The front door of the second house was closed, but it opened easily and smoothly when he turned the knob. Because of the lack of windows, the interior of the house was dark, but not so dark as to interfere with vision. Swiftly he checked the rooms. There were four bedrooms and a den, a kitchen, a living room and dining room—and two bathrooms, one off the master bedroom. The floor in the first house had been of wood; here all the floors were carpeted. Drapes hung on the walls where windows should have been. He tried the kitchen appliances. They worked. The stove top heated when he turned on the burners, at the sink the water ran; when he opened the door of the refrigerator a gush of cold hit him in the face. In the bathrooms, the taps ran normally and the toilets flushed.

Everything seemed perfect. But why should someone build a perfect house and then forget the windows?

Or had someone built it?

Could the visitors.

He gulped at the idea and suddenly went cold.

If it were the visitors, then it did make sense. No human would have built two houses in the middle of a wilderness. To start with, it would have been all but impossible to do it.

But the visitors? Why would the visitors be building houses? Or practicing the art of building houses? For it was quite apparent that these were practice houses, constructed by someone who was not entirely clear on the matter of how houses should be built. The lopsided house probably had been the first one to be tried. The house in which he stood most likely was the second, considerably improved over the first one, but lacking windows.

He stood, shaken, in the middle of the kitchen, still not certain, questioning himself. The only answer, reluctant as he might be to accept it, was that the two houses had been fabricated by the visitors. But that left a second, even more puzzling, less easily answered question: Why should the visitors be building houses?

He groped his way out of the kitchen and across the living room, went into the hall and let himself out the door.

Long shadows had crept across the clearing. The tops of the picket fence of pines to the west cut a saw-toothed pattern into the reddening sun. A chill was beginning to move in and Norton shivered at the touch of it.

He ran his hand over the siding exterior of the house and it had a strange feel to it. Peering closely at it in the deepening dusk, he saw that it was not siding, not separate lengths of lumber, but that the exterior seemed to be molded in a single piece, like a preformed plastic.

Slowly he backed away from the house. Superficially, except for the lack of windows, there was nothing wrong with it. It was an almost exact copy of the kind of house that could be found in any suburb.

He ran his gaze from the rooftop down to the basement wall— and there was no basement wall. It was a detail that had escaped him—this lack of a basement wall. The house hovered half a foot or so above the ground, suspended in the air.

Suspended, Norton told himself, as the visitors were suspended. There was no question now—no question of how the houses had come into being.

He walked around the corner of the house and there they stood, the visitors, clumped together, like a massed group of darkened buildings standing in the center plaza of some futuristic city, the lower half of them blotted out in the forest dusk, the upper half highlighted by the dying rays of a setting sun.

From their direction came another house, floating along a foot or so above the ground, the whiteness of it ghostly in the twilight. As it approached, Norton backed away, apprehensively, ready to break and run. The house came up, then stopped, as if to determine its position. Then slowly, majestically, it wheeled into line with the other houses and came to a halt, the three of them standing in a row, somewhat closer together, it was true, than would be the ordinary case, but very much like three houses sitting on a street.

Norton took a slow step toward the third house and as he did, lights came on inside of it, with the windows gleaming. Inside it he saw a table in the dining room, set with glass and china and two candlesticks, with tall tapers in them waiting to be lighted. In the living room, the screen of a TV set glimmered and across from it stood a davenport and all about the room were chairs, with a curio cabinet, filled with dainty figurines, ranged against one wall.

Startled, he moved to turn away and as he did, he caught the hint of shadows, as if someone were moving in the kitchen, as if there was someone there taking up the dinner to be brought to the waiting table.

He cried out in terror and spun about, racing toward the river and the canoe that waited there.

49. WASHINGTON, D.C

When Porter rang the bell, Alice came to the door. She seized him by the arm, hurried him inside and closed the door behind him.

"I know," he said. "It's an ungodly hour and I haven't got much time. But I wanted to see you and I must see the senator."

"Daddy has the drinks all poured," said Alice, "and is waiting for you. He's all a-twitter as to why you should come running out to see us in the middle of the night. You must be knee-deep in matters of importance."

"A lot of motion," Porter told her. "A lot of talk. I don't know if we're getting anywhere. You've heard about the business holiday?"

"A late bulletin on TV. Daddy is all upset about it."

But the senator, when they came into the room where he was waiting for them, was not visibly upset. He was quite the genial host. He handed Porter a drink and said, "See, young man, I didn't even have to ask. I have learned your drinking preference."

"Thank you, senator," said Porter, accepting the glass. "I stand in need of that."

"Did you take time to eat tonight?" asked Alice.

He stared at her, as if astonished by the question.

"Well, did you?"

"I'm afraid that I forgot," said Porter. "It did not occur to me. The kitchen did bring up something, but, at the time, I was with the press corps. It was all gone when I got back."

"I suspected it," said Alice. "Soon as you called, I made some sandwiches and started up the coffee. I'll bring in something for you.~~

"Sit down, Dave," said the senator, "and say what you have in mind. Is there some way I can help the White House?"

"I think there might be," said Porter, "but it's up to you. No one will twist your arm. What you might want to do about it is a matter for your conscience to decide."

"You must have had some rough hours down there," said the senator. "I suppose it is still rough. I'm not sure I agree with the President on his financial moratorium, but I do realize there was a need of some sort of action."

"We were afraid of what the snap reaction might be," said Porter. "The holiday will give some level headed men the time they'll need to head off total panic."

"The dollar is going to take a beating on the foreign exchanges," the senator told him. "No matter what we do, it will hit near bottom. By tomorrow afternoon, it might be damn near worthless."

"We can't do anything about that," Porter said. "Give us the chance to win a round or two back home and the dollar will climb back. The real danger that we face is right here—the Congress, the press, public opinion."

"You mean to fight it out," said the senator. "I think that's the only thing you can do. Not back down. Not give ground."

"We're hanging in there," said Porter, grimly. "We are not about to say that we were wrong in the handling of the visitor situation. We'll make no apologies."

"I like that," said the senator. "Much as I may disapprove of some of the things that have been going on down there, I do like this show of strength. The way things are tonight, we need strength at the core of government."