“Well, you wanted to live way out,” he told her. “You wouldn’t ever have known about it if you hadn’t turned off the trees.”
“There’s one other thing I’ve got to bother you with, Jonathan,” she said. “Now the second switch—the one next below—has got a name that glows. It just says HOUSE. It’s turned on—I haven’t touched it! Do you suppose.”
“I want to look at this,” he said, bounding up from the couch and slamming his martini-on-the-rocks tumbler down on the tray of the robot maid sb that she rattled. “I bought this house as solid, but there are swindles. Ordinarily I’d spot a broadcast style in a flash, but they just might have slipped me a job relayed from some other planet or solar system. Fine thing if me and fifty other multi-megabuck men were spotted around in identical houses, each thinking his was unique.”
“But if the house is based on rock like it is.”
“That would just make it easier for them to pull the trick, you dumb bunny!”
They reached the master control panel. “There it is,” she said helpfully, jabbing out a finger. and hit the HOUSE switch.
For a moment nothing happened, then a white churning ran across the ceiling, the walls and furniture started to swell and bubble like cold lava, and then they were alone on a rock table big as three tennis courts. Even the master control panel was gone. The only thing that was left was a slender rod coming out of the grey stone at their feet and bearing at the top, like some mechanistic fruit, a small block with the six switches—that and an intolerably bright star hanging in the air where the master bedroom had been.
Mariana pushed frantically at the HOUSE switch, but it was unlabelled now and locked hi the “off” position, although she threw her weight at it stiff-armed.
The upstairs star sped off like an incendiary bullet, but its last flashbulb glare showed her Jonathan’s face set hi lines of fury. He lifted his hands like talons.
“You little idiot!” he screamed, coming at her.
“No Jonathan, no!” she wailed, backing off, but he kept coming.
She realized that the block of switches had broken off in her hands. The third switch had a glowing name now: JONATHAN. She flipped it.
As his fingers dug into her bare shoulders they seemed to turn to foam rubber, then to air. His face and grey flannel suit seethed iridescently, like a leprous ghost’s, then melted and ran. His star, smaller than that of the house but much closer, seared her eyes. When she opened them again there was nothing at all left of the star or Jonathan but a dancing dark after-image like a black tennis ball.
She was alone on an infinite flat rock plain under the cloudless, star-specked sky.
The fourth switch had its glowing name now: STARS.
It was almost dawn by her radium-dialled wristwatch and she was thoroughly chilled, when she finally decided to switch off the stars. She did not want to do it—in their slow wheeling across the sky they were the last sign of orderly reality—but it seemed the only move she could make.
She wondered what the fifth switch would say. ROCKS? AIR? Or even. ?
She switched off the stars.
The Milky Way, arching in all its unalterable glory, began to churn, its component stars darting about like midges. Soon only one remained, brighter even than Sirius or Venus—until it jerked back, fading, and darted to infinity.
The fifth switch said DOCTOR and it was not on but off.
An inexplicable terror welled up hi Mariana. She did not even want to touch the fifth switch. She set the block of switches down on the rock and backed away from it.
But she dared not go far hi the starless dark. She huddled down and waited for dawn. From time to time she looked at her watch dial and at the night-light glow of the switch-label a dozen yards away.
It seemed to be growing much colder.
She read her watch dial. It was two hours past sunrise. She remembered they had taught her in third grade that the sun was just one more star.
She went back and sat down beside the block of switches and picked it up with a shudder and flipped the fifth switch.
The rock grew soft and crisply fragrant under her and lapped up over her legs and then slowly turned white.
She was sitting hi a hospital bed in a small blue room with a white pin-stripe.
A sweet, mechanical voice came out of the wall, saying, “You have interrupted the wish-fulfilment therapy by your own decision. If you now recognize your sick depression and are willing to accept help, the doctor will come to you. If not, you are at liberty to return to the wish-fulfilment therapy and pursue it to its ultimate conclusion.”
Mariana looked down. She still had the block of switches hi her hands and the fifth switch still read DOCTOR.
The wall said, “I assume from your silence that you will accept treatment. The doctor will be with you immediately.”
The inexplicable terror returned to Mariana with compulsive intensity.
She switched off the doctor.
She was back in the starless dark. The rocks had grown very much colder. She could feel icy feathers falling on her face—snow.
She lifted the block of switches and saw, to her unutterable relief, that the sixth and last switch now read, in tiny glowing letters:
MARIANA.
The Man Who Made Friends With Electricity
WHEN MR. SCOTT showed Peak House to Mr. Leverett, he hoped he wouldn’t notice the high-tension pole outside the bedroom window, because it had twice before queered promising rentals—so many elderly people were foolishly nervous about electricity. There was nothing to be done about the pole except try to draw prospective tenants’ attention away from it—electricity follows the hilltops and these lines supplied more than half the juice used in Pacific Knolls.
But Mr. Scott’s prayers and suave misdirections were in vain-Mr. Leverett’s sharp eyes lit on the “negative feature” the instant they stepped out on the patio. The old New Englander studied the short thick wooden column, the 18-inch ridged glass insulators, the black transformer box that stepped down voltage for this house and a few others lower on the slope. His gaze next followed the heavy wires swinging off rhythmically four abreast across the empty grey-green hills. Then he cocked his head as his ears caught the low but steady frying sound, varying from a crackle to a buzz of electrons leaking off the wires through the air.
“Listen to that!” Mr. Leverett said, his dry voice betraying excitement for the first time in the tour. “Fifty thousand volts if there’s five! A power of power!”
“Must be unusual atmospheric conditions today—normally you can’t hear a thing,” Mr. Scott responded lightly, twisting the truth a little.
“You don’t say?” Mr. Leverett commented, his voice dry again, but Mr. Scott knew better than to encourage conversation about a negative feature. “I want you to notice this lawn,” he launched out heartily. “When the Pacific Knolls Golf Course was subdivided, the original owner of Peak House bought the entire eighteenth green and-”
For the rest of the tour Mr. Scott did his state-certified real estate broker’s best, which in Southern California is no mean performance, but Mr. Leverett seemed a shade perfunctory in the attention he accorded it. Inwardly Mr. Scott chalked up another defeat by the damn pole.
On the quick retrace, however, Mr. Leverett insisted on their lingering on the patio. “Still holding out,” he remarked about the buzz with an odd satisfaction. “You know, Mr. Scott, that’s a restful sound to me. Like wind or a brook or the sea. I hate the clatter of machinery—that’s the other reason I left New England—but this is like a sound of nature. Downright soothing. But you say it comes seldom?”