That got me. "I've got to call Harry," I chattered. "They don't like him to be called at work, but I've got to call him."
"You'll just worry him," said Mabel. "Call the police."
"No!" I said. I felt like crying myself. Baby was so happy. Maybe the baby monster was happy, too. The police would do something awful to it. But what about my maternal instinct? Something told me I simply had to save my baby! "I've got to call Harry," I insisted, and I went to the 'phone.
The dial tone sounded peculiar, I remember, but I called Harry's place of employment. A brisk female voice cut in:
"What number are you calling, please?"
"CHarlemont 7-890," I whispered.
"Sorry. You must have the wrong dimension." There was a click as she disconnected. I sat like a statue. A haggard statue with a greasy housedress on. A statue that hadn't plucked its eyebrows in two months. I had a lot of nerve. I was a bad mother, and a poor mistress. And I had a swell husband, who could lie like a trooper. I wasn't any good, I was ugly, I was greasy. I cried. "Mabel," I choked.
It took her a while to get it out of me, and then her blue eyes flashed. "I told you!" she cried. "From another dimension!" In her broken-down green wedgies she clattered toward the door. I heard her fighting it. She couldn't get it open. Then she tried a window. It opened, but she couldn't stick her hand out. She flung herself around.
"Stella," she said, with a quiver of that good-looking short upper lip of hers, "we're trapped in. We're in the middle of some kind of fantasy. It's a crazy world we're living in, Stella. A-bombs and H-bombs and flying saucers and space-flight—it's all the fiction stuff coming true. Now we're lost in some other dimension, and I have to get dinner in the oven."
"Please," I mumbled. "Let's don't get desperate about the wrong things." I tried all the doors and windows in the house, and it was true. We were trapped in. There was some barrier surrounding the house. There wasn't anything to see outside except a kind of grey steam.