Hunched in the robe, Blake turned and crossed the patio, mounted the short three steps up to the door. The door came open and he stepped inside.
‘Good evening, sir,’ said the House, and then, in a tone of reprimand, ‘it appears you were detained.’
‘Something happened to me,’ said Blake. ‘Would you have any idea what it might have been?’
‘You left the patio.’ said the House, disgusted that he should expect further information from it. ‘You are aware, of course, that our concern does not extend beyond the patio.’
‘Yes,’ mumbled Blake. ‘I am aware of that.’
‘You should have let us know you were going out,’ the House said, sternly. ‘You could have made arrangements to keep in touch with us. We would have provided clothing that was appropriate. As it is, I see you have come back with clothing different than you were wearing when you left.’
‘A friend loaned it to me,’ said Blake.
‘While you were gone,’ the House told him, ‘a message came for you. It is on the PG.’
The postalgraph machine stood to one side of the entry way. Blake stepped over to it and pulled out the sheet of paper projecting from its face. The message was written in precise bold hand and was short and formal. It read:
If Mr. Andrew Blake should find it convenient to contact Mr. Ryan Wilson at the town of Willow Grove, he might learn something to his great advantage.
Blake held the sheet gingerly between, his fingers. It was incredible, he thought. It smelled of melodrama.
‘Willow Grove?’ he asked.
Said the House, ‘We’ll look it up.’
‘If you please,’ said Blake.
‘A bath can be ready in a moment,’ said the House, ‘if that is what you wish?’
‘Food, also, can be ready soon,’ yelled the Kitchen. ‘What does the master wish?’
‘I think,’ said Blake, ‘I would like some food. How about some ham and eggs and a slice or two of toast.’
‘Something else could be made as easily,’ said the Kitchen. ‘Welsh rarebit? Lobster thermidor?’
‘Ham and eggs,’ said Blake.
‘How about the decor?’ asked the House. ‘We have had the present one for an unseemly length of time.’
‘No,’ Blake told it, wearily. ‘leave it as it is. Leave the decor be. It doesn’t really matter.’
‘Of course it matters,’ the House said, tartly. ‘There is such a thing as…’
‘Just leave it be,’ said Blake.
‘As you wish, master,’ said the House.
‘Food first,’ said Blake, ‘then the bath, then off to bed. It’s been quite a day.’
‘And the message?’
‘Forget about it now. We’ll think of it tomorrow.’
‘The town of Willow Grove,’ said the House, ‘is northwest of here. Fifty-seven miles. We looked it up.’
Blake walked across the living-room into the dining-room and sat down at the table.
‘You have to come and get it,’ wailed the Kitchen. ‘I can’t bring it to you.’
‘I know that,’ said Blake. ‘Tell me when it’s ready.’
‘But you’re sitting at the table!’
‘The man has a right to sit wherever he may wish,’ stormed the House.
‘Yes, sir,’ said the Kitchen.
The House relapsed into silence and Blake sat in the chair, bone tired.
The wallpaper of the room, he saw, had been animated. Although, come to think of it, it wasn’t really wallpaper. The House had pointed that out to him the day he had arrived.
There were, he thought, so many new things, that he often was confused.
It was a woodland scene, interspersed with meadows, and with a brook that ran through woods and meadow. A rabbit came hopping deliberately along. It stopped beside a clump of clover and settled down to nibble at the blossoms. Its ears went back and forth and it scratched itself, holding its head to one side and hitting gentle strokes with a ponderous hind leg. The brook sparkled in the sunlight as it ran down a tiny rapid and there were flecks of foam and fallen leaves riding on its surface. A bird flew across the scene and landed in a tree. It raised its head and sang, but there was no sound. One could tell that it was singing by the trembling of its throat.
‘Would you like the sound turned on?’ asked the Dining-room.
‘No, thank you. I don’t believe I would. I want just to sit and rest. Some other time, perhaps.’
To sit and rest and think – to get it figured out. To try to find what had happened to him and how it might have happened, and why, of course, as well. And to determine who or what he was, what he had been and what he might be now. It all was, he thought, a nightmare happening while he was wide awake.
Although, when morning came, it might be all right again, it might seem all right again. The sun would be shining then and the world be bright. He’d go out for a walk and talk with some of the neighbours up and down the street and it would be all right. Perhaps if he just forgot about it, brushed it from his mind – that, perhaps, would be the best way to handle it. It might not happen again and if it didn’t happen, there’d be no need to worry.
He stirred uneasily in the chair.
‘What time is it?’ he asked. ‘How long was I gone?’
‘It is almost two o’clock,’ said the House. ‘You went away at eight or very shortly after.’
Six hours, he thought, and he could account for two of them at most. What had happened in those other four hours and why could he not recall them? For that matter, why could he not recall the time when he had been in space and the time before he was in space? Why must his life start with that moment he had opened his eyes in a hospital bed in Washington? There had been another time, there had been other years. He once had held a name and history – and what had happened to blot it all away?
The rabbit finished its munching of the clover and went hopping off. The bird sat on the limb, no longer singing. A squirrel ran head-first down a tree trunk, halted two feet above the ground, spun like a flash and scurried up again. It reached a limb and ran out on it for a way, then halted, poised, its tail jerking in excitement.
Like sitting in a window, Blake thought, gazing out at the woodland scene – for there was no flatness to it. It had depth and perspective and the colour of the landscape was no painted colour, but the colour one would know if he had looked upon an actual scene.
The House still puzzled and disturbed him, at times made him uncomfortable. There was nothing in his background memory that had prepared him for anything like this. Although he could recall, in that misty time before complete forgetfulness closed down, that someone (whose name he could not recall) had cracked the enigma of gravity and that functioning solar power had been commonplace.
But while the house was energized by its solar power plant and was mobile by virtue of its anti-gravity apparatus, it was much more than that. It was a robot – a robot with a good-servant complex built into it, and at times, it seemed, almost a mother complex. It took care of the people that it housed. It had their welfare firmly fixed in its computer mind. It talked with them and served them, it reminded them and bullied them and nagged at them and coddled them. It was house and servant and companion all rolled into one. A man, Blake told himself, in time could come to look upon his house as a loyal and loving friend.
The House did everything for you. It fed you and did the washing, it tucked you into bed, and given half a chance, it would wipe your nose. It watched over you and anticipated every single wish and sometimes was objectionable in its wish to do too much. It dreamed up things that it imagined you might like – like the animated wallpaper (oops, not wallpaper!) with the rabbit and the singing bird.
But, Blake told himself, it took some getting used to. Maybe not for someone who had lived his life with it. But come back from the stars, God knows from where or when, and be thrown into a house like this – then it took some getting used to.
‘Come and get it!’ bawled the Kitchen. ‘Ham and eggs are ready!’
6
It came alive humped in a place it had never sensed before – a strange enclosure inhabited by artifacts made mostly out of wood, although there was some metal and some fabric.
It reacted instantly. It snapped out its defences and blotted out the place. It built itself into a pyramid, which was a solid state of being, and constructed about itself a sphere of isolation.