Free Parallelities by Alan Dean Foster Page B

identical para eyes, casting teasing shadows across their startling para bodies. Maybe being a locus for parallel worlds wasn’t such a bad thing, after all. Especially if Boles was right and the effect would wear off of its own accord.
    If that was the case, he reflected, he needed to return tothat hotel and look up his most recent para acquaintances before they snapped back into their pertinent parallel worlds. In the absence of any harmful side effects, it was an experience he ought not to miss. Especially if they all thought like sister Sherri. Some simultaneous notions might not be such a bad thing.
    Get on with your life, Boles was telling him. Could be that the old boy’s attitude was as right on as his science was way off. In any event, it would not do any good to sue him—not even in California. What kind of accusation could be brought? “Plaintiff was made an attractant to parallel worlds without his consent and with malicious intent?” Any lawsuit that made even oblique reference to Boles’s bizarre scientific theories would be laughed out of court. Even in California.
    “I do have one idea for canceling or negating the effects of the field if it doesn’t dissipate on its own,” the inventor was telling him. “It’s awfully premature and I hate to mention anything so wild.”
    “What do you call my condition now?” Max challenged him, waving his glass. By this time it was empty save for melting ice cubes.
    “From a scientific point of view, enviable.” Boles’s reply contained not a trace of irony. “I wish I had been the one affected, not you.”
    “Finally. Something we agree on.” Max’s concurrence washeartfelt. “Let’s give your idea a try, whatever it is. The results can’t be any wilder than my current reality.”
    “It isn’t going to be that easy. Certain preparations have to be made. The system must be modified and checks run.” The inventor considered. “Come back next Tuesday.”
    Sure thing
Doc, Max mused sourly.
After all, I’m way overdue for my yearly reality shot.

O ther than being passed by two apparently identical black Mercedes E-600 sedans headed north on Lincoln Avenue, a wary Max was not assaulted by any blatant parallelities on his way to work Monday morning. At the office friends and acquaintances remarked on his unusual pallor and a lack of the familiar energy that customarily seemed to radiate from him. Max barely acknowledged their stares and whispered comments. Anything that caught his eye and smacked of unnatural redundancy, from people to pencils, caught and held his attention.
    He turned in the medium story for publication, the clever embellishments he had added in the course of reliving his visit to the bereaved Collins household cheering him as he reread them. The brilliance of his own writing never failed to inspire him. He hesitated over the Boles story, finally dismissing hisconcerns with a mental shrug. A story was a story, whether it involved him personally or not. He had written selectively about the colorful and lively demonstration of Boles’s equipment, downplaying the laughable aspects of the inventor’s theories. There was a chance that the sharp-eyed Kryzewski would sniff out the omissions, but Max could not laugh at that which he no longer found funny.
    By lunchtime, his presence among familiar surroundings and friends had combined to reinvigorate much of his usual easygoing, wisecracking persona. He was almost relaxed, when he saw the twins.
    They were seated several tables across the room, in one of the darker sections of the Thai restaurant where he and his friends had gone to eat. The two young men were nearly but not quite identical, and the sight of them was like a big bucket of ice water in his face. Excusing himself from his puzzled companions, he stumbled over to the table that drew him like a fly to a
Rafflesia.
    “Pardon me,” he mumbled, interrupting their conversation. They looked to be about twenty, twenty-one. Probably