The Door Into Summer

He considered it carefully. “Well, it’s Friday … and I always like to have a head on Monday; it lets me know what day it is.”

“Carried and so ordered. Wait a second while I stuff some things in this brief case.”

We had some beers, then we had some food, then we had more beers at a place where the music was good, then we moved on to another place where there was no music and the booths had hush linings and they didn’t disturb you as long as you ordered something about once an hour. We talked. I showed him the patent records.

Chuck looked over the Eager Beaver prototype. “That’s a real nice job, Dan. I’m proud of you, boy. I’d like your autograph.”

“But look at this one.” I gave him the drafting-machine patent papers.

“Some ways this one is even nicer. Dan, do you realize that you have probably had more influence on the present state of the art than, well, than Edison had in his period? You know that, boy?”

“Cut it out, Chuck; this is serious.” I gestured abruptly at the pile of photostats. “Okay, so I’m responsible for one of them. But I can’t be responsible for the other one. I didn’t do it . . . unless I’m completely mixed up about my own life before I took the Sleep. Unless I’ve got amnesia.”

“You’ve been saying that for the past twenty minutes. But you don’t seem to have any open circuits. You’re no crazier than is normal in an engineer.”

I banged the table, making the stems dance. “I’ve got to know!”

“Steady there. So what are you going to do?”

“Huh?” I pondered it. “I’m going to pay a psychiatrist to dig it out of me.”

He sighed. “I thought you might say that. Now look, Dan, let’s suppose you pay this brain mechanic to do this and he reports that nothing is wrong, your memory is in fine shape, and all your relays are closed. What then?”

“That’s impossible.”

“That’s what they told Columbus. You haven’t even mentioned the most likely explanation.”

“Huh? What?”

Without answering he signaled the waiter and told it to bring back the big phone book, extended area. I said, “What’s the matter? You calling the wagon for me?”

“Not yet.” He thumbed through the enormous book, then stopped and said, “Dan, scan this.”

I looked. He had his finger on “Davis.” There were columns of Davises. But where he had his finger there were a dozen “D. B. Davises”-from “Dabney” to “Duncan.”

There were three “Daniel B. Davises.” One of them was me.

“That’s from less than seven million people,” he pointed out. “Want to try your luck on more than two hundred and fifty million?”

“It doesn’t prove anything,” I said feebly.

“No,” he agreed, “it doesn’t. It would be quite a coincidence, I readily agree, if two engineers with such similar talents happened to be working on the same sort of thing at the same time and just happened to have the same last name and the same initials. By the laws of statistics we could probably approximate just how unlikely it is that it would happen. But people forget-especially those who ought to know better, such as yourself-that while the laws of statistics tell you how unlikely a particular coincidence is, they state just as firmly that coincidences do happen. This looks like one. I like that a lot better than I like the theory that my beer buddy has slipped his cams. Good beer buddies are hard to come by.”

“What do you think I ought to do?”

“The first thing to do is not to waste your time and money on a psychiatrist until you try the second thing. The second thing is to find out the first name of this `D. B. Davis’ who filed this patent. There will be some easy way to do that. Likely as not his first name will be `Dexter.’ Or even `Dorothy.’ But don’t trip a breaker if it is `Daniel,’ because the middle name might be `Berzowski’ with a social-security number different from yours. And the third thing to do, which is really the first, is to forget it for now and order another round.”

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