—And He Built a Crooked House

by Robert Anson Heinlein

  Teal turned from their faces to the house. Gone was the crazy tower with its jutting second-story rooms. No trace remained of the seven rooms above ground floor level. Nothing remained but the single room that rested on the foundations. “Great jumping cats!” he yelled, “I’ve been robbed!”

  He broke into a run.

  But it did him no good. Front or back, the story was the same: the other seven rooms had disappeared, vanished completely. Bailey caught up with him, and took his arm. “Explain yourself. What is this about being robbed? How come you built anything like this—it’s not according to agreement.”

  “But I didn’t. I built just what we had planned to build, an eight-room house in the form of a developed tesseract. I’ve been sabotaged; that’s what it is! Jealousy! The other architects in town didn’t dare let me finish this job; they knew they’d be washed up if I did.”

  “When were you last here?”

  “Yesterday afternoon.”

  “Everything all right then?”

  “Yes. The gardeners were just finishing up.”

  Bailey glanced around at the faultlessly manicured landscaping. “I don’t see how seven rooms could have been dismantled and carted away from here in a single night without wrecking this garden.”

  Teal looked around, too. “It doesn’t look it. I don’t understand it.”

  Mrs. Bailey joined them. “Well? Well? Am I to be left to amuse myself? We might as well look it over as long as we are here, though I’m warning you, Homer, I’m not going to like it.”

  “We might as well,” agreed Teal, and drew a key from his pocket with which he let them in the front door. “We may pick up some clues.”

  The entrance hall was in perfect order, the sliding screens that separated it from the garage space were back, permitting them to see the entire compartment. “This looks all right,” observed Bailey. “Let’s go up on the roof and try to figure out what happened. Where’s the staircase? Have they stolen that, too?”

  “Oh, no,” Teal denied, “look—” He pressed a button below the light switch; a panel in the ceiling fell away and a light, graceful flight of stairs swung noiselessly down. Its strength members were the frosty silver of duralumin, its tread and risers transparent plastic. Teal wriggled like a boy who has successfully performed a card trick, while Mrs. Bailey thawed perceptibly.

  It was beautiful.

  “Pretty slick,” Bailey admitted. “Howsomever it doesn’t seem to go any place—”

  “Oh, that—” Teal followed his gaze. “The cover lifts up as you approach the top. Open stair wells are anachronisms. Come on.” As predicted, the lid of the staircase got out of their way as they climbed the flight and permitted them to debouch at the top, but not, as they had expected, on the roof of the single room. They found themselves standing in the middle one of the five rooms which constituted the second floor of the original structure.

  For the first time on record Teal had nothing to say. Bailey echoed him, chewing on his cigar. Everything was in perfect order. Before them, through an open doorway and translucent partition lay the kitchen, a chef’s dream of up-to-the-minute domestic engineering, monel metal, continuous counter space, concealed lighting, functional arrangement. On the left the formal, yet gracious and hospitable dining room awaited guests, its furniture in parade-ground alignment.

  Teal knew before he turned his head that the drawing room and lounge would be found in equally substantial and impossible existence.

  “Well, I must admit this is charming,” Mrs. Bailey approved, “and the kitchen is just too quaint for words—though I would never have guessed from the exterior that this house had so much room upstairs. Of course some changes will have to be made. That secretary now—if we moved it over here and put the settle over there—”

  “Stow it, Matilda,” Bailey cut in brusquely. “Wha’d’yuh make of it, Teal?”

  “Why, Homer Bailey! The very id—”

  “Stow it, I said. Well, Teal?”

  The architect shuffled his rambling body. “I’m afraid to say. Let’s go on up.”

  “How?”

  “Like this.” He touched another button; a mate, in deeper colors, to the fairy bridge that had let them up from below offered them access to the next floor. They climbed it, Mrs. Bailey expostulating in the rear, and found themselves in the master bedroom. Its shades were drawn, as had been those on the level below, but the mellow lighting came on automatically. Teal at once activated the switch which controlled still another flight of stairs, and they hurried up into the top floor study.

  “Look, Teal,” suggested Bailey when he had caught his breath, “can we get to the roof above this room? Then we could look around.”

  “Sure, it’s an observatory platform.” They climbed a fourth flight of stairs, but when the cover at the top lifted to let them reach the level above, they found themselves, not on the roof, but standing in the ground floor room where they had entered the house.

  Mr. Bailey turned a sickly gray. “Angels in heaven,” he cried, “this place is haunted. We’re getting out of here.” Grabbing his wife he threw open the front door and plunged out.

  Teal was too much preoccupied to bother with their departure. There was an answer to all this, an answer that he did not believe. But he was forced to break off considering it because of hoarse shouts from somewhere above him. He lowered the staircase and rushed upstairs. Bailey was in the central room leaning over Mrs. Bailey, who had fainted. Teal took in the situation, went to the bar built into the lounge, and poured three fingers of brandy, which he returned with and handed to Bailey. “Here—this’ll fix her up.”

  Bailey drank it.

  “That was for Mrs. Bailey,” said Teal.

  “Don’t quibble,” snapped Bailey. “Get her another.” Teal took the precaution of taking one himself before returning with a dose earmarked for his client’s wife. He found her just opening her eyes.

  “Here, Mrs. Bailey,” he soothed, “this will make you feel better.”

  “I never touch spirits,” she protested, and gulped it.

  “Now tell me what happened,” suggested Teal. “I thought you two had left.”

  “But we did—we walked out the front door and found ourselves up here, in the lounge.”

  “The hell you say! Hm-m-m—wait a minute.” Teal went into the lounge. There he found that the big view window at the end of the room was open. He peered cautiously through it. He stared, not out at the California countryside, but into the ground floor room—or a reasonable facsimile thereof. He said nothing, but went back to the stair well which he had left open and looked down it. The ground floor room was still in place. Somehow, it managed to be in two different places at once, on different levels.

  He came back into the central room and seated himself opposite Bailey in a deep, low chair, and sighted him past his upthrust bony knees. “Homer,” he said impressively, “do you know what has happened?”

  “No, I don’t—but if I don’t find out pretty soon, something is going to happen and pretty drastic, too!”

  “Homer, this is a vindication of my theories. This house is a real tesseract.”

  “What’s he talking about, Homer?”

  “Wait, Matilda—now Teal, that’s ridiculous. You’ve pulled some hanky-panky here and I won’t have it—scaring Mrs. Bailey half to death, and making me nervous. All I want is to get out of here, with no more of your trapdoors and silly practical jokes.”

  “Speak for yourself, Homer,” Mrs. Bailey interrupted, “I was not frightened; I was just took all over queer for a moment. It’s my heart; all of my people are delicate and high-strung. Now about this tessy thing—explain yourself, Mr. Teal. Speak up.”

  He told her as well as he could in the face of numerous interruptions the theory back of the house. “Now as I see it, Mrs. Bailey,” he concluded, “this house, while perfectly stable in three dimensions, was not stable in four dimensions. I had built a house in the shape of an unfolded tesseract; something
happened to it, some jar or side thrust, and it collapsed into its normal shape—it folded up.” He snapped his fingers suddenly. “I’ve got it! The earthquake!”

  “Earthquake?”

  “Yes, yes, the little shake we had last night. From a four-dimensional standpoint this house was like a plane balanced on edge. One little push and it fell over, collapsed along its natural joints into a stable four-dimensional figure.”

  “I thought you boasted about how safe this house was.”

  “It is safe—three-dimensionally.”

  “I don’t call a house safe,” commented Bailey edgily, “that collapses on the first little temblor.”

  “But look around you, man!” Teal protested. “Nothing has been disturbed, not a piece of glassware cracked. Rotations through a fourth dimension can’t affect a three-dimensional figure any more than you can shake letters off a printed page. If you had been sleeping in here last night, you would never have awakened.”

  “That’s just what I’m afraid of. Incidentally, has your great genius figured out any way for us to get out of this booby trap?”

  “Huh? Oh, yes, you and Mrs. Bailey started to leave and landed back up here, didn’t you? But I’m sure there is no real difficulty—we came in, we can go out. I’ll try it.” He was up and hurrying downstairs before he had finished talking. He flung open the front door, stepped through, and found himself staring at his companions, down the length of the second floor lounge. “Well, there does seem to be some slight problem,” he admitted blandly. “A mere technicality, though—we can always go out a window.” He jerked aside the long drapes that covered the deep French windows set in one side wall of the lounge. He stopped suddenly.

  “Hm-m-m,” he said, “this is very interesting—very.”

  “What is it?” asked Bailey, joining him.

  “This.” The window stared directly into the dining room, instead of looking outdoors. Bailey stepped back to the corner 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 nonplussed; 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.

  “Nobody around,” he reported. “I opened all of the doors and windows as I went—all except this one.” He stepped to the window opposite the one through which he had recently fallen and thrust back the drapes.

  He saw a man with his back toward him, four rooms away. Teal snatched open the French window and dived through it, shouting, “There he goes now! Stop thief!”

  The figure evidently heard him; it fled precipitately. Teal pursued, his gangling limbs stirred to unanimous activity, through drawing room, kitchen, dining room, lounge—room after room, yet in spite of Teal’s best efforts he could not seem to cut down the four-room lead that the interloper had started with.

  He saw the pursued jump awkwardly but actively over the low sill of a French window and in so doing knock off the hat. When he came up to the point where his quarry had lost his headgear, he stopped and picked it up, glad of an excuse to stop and catch his breath. He was back in the lounge.

  “I guess he got away from me,” he admitted. “Anyhow, here’s his hat. Maybe we can identify him.”

  Bailey took the hat, looked at it, then snorted, and slapped it on Teal’s head. It fitted perfectly. Teal look puzzled, took the hat off, and examined it. On the sweat band were the initials “Q.T.” It was his own.

  Slowly comprehension filtered through Teal’s features. He went back to the French window and gazed down the series of rooms through which he had pursued the mysterious stranger. They saw him wave his arms semaphore fashion. “What are you doing?” asked Bailey.

  “Come see.” The two joined him and followed his stare with their own. Four rooms away they saw the backs of three figures, two male and one female. The taller, thinner of the men was waving his arms in a silly fashion.

  Mrs. Bailey screamed and fainted again.

  Some minutes later, when Mrs. Bailey had been resuscitated and somewhat composed, Bailey and Teal took stock. “Teal,” said Bailey, “I won’t waste any time blaming you; recriminations are useless and I’m sure you didn’t plan for this to happen, but I suppose you realize we are in a prett
y serious predicament. How are we going to get out of here? It looks now as if we would stay until we starve; every room leads into another room.”

  “Oh, it’s not that bad. I got out once, you know.”

  “Yes, but you can’t repeat it—you tried.”

  “Anyhow we haven’t tried all the rooms. There’s still the study.”

  “Oh, yes, the study. We went through there when we first came in, and didn’t stop. Is it your idea that we might get out through its windows?”

  “Don’t get your hopes up. Mathematically, it ought to look into the four side rooms on this floor. Still we never opened the blinds; maybe we ought to look.”

  “ ’Twon’t do any harm anyhow. Dear, I think you had best just stay here and rest—”

  “Be left alone in this horrible place? I should say not!” Mrs. Bailey was up off the couch where she had been recuperating even as she spoke.

  They went upstairs. “This is the inside room, isn’t it, Teal?” Bailey inquired as they passed through the master bedroom and climbed on up toward the study. “I mean it was the little cube in your diagram that was in the middle of the big cube, and completely surrounded.”

  “That’s right,” agreed Teal. “Well, let’s have a look. I figure this window ought to give into the kitchen.” He grasped the cords of Venetian blinds and pulled them.

  It did not. Waves of vertigo shook them. Involuntarily they fell to the floor and grasped helplessly at the pattern on the rug to keep from falling. “Close it! Close it!” moaned Bailey.

  Mastering in part a primitive atavistic fear, Teal worked his way back to the window and managed to release the screen. The window had looked down instead of out, down from a terrifying height.

  Mrs. Bailey had fainted again.

  Teal went back after more brandy while Bailey chafed her wrists. When she had recovered, Teal went cautiously to the window and raised the screen a crack. Bracing his knees, he studied the scene. He turned to Bailey. “Come look at this, Homer. See if you recognize it.”