Orbit 2 - Anthology

by Edited by Damon Knight

  “Shriek, shriek,” said mama Regina, but her voice was muffled.

  They had a lot of fun at their house.

  * * * *

  Homer Hoose came home that evening to the golden cliché: the u.n.d.; the p.h.; the l. and u.w.; and the f.c. (four more would have been too many).

  The dog waggled all over him happily, and son Robert was chewing an apple core on the front lawn.

  “Hi, Robert,” Homer said, “what’s new today?”

  “Nothing, papa. Nothing ever happens here. Oh yeah, there’s a monster in the house. He looks kind of like you. He’s killing mama and eating her up.”

  “Eating her up, you say, son? How do you mean?”

  “He’s got her whole head in his mouth.”

  “Droll, Robert, mighty droll,” said Homer, and he went in the house.

  One thing about the Hoose children: a lot of times they told the bald-headed truth. There was a monster there. He was killing and eating the wife Regina. This was no mere evening antic. It was something serious.

  Homer the man was a powerful and quick-moving fellow. He fell on the monster with judo chops and solid body punches; and the monster let the woman go and confronted the man.

  “What’s with it, you silly oaf?” the monster snapped. “If you’ve got a delivery, go to the back door. Come punching people in here, will you? Regina, do you know who this silly simpleton is?”

  “Wow, that was a pretty good one, wasn’t it, Homer?” Regina gasped as she came from under, glowing and gulping. “Oh, him? Gee, Homer, I think he’s my husband. But how can he be, if you are? Now the two of you have got me so mixed up that I don’t know which one of you is my Homer.”

  “Great goofy Gestalten! You don’t mean I look like him?” howled Homer the monster, near popping.

  “My brain reels,” moaned Homer the man. “Reality melts away. Regina! Exorcise this nightmare if you have in some manner called it up! I knew you shouldn’t have been fooling around with that book.”

  “Listen, mister reely-brains,” wife Regina began on Homer the man. “You learn to kiss like he does before you tell me which one to exorcise. All I ask is a little affection. And this I didn’t find in a book.”

  “How we going to know which one is papa? They look just alike,” daughters Clara-Belle, Anna-Belle, and Maudie-Belle came in like three little chimes.

  “Hell-hopping horrors!” roared Homer the man. “How are you going to know—? He’s got green skin.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with green skin as long as it’s kept neat and oiled,” Regina defended.

  “He’s got tentacles instead of hands,” said Homer the man.

  “Oh boy, I’ll say!” Regina sang out.

  “How we going to know which one is papa when they look just alike?” the five Hoose children asked in chorus.

  “I’m sure there’s a simple explanation to this, old chap,” said Homer the monster. “If I were you, Homer—and there’s some argument whether I am or not—I believe I’d go to a doctor. I don’t believe we both need to go, since our problem’s the same. Here’s the name of a good one,” said Homer the monster, writing it out.

  “Oh, I know him,” said Homer the man when he read it. “But how did you know him? He isn’t an animal doctor. Regina, I’m going over to the doctor to see what’s the matter with me, or you. Try to have this nightmare back in whatever corner of your under-id it belongs in when I come back.”

  “Ask him if I keep taking my pink medicine,” Regina said.

  “No, not him. It’s the head doctor I’m going to.”

  “Ask him if I have to keep on dreaming those pleasant dreams,” Regina said. “I sure do get tired of them. I want to get back to the other kind. Homer, leave the coriander seed when you go.” And she took the package out of his pocket. “You did remember to bring it. My other Homer forgot.”

  “No. I didn’t,” said Homer the monster. “You couldn’t remember what you told me to get. Here, Regina.”

  “I’ll be back in a little while,” said Homer the man. “The doctor lives on the corner. And you, fellow, if you’re real, keep your plankton-picking polypusses off my wife till I get back.”

  * * * *

  Homer Hoose went up the street to the house of Dr. Corte on the corner. He knocked on the door, and then opened it and went in without waiting for an answer. The doctor was sitting there, but he seemed a little bit dazed.

  “I’ve got a problem, Dr. Corte,” said Homer the man. “I came home this evening, and I found a monster eating my wife—as I thought.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Dr. Corte. “Homer, we got to fix that hole on the corner.”

  “I didn’t know there was a hole there, doctor. As it happened, the fellow wasn’t really swallowing my wife, it was just his way of showing affection. Everybody thought the monster looked like me, and doctor, it has green skin and tentacles. When I began to think it looked like me too, then I came here to see what was wrong with me, or with everybody else.”

  “I can’t help you, Hoose. I’m a psychologist, not a contingent-physicist. Only one thing to do; we got to fix that hole on the corner.”

  “Doctor, there’s no hole in the street on this corner.”

  “Wasn’t talking about a hole in the street. Homer, I just got back from a visit of my own that shook me up. I went to an analyst who analyzes analysts. I’ve had a dozen people come to see me with the same sort of story,’ I told him. ‘They all come home in the evening; and everything is different, or themselves are different; or they find that they are already there when they get there. What do you do when a dozen people come in with the same nonsense story, Dr. Diebel?’ I asked him.

  “ ‘I don’t know, Corte,’ he said to me. ‘What do I do when one man comes in a dozen times with the same nonsense story, all within one hour, and he a doctor too?’ Dr. Diebel asked me.

  “ ‘Why, Dr. Diebel?’ I asked. ‘What doctor came to you like that?’

  “ ‘You,’ he said. ‘You’ve come in here twelve times in the last hour with the same dish of balderhash; you’ve come in each time looking a little bit different; and each time you act as if you hadn’t seen me for a month. Dammit, man,’ he said, ‘you must have passed yourself going out when you come in.’

  “ ‘Yes, that was me, wasn’t it?’ I said. ‘I was trying to think who he reminded me of. Well, it’s a problem, Dr. Diebel,’ I said. ‘What are you going to do about it?’

  “ ‘I’m going to the analyst who analyzes the analysts who analyze the analysts,’ he said. ‘He’s tops in the field.’ Dr. Diebel rushed out then; and I came back to my office here. You came in just after that. I’m not the one to help you. But, Homer, we got to do something about that hole on the corner!”

  “I don’t understand the bit about the hole, doctor,” Homer said. “But—has a bunch of people been here with stories like mine?”

  “Yes, every man in this block has been in with an idiot story, Homer, except— Why, everybody except old double-domed Diogenes himself! Homer, that man who knows everything has a finger in this up to the humerus. I saw him up on the power poles the other night, but I didn’t think anything of it. He likes to tap the lines before they come to his meter. Saves a lot on power that way, and he uses a lot of it in his laboratory. But he was setting up the hole on the corner. That’s what he was doing. Let’s get him and bring him to your house and make him straighten it out.”

  “Sure, a man that knows everything ought to know about a hole on the corner, doctor. But I sure don’t see any hole anywhere on this corner.”

  The man who knew everything was named Diogenes Pontifex. He lived next door to Homer Hoose, and they found him in his back yard wrestling with his anaconda.

  “Diogenes, come over to Homer’s with us,” Dr. Corte insisted. “We’ve got a couple of questions that might be too much even for you.”

  “You touch my pride there,” Diogenes sang out. “When psychologists start using psychology on you, it’s time to give in. Wa
it a minute till I pin this fellow.”

  Diogenes put a chancery on the anaconda, punched the thing’s face a few times, then pinned it with a double bar-arm and body lock, and left it writhing there. He followed them into the house.

  “Hi, Homer,” Diogenes said to Homer the monster when they had come into the house. “I see there’s two of you here at the same time now. No doubt that’s what’s puzzling you.”

  “Doctor Corte, did Homer ask you if I could stop dreaming those pleasant dreams?” wife Regina asked. “I sure do get tired of them. I want to go back to the old flesh-crawlers.”

  “You should be able to do so tonight, Regina,” said Dr. Corte. “Now then, I’m trying to bait Diogenes here into telling us what’s going on. I’m sure he knows. And if you would skip the first part, Diogenes, about all the other scientists in the world being like little boys alongside of you, it would speed things up. I believe that this is another of your experiments like— Oh no! Let’s not even think about the last one!

  “Tell us, Diogenes, about the hole on the corner, and what falls through it. Tell us how some people come home two or three times within as many minutes, and find themselves already there when they get there. Tell us how a creature that staggers the imagination can seem so like an old acquaintance after a moment or two that one might not know which is which. I am not now sure which of these Homers it was who came to my office several moments ago, and with whom I returned to this house. They look just alike in one way, and in another they do not.”

  “My Homer always was funny looking,” Regina said.

  “They appear quite different if you go by the visual index,” Diogenes explained. “But nobody goes by the visual index except momentarily. Our impression of a person or a thing is much more complex, and the visual element in our appraisal is small. Well, one of them is Homer in gestalt two, and the other is Homer in gestalt nine. But they are quite distinct. Don’t ever get the idea that such are the same persons. That would be silly.”

  “And Lord spare us that!” said Homer the man. “All right, go into your act, Diogenes.”

  “First, look at me closely, all of you,” Diogenes said. “Handsome, what? But note my clothing and my complexion and my aspect.

  “Then to the explanations: It begins with my Corollary to Phelan’s Corollary on Gravity. I take the opposite alternate of it. Phelan puzzled that gravity should be so weak on all worlds but one. He said that the gravity of that one remote world was typical, and that the gravity of all other worlds was atypical and the result of a mathematical error. But I, from the same data, deduce that the gravity of our own world is not too weak, but too strong. It is about a hundred times as strong as it should be.”

  “What do you compare it to when you decide it is too strong?” Dr. Corte wanted to know.

  “There’s nothing I can compare it to, doctor. The gravity of every body that I am able to examine is from eighty to a hundred times too strong. There are two possible explanations: either my calculations or theories are somehow in error—unlikely—or there are, in every case, about a hundred bodies, solid and weighted, occupying the same place at the same time. Old Ice Cream Store Chairs! Tennis Shoes in October! The Smell of Slippery Elm! County-Fair Barkers with Warts on Their Noses! Horned Toads in June!”

  “I was following you pretty good up to the Ice Cream Store Chairs,” said Homer the monster.

  “Oh, I tied that part in, and the tennis shoes too,” said Homer the man. “I’m pretty good at following this cosmic theory business. What threw me was the slippery elm. I can’t see how it especially illustrates a contingent theory of gravity.”

  “The last part was an incantation,” said Diogenes. “Do you remark anything different about me now?”

  “You’re wearing a different suit now, of course,” said Regina, “but there’s nothing remarkable about that. Lots of people change to different clothes in the evening.”

  “You’re darker and stringier,” said Dr. Corte. “But I wouldn’t have noticed any change if you hadn’t told us to look for it. Actually, if I didn’t know that you were Diogenes, there wouldn’t be any sane way to identify Diogenes in you. You don’t look a thing like you, but still I’d know you anywhere.”

  “I was first a gestalt two. Now I’m a gestalt three for a while,” said Diogenes. “Well, first we have the true case that a hundred or so solid and weighty bodies are occupying the same space that our earth occupies, and at the same time. This in itself does violence to conventional physics. But now let us consider the characteristics of all these cohabiting bodies. Are they occupied and peopled? Will it then mean that a hundred or so persons are occupying at all times the same space that each person occupies? Might not this idea do violence to conventional psychology? Well, I have proved that there are at least eight other persons occupying the same space occupied by each of us, and I have scarcely begun proving. Stark White Sycamore Branches! New-Harrowed Earth! (New harrow, old earth.) Cow Dung Between Your Toes in July! Pitchers’-Mound Clay in the Old Three-Eye League! Sparrow Hawks in August!”

  “I fell off the harrow,” said wife Regina. “I got the sycamore branches bit, though.”

  “I got clear down to the sparrow hawks,” said Homer the monster.

  “Do you remark anything different about me this time?” Diogenes asked.

  “You have little feathers on the backs of your hands where you used to have little hairs,” said Homer the man, “and on your toes. You’re barefoot now. But I wouldn’t have noticed any of it if I hadn’t been looking for something funny.”

  “I’m a gestalt four now,” said Diogenes. “My conduct is likely to become a little extravagant.”

  “It always was,” said Dr. Corte.

  “But not so much as if I were a gestalt five,” said Diogenes. “As a five, I might take a Pan-like leap onto the shoulders of young Fregona here, or literally walk barefoot through the hair of the beautiful Regina as she stands there. Many normal gestalt twos become gestalt fours or fives in their dreams. It seems that Regina does.

  “I found the shadow, but not the substance, of the whole situation in the psychology of Jung. Jung served me as the second element in this, for it was the errors of Phelan and Jung in widely different fields that set me on the trail of the truth. What Jung really says is that each of us is a number of persons in depth. This I consider silly. There is something about such far-out theories that repels me. The truth is that our counterparts enter into our unconsciousness and dreams only by accident, as being most of the time in the same space that we occupy. But we are all separate and independent persons. And we may, two or more of us, be present in the same frame at the same time, and then in a near, but not the same, place. Witness the gestalt two and the gestalt nine Homers here present.

  “I’ve been experimenting to see how far I can go with it, and the gestalt nine is the furthest I have brought it so far. I do not number the gestalten in the order of their strangeness to our own norm, but in the order in which I discovered them. I’m convinced that the concentric and congravitic worlds and people complexes number near a hundred, however.”

  “Well, there is a hole on the corner, isn’t there?” Dr. Corte asked.

  “Yes, I set it up there by the bus stop as a convenient evening point of entry for the people of this block,” said Diogenes. “I’ve had lots of opportunity to study the results these last two days.”

  “Well, just how do you set up a hole on the corner?” Dr. Corte persisted.

  “Believe me, Corte, it took a lot of imagination,” Diogenes said. “I mean it literally. I drew so deeply on my own psychic store to construct the thing that it left me shaken, and I have the most manifold supply of psychic images of any person I know. I’ve also set up magnetic amplifiers on both sides of the street, but it is my original imagery that they amplify. I see a never-ending field of study in this.”

  “Just what is the incantation stuff that takes you from one gestalt to another?” Homer the monster asked.

&
nbsp; “It is only one of dozens of possible modes of entry, but I sometimes find it the easiest,” said Diogenes. “It is Immediacy Remembered, or the Verbal Ramble. It is the Evocation—an intuitive or charismatic entry. I often use it in the Bradmont Motif—named by me from two as-aff writers in the twentieth century.”

  “You speak of it as if—well—isn’tthis the twentieth century?” Regina asked.

  “This the twentieth? Why, you’re right! I guess it is,” Diogenes agreed. “You see, I carry on experiments in other fields also, and sometimes I get my times mixed. All of you, I believe, do sometimes have moments of peculiar immediacy and vividness. It seems then as if the world were somehow fresher in that moment, as though it were a new world. And the explanation is that, to you, it is a new world. You have moved, for a moment, into a different gestalt. There are many accidental holes or modes of entry, but mine is the only contrived one I know of.”