And He Built a Crooked House

The story 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 Teal is to show Bailey and his wife, Matilda, around the house, an earthquake occurs.

Inside, they find the upper floors completely intact, but the stairs seem to form a closed loop.

In attempting to move from one room to another by way of a French window, Teal falls outside and lands in shrubbery.

They find themselves in a desert with twisted, tree-like vegetation around them, with no sign of the house or the window they just jumped through.

[2] Stating that it "was, for many readers, the first introduction to four-dimensional geometry that held any promise of comprehensibility", Carl Sagan in 1978 listed "—And He Built a Crooked House—" as an example of how science fiction "can convey bits and pieces, hints and phrases, of knowledge unknown or inaccessible to the reader".