—And He Built a Crooked House

“It’s all right, Mrs. Bailey. This house is perfectly safe. You know you can expect settling tremors after a shock like last night.” He had just settled his features into an expression of reassurance when the second shock came. This one was no mild shimmy but the real seasick roll.

In every Californian, native born or grafted, there is a deep-rooted primitive reflex. An earthquake fills him with soul-shaking claustrophobia which impels him blindly to get outdoors! Model Boy Scouts will push aged grandmothers aside to obey it. It is a matter of record that Teal and Bailey landed on top of Mrs. Bailey. Therefore, she must have jumped through the window first. The order of precedence cannot be attributed to chivalry; it must be assumed that she was in readier position to spring.

They pulled themselves together, collected their wits a little, and rubbed sand from their eyes. Their first sensations were relief at feeling the solid sand of the desert land under them. Then Bailey noticed something that brought them to their feet and checked Mrs. Bailey from bursting into the speech that she had ready.

“Where’s the house?”

It was gone. There was no sign of it at all. They stood in the center of flat desolation, the landscape they had seen from the window. But, aside from the tortured, twisted trees there was nothing to be seen but the yellow sky and the luminary overhead, whose furnacelike glare was already almost insufferable.

Bailey looked slowly around, then turned to the architect.

“Well, Teal?” His voice was ominous.

Teal shrugged helplessly. “I wish I knew. I wish I could even be sure that we were on Earth.”

“Well, we can’t stand here. It’s sure death if we do. Which direction?”

“Any, I guess. Let’s keep a bearing on the sun.”

· · · · ·

They had trudged on for an undetermined distance when Mrs. Bailey demanded a rest. They stopped. Teal said in an aside to Bailey, “Any ideas?”

“No … no, none. Say, do you hear anything?”

Teal listened. “Maybe—unless it’s my imagination.”

“Sounds like an automobile. Say, it is an automobile!”

They came to the highway in less than another hundred yards. The automobile, when it arrived, proved to be an elderly, puffing light truck, driven by a rancher. He crunched to a stop at their hail. “We’re stranded. Can you help us out?”

“Sure. Pile in.”

“Where are you headed?”

“Los Angeles.”

“Los Angeles? Say, where is this place?”

“Well, you’re right in the middle of the Joshua Tree National Forest.”

· · · · ·

The return was as dispiriting as the Retreat from Moscow. Mr. and Mrs. Bailey sat up in front with the driver while Teal bumped along in the body of the truck, and tried to protect his head from the sun. Bailey subsidized the friendly rancher to detour to the tesseract house, not because they wanted to see it again, but in order to pick up their car.

At last the rancher turned the corner that brought them back to where they had started. But the house was no longer there.

There was not even the ground floor room. It had vanished. The Baileys, interested in spite of themselves, poked around the foundations with Teal.

“Got any answers for this one, Teal?” asked Bailey.

“It must be that on that last shock it simply fell through into another section of space. I can see now that I should have anchored it at the foundations.”

“That’s not all you should have done.”

“Well, I don’t see that there is anything to get down-hearted about. The house was insured, and we’ve learned an amazing lot. There are possibilities, man, possibilities! Why, right now I’ve got a great new revolutionary idea for a house—”

Teal ducked in time. He was always a man of action.