I knew perfectly well that I was sitting at a desk the top of which was glass, and not grass; that the floor under my feet was ordinary plastiplate and not a sheet of rippling water; that the objects on my desk were not a pink flowerpot with a Saturnian lizard sticking in it, but an antique twentieth century inkwell and pen—and that the “God Bless Our Home” sampler was a radiotype message on ordinary radiotype paper. I could verify any of those things by my sense of touch, which the Blakeslee Field doesn’t affect.
You can close your eyes, of course, but you don’t—because even at the height of the effect, your eyesight gives you the relative size and distance of things and if you stay in familiar territory your memory and your reason tell you what they are.
So when the door opened and a two-headed monster walked in, I knew it was Reagan. Reagan isn’t a two-headed monster, but I could recognize the sound of his walk.
I said, “Yes, Reagan?”
The two-headed monster said, “Chief, the machine shop is wobbling. We may have to break the rule not to do any work in midperiods.”
“Birds?” I asked.
Both of his heads nodded. “The underground part of those walls must he like sieves from the birds flying through ’em, and we’d better pour concrete quick. Do you think those new alloy reinforcing bars the Ark ’ll bring will stop them?”
“Sure,” I lied. Forgetting the field, I turned to look at the clock, but there was a funeral wreath of white lilies on the wall where the clock should have been. You can’t tell time from a funeral wreath. I said, “I was hoping we wouldn’t have to reinforce those walls till we had the bars to sink in them. The Ark ’ s about due; they’re probably hovering outside right now waiting for us to come out of the field. You think we could wait till—”
There was a crash.
“Yeah, we can wait,” Reagan said. “There went the machine shop, so there’s no hurry at all.”