"What are they?" I asked.
"Same as before, only stronger. Should send you right down to the
root of things. Pass quiet nights in no-mind, Mr. Jones, sleep beyond
the trammels of self, support yourself on the universal calm sea of
no-mind."
"If these don't work, there'll be no-fee," I told him.
* * * * *
I took three of the stronger pills that night, turned off the light and
lay back in bed, waiting for sleep to come and get me. The antiseptic
odor of the Medical Center recalled itself, but nothing else happened,
and I was still waiting to go to sleep when I woke up next morning.
No dreams of a breakfast I couldn't eat, no dreams at all. I had been
smelling the memory of formaldehyde and just slid off to sleep. I could
still smell it, for that matter, as if it were coming from the slightly
open bedroom window. I looked up.
"Hallo," said the tall skinny man in a doctor's coat on the window sill.
"Hallo yourself," I said. "Go away, I'm awake."
"Yes, you are. At least I assume you are. But I'm not."
I sat up and looked at him, and he obligingly turned his head to
profile against the brightness of the window. He had a sharp, beaky
face that was familiar.
"Haven't we met somewhere?" I asked.
"Certainly," he said, in a slightly affected voice.
"Well?"
"I don't know your name," he said, "but I have a very important
post-operative case at present, and you keep charging around the ward
when you're asleep. I just came over, as soon as I could get a few
hours' sleep myself, to ask you to stop doing it, if you don't mind."
"I've done no such thing."
"You were doing it all last night, my friend."
"I was not," I said. "I spent last night here in my own bed. I didn't
even dream."
"Ah, that probably accounts for it. Tell me, do you take drugs,
tranquilizers, by any chance? We've had a lot of trouble with that.
They seem to cause a bubble in the sequence of probabilities and things
shift about. I've been taking a new one myself, while this case is on.
I suspect that although I'm dreaming you, I think, you are not asleep
at all. At least I wasn't when you made all that noise in my ward last
night."
"No, I'm awake," I said. "Very much so."
"I see. Well, I shall wake up soon myself and go back to my own world,
of course. But while I'm here, I suppose you haven't any advanced works
on post-operative hyperspace relapse?
"Pity," he said, as I shook my head.
"I suppose you have no information on the fourth octave of
ultra-uranium elements?"
He shook his head. "Didn't even know they existed," he said. "I don't
believe they do in my probable time. What are you, a physicist? Ah," he
added, as I nodded, "I wanted to specialize in physics when I was in
college, but I went in for medicine instead."
"So did I," I said, "medicine, I mean, but I never passed pharmacology
with all those confusing extraterrestrial derivatives."
"Really?" he said interestedly. "It's my weakest subject, too. I'm a
pretty good surgeon, but an awful fool with medications. I suppose
that's how we got together. You won't come busting up the ward again,
will you?"
"I'd like to be obliging, but if I don't dream and I don't know where I
am when I'm asleep, I don't see what I can do to stop it. It's not as
if I'm really there, is it?"
* * * * *
He crossed his arms and frowned at me. "Look," he said. "In my probable
time, you're as much physically there as I am now in your time here.
I'll prove it. I know I'm asleep in the emergency surgeon's room in my
hospital. You know you're awake in your bedroom."
He held out his hand and walked across the floor to me.
"My name's Jones," he said.
"So's mine," I answered, shaking his solid hand. "This must be a very
vivid dream to you."
We smiled at each other, and as he turned away, I caught sight of his
reflection in the wall mirror beside my hairbrush on the cabinet.
"Good heavens!" I said. "In a mirror, you look exactly like me. Is your
name Harry Jones?"
He stopped, walked over to the mirror and moved about until he could
see me in it.
"Harold K. Jones," he said. "You've got the face I shave every morning,
but I've only just recognized you. You're me."
"I prefer to think you are me," I said.
"So you did fail that final pharmacology exam, eh? And I didn't, in my
probability. Well, well. I must admit it seemed more probable I would
fail at the time, but I passed."
"It was that tramp Kate's fault. She said yes too easily."
He coughed and looked at his fingers. "She said no to me. And, as a
matter of fact, after I passed I married her. She's my wife."
"I'm sorry. I meant nothing personal."
"You never married?"
"I never really got over Kate," I said.
"I wonder what would have happened if I had qualified and then not
married her."
"You mean what _did_ happen--to the Harry K. Jones who passed in
pharmacology but did not marry Kate. He must be around in another
probability somewhere, the same as we are. Good heavens," I shouted,
"somewhere I may have solved the fourth octave equation."
"You're right, Harry. And I may have found out how to get hyperspace
relapse under control."
"Harold," I said, "This is momentous! It is more probable that
you-I and I-you will make a mess of things, but there must be other
probability sequences where we are successful."
"And we can get to them," he shouted, jumping up. "Are you using
oxylatohydrobenzoic-pheophenophino?"
"Something like that."
"Three pills last thing at night?"
"Yes."
"Ever have foreign bodies materialize into your time-space?"
"Several breakfasts," I said. "The last egg was yesterday, on my shoe."
"It was Virginia ham with me, so I stopped dieting and increased the
dosage."
"So did I," I said. "I suppose, apart from major points where a whole
probability branches off, we lead much the same lives. But eggs don't
dream. How did the ham get into your waking world?"
"Harry, really! I have a tendency to jump to conclusions, which you
must control. How do you know eggs don't dream? I would have thought,
though, that a pig was peculiarly liable to the nightmare that it will
end up as a rasher--any reasonably observant pig, that is. But I don't
think that is necessary. Obviously, we are dipping down to a stratum
where things coexist in fact, and not merely one in fact and the other
in mind, or one probability and not its twin alternative. Now, how do I
get hold of the me that solved this hyperspace relapse business?"
"And I the ultra-uranium octave relationship," I added.
"Look out," he said. "I'm waking up. Good-by, Harry. Look after
myself...."
He flickered, paused in recovery and then faded insubstantially away. I
looked around my empty bedroom. Then, because it was time to go to work
at the laboratory, I shaved, dressed and left my apartment, as usual.
* * * * *
Some high brass and politicians had been visiting the laboratory,
showing off to their females how they were important enough to visit
the top-secret bomb proving labs, and the thick perfume was hanging in
the sealed rooms like a damp curtain.
"I wish they wouldn't bring women into the unventilated labs," I
grumbled to my assistant.
"Never mind, Chief. If you can make this bomb work, they'll let you
build your own lab in the Nevada desert, with no roads to it. Have you
found the solution?"
"I'll tell you when I have," I said. "But I do have a new approach to
the problem."
And as soon as I could, I left the labs and went back to my apartment
downtown, took three pills and lay still, waiting for sleep. I could
not get the smell of that perfume in the lab out of my nose. It was a
heavy gardenia-plus-whatnot odor. I woke up in the middle of the night
with the perfume still clinging to the air. The room was dark and I
crossed my fingers as I leaned over to turn on the bedside lamp. If
mental concentration on all the possible errors in my work was the key,
the successful me should be here in the room, snatched from his own
segment of probability.