Part 2

The whirling was like nothing Durkin had ever known before. It constricted his chest, blurred his vision, and drove the blood in torrents from his heart. There was no stopping it, and as it grew steadily more intolerable he tore at his collar, swayed, and went down on his hands and knees.

Around and around the cottage whirled, now rising and tilting, and then descending with a terrible, jerky abruptness. Twice he tried to rise, but fell back helpless, powerless to save himself from the spineless inertia that sent him spinning to and fro like some ill-made, rain-sodden scarecrow dragged in disgust from a corn-field, and tossed into a butter-churning machine.

In one respect only was Durkin fortunate. His torment, though great and almost unendurable, was not absolutely continuous. There were moments when the cottage seemed to hover motionless in mid-air, or to drift lazily in a single direction with a buoyancy as light as thistledown.

Gradually these moments became more frequent, calming Durkin like a soothing palm pressed with compassion to his brow. More and more frequent until the merciless buffetings and swift, sickening descents ceased completely, and a light that was bright, clear and steady streamed in through the kitchen window, and somewhere off in the distance a snowy-crested bird burst into song.

There were flowers outside the window, scarlet and aquamarine faintly flecked with gold. Tall-stemmed and wide-petalled they were, almost screening the view, and if at that moment Durkin had been on his feet staring out he might well have failed to see the huge, joyously romping lad.

But Durkin was still lying prone, and the lad's curiosity had not as yet been acutely aroused.

The lad came swinging boisterously down a country lane, his lips puffed out in a childish pout, his chubby hands thrust deeply into the green and vermillion trousers of his play suit.

He did not love his foster father, and he had run away in a sudden burst of independence and was temporarily free to roam. Oh, it was good to be free to laugh and romp in the sunlight, and to build mud castles out of the gleaming red walls of _Snerkle_ nests.

He came swinging around a curve in the lane and stopped abruptly, staring straight before him in utter disbelief.

For a moment he stood as if turned to stone, his eyes saucer-wide in the slanting sun glow. Then he was running forward with a cry of boyish eagerness.

The little cottage stood in a glimmer of sunlight and shadow cast by weaving boughs. All about it stretched a smooth blue lawn, starred with long-stemmed wind-flowers as tall as the house itself.

He clapped his hands in pure delight. True, he had a village of his own to play with, an entire toy village bright with weaving communication beams. But all the dolls were child dolls and the village no longer pleased him.

He pouted and became angry again when he thought about it. His foster father did not want him to play with grown-up dolls. His foster father was an old meanie, and he didn't want him to have any fun.

He was hovering directly over the house now, straddling it. He reached down with a chuckle of delight, and poked at the little red chimney with a stubby forefinger, beaming in simple pleasure as four tiny bricks tumbled out on the roof.

Then he bent over and stared with a puzzled frown at the smashed windows.

A moment later he was squatting before the house peeking in. Slowly as he stared all of the good-natured anticipation went out of his face.

Exaltation of a different kind came into his features, a fiendish kind of exaltation common enough in childhood, but often disturbing to adults.

It was shockingly disturbing to Durkin. Roused suddenly to consciousness in the middle of the kitchen floor he saw the great malicious child face staring in at him, and struggled frantically to rise, his eyes wild with terror.

There were other things Durkin did not understand, about energy, about time, about other worlds of life and purpose lying parallel to ours in undreamed of dimensions of space.

He did know that a single farmhouse in the path of a tornado could be uprooted and carried for miles through the sky. He knew that a fence could be leveled, a tree torn down and the rest of the countryside remain unscathed, even to the last sun-gilded haystack.

It was easy to understand how such things might be. But nothing had prepared Durkin's mind for the disturbing and frightening parallel which a scientist might have drawn from a hurricane's erratic course. He had no way of knowing that matter on the fringe of an atomic blast could be agitated abnormally, and pass into another dimension piecemeal.

He had no way of knowing that the desert at the edge of an atomic proving ground might decide suddenly to blossom like some multi-dimensional rose.

He had no way of knowing that _size_ is a relative thing, varying with every matter dissolving energy shift in the physical universe, and that a house could be huge in one dimension, his own, and tiny in another, and might even indeed take on the aspect of a house built solely to delight the eye of childhood.

He had no way of knowing, for he had not heard the great eternal voices discussing it. The reddening of the rose meant nothing to him, the stars in their wheeling courses, the speculations of men like gods.

All time, all space is relative, Einstein had said. There is only one equation for energy, matter, light, fire, air--

And who knows how closely other dimensions may parallel ours?

Durkin had no way of knowing until the great dimpled hand reached in through the window and picked him up. Then, and only then, in one blinding flash of intuition, he guessed the truth.

Too late. The blade of grass was like a tendril rope, and it went so swiftly about Durkin's throat he had no time to leap back. As he screamed and struggled a huge wet palm smothered his mouth, rumpled his hair, and squeezed the breath from his lungs. His struggles were of no avail.

Emotional impulses which later in life are filtered through reason and harden into social attitudes remain in children appallingly fluid and direct. A child identifies itself with its toys and it is very easy for a child to see a living, breathing adult human being in a doll which is in reality quite unlike the object of its love--or hate.

Kneeling beside the house, a child Durkin knew nothing about thought it all out for the barest instant, its body oddly bent. Then it leaned forward, and hung its hated foster father very carefully to a ceiling rafter in the precise middle of the house.

Ever so slowly the child arose, and the snowy-crested bird burst into song again, somewhere off in the distance. But Durkin knew nothing of that.