“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.”
Robert stood up. He said, “I guess Ruth and I better go ahead with the wedding. Will you come, Doctor?”
Again he winced inwardly. “Ah... I’ve a pretty full schedule.”
“Of course,” Ruth said. “We should all get together now and then, though, to sort of... check up.”
“I’m prescribing sedatives for myself,” Vrees said. “I intend to stop dreaming.”
He walked them to the door. He could not help considering them his enemies. They had gotten him into this horror. And besides, they towered over him.
But he had to make some gesture.
At the door he said softly, so softly that they both had to bend down a little to hear him. “That sound they make. You... uh... were right. It’s definitely whoop, whoop.”
He sat alone in the dark after they had gone. He was an honest and objective man. Yet it took him an hour to isolate that final reason for his sense of bitterness. He realized it at last. Somewhere 1000 Drs. Vrees attended 10,000 Ruths. Yet, through an irony of selection, they were all as unattainable as the original Ruth was to the original Vrees. Anyway, they’d all be too busy with the children.
The Legend of Joe Lee
Originally published in Cosmopolitan, October 1964.
“Tonight,” Sergeant Lazeer said, “we get him for sure.”
We were in a dank office in the Afaloosa County Courthouse in the flat wetlands of south central Florida. I had come over from Lauderdale on the half chance of a human interest story that would tie in with the series we were doing on the teen-age war against the square world of the adult.
He called me over to the table where he had the county map spread out. The two other troopers moved in beside me.
“It’s a full moon night and he’ll be out for sure,” Lazeer said, “and what we’re fixing to do is bottle him on just the right stretch, where he got no way off it, no old back-country roads he knows like the shape of his own fist. And here we got it.” He put brackets at either end of a string-straight road.