Orbit 2

“ ‘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 comer!”

“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 comer. 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 comer, doctor. But I sure don’t see any hole anywhere on this comer.”

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. Wait 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 comer, 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-H arrowed 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.”