“Out of the ground, do you mean?” she wondered.
“No, we came from the third planet, Earth, in a ship.
And we’ve landed here on the fourth planet, Mars — ”
“This,” explained the woman, as if she were addressing a child, “is Green Bluff, Illinois, on the continent of America, surrounded by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, on a place called the world, or, sometimes, the Earth.
Go away now.
Goodby.”
She trotted down the hall, running her fingers through the beaded curtains.
The three men looked at one another.
“Let’s knock the screen door in,” said Lustig.
“We can’t do that.
This is private property.
Good God!”
They went to sit down on the porch step.
“Did it ever strike you, Hinkston, that perhaps we got ourselves somehow, in some way, off track, and by accident came back and landed on Earth?”
“How could we have done that?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know.
Oh God, let me think.”
Hinkston said, “But we checked every mile of the way.
Our chronometers said so many miles.
We went past the Moon and out into space, and here we are.
I’m positive we’re on Mars.”
Lustig said,
“But suppose, by accident, in space, in time, we got lost in the dimensions and landed on an Earth that is thirty or forty years ago.”
“Oh, go away, Lustig!”
Lustig went to the door, rang the bell, and called into the cool dim rooms:
“What year is this?”
“Nineteen twenty-six, of course,” said the lady, sitting in a rocking chair, taking a sip of her lemonade.
“Did you hear that?”
Lustig turned wildly to the others.
“Nineteen twenty-six!
We have gone back in time!
This is Earth!”
Lustig sat down, and the three men let the wonder and terror of the thought afflict them.
Their hands stirred fitfully on their knees.
The captain said,
“I didn’t ask for a thing like this.
It scares the hell out of me.
How can a thing like this happen?
I wish we’d brought Einstein with us.”
“Will anyone in this town believe us?” said Hinkston.
“Are we playing with something dangerous?
Time, I mean.
Shouldn’t we just take off and go home?”
“No.
Not until we try another house.”
They walked three houses down to a little white cottage under an oak tree.
“I like to be as logical as I can be,” said the captain.
“And I don’t believe we’ve put our finger on it yet.
Suppose, Hinkston, as you originally suggested, that rocket travel occurred years ago?
And when the Earth people lived here a number of years they began to get homesick for Earth.