It was shockingly disturbing to Durkin. Roused suddenly to consciousness in the middle of the kitchen floor he saw the great malicious child face staring in at him, and struggled frantically to rise, his eyes wild with terror.
There were other things Durkin did not understand, about energy, about time, about other worlds of life and purpose lying parallel to ours in undreamed of dimensions of space.
He did know that a single farmhouse in the path of a tornado could be uprooted and carried for miles through the sky. He knew that a fence could be leveled, a tree torn down and the rest of the countryside remain unscathed, even to the last sun-gilded haystack.
It was easy to understand how such things might be. But nothing had prepared Durkin's mind for the disturbing and frightening parallel which a scientist might have drawn from a hurricane's erratic course. He had no way of knowing that matter on the fringe of an atomic blast could be agitated abnormally, and pass into another dimension piecemeal.
He had no way of knowing that the desert at the edge of an atomic proving ground might decide suddenly to blossom like some multi-dimensional rose.
He had no way of knowing that size is a relative thing, varying with every matter dissolving energy shift in the physical universe, and that a house could be huge in one dimension, his own, and tiny in another, and might even indeed take on the aspect of a house built solely to delight the eye of childhood.
He had no way of knowing, for he had not heard the great eternal voices discussing it. The reddening of the rose meant nothing to him, the stars in their wheeling courses, the speculations of men like gods.
All time, all space is relative, Einstein had said. There is only one equation for energy, matter, light, fire, air—
And who knows how closely other dimensions may parallel ours?
Durkin had no way of knowing until the great dimpled hand reached in through the window and picked him up. Then, and only then, in one blinding flash of intuition, he guessed the truth.