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?"