CHAPTER II
She was clad in superbly tailored cream-colored slacks of a material that was glass-like in sheen, an equally well-fitted blouse of forest green hardly a shadow less than opaque, and sandals of a soft, flexible texture slightly raised at the heel. The wide cummerbund of silken flame that circled her slender waist was her only ornamentation.
Doug's pastel shirt felt like a feather; it lay open at the throat and clung comfortably about his chest and shoulders, then tapered leisurely to his waist. The trousers were of the same weight and of a darker hue somewhere between the blue of midnight and cobalt; the sandals were like hers.
He did not understand.
"You—I know you are not—"
Her face was not the same; her hair was the deeper red of mahogany, her eyes as large, but of green, not blue. Dorothy's mouth was wider, her cheeks not quite so shadowed. Yet now her face was drawn in the look of bewilderment that he felt on his own.
"Doug?"
"Dot! For God's sake!"
"Your voice is the same—but you don't look like—"
"Don't get scared, take it easy. It's me. You're different too—all but your voice. I've got to figure it out. Everything's all wrong. Wrong as hell—"
He found a chair of light metal that felt like foam rubber when he sat on it. Dorothy—and he knew somehow that it must be Dorothy—was looking around her with quick, nervous glances.
"Doug, the boys—where are the boys?"
"Terry! Mike!" He called again, stood up. "Oh, God—"
"They were just behind me, Doug, they couldn't have run—"
"No I think—I think they must've stayed with—with the Contraption. We were in the blur light. It wasn't. They must've been just beyond its effective range. That must be it. It just got us."
"Got us—you mean we're—"
"No, no of course not. Alive as we'll ever be. But where—"
"Wherever we are, I don't want to be here, Doug. I want to be back...."
"Easy, honey." He put his arm about her, drew her to him, and he could feel her taut muscles relax a little. "I'd like to say it's a dream, but two people don't dream the same dream at once. And I'm not the type to think up clothes like these all by myself.... Somehow, the Contraption did it. I was monkeying with a theorem I got interested in once in space-time mechanics. But it was all on paper—just something to fool with. It was impossible for the Contraption to really do anything." He sat down again. "Impossible."
"Like flying, my mother used to say. What do we do, Doug?"
"That's my gal...." He got up a second time, forced a smile. "Let's go upstairs and see if anybody's around."
There were stairs. Wide and gently curving and constructed of a light, lusterless steel.
Architecturally, the house was little different from many of the expensive-looking California-type affairs he had seen in the women's magazines that Dot bought every so often. Yet there was something about its interior, a certain grace combined with a subtle simplicity that made it a work of art as a good painting or sculptural piece is art. There was rebellion in it—a gentle rebellion against the eye-aching extremes of artificial modernity, yet at the same time a freedom of execution that made the confines of formalized pattern seem childish.
The pastel carpeting was of a deep, soft substance that Doug recognized as a masterpiece in plastic; the furniture was simple, casual, but not stark and starved-looking. The rooms themselves were ample and were as bright in the far corners as in those nearest the wide, sashless windows. They were not separated by partitions, but divided instead by a fragile-appearing tracery of lattice-work in which a decorative motif was woven with an almost fairy-like geometrical magic. The air was cool and fresh.
"Now I know I'm dreaming," Dot said in a low voice. They walked quietly, from room to room, listening, half-waiting. "I expect any minute to find three bowls of porridge somewhere," Dot said.
"I wonder ..." Doug said. "What's here is—I think its ours. I think we live here."
"Doug look—through the window!"
He saw a broad lawn of carefully trimmed yet almost ankle-deep grass, inset at the edges with a running garden. And the street beyond was wide, and there were other houses at its far side that looked much as he knew this one must appear. Roofs of tinted tiling, walls of delicately-toned glass brick, wide, gently-curving windows.
These Doug saw in the first instant, and then there were the soundless vehicles in the street.
"Like smooth, transparent walnut shells," Doug said. "Cooling louvres in the back—engines in the rear. They know their engineering, too. Wonder if the body is some sort of transparent steel—"
"The people in them, Doug! Did you see them? Just like—"
"Like us, of course. Still expecting the three bears?" He laughed a little. They were like children in some new fairyland, half afraid, half unbelieving. "Wherever we are, it's populated by humans—if it weren't, we may not have come out this way...."
"Doug, do you know?" She turned, faced him, and there was still fear deep in her eyes. Not the stark fear of terror, but the bewildered, uncomprehending fear of disbelief.
"No I don't. But these clothes aren't ours—even our faces, our bodies aren't. Just our actual selves came through unaltered. Our egos—personalities—whatever you want to call it that gives a human being his identity. The rest we've—moved into, I think. Anyway, it's a theory to go on. I wonder what our names are—"
"Doug, don't."
"I wish I were trying to be funny. But don't you see?"
"Whatever happened to us—couldn't that have changed us? Our—our atomic structure, couldn't that have been changed or altered somehow? It's all so crazy—"
"It's easy to see, m'girl, that you don't spend your time at a bridge table all those hours I'm slaving away on Madhouse Hill! But if that had happened ... I don't know. It's the clothes. Too completely different—not just out of shape, or an altered shape, but of a fundamentally different shape. We got—we got transplanted."
"But then what of—"
"Thinking the same thing. Suppose the Contraption, whatever it's done—suppose it works two ways? A swap, a trade?"
"But Doug that's—"
He smiled. Dot was suddenly silent with the knowledge that whether she liked it or not, she could no longer refuse to accept the facts as they were, could no longer cross off their implications for want of bolder imagination.
"Are we—is it the ... the future?"
"Maybe. You could even ask 'is this Earth?' and I couldn't tell you. I wonder what they think where they are ... I wonder if they know."
"Doug, would they—do anything? To Terry and Mike, I mean?"
"I sure hope not—and I don't think so. The boys will be all right—they know their way around back home—whomever it is we've replaced is in the same boat we are. They'd think more than twice before rashly committing themselves to trouble. They're probably trying to communicate with the kids—if the kids stuck around that long. I'm wondering more about the Contraption. If they start fooling with it...."
"Then we'd go back?"
"Maybe. Maybe not. I think though that they'd leave it alone, on the theory that whoever invented it knows its use, knows how to handle it safely. They'd be wrong, but I think that's how they'd figure it. I don't think any one'll dare touch it, simply out of sheer fear of what might happen next."
"I'm scared, Doug. Awful scared."
"I guess that makes two of us. Somehow we've got to dig up the parts for another Contraption. And then—" He let the sentence drift into silence.
"And then, Doug?"
"Well maybe with the exact same set-up—same everything, I could do it again. I don't know. But if they so much as try to turn the other one off, try to change anything, we'll lose this point of reference in space-time for good."
Slowly, Dot nodded understanding. "The parts," she said then. "Can we find the things you need?"
"I'll give it the old college try, sweetheart."
"How long—"
He shrugged. "A few days maybe. Depends."
They were silent for a moment, looking through the wide window, watching the beautiful vehicles as they slid silently past, re-examining what they could see of the colorful world beyond the rolling lawn. Doug felt an aching in his jaws, a tightness through his lips. God, it was so silly—standing there, trying to explain, when he didn't even know what had happened, where they were or—or when they were. He'd been after travelling light to bring back pictures of the past—every home should have one. Nuts. The future—no, it wasn't supposed to be that way. Unless you accepted past, present and future as the components of one great unit, and progression from one to the other nothing more than illusion, like the illusion of movement given by the hundreds of still frames on a film-strip. If time was like such a film-strip, and you found a way to jump forward along it, bypassing the frames that were in immediate succession—
But then what about the possibility-probability pattern theory, in which time was supposed to exist as an infinite number of possibility and probability paths, intersecting, paralleling, diverging, splitting with each new decision, each new action—Lord it was getting insane.
"Hell I'm all mixed up," he said. Dot put her arm through his. He nodded toward what was beyond the window. "We might as well have a look for ourselves. If anybody says anything to us we'll suddenly see something interesting in the other direction. Game?"
"I—I guess so...."
"Damn, I wish I had a cigarette!"
They went to the front door, swung it open.
The streets were long and incredibly wide and straight, bearing their traffic smoothly and with hardly a hint of the inevitable jamming that was so familiar. The sidewalks were immaculately kept, yet surprisingly free of pedestrians; a few passed, bowed slightly and smiled, continued on.
"Polite bunch," Doug murmured. "They bow like good Republicans...."
"And all smiling—as if they didn't have a worry in the world."
"Democrats, then!" They laughed, and for a moment the anxiety was gone, and the street could have been any fine street in the world from which they'd come.
"We'd better try to find the center of town," Doug said then. "We've got to do a lot more than ogle if we want to locate the stuff we're after. Sshh...."
This time two women passed. They smiled, bowed, went on.
"Maybe you're the mayor of this town or something—at least an alderman."
"They wouldn't smile, honey! Anyway, there are three things we'd better figure. How to get money, how to get food, how to get the equipment. Any ideas?"
"We should've searched the house for a wallet or something. Or maybe these people don't believe in money—maybe they use a different system altogether."
"It's possible, of course, and—good night!" Doug was staring suddenly upward. There had been a low rumbling sound which within seconds had ascended the decibel scale to a throbbing roar. A great, tapering thing of silvery metal with no hint of wing-surfaces was bolting skyward, and Doug knew somehow that the sky was not its limit. The roar and scream of suddenly-split atmosphere subsided, and in moments, the vertically-climbing craft was out of sight. "They've done it here, Dot! I'd bet the bottom dollar I don't have that we've seen our first space-liner!"
"Could I have been right, Doug? The future, I mean?"
"I don't know, Dot.... I don't know."
There were towering buildings less than a half-mile from them of a simplicity and beauty that left no time for talk. The city was suddenly before them—a sparkling thing, unmarred by eye-stumbling bits and pieces—a flawless, symmetrical sweep toward the heavens that momentarily stupefied credulity. Traffic ramps soared from street-level in gently-curving ribbons above spacious quiet parks; sound was muffled to near-inaudibility, and the illusion of a great fairy kingdom was unmarred by the confusion of advertising posters, marquees, store front lettering, or the raucous stampede of elbowing mobs....
"I wonder how they illuminate at night," Doug was saying. "I wonder what they—my God, Dot, look up—all over. Where is it?"
Far above, the sky seemed gradually to darken into an ever-deepening shadow of blackness. But the sun—She couldn't find the sun!
"It's a different planet, Doug!"
"And the city—it is lit! There must be a sun but it's down—it's night, and they've found a way to illuminate an entire city as though daylight were perpetual!"
And that was when it caught their eye. It was a small store, and she could see neatly-tiered rows of groceries inside—fruits and vegetables were easily recognizable even the street's width from them. But it was the little rack outside the store—the one that held the newspapers.
Almost at a run they crossed the street, and Doug fought down the urge to reach out, grab one of the editions.
The front pages of the newspapers were easily readable. Because they were printed in excellent English.
The date beneath the masthead of one was April 17, 1958. The paper was the Washington Post.