I looked at him and he knew the answer.
“Another … dimension?” Ruth said in a tight voice. The voice of a mother who has just been told her child is lost forever.
Bill started pacing, punching his right fist into his palm.
“Damn, damn,” he muttered. “How do things like this happen?”
Then while we sat there numbly, half listening to him, half for the sound of our child, he spoke. Not to us really. To himself, to try and place the problem in the proper perspective.
“One dimensional space, a line,” he threw out the words quickly. “Two dimensional space, an infinite number of lines—an infinite number of one dimensional spaces. Three dimensional space an infinite number of planes—an infinite number of two dimensional spaces. Now the basic factor … the basic factor …”
He slammed his palm and looked up at the ceiling. Then he started again, more slowly now.
“Every point in each dimension a section of a line in the next higher dimension. All points in line are sections of the perpendicular lines that make the line a plane. All points in plane are sections of perpendicular lines that make the plane a solid.
“That means that in the third dimension …”
“Bill, for God’s sake!” Ruth burst out. “Can’t we do something? My baby is in … in there.”
Bill lost his train of thought. He shook his head.
“Ruth, I don’t …”
I got up then and was down on the floor again, climbing under the couch. I had to find it! I felt, I searched. I listened until the silence rang. Nothing.
Then I jerked up suddenly and hit my head as Mack barked loudly in my ear.
Bill rushed over and slid in beside me, his breath labored and quick.
“God’s sake,” he muttered, almost furiously. “Of all the damn places in the world …”
“If the … the entrance is here,” I muttered, “why did we hear her voice and breathing all over the room?”
“Well, if she moved beyond the effect of the third dimension and was entirely in the fourth—then her movement, for us, would seem to spread over all space. Actually she’d be in one spot in the fourth dimension but to us …”
He stopped.
Mack was whining. But more importantly Tina started in again. Right by our ears.
“He brought her back!” Bill said excitedly. “Man, what a mutt!”
He started twisting around, looking, touching, slapping at empty air.
“We’ve got to find it!” he said. “We’ve got to reach in and pull them out. God knows how long this dimension pocket will last.”
“What?” I heard Ruth gasp, then suddenly cry, “Tina, where are you? This is mommy.”
I was about to say something about it being no use but then Tina answered.
“Mommy, mommy! Where are you, mommy?”
Then the sound of Mack growling and Tina crying angrily.
“She’s trying to run around and find Ruth,” Bill said. “But Mack won’t let her. I don’t know how but he seems to know where the joining place is.”
“Where are they for God’s sake!” I said in a nervous fury.
And backed right into the damn thing.
To my dying day I’ll never really be able to describe what it was like. But here goes.
It was black, yes—to me. And yet there seemed to be a million lights. But as soon as I looked at one it disappeared and was gone. I saw them out of the sides of my eyes.
“Tina,” I said, “where are you? Answer me! Please!”
And heard my voice echoing a million times, the words echoing endlessly, never ceasing but moving off as if they were alive and traveling. And when I moved my hand the motion made a whistling sound that echoed and reechoed and moved away like a swarm of insects flowing into the night.
“Tina!”
The sound of the echoing hurt my ears.
“Chris, can you hear her?” I heard a voice. But was it a voice—or more like a thought?
Then something wet touched my hand and I jumped.
Mack.
I reached around furiously for them, every motion making whistling echoes in vibrating blackness until I felt as if I were surrounded by a multitude of birds flocking and beating insane wings around my head. The pressure pounded and heaved in my brain.
Then I felt Tina. I say I felt her but I think if she wasn’t my daughter and if I didn’t know somehow it was her, I would have thought I’d touched something else. Not a shape in the sense of third dimension shape. Let it go at that, I don’t want to go into it.
“Tina,” I whispered. “Tina, baby.”
“Daddy, I’m scared of dark,” she said in a thin voice and Mack whined.
Then I was scared of dark too, because a thought scared my mind.
How could I get us all out?
Then the other thought came—Chris, have you got them?
“I’ve got them!” I called.
And Bill grabbed my legs (which, I later learned, were still sticking out in the third dimension) and jerked me back to reality with an armful of daughter and dog and memories of something I’d prefer having no memories about.
We all came piling out under the couch and I hit my head on it and almost knocked myself out. Then I was being alternately hugged by Ruth, kissed by the dog and helped to my feet by Bill. Mack was leaping on all of us, yelping and drooling.
When I was in talking shape again I noticed that Bill had blocked off the bottom of the couch with two card tables.
“Just to be safe,” he said.
I nodded weakly. Ruth came in from the bedroom.
“Where’s Tina?” I asked automatically, uneasy left-overs of memory still cooking in my brain.
“She’s in our bed,” she said. “I don’t think we’ll mind for one night.”
I shook my head.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
Then I turned to Bill.
“Look,” I said. “What the hell happened?”
“Well,” he said, with a wry grin, “I told you. The third dimension is just a step below the fourth. In particular, every point in our space is a section of a perpendicular to every point in the fourth dimension. They wouldn’t be parallel—to us. But if enough of them in one area happened to be parallel in both dimensions—it might form a connecting corridor.”
“You mean … ?”
“That’s the crazy part,” he said. “Of all the places in the world—under the couch—there’s an area of points that are sections of parallel lines—parallel in both dimensions. They make a corridor into the next space.
“Or a hole,” I said.
Bill looked disgusted.
“Hell of a lot of good my reasoning did,” he said. “It took a dog to get her out.”
I groaned softly.
“You can have it,” I said.
“Who wants it?” he answered.
“What about the sound?”
“You’re asking me?” he said.
That’s about it. Oh, naturally, Bill told his friends at Cal Tech, and the apartment was overrun with research physicists for a month. But they didn’t find anything. They said the thing was gone. Some said worse things.
But, just the same, when we got back from my mother’s house where we stayed during the scientific siege—we moved the couch across the room and stuck the television where the couch was.
So some night we may look up and hear Arthur Godfrey chuckling from another dimension. Maybe he belongs there.
TRESPASS
IN THE HALL HE PUT DOWN HIS SUITCASE. “HOW have you been?” he asked.
“Fine” she said, with a smile.
She helped him off with his coat and hat and put them in the hall closet.
“This Indiana January sure feels cold after six months in South America.”
“I bet it does,” she said.
They walked into the living room, arms around each other.
“What have you been doing with yourself?” he ask
ed.
“Oh … not too much,” she said. “Thinking about you.”
He smiled and hugged her.
“That’s a lot,” he said.
Her smile flickered a moment, then returned. She held his hand tightly. And, suddenly, although he didn’t realize it at first, she was wordless. He’d gone over this moment in his mind so often that the sharpness of its anticlimax later struck him. She smiled and looked into his eyes while he spoke but the smile kept fading and her eyes kept evading his at the very moments he wanted their attention most.
Later in the kitchen she sat across from him as he drank the third cup of her hot, rich coffee.
“I won’t sleep tonight,” he said, grinning, “but I don’t want to.”
Her smile was only obliging. The coffee burned his throat and he noticed she wasn’t drinking any of the first cup she’d poured for herself.
“No coffee for you?” he asked.
“No, I … I don’t drink it anymore.”
“On a diet or something?”
He saw her throat move.
“Sort of,” she said.
“That’s silly,” he said. “Your figure is perfect.”
She seemed about to say something. Then she hesitated. He put down his cup.
“Ann, is …”
“Something wrong?” she finished.
He nodded.
She lowered her eyes. She bit her lower lip and clasped her hands before her on the table. Then her eyes closed and he got the feeling that she was shutting herself away from something hopelessly terrible.
“Honey, what is it?”
“I guess … the best way is to just … just up and tell you.”
“Well, of course, sweetheart,” he said anxiously. “What is it? Did something happen while I was gone?”
“Yes. And no.”
“I don’t understand.”
She was looking at him suddenly. The look was haunted and it made him shudder.
“I’m going to have a baby,” she said.
He was about to cry out—but that’s wonderful. He was about to jump up and embrace her and dance her around the room.
Then it hit him, driving the color from his face.
“What?” he said.
She didn’t answer because she knew he’d heard.
“How … long have you known this?” he asked, watching her eyes hold motionless on his face.
She drew in a shaking breath and he knew her answer would be the wrong one. It was.
“Three weeks,” she said.
He sat there looking blankly at her and stirring the coffee without realizing. Then he noticed and, slowly, he drew out the spoon and put it down beside the cup.
He tried to say the word but he couldn’t. It trembled in his vocal cords. He tensed himself.
“Who?” he asked her, his voice toneless and weak.
Her eyes were back on him, her face ashen. Her lips trembled when she told him.
She said, “No one.”
“What?”
“David,” she said carefully, “I …”
Then her shoulders slumped.
“No one, David. No one.”
It took a moment for the reaction to hit him. She saw it on his face before he turned it away from her. Then she stood up and looked down at him, her voice shaking.
“David, I swear to God I never had anything to do with any man while you were gone!”
He sank back numbly against the chair back. God, Oh God, what could he say? A man comes back from six months in the jungle and his wife tells him she’s pregnant and asks him to believe that …
His teeth set on edge. He felt as if he were involved in the beginning of some hideously smutty joke. He swallowed and looked down at his trembling hands. Ann, Ann! He wanted to pick up his cup and hurl it against the wall.
“David, you’ve got to bel—”
He stumbled up and out of the room. She was behind him quickly, clutching for his hand.
“David, you’ve got to believe me. I’ll go insane if you don’t. It’s the only strength that’s kept me going—the hope that you’d believe me. If you don’t …”
Her words broke off and they stared bleakly at each other. He felt her hand holding his. Cold.
“Ann, what do you want me to believe? That my child was conceived five months after I left you?”
“David, if I were guilty would I … be so open in telling you? You know how I feel about our marriage. About you.”
Her voice lowered.
“If I’d done what you think I’ve done, I wouldn’t tell you,” she said, “I’d kill myself.”
He kept looking helplessly at her, as if the answer lay in her anxious face. Finally he spoke.
“We’ll … go to Doctor Kleinman,” he said. “We’ll …”
Her hand dropped away from his.
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
His voice was tortured.
“You know what you’re asking of me, don’t you?” he said. “Don’t you, Ann? I’m a scientist. I can’t accept the incredible … just like that. Don’t you think I want to believe you? But …”
She stood before him a long time. Then she turned away a little and her voice was well controlled.
“All right,” she said quietly, “do what you think is best.”
Then she walked out of the room. He watched her go. Then he turned and walked slowly to the mantel. He stood looking at the kewpie doll sitting there with its legs hanging down over the edge. Coney Island read the words on her dress. They’d won it on their honeymoon trip eight years before.
His eyes fell shut suddenly.
Homecoming.
The word was a dead word now.
“Now that the welcomes are done for,” said Doctor Kleinman, “what are you doing here? Catch a bug in the jungle?”
Collier sat slumped in the chair. For a few seconds he glanced out the window. Then he turned back to Kleinman and told him quickly.
When he’d finished they looked at each other for a silent moment.
“It’s not possible, is it?” Collier said then.
Kleinman pressed his lips together. A grim smile flickered briefly on his face.
“What can I say?” he said. “No, it’s impossible? No, not as far as observation goes? I do not know, David. We assume that the sperm survives in the cervix canal no more than three to five days, maybe a little longer. But, even if they do …”
“They can’t fertilize?” Collier finished.
Kleinman didn’t nod or answer but Collier knew the answer. Knew it in simple words that were pronouncing doom on his life.
“There’s no hope then,” he said quietly.
Kleinman pressed his lips together again and ran a reflective finger along the edge of his letter opener.
“Unless,” he said, “it is to speak to Ann and make her understand you will not desert her. It is probably fear which makes her speak as she does.”
“ … will not desert her,” Collier echoed in an inaudible whisper and shook his head.
“I suggest nothing, mind you,” Kleinman went on. “Only that it is possible Ann is too hysterically frightened to tell you the truth.”
Collier rose, drained of vitality.
“All right,” he said indecisively, “I’ll speak to her again. Maybe we can … work it out.”
But when he told her what Kleinman had said she just sat in the chair and looked at him without expression on her face.
“And that’s it,” she said. “You’ve decided.”
He swallowed.
“I don’t think you know what you’re asking of me,” he said.
“Yes, I know what I’m asking,” she answered. “Just that you believe in me.”
He started to speak in rising anger, then checked himself.
“Ann,” he said, “just tell me. I’ll do my best to understand.”
Now she was losing temper too. He watched her hands tighten, then tremble on her lap.
&n
bsp; “I hate to spoil your noble scene,” she said, “but I’m not pregnant by another man. Do you understand me—believe me?”
She wasn’t hysterical now or frightened or on the defensive. He stood there looking down at her, feeling numb and confused. She never had lied to him before and yet … what was he to think?
She went back to her reading then and he kept standing and watching her. These are the facts, his mind insisted. He turned away from her. Did he really know Ann? Was it possible she was something entirely strange to him now? Those six months?
What had happened during those six months?
He stood making up the living-room couch with sheets and the old comforter they had used when they were first married. As he looked down at the thick quilting and the gaudy patterns now faded from innumerable washings, a grim smile touched his lips.
Homecoming.
He straightened up with a tired sigh and walked over to where the record player scratched gently. He lifted the arm up and put on the next record. He looked at the inside cover of the album as Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake started.
To my very own darling. Ann.
They hadn’t spoken all afternoon or evening. After supper she’d gotten a book from the case and gone upstairs. He’d sat in the living room trying to read The Fort Tribune, trying even harder to relax. Yet how could he? Could a man relax in his home with his wife who carried a child that wasn’t his? The newspaper had finally slipped from his lax fingers and fallen to the floor.
Now he sat staring endlessly at the rug, trying to figure it out.
Was it possible the doctors were wrong? Could the life cell exist and maintain its fertilizing capacity for, not days, but months? Maybe, he thought, he’d rather believe that than believe Ann could commit adultery. Theirs had always been an ideal relationship, as close an approximation of The Perfect Marriage as one could allow possible. Now this.
He ran a shaking hand through his hair. Breath shuddered through him and there was a tightness in his chest he could not relieve. A man comes home from six months in the …
Put it out of your mind!—he ordered himself, then forced himself to pick up the paper and read every word in it including comics and the astrology column. You will receive a big surprise today, the syndicated seer told him.