"R. A. Lafferty - Stories 2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lafferty R A)

might be.
"No, I wouldn't go back to that room for any sum. But I wil1 do
something for another sum, and I'll do it damned quick."
He ran, and he hasn't stopped running yet. That he should have
another self-made flesh terrified him. He ran, hut he knew where he was
running for the first stage of it. He took the night plane back to his
hometown, leaving bag and baggage behind.
He was at the bank when it opened in the morning. He closed out all
his accounts. He turned everything into cash. This took several hours. He
walked out of there with $83,000. He didn't feel like a thief; it was his
own; it couldn't have belonged to his other self, could it? If there were
two of them, then let there be two sets of accounts.
Now to get going fast.
He continued to feel odd. He weighed himself. In spite of his great
eating lately, he had lost a hundred pounds. That's enough to make anyone
feel odd. He went to New York City to lose himself in the crowd and to think
about the matter.
And what was the reaction at his firm and at his home when he turned
up missing? That's the second point. He didn't turn up missing. As the
months went by he followed the doings of his other self. He saw his pictures
in the trade papers; he was still with the same firm he was still top
salesman. He always got the hometown paper, and he sometimes found himself
therein. He saw his own picture with his wife Veronica. She looked wonderful
and so, he had to admit, did he. They were still on the edge of the social
stuff.
"If he's me, I wonder who I am?" Clem continued to ask himself.
There didn't seem to be any answer to this. There wasn't any handle to take
the thing by.
Clem went to an analyst and told his story. The analyst said that
Clem had wanted to escape his job, or his wife Veronica, or both. Clem
insisted that this was not so; he loved his job and his wife; he got deep
and fulfilling satisfaction out of both.
"You don't know Veronica or you wouldn't suggest it," he told the
analyst. "She is -- ah -- well, if you don't know her, then hell, you don't
know anything."
The analyst told him that it had been his own id talking to him on
the telephone.
"How is it that my id is doing a top selling job out of a town five
hundred miles from here, and I am here?" Clem wanted to know. "Other men's
ids aren't so talented."
The analyst said that Clem was suffering from a tmema or diairetikos
of an oddly named part of his psychic apparatus.
"Oh hell, I'm an extrovert. Things like that don't happen to people
like me," Clem said.
Thereafter Clem tried to make the best of his compromised life. He
was quickly well and back to normal weight. But he never talked on the
telephone again in his life. He'd have died most literally if he ever heard
his own voice like that again. He had no phone in any room where he lived.
He wore a hearing aid which he did not need; he told people that he could
not hear over the phone, and that any unlikely call that came for him would