The girl nodded, dubiously.
Vrees went on. “There are many cases on record. I try to keep an open mind. Often you will find that identical twins have that faculty to a higher degree than the rest of us. There is the classic case of the twin sister who was on the Lusitania, and her sister in New York dreamed the entire disaster in precise detail and it was such a shock to her that she wrote it all down the moment she awakened. Later it was found to match the eye-witness reports with astounding accuracy. If I were you, Miss Jones, I should not worry too much about your both dreaming the same thing. Our purpose here is to find out why Robert started having these dreams in the first place. Once we find that reason, and eliminate it, I am positive that you will both stop having the dreams.”
“We’ve worried so much about it.”
“They do sound ominously realistic, I grant you. Frightening.”
She straightened out her gloves. “I don’t know if this means anything, Dr. Vrees, but you see, I’ve been having the dreams for five months. With Robert, it’s nearly six. And... lately... well, maybe it isn’t important.”
“Please go on, my dear.”
She lifted her chin and said, almost defiantly, “In the dreams, all of my. . duplicates are quite obviously pregnant.”
Vrees closed his mouth after an unprofessional interval. He said, “A vague theory begins to present itself. Robert states that he had a happy childhood, that he enjoyed being a member of such a large family. Eleven children, weren’t there?”
“That’s correct.”
“Let us assume for a moment that, subconsciously, he did not like being a part of a large family at all, that he resented all the others for... diluting the love his parents could have given to him alone.”
“But Robert isn’t...”
“Just a moment. Let me follow through on this. He sees a horrid dream world where your love for him is diluted in a similar fashion. I do not yet understand the symbolism of all of the duplications of him, and of yourself, but I feel that our method of approach is through psychoanalysis. I can give him two afternoons a week, a two hour session each time. I shall try to uncover this childhood feeling of jealousy toward his brothers and sisters. You see how pregnancy comes in, don’t you? Each time he saw his mother heavy with child, he knew that there would be yet another dilution of the amount of love she had to give.”
“Yes, but...”
“Now I’ll ask Robert to come in and the three of us will talk this over.”
A month later, the analyst’s couch having failed, sodium pentathol having uncovered nothing but further details of the dreams, Vrees was beginning to speculate about bringing in a colleague who had had a certain amount of success with hypnosis.
One day at lunch at his professional club, Vrees happened to sit with Louisoln, the physicist, and Cramer, another psychoanalyst. Out of common courtesy, Vrees wanted to avoid shop talk in front of Louisoln, but Cramer, having heard a bit of the Smith-Jones case, was eager to hear the latest developments, if any. In spite of his good intentions, Vrees found himself discussing the “hypothetical” case’ with a confidence so precarious that he was certain Cramer could see through it.
“What is this... duplication?” Louisoln asked.
“Just a dream, Doctor,” Vrees explained. “A patient of mine has a recurring dream in which he sees himself endlessly duplicated, laboring in a sort of bondage to a bunch of gnomes.”
Louisoln chuckled. “Duplication of matter. A pretty solution to the labor problem, no? Of course, if matter could be duplicated, the demand for labor would not be high, except for the most menial sort of work. For example, duplication of matter would be no good, if one wished a ditch dug.”
Vrees laughed, a bit flatly, “You sound, Dr. Louisoln, as though duplication of matter was a possibility. To me the idea is quite shocking.”
Louisoln raised one matted gray eyebrow. “Shocking? My boy, you are living with it, each day. I shall not go into the quantum theory.”
“Please don’t,” Cramer said, softening rudeness with a smile.
“But please, gentlemen, consider a phonograph record. Say the music, as such, is a substance. Using an electrical theory of matter, it is a substance. And it can be duplicated endlessly, by merely reproducing the same circumstances, a needle in a wax groove imparting an electrical impulse. With your kinescope the shadows of two dimensional television stars are also endlessly duplicated. So why should it be at all shocking to you, gentlemen, to fit your minds around the idea that if the electrical charges in the basic building blocks of matter can be precisely duplicated, the matter itself will be duplicated? It would take vast energy, of course, to work the mass-energy formula backwards, but inconceivable? No. Not at all.” He gave them a leonine glare and delved back into his cheese cake.
It was then that Vrees began to live in mild fantasy. Louisoln’s matter-of-fact statements gave idiotic credence to the Smith-Jones recurrent dream.
That afternoon, while listening to a well-upholstered matron relate, in doze-producing detail, an account of how, at the age of eleven, her half-sister had shoved her out of a cherry tree, breaking her collarbone, Vrees found himself playing the childhood game of “supposing.”
Suppose the legends of gnomes have a basis in fact. Suppose they are underworld or otherworld creatures, far more advanced than man. Aren’t there tales of humans being taken as slaves by them? Supposing these gnomes need more labor. A bigger supply. It would upset mankind too much to have a rash of thousands of disappearances. And then, of course, there would be the problem of selection of healthy specimens, good breeding stock, possessed of sufficient intelligence. Now if they could merely select two specimens with all the requirements, create endless duplicates, set them to work, wouldn’t it be possible that some extrasensory thread might connect the souls of those duplicated and their hard-laboring counterparts who were underworld or, perhaps, otherworld. It could well be otherworld. There had been a rash of things in the sky. And where, even in the bowels of the earth, could you find cobalt blue rock?
“What do you think, Doctor? I’m still waiting?”
“Perhaps I can detect something significant, Madame, in the way you rephrase the question.”
“I see. I’ll ask it this way. Do you think there’s any significance in the fact that it was a cherry tree I was pushed out of?”
Vrees groaned inwardly. “We have not yet reached the stage where we can discuss symbolism, Madame. If you would please continue.”
A few days later Mr. Smith and Miss Jones sat in the doctor’s office. They had come at once when myriad Doctors Vrees had appeared in their dreams.
And Dr. Vrees had been expecting their call.
Although it was now dusk, he didn’t turn on the lights. Mr. Smith and Miss Jones held hands. Tightly. Vrees had talked until his voice was husky. The avoidance of madness, he had found, was like working your way around and around the outside of a tall building, with your fingernails scratching the cornice.
Everything had been said, including the impossibility of trying to tell anyone else in the world.
They sat in silence. At last Vrees said, “I guess they decided they needed me to assist in the... ah... multiple births.”
“And take care of the children, afterward, perhaps,” Miss Jones said dreamily.
Vrees flinched inwardly. He smiled at all children, patted their heads and gave them gum. He detested them.
“Then there’s nothing we can do, is there?” Robert asked.
“Nothing,” Vrees said. “Perhaps, in time, as that... uh... regimentation causes an emotional and intellectual deviation from... our norms, the contact will gradually be broken.”