"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—"