“Jasper?”
“The cat,” she said, “It was my fault.”
Jasper? He could remember no cat. He waited.
“Jasper was on the garage roof,” she said. “He was whining so pitifully… as if he were afraid to come down. You said he'd jump when he wanted, but you couldn't convince me. Then you went after him, and he jumped when you were reaching for him. He startled you and you—”
“Fell.”
“It was awful,” she said.
“Such a silly thing to risk my neck about,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “And all my fault.” She put one arm around him, leaned against him.
“Where's Jasper now?” he asked.
“Oh,” she said, “probably in the woods somewhere. He isn't much of a house cat. He likes the open air.”
The explanation was painfully weak. He had a feeling there was no cat, that he could destroy her story if he pressed the point. But why would she lie to him? What did she have to gain?
Another thought occurred to him. “Why were we here in the first place? Why were we staying with your Uncle Henry when he hates me?”
“Because,” Henry Galing said from the doorway, “I don't dislike my niece, no matter how foolish she's been in her private affairs.”
The old man was as impressive as he had been the day before. He was wearing a well tailored wool suit with double vest, soft blue shirt, and maroon tie. He was slim but strong, unstooped. With his white hair and dignified posture he might have been a senator or a diplomat. He couldn't possibly be the president of a firm dealing in paranormal research.
Could he? No.
Then Allison was lying.
But why?
“I enjoy Allison's company,” Galing added. He seemed to be goading Joel. He was overplaying it, pushing, exaggerating like a stage actor.
Joel flushed but was unable to respond to the taunt. He had not known Galing well enough or long enough to be able to find the old man's weak spot. He didn't remember anything salient from their previous relationship, and he knew any reply would sound like that of a man shooting in the dark and imagined adversaries.
Allison settled the clash with an insistence that defeated even her uncle. She refused to tolerate any petty squabbles, she told them. This whole feud, she said, was absurd. They were all adults, she said, capable of negotiating their differences. She had a nice little monologue which she delivered well.
Galing shrugged, turned away from the door. The carpet soaked up his footsteps.
“Now,” she said, turning to Joel, “it's time you went back to your room. You'll need a nap before supper.”
“I'm not sleepy,” he said.
“I don't care about that,” she said. “If you're not sleepy, then you'll take a pill to make you sleepy. You need all the rest you can get.”
She hustled him upstairs and tucked him in bed. She gave him a lingering kiss which erased any sleepiness he might have had, and she left the room, closing the door behind.
He was alone with the sound of the rain — and with a renewed certainty that something was not right about this place or these people.
But what?
I don't know!
He tried recalling how Allison had looked this morning, but not even that vision made him content again. When he had tossed and turned for half an hour, he finally got up and paced around the room. He stopped by the only window and sat in a high-back Louis XIV chair, and he watched the rain sheet across the New England countryside.
He picked through all the sources of doubt that littered his mind, scrutinized the strange incidents of the last two days, tried to work them together as if they were all shards of a single shattered vase. First: Galing's pathological dislike for him. Second: the rude silence of the servants. Third: the dust on Harttle's suit and in his hair. Fourth: the dust between Allison's breasts. Also: the dream about the pods and the faceless man, Allison's unbelievably good humor, the too ironic and mundane manner in which he'd reputedly sustained his head wound and—
He sat straight up in the chair and continued to stare at the rain beyond the window as if he were afraid to look away from it and, in changing the direction of his gaze, find some unspeakable terror standing close behind him. Reluctantly, cautiously, he examined his head with his fingertips, pressing, massaging, testing… Temples first. Nothing there but the throb of his blood. Forehead. Nothing. The crown of his head. No cut, no bump. The back of his skull. He was not wearing any bandages, and he could feel no scabs or tender bruises.
Now what?
He resisted an urge to call Allison. If he asked her why he had no visible wound after falling off the garage roof, she would have some half-acceptable, half-impossible answer. He preferred, for the moment anyway, to fret about it rather than let himself be mollified by her exceptional beauty. It was time he stopped floating through this scene like a theater customer willing to be temporarily deceived into believing in the reality of the events on the stage. It was time that he started thinking for himself.
While he puzzled over this newest development, he watched the rain, the swaying pine trees, and the low clouds that scudded by close above them. He also watched the sparse traffic on the nearby highway a quarter of a mile to the right, and almost an hour passed before he realized that something was distinctly odd about those distant cars. Twenty minutes after that, he saw what it was: the same vehicles kept passing in their same relative positions, with the same number of seconds between their appearances. Eight different spurts of traffic passed, passed again, re-passed… The entire cycle took only six minutes to repeat itself. Then it began again. He watched it happen three times before he got out of his chair and opened the window.
He reached out and touched the pine trees— which were only inches from the glass.
He touched the tiny cars that sped past.
He touched the highway.
He touched the clouds.
All of these things were back-projected images on a hologram screen which produced an illusion with a high degree of verisimilitude. If he shattered that screen, he knew he would find an automatic projector behind it.
He remembered Harttle making some comment about the Twenty-third Century. Could that really be the case?
But even if it were true, even if he were somehow in a future era, why all this deception?
Closing the window he sat down and tried to imagine why they would attempt to fool him with false windows and fake scenery. Apparently, they had even constructed a fake house… It was all a stage of sorts, a performance… Did that mean that Henry Galing's hatred was also an act? Was the dust a prop, put on Harttle's hair to confuse Joel, sprinkled between Allison's breasts to make the mystery of this place even more inexplicable? It seemed that way, yet… That meant they wanted him to sense the hollowness of it. They wanted him to pick up on these clues. They wanted him to have doubts and to wonder and to fear them. Was that it? Was Allison—
“Hey, you're cheating on your nap time, Mr. Amslow,” Allison said, pushing open the bedroom door with her hip. She was carrying his dinner tray.
“Watching the rain,” he said.
“Restful, isn't it?”
“No.”
“It isn't?”
“It puzzles me,” he said.
She looked quickly at the window, frowned, stared hard at him. Her nervousness was an act, an obvious performance. Why? “Puzzles you?” she asked.
“Never mind.”
“Do you feel all right?” she asked.
“Better than ever.”
“You're sure?”
He forced a smile. “Positive.”
“I've brought your supper.” She grinned again. Her blue eyes seemed as large as half dollars, brighter than ever, as if the beauty of her own smile surprised her. “Your favorite dessert,” she said.