Now, Mr. Gretch, whatever you are doing in your laboratory is your own business. You could be making atomic disintegrators, for all Jack told us. But he does not like or approve of it and he told us about your running battle with him to keep him working on your project instead of his own.
Jack tried to explain his ideas for harnessing time and what he called "the re-integration principle." It was all so much whiskaboom to us, so to speak, but he claimed it was for the good of mankind, which was fine with us.
But he said you would not let him work it out because there was less money in it than in your project, and this is why he had to get away and work and worry himself into a collapse.
When he got well, Mrs. Burroughs told him, "From now on, you're going to have three meals a day and eight hours sleep, and in between you can play on your whiskaboom all you please."
The whiskabooming became as familiar to us as our own voices.
Last Sunday, Mrs. Burroughs and I came home from church, about noon. She went inside through the front door to fix dinner. I walked around the house to look at the garden. And the moment I walked past the front of the house, I got the shock of my life.
The house disappeared!
I was too surprised to stop walking, and a step later I was standing at the back of the house, and it was all there. I took a step back and the whole house vanished again. One more step and I was at the front.
It looked like a real house in front and in back, but there wasn't any in-between. It was like one of those false-front saloons on a movie lot, but thinner.