"George,
I wish you'd look at the nursery."
"What's
wrong with it?"
"I
don't know."
"Well,
then."
"I
just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to look at
it."
"What
would a psychologist want with a nursery?"
"You
know very well what he'd want." His wife paused in the middle of the
kitchen and watched the stove busy humming to itself, making supper for four.
"It's
just that the nursery is different now than it was."
"All
right, let's have a look."
They
walked down the hall of their soundproofed Happylife Home, which had cost them
thirty thousand dollars installed, this house which clothed and fed and rocked
them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them.
Their
approach sensitized a switch somewhere and the nursery light flicked on when
they came within ten feet of it. Similarly, behind them, in the halls, lights
went on and off as they left them behind, with a soft automaticity.
"Well,"
said George Hadley.
They
stood on the thatched floor of the nursery. It was forty feet across by forty
feet long and thirty feet high; it had cost half again as much as the rest of
the house. "But nothing's too good for our children," George had
said.
The
nursery was silent. It was empty as a jungle glade at hot high noon. The walls
were blank and two dimensional. Now, as George and Lydia Hadley stood in the
center of the room, the walls began to purr and recede into crystalline
distance, it seemed, and presently an African veldt appeared, in three
dimensions, on all sides, in color reproduced to the final pebble and bit of
straw. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a hot yellow sun.
George
Hadley felt the perspiration start on his brow.
"Let's
get out of this sun," he said. "This is a little too real. But I don't
see anything wrong."
"Wait
a moment, you'll see," said his wife.
Now
the hidden odorophonics were beginning to blow a wind of odor at the two people
in the middle of the baked veldtland. The hot straw smell of lion grass, the
cool green smell of the hidden water hole, the great rusty smell of animals,
the smell of dust like a red paprika in the hot air. And now the sounds: the
thump of distant antelope feet on grassy sod, the papery rustling of vultures.
A shadow passed through the sky. The shadow flickered on George Hadley's
upturned, sweating face.
"Filthy
creatures," he heard his wife say.
"The
vultures."
"You
see, there are the lions, far over, that way. Now they're on their way to the
water hole. They've just been eating," said Lydia. "I don't know what."
"Some
animal." George Hadley put his hand up to shield off the burning light
from his squinted eyes. "A zebra or a baby giraffe, maybe."
"Are
you sure?" His wife sounded peculiarly tense.
"No,
it's a little late to be sure," be said, amused. "Nothing over there
I can see but cleaned bone, and the vultures dropping for what's left."
"Did
you hear that scream?" she asked.
