The pastel carpeting was of a deep, soft substance that Doug recognized as a masterpiece in plastic; the furniture was simple, casual, but not stark and starved-looking. The rooms themselves were ample and were as bright in the far corners as in those nearest the wide, sashless windows. They were not separated by partitions, but divided instead by a fragile-appearing tracery of lattice-work in which a decorative motif was woven with an almost fairy-like geometrical magic. The air was cool and fresh. "Now I know I'm dreaming," Dot said in a low voice. They walked quietly, from room to room, listening, half-waiting. "I expect any minute to find three bowls of porridge somewhere," Dot said. "I wonder ..." Doug said. "What's here is--I think its ours. I think we live here." "Doug look--through the window!" * * * * * He saw a broad lawn of carefully trimmed yet almost ankle-deep grass, inset at the edges with a running garden. And the street beyond was wide, and there were other houses at its far side that looked much as he knew this one must appear. Roofs of tinted tiling, walls of delicately-toned glass brick, wide, gently-curving windows. These Doug saw in the first instant, and then there were the soundless vehicles in the street. "Like smooth, transparent walnut shells," Doug said. "Cooling louvres in the back--engines in the rear. They know their engineering, too. Wonder if the body is some sort of transparent steel--" "The people in them, Doug! Did you see them? Just like--" "Like us, of course. Still expecting the three bears?" He laughed a little. They were like children in some new fairyland, half afraid, half unbelieving. "Wherever we are, it's populated by humans--if it weren't, we may not have come out this way...." "Doug, do you know?" She turned, faced him, and there was still fear deep in her eyes. Not the stark fear of terror, but the bewildered, uncomprehending fear of disbelief. "No I don't. But these clothes aren't ours--even our faces, our bodies aren't. Just our actual selves came through unaltered. Our egos--personalities--whatever you want to call it that gives a human being his identity. The rest we've--moved into, I think. Anyway, it's a theory to go on. I wonder what our names are--" "Doug, don't." "I wish I were trying to be funny. But don't you see?" "Whatever happened to us--couldn't that have changed us? Our--our atomic structure, couldn't that have been changed or altered somehow? It's all so crazy--" "It's easy to see, m'girl, that you don't spend your time at a bridge table all those hours I'm slaving away on Madhouse Hill! But if that had happened ... I don't know. It's the clothes. Too completely different--not just out of shape, or an altered shape, but of a fundamentally _different_ shape. We got--we got transplanted." "But then what of--" "Thinking the same thing. Suppose the Contraption, whatever it's done--suppose it works _two_ ways? A swap, a trade?"