Science-Fiction Adventures in Dimension, page 46
Temple smiled. “Grandpop, when we found ourselves outside the cylinder on the dun, firm ground, with that strange crystalline life all about us again, I’ll admit I thought so myself. For a moment I doubted my own sanity. But when we got swayingly to our feet, it was as though my sanity had been multiplied a hundredfold. For when Joan tried to pull her hand from my clasp, and it wouldn’t come free, only a very sane man could have taken it in his stride. Y’ see what I mean?
“Looking down, and observing that our palms had been welded together by ‘wild talents’ inside the Dimension of Unreason, I didn’t go off the deep end. I knew that we’d been lucky and that a minor operation was all that we’d be needing.”
“Holy suffering cats!”
“She was just a little thing, grandpop. But when you hold a woman’s
hand day after day, week after week—there were no surgeons on board our backward-forward jeep—you’re apt to find yourself getting all steamed up over trifles you’ve never even noticed before. I began by overlooking her defects, and ended by asking her to marry me.
“Grandpop, we were spliced by the commander on the twelfth week out. Later on, I got to thinking. Take two pairs of people, grandpop. One pair is the exact duplicate of the other pair. They look and think and feel alike, and there isn’t a hairbreadth of difference between them. Have you really four people, or just two people?”
“Son, I couldn’t say. I’m not Hegel.”
“Well, for twenty-two years now, grandpop, Joan and I have been making up for all the happiness we lost near the center of the known universe—on a cool little inner planet called Urth. And somehow, grandpop, I’ve a feeling that the faces at the hub of that wheel had hoped that we’d do that.
“I have a feeling that the wheel was—well, courage outlasting the vehicle that gave it birth, human thought surviving the brain from which it came.
“Grandpop, there may be a million Joan Harveys and Ralph Temples in the Universe of Stars, and some of us may have gone off the deep end. But here on Kamith, Joan and I have made up for all the losses, for all the mishaps, for all the patterns that didn’t jell right. We may have been Morrison’s guinea pigs on Urth, but on Kamith—”
“I wish I had caught some flats,” the old man said, getting slowly to his feet. “Yes, I see what you mean. I see what you mean, lad.”
“Give your daughter these,” Temple said, raising a string of summer flounders from the flaking tide. “I’ll stay and catch some more. Joan won’t be expecting me for another hour yet.”
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Groff Conklin, Science-Fiction Adventures in Dimension
