said, loudly. “Here we are with the most amazing, the most monstrous thing happening all around us, and all you two can do is to natter on about gas and bread.”
Sylvia’s eyes narrowed a bit. Then she remembered that we weren’t alone.
“There’s no need to shout. What do you suggest we do?” she said, chillily.
“That’s not the point, not yet,” I said. “The first thing is to find out what has happened. Then maybe we can begin to do something about it. Now has anybody any ideas?”
Apparently nobody had. Doug wandered over to the window and stood there mutely uninspired by the empty miles of dunes. Sylvia and Rose sat registering womanly forbearance with the male.
“I have a theory,” I suggested.
“It’ll have to be good,” said Doug gloomily. “Still let’s have it.”
“It seems to me that we may be the unwitting subjects of some test or experiment,” I offered.
Doug shook his head.
“If “unwitting” means what I think it does, it’s the wrong word. I’m extremely aware of all this.”
“What I mean is that someone tried his experiment, and we just happened to be here when he tried it.”
“Experiment? You mean like letting off an atom bomb or something which just happened to finish everybody but us? Because”
“I do not,” I said shortly. I went on to make my points. Though all trace of buildings had vanished, the configuration of the ground was roughly the same. We seemed to be in a kind of invisible glass box. Certainly there were walls all round, and probably, since the air was so still, there was a roof as well we could test for that later. Everything within the enclosed area was unchanged everything outside, except the general lay of the land was altered. Or it might be vice versa. Now the contents of the invisible box were quite alien to the surroundings; it followed that they must have been moved from somewhere to somewhere else. But the evidence was that they were still in the same place though it had an unfamiliar aspect. Therefore, as they had not been moved in space, the only other thing they could have been moved in was time.
This piece of calm and, I felt, logical reasoning was received with a silence which lasted for some moments. Then Doug said: “If an atom bomb, o several atom bombs, were let off, and we happened to be protected by this glass case or whatever it is”
“Then there certainly wouldn’t be grass growing out there,” I finished for him. “No. What must have happened is that in some way this enclosed area was twisted through another dimension to another section of time, probably what we would call forward, or to the future. I don’t see that anything else could explain the situation.”
“H’m,” said Doug. “And you think that does explain it, eh?”
There was a pause. Sylvia said conversationally to Rose: “My husband reads the most captivating magazines, my dear. All about girls who go through deep space whatever that is just in bras and panties. And about good galaxies fighting perfectly horrid galaxies, and the cutest little things called mutants of robots or something, and such lovely men who go out on space patrol for a few hundred light-years at a time. So intriguing. Such interesting titles they have, too. There’s Staggering Stories Stunning Science Stories, Dumfounding Tales, Flabbergasting Fiction, Be wild”
“Listen,” I said coldly. “Maybe you’d like to explain what’s going on around here on the hints you’ve picked up from Woman’s Glamour, Clean Confessions, Gracious Loving, Wolf Tales or Heartbeat Magazine?”
“At least they have stories in them about things that could happen,” said Sylvia, equally chilly.
“Euclid said all that was necessary about triangles in his first book and he got someplace with them.”
“Well, what place do the stories in your magazines about things that never could happen get to?” Sylvia snapped.
“I wouldn’t know. What I do know is that one of the “never coulds” is all around us right now. Look at it! And when I try to understand it, you just sneer.”
“Sneer!” said Sylvia. “I like that. I was just explaining to Rose. Why, if anybody was sneering”
“Yes,” agreed Rose, as if answering a question.
We withdrew to our corners for the moment. Doug broke in: “You really think there must have been some fourth-dimensional twist?”
I nodded, glad to get back to the matter in hand.
“Well, some other-dimensional twist,” I agreed. “It must have been that.”
“What is a fourth dimension?” asked Rose. I tried: “It’s, well, it’s a kind of extension in a direction we can’t perceive. Suppose you lived in a two-dimensional world, you’d only be aware of length and breadth. And suppose that in your flat country you found a square.”
“What of?”
“Nothing. Just a square.”
“Oh,” said Rose, with some reservation.
“Well, that square might really be the bottom surface of a cube only you wouldn’t be able to perceive the rest of the cube, of course. Now if somebody outside picked the cube up and put it down somewhere else it would, as far as you were concerned, vanish suddenly, and then reappear in a different place. You’d be quite at a loss to understand it.”
“Well, I certainly am. So what?” agreed Rose.
I wondered irritably why anybody marries them.
“Don’t you see?” I began patiently. But Sylvia cut in: “We don’t. What’s more, I don’t see that it would make any practical difference if we did.”
“Well, not practical, exactly,” I admitted.
“All right then.” She turned to Rose. “Haven’t you a kerosene stove, dear?” she enquired. Rose nodded, and they went out together.
I looked at Doug, and shook my head.