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"'—And He Built a Crooked House—''" is a science fiction short story by Robert A. Heinlein first published in Astounding Science Fiction in March 1941. It is about a mathematically-inclined architect named Quintus Teal who has what he thinks is a brilliant idea to save on real estate costs by building a house shaped like the unfolded net of a tesseract. The night before the architect is to show the new owners around the house, there is an earthquake: the house then becomes folded through the fourth dimension. When the people go inside the house, they find that they cannot get out because all the doors only lead into other rooms. They manage to find a window which still leads outside and escape just as another earthquake rocks the house, which promptly vanishes.
This story was reprinted in the collection The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag (1959).
External links
- Story at scifi.com (http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/heinlein/heinlein1.html)