I wanted to join them. The most desperate longing roared up in me from the bottom of my soul to be there on that beach, after breakfast, with those people in the sunny morning—and I could hardly stand it. I looked up at the man behind the counter and managed to smile. “This is—very interesting.”
“Yes.” He smiled back, then shook his head in amusement. “We’ve had customers so interested, so carried away, that they didn’t want to talk about anything else.” He laughed. “They actually wanted to know rates, details, everything.”
I nodded to show I understood and agreed with them. “And I suppose you’ve worked out a whole story to go with this?” I glanced at the folder in my hands.
“Oh, yes. What would you like to know?”
“These people,” I said softly, and touched the picture of the group on the beach. “What do they do?”
“They work; everyone does.” He took a pipe from his pocket. “They simply live their lives doing what they like. Some study. We have, according to our little story,” he added, and smiled, “a very fine library. Some of our people farm, some write, some make things with their hands. Most of them raise children, and—well, they work at whatever it is they really want to do.”
“And if there isn’t anything they really want to do?”
He shook his head. “There is always something, for everyone, that he really wants to do. It’s just that here there is so rarely time to find out what it is.” He brought out a tobacco pouch and, leaning on the counter, began filling his pipe, his eyes level with mine, looking at me gravely. “Life is simple there, and it’s serene. In some ways, the good ways, it’s like the early pioneering communities here in your country, but without the drudgery that killed people young. There is electricity. There are washing machines, vacuum cleaners, plumbing, modern bathrooms, and modern medicine, very modern. But there are no radios, television, telephones, or automobiles. Distances are small, and people live and work in small communities. They raise or make most of the things they use. Every man builds his own house, with all the help he needs from his neighbors. Their recreation is their own, and there is a great deal of it, but there is no recreation for sale, nothing you buy a ticket to. They have dances, card parties, weddings, christenings, birthday celebrations, harvest parties. There are swimming and sports of all kinds. There is conversation, a lot of it, plenty of joking and laughter. There is a great deal of visiting and sharing of meals, and each day as well filled and well spent. There are no pressures, economic or social, and life holds few threats. Every man, woman, and child is a happy person.” After a moment he smiled. “I’m repeating the text, of course, in our little joke”—he nodded at the folder.
“Of course,” I murmured, and looked down at the folder again, turning a page. “Homes in The Colony,” said a caption, and there, true and real, were a dozen or so pictures of the interiors of what must have been the cabins I’d seen in the first photograph, or others like them. There were living rooms, kitchens, dens, patios. Many of the homes seemed to be furnished in a kind of Early American style, except that it looked—authentic, as though those rocking chairs, cupboards, tables, and hooked rugs had been made by the people themselves, taking their time and making them well and beautifully. Others of the interiors seemed modern in style; one showed a definite Oriental influence.
All of them had, plainly and unmistakably, one quality in common: You knew as you looked at them that these rooms were home, really home, to the people who lived in them. On the wall of one living room, over the stone fireplace, hung a hand-stiched motto; it said, “There Is No Place Like Home,” but the words didn’t seem quaint or amusing, they didn’t seem old-fashioned, resurrected or copied from a past that was gone. They seemed real; they belonged; those words were nothing more or less than a simple expression of true feeling and fact.
“Who are you?” I lifted my head from the folder to stare into the man’s eyes.
He lighted his pipe, taking his time, sucking the match flame down into the bowl, eyes glancing up at me. “It’s in the text,” he said then, “on the back page. We—that is to say, the people of Verna, the original inhabitants—are people like yourself. Verna is a planet of air, sun, land, and sea, like this one. And of the same approximate temperature. So life evolved there, of course, just about as it has here, though rather earlier; and we are people like you. There are trivial anatomical differences, but nothing important. We read and enjoy your James Thurber, John Clayton, Rabelais, Allen Marple, Hemingway, Grimm, Mark Twain, Alan Nelson. We like your chocolate, which we didn’t have, and a great deal of your music. And you’d like many of the things we have. Our thoughts, though, and the great aims and directions of our history and development have been—drastically different from yours.” He smiled and blew out a puff of smoke. “Amusing fantasy, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” I knew I sounded abrupt, and I hadn’t stopped to smile; the words were spilling out. “And where is Verna?”
“Light years away, by your measurements.”
I was suddenly irritated, I didn’t know why. “A little hard to get to, then, wouldn’t it be?”
For a moment he looked at me; then he turned to the window beside him. “Come here,” he said, and I walked around the counter to stand beside him. “There, off to the left”—he put a hand on my shoulder and pointed with his pipe stem—”are two apartment buildings, built back to back. The entrance to one is on Fifth Avenue, the entrance to the other on Sixth. See them? In the middle of the block; you can just see their roofs.”
I nodded, and he said, “A man and his wife live on the fourteenth floor of one of those buildings. A wall of their living room is the back wall of the building. They have friends on the fourteenth floor of the other building, and a wall of their living room is the back wall of their building. These two couples live, in other words, within two feet of one another, since the back building walls actually touch.”
The big man smiled. “But when the Robinsons want to visit the Bradens, they walk from their living room to the front door. Then they walk down a long hall to the elevators. They ride fourteen floors down; then, in the street, they must walk around to the next block. And the city blocks there are long; in bad weather they have sometimes actually taken a cab. They walk into the other building, then go on through the lobby, ride up fourteen floors, walk down a hall, ring a bell, and are finally admitted into their friends’ living room—only two feet from their own.”
The big man turned back to the counter, and I walked around it to the other side again. “All I can tell you,” he said then, “is that the way the Robinsons travel is like space travel, the actual physical crossing of those enormous distances.” He shrugged. “But if they could only step through those two feet of wall without harming themselves or the wall—well, that is how we ‘travel.’ We don’t cross space, we avoid it.” He smiled. “Draw a breath here—and exhale it on Verna.”
I said softly, “And that’s how they arrived, isn’t it? The people in the picture. You took them there.” He nodded, and I said, “Why?”
He shrugged. “If you saw a neighbor’s house on fire, would you rescue his family if you could? As many as you could, at least?”
“Yes.”
“Well—so would we.”
“You think it’s that bad, then? With us?”
“How does it look to you?”
I thought about the headlines in my morning paper, that morning and every morning. “Not so good.”
He just nodded and said, “We can’t take you all, can’t even take very many. So we’ve been selecting a few.”