“Hm-m-m,” he said, “this is interesting-very.”
“What is?” asked Bailey, joining him.
“This.” The window stared directly into the dining room, instead of looking outdoors. Bailey stepped back to the comer where the lounge and the dining room joined the central room at ninety degrees.
“But that can’t be,” he protested, “that window is maybe fifteen, twenty feet from the dining room.”
“Not in a tesseract,” corrected Teal. “Watch.” He opened the window and stepped through, talking back over his shoulder as he did so.
From the point of view of the Baileys he simply disappeared.
But not from his own viewpoint. It took him some seconds to catch his breath. Then he cautiously disentangled himself from the rosebush to which he had become almost irrevocably wedded, making a mental note the while never again to order landscaping which involved plants with thorns, and looked around him.
He was outside the house. The massive bulk of the ground floor room thrust up beside him. Apparently he had fallen off the roof.
He dashed around the corner of the house, flung open the front door and hurried up the stairs. “Homer!” he called out. “Mrs. Bailey! I’ve found a way out!”
Bailey looked annoyed rather than pleased to see him. “What happened to you?”
“I fell out. I’ve been outside the house. You can do it just as easily-just step through those French windows. Mind the rosebush, though-we may have to build another stairway.”
“How did you get back in?”
“Through the front door.”
“Then we shall leave the same way. Come, my dear.” Bailey set his hat firmly on his head and marched down the stairs, his wife on his arm.
Teal met them in the lounge. “I could have told you that wouldn’t work,” he announced. “Now here’s what we have to do: As I see it, in a four-dimensional figure a three-dimensional man has two choices every time he crosses a line of juncture, like a wall or a threshold. Ordinarily he will make a ninety-degree turn through the fourth dimension, only he doesn’t feel it with his three dimensions. Look.” He stepped through the very window that he had fallen out of a moment before. Stepped through and arrived in the dining room, where he stood, still talking.
“I watched where I was going and arrived where I intended to.” He stepped back into the lounge. “The time before I didn’t watch and I moved on through normal space and fell out of the house. It must be a matter of subconscious orientation.”
“I’d hate to depend on subconscious orientation when I step out for the morning paper.”
“You won’t have to; it’ll become automatic. Now to get out of the house this time-Mrs. Bailey, if you will stand here with your back to the window, and jump backward, I’m pretty sure you will land in the garden.”
Mrs. Bailey’s face expressed her opinion of Teal and his ideas. “Homer Bailey,” she said shrilly, “are you going to stand there and let him suggest such-”
“But Mrs. Bailey,” Teal attempted to explain, “we can tie a rope on you and lower you down eas-”
“Forget it, Teal,” Bailey cut him off brusquely. “We’ll have to find a better way than that. Neither Mrs. Bailey nor I are fitted for jumping.”
Teal was temporarily nonplused; there ensued a short silence. Bailey broke it with, “Did you hear that, Teal?”
“Hear what?”
“Someone talking off in the distance. D’you s’pose there could be someone else in the house, playing tricks on us, maybe?”
“Oh, not a chance. I’ve got the only key.”
“But I’m sure of it,” Mrs. Bailey confirmed. “I’ve heard them ever since we came in. Voices. Homer, I can’t stand much more of this. Do something.”
“Now, now, Mrs. Bailey,” Teal soothed, “don’t get upset. There can’t be anyone else in the house, but I’ll explore and make sure. Homer, you stay here with Mrs. Bailey and keep an eye on the rooms on this floor.” He passed from the lounge into the ground floor room and from there to the kitchen and on into the bedroom. This led him back to the lounge by a straight-line route, that is to say, by going straight ahead on the entire trip he returned to the place from which he started.