The Infinite Moment (21 page)

"I did hear there was a girl," he said. "I even made enquiries, but they told me she had married soon afterwards. I thought sheBut why didn't she come to me? I would have looked after her."

"She couldn't know that. She was fond of Reggie Gale. He was in love with her, and willing to give the baby his name," Cohn said.

After a glance towards the desk, he got up and walked over to the window. He stood there for several minutes with his back to the room until he heard a movement behind him. Dr. Harshom had got up and was crossing to the cupboard.

"I could do with a drink," he said. "The toast will be the restoration of order, and the rout of the random element."

"I'll support that," Cohn told him, "but I'd like to couple it with the confirmation of your contention, Doctorafter all, you are right at last, you know; Ottihie Harshom does not existnot any more. And then, I think, it will be high time you were introduced to your grand daughter, Mrs Cohn Trafford."

A person awaking should, in my opinion, glide smoothly back into coordination, otherwise he feels that there is some part of him that hasn't got back in time.

And if there's another thing I dislike, it's the sharp drive of a woman's elbowwell, come to that, anybody's: elbowamong my ribs, more particularly if that woman happens to be my wife. After all, it's part of a wife's job to learn not to do these things.

In the circumstances my response came clear out of the subconscious.

"Well, really I..." said Sylvia. "I know I'm only your wife, George, butwell, really!"

My time lag caught up.

"Sorry," I said. "But, golly, what's the matter anyway?"

"I don't know," Sylvia admitted. "But I've got a feeling there's something wrong."

"Oh gosh!" I said, and switched on the light.

Naturally, everything looked just as usual.

"Intuition?" I suggested.

"You needn't sneer at me, George. What about that Sunday I knew we were going to have an accident with the car?"

"Which Sunday? There were so many," I said.

"Why, the Sunday we did have one, of course. I felt just the same way about it as I do now."

I sat up in bed. The clock had been a wedding present. After a while I calculated that it was trying to indicate 3:15 A.M. I listened. I couldn't hear anything anyplace. Still, you know what intuition is.

"I suppose I'd better have a look. Where did you think it was?" I asked her.

"What was?" she said.

"Whatever you heard."

"But I didn't hear anything. I told you it's just a. feeling that something's wrong."

I relaxed and leaned back on the pillow.

"Would I do something about that?" I asked.

"What can you do? It's just a feeling."

"Then why on earth?" I began.

At that moment the light went out.

"There!" said Sylvia triumphantly. "I knew!"

"Good. Well, that's over then," I said and pulled up the bedclothes.

"Aren't you going to look at it?" she enquired.

"A blown fuse can keep till morningeven if you'd not left my torch someplace," I told her.

"But it may not be a fuse," she said.

"To hell with it," I muttered, getting comfortable again.

"I should have thought you would want to know," she suggested.

"I don't. I just want to sleep," I said.

When I woke again the morning was nice and bright. The sun was shining in and painting a part of the opposite wall with pale gold. I stretched a bit in warm comfort, and reached for a cigarette. As I lit it, I remembered the light. I pushed the switch on and off a few times without result. That cute electric clock still seemed to be saying 3:15. My watch said seven o'clock. I lay back, enjoying the first few puffs at the cigarette.

Sylvia slept on. I allowed the temptation to drive my elbow into her ribs for a change to pass. She manages such a decorative and confiding appearance when she sleeps. Just then she said: "Ughhhh," and pulled the sheets over her ear. She is not one who greets the dawn with a glad cry.

At about the same moment it occurred to me that there was something wrong with the daya sort of publicholiday quality. As a rule one can hear a sort of background buzz of traffic from the main road, an occasional car in our own road, milk bottles clinking, and can feel a general sense of stir. This morning all that was missingeven the bird sounds. A disturbing air of peace lay over the neighbourhood. The more I listened, the more unnatural it seemed. At length it drove me to get up and go to the window. Behind me Sylvia murmured and pulled the bedclothes more closely round her.

I think I must have stood looking out the window for several minutes before I turned back. Then I said: "Sylvia. Something funny's been happening."

"Ugh," she remarked.

Dropping the understatement, I said: "Come arid look. If you don't see it, too, I must be going crazy."

The tone of my voice got through to her. She opened her eyes.

"What is it?"

"Come and look," I repeated.

She yawned, pushed back the covers and manoeuvred off the bed. She thrust her feet into a pair of mules decorated for some incomprehensible feminine reason with feathers, and pulled on a wrap as she staggered across.

"What?" she began. Then she suddenly dried up, and stood staring.

We live in a suburb. It's a nice suburb, nice sort of people. The houses are pretty much alike, all with their garages and gardens. Not large housesnot large gardens, either, though quite large enough for the husbands to look after. We stand on a slope, and from the bedroom window we look down upon the backs of a similar row of houses which front upon a road parallel with ours and have gardens running up toward us. The end of our garden is separated from the end of the one opposite by a high wooden fence which is continuous along all the properties. Across the roofs of the opposite houses we can see the huddle of more industrial parts beyond. On fine days we can see a considerable distance further, to low hills where houses similar to our own stand out among trees and gardens; but more often the two residential areas are hidden from one another by the haze thickened with smoke that rises between them. It is not, perhaps, an inspiring view across the tall chimneys, municipal towers, and the beetle backs of several movie houses, but it does give us a sense of space and a big stretch of sky. The trouble with it this morning was that it gave us little else.

Just beneath us lay our lawn and flower beds. Then the hedge which cuts off the vegetable garden. There the rows of beans, peas, and cabbages should have run down past a pear tree on the left and a plum tree on the right until they reached the raspberry and currant department. But they didn't. They beganbut about halfway down their edge there was a brown, sandylooking soil in which a coarse grass grew in large or small patches and lonely tufts. It was a dune land, save that it lacked any noticeable hillocks, and it stretched on and on, undulating gently into the distance until it met brownishgreen hills far away.

We stared out at it in silence for some little time. Then Sylvia said in a choked voice: "Is this some kind of joke, George?"

Sylvia has two reactions to any sort of unpleasant surprise. One is that if it utterly fails to amuse her it must be some form of joke. And the other, that whatever it concerns, I must somehow be responsible for it. I do not pretend to know what she thought I might have been doing in order to spirit away a whole landscape, but I was able to reply with truth that no one could be more surprised than I.

Whereupon she gave a kind of gulp, and ran out of the room.

I stood where I was, still looking out. On the left was the Saggitts" garden, running down alongside our own, and cut off in the same peculiar way. Beyond that was the Drurys'at least there was part of theirs, for not only was it cut off on a line with ours, but there was no more than a sixfootwide strip of it to be seen; beyond was the sandy soil.

Sylvia came back looking frightened.

"It's the same in front," she said. "The garden's there, and half the width of the sidewalkthen there's just that stuff. And half the garage has gone."

I raised the window sash and looked out to the right. From that angle I could look down on the garage roof. It looked usual enough. Then I saw what she meant.

"It's half the Gunners" garage that's gone," I said.

And it had. The roof of their garage climbed to within an inch or two of the ridge, and then stopped as if it had been sliced clean off. Where the rest of it should have beenand where the Gunners" house should have beentussocks of grass waved in a light wind.

"Thank goodness," said Sylvia. Not uncharitably, you understand, but after all, we had only our new convertible a couple of weeks.

"We must be dreaming," I said, a little shakily.

"We can't both be," she objected.

That, of course, was debatable, but this was scarcely the moment, so I said: "Well, am I dreaming you, or are you dreaming me?"

I let her have it: I ought to have known better than to ask the question in the first place.

I hurried on some clothes and went outside to see what 1 could make of it. The front was just as Sylvia had said. I walked down the path, opened the gate, and stepped out onto the halfwidth of sidewalk. The edge where the sandy soil began looked just as if it had been trimmed off with a sharp knife. I bent over to look at it more closelyand caught myself a sharp crack on the head.

It was so unexpected that I recoiled slightly. Then I put up a hand to see what had done it. My fingers met a smooth surface which was neither hot nor cold and seemed as solid as rock. I raised the other hand, and felt across several square feet of it. It scared me a bit because, though it was unfamiliar, it was only a step on from the quite familiar. One just had to imagine plate glass with a perfectly nonreflecting surface...

I could not touch the sandy soil and the grass beyond. The transparent wall rose from the very line where nor 142 mal things ended. As I stood there looking through it in bewilderment I noticed an odd thing: the grass beyond was waving, yet I could not feel even a stir in the air around me.

After a moment's thought I went to the garage. There I chose my heaviest hammer and found an old can half full of sludgy kerosene. Outside again, I threw the contents of the can at the transparent wall. It was queer the way the stuff splattered suddenly in midair and began to trickle down. Then I took a grip on the hammer, and hit hard. The thing rebounded, and the shaft stung my fingers so that I dropped it. There was no other perceptible result.

When I investigated at the back of the house I found that the same invisible barrier terminated what remained of the gardenand with increased bizarre effect, for there it appeared to bisect the plum tree so that, seen from as nearly to the side as I could get, the whole trunk and spread was flatbacked like a piece of a stage scenery. I wished I could crane around to see what the devil it looked like from the back, but the wall itself prevented that.

In a rough survey I estimated that the area of normalcy enclosed by these walls would be an approximate square of seventy yards. Beyond this in all directions stretched the featureless dunesfeatureless, that is, save for the hills in the distance which occupied just the same position that hills usually occupied in our view. Not much wiser, I went back to the house.

Sylvia, who feels able to face most things better on a cup of coffee, was cursing the cooker for not heating.

"Oh, there you are. Can't you fix that fuse?" she demanded.

"Well" I began doubtfully. Then I went and looked in the box. As I had expected, the fuses were okay. I said so.

"Nonsense," said Sylvia. "Nothing goes on."

"On the contrary, quite a lot goes on," I said. "Though just what. Anyway, the point is, where would the power come from?"

"How would I?" she began. Then she got the idea. She opened her mouth again, failed to find anything to say, and stood looking at me.

I shook my head. "I'll go and see the Saggitts," I said.

It was not that I expected either Saggitt to be much help, but one began to have a feeling that some company 143 would be acceptable. Still, I get along all right with Doug Saggitt althought he's quite a bit older than I amfortyseven, fortyeight, maybe. He's getting thin some places and grey in others, and though he's not fossilising yet, it's hard to see why Rose married him, she being only twentyone, and quite a whistlerouser. It seems to me that some girls, maybe when they're halfawake one morning, get a kind of nudge from the lifeforce. "Hey?" says the lifeforce. "Time you were getting married."

"What, me?" says the girl. "Sure, youand someone else, of course," says the lifeforce. "But I mean to have a lot of fun first," says the girl. "Maybebut then maybe not." says the If ominously. "It could be you'll come out in spots tomorrow, or lose a leg in a car accident, or And after it's gone on this way for a bit it has the girl so paralytic with fright she flies off wildly, and marries a Doug Saggitt. After a bit she finds that she doesn't have spots and does have two legs, that she doesn't have a lot of fun and does have Doug Saggitt, and she begins to wonder whether Doug Saggitt was just what the lifeforce had in mind, after all. Mind you, that's only a theory, but it does save me having to say "I can't think why she married him," the way the rest of the people in the road do every time they see her.

Anyway, I went over to their house, and pressed the bell. It looked as if, whatever it was, we and the Saggitts were in it togetherand alone, for the transparent barrier on the side beyond them passed through the Drury's house, including in our area simply the side wall and a depth of perhaps six inches beyond it which looked extremely dangerous though it showed no sign of falling. Looking at it while I waited, I reckoned that it, like the plum tree and the other things the barrier cut across, must be clamped to the invisible surface by a kind of magnetism.

I gave a second long chime on the bell. Presently I heard feet on the stairs. The door opened. A hand thrust out some coins wrapped in a scrap of writing paper. It moved impatiently when I didn't accept the offer. The door opened a little more, and Rose's head appeared.