On the morning of June 16th, Guy Burckhardt woke up in a cramped
position huddled under the hull of the boat in his basement--and raced
upstairs to find it was June 15th.
The first thing he had done was to make a frantic, hasty inspection of
the boat hull, the faked cellar floor, the imitation stone. They were
all as he had remembered them--all completely unbelievable.
The kitchen was its placid, unexciting self. The electric clock was
purring soberly around the dial. Almost six o'clock, it said. His wife
would be waking at any moment.
Burckhardt flung open the front door and stared out into the quiet
street. The morning paper was tossed carelessly against the steps--and
as he retrieved it, he noticed that this was the 15th day of June.
But that was impossible. _Yesterday_ was the 15th of June. It was not
a date one would forget--it was quarterly tax-return day.
He went back into the hall and picked up the telephone; he dialed for
Weather Information, and got a well-modulated chant: "--and cooler,
some showers. Barometric pressure thirty point zero four, rising ...
United States Weather Bureau forecast for June 15th. Warm and sunny,
with high around--"
He hung the phone up. June 15th.
"Holy heaven!" Burckhardt said prayerfully. Things were very odd
indeed. He heard the ring of his wife's alarm and bounded up the
stairs.
Mary Burckhardt was sitting upright in bed with the terrified,
uncomprehending stare of someone just waking out of a nightmare.
"Oh!" she gasped, as her husband came in the room. "Darling, I just
had the most _terrible_ dream! It was like an explosion and--"
"Again?" Burckhardt asked, not very sympathetically. "Mary,
something's funny! I _knew_ there was something wrong all day
yesterday and--"
He went on to tell her about the copper box that was the cellar, and
the odd mock-up someone had made of his boat. Mary looked astonished,
then alarmed, then placatory and uneasy.
She said, "Dear, are you _sure_? Because I was cleaning that old trunk
out just last week and I didn't notice anything."
"Positive!" said Guy Burckhardt. "I dragged it over to the wall to
step on it to put a new fuse in after we blew the lights out and--"
"After we what?" Mary was looking more than merely alarmed.
"After we blew the lights out. You know, when the switch at the head
of the stairs stuck. I went down to the cellar and--"
Mary sat up in bed. "Guy, the switch didn't stick. I turned out the
lights myself last night."
Burckhardt glared at his wife. "Now I _know_ you didn't! Come here and
take a look!"
He stalked out to the landing and dramatically pointed to the bad
switch, the one that he had unscrewed and left hanging the night
before....
Only it wasn't. It was as it had always been. Unbelieving, Burckhardt
pressed it and the lights sprang up in both halls.
* * * * *
Mary, looking pale and worried, left him to go down to the kitchen and
start breakfast. Burckhardt stood staring at the switch for a long
time. His mental processes were gone beyond the point of disbelief and
shock; they simply were not functioning.
He shaved and dressed and ate his breakfast in a state of numb
introspection. Mary didn't disturb him; she was apprehensive and
soothing. She kissed him good-by as he hurried out to the bus without
another word.
Miss Mitkin, at the reception desk, greeted him with a yawn.
"Morning," she said drowsily. "Mr. Barth won't be in today."
Burckhardt started to say something, but checked himself. She would
not know that Barth hadn't been in yesterday, either, because she was
tearing a June 14th pad off her calendar to make way for the "new"
June 15th sheet.
He staggered to his own desk and stared unseeingly at the morning's
mail. It had not even been opened yet, but he knew that the Factory
Distributors envelope contained an order for twenty thousand feet of
the new acoustic tile, and the one from Finebeck & Sons was a
complaint.
After a long while, he forced himself to open them. They were.
By lunchtime, driven by a desperate sense of urgency, Burckhardt made Miss
Mitkin take her lunch hour first--the June-fifteenth-that-was-yesterday,
_he_ had gone first. She went, looking vaguely worried about his strained
insistence, but it made no difference to Burckhardt's mood.
The phone rang and Burckhardt picked it up abstractedly. "Contro
Chemicals Downtown, Burckhardt speaking."
The voice said, "This is Swanson," and stopped.