He did not understand. "You--I know you are not--" Her face was not the same; her hair was the deeper red of mahogany, her eyes as large, but of green, not blue. Dorothy's mouth was wider, her cheeks not quite so shadowed. Yet now her face was drawn in the look of bewilderment that he felt on his own. "Doug?" "Dot! For God's sake!" "Your voice is the same--but you don't look like--" "Don't get scared, take it easy. It's me. You're different too--all but your voice. I've got to figure it out. Everything's all wrong. Wrong as hell--" He found a chair of light metal that felt like foam rubber when he sat on it. Dorothy--and he knew somehow that it must be Dorothy--was looking around her with quick, nervous glances. "Doug, the boys--where are the boys?" "Terry! Mike!" He called again, stood up. "Oh, God--" "They were just behind me, Doug, they couldn't have run--" "No I think--I think they must've stayed with--with the Contraption. We were in the blur light. It wasn't. They must've been just beyond its effective range. That must be it. It just got _us_." "Got us--you mean we're--" "No, no of course not. Alive as we'll ever be. But where--" "Wherever we are, I don't want to be here, Doug. I want to be back...." "Easy, honey." He put his arm about her, drew her to him, and he could feel her taut muscles relax a little. "I'd like to say it's a dream, but two people don't dream the same dream at once. And I'm not the type to think up clothes like these all by myself.... Somehow, the Contraption did it. I was monkeying with a theorem I got interested in once in space-time mechanics. But it was all on paper--just something to fool with. It was impossible for the Contraption to really do anything." He sat down again. "Impossible." "Like flying, my mother used to say. What do we do, Doug?" "That's my gal...." He got up a second time, forced a smile. "Let's go upstairs and see if anybody's around." There were stairs. Wide and gently curving and constructed of a light, lusterless steel. Architecturally, the house was little different from many of the expensive-looking California-type affairs he had seen in the women's magazines that Dot bought every so often. Yet there was something about its interior, a certain grace combined with a subtle simplicity that made it a work of art as a good painting or sculptural piece is art. There was rebellion in it--a gentle rebellion against the eye-aching extremes of artificial modernity, yet at the same time a freedom of execution that made the confines of formalized pattern seem childish.