In the hall, with the door safely closed, I started to take out the wallet. I hesitated. She was the type of woman who might come to the door with more instructions. So I went down the stairs to the ground floor, and out to the sidewalk.
I had never seen this neighborhood before. I walked along the sidewalk and casually took out my wallet. Unfolding it, I saw an identification card. It was a familiar one. It was the one for Rexlo Research Corporation. It classified me as a scientist.
My name was David Thordsen!
It made sense. I wasn't going to bother about what kind of sense yet. But I felt a great weight lift. For one thing, I didn't have to wonder about where I was going to go for the day. For another, I was suddenly and irrationally sure that I wasn't insane.
Why?
Probably it was more like having a box of pieces from what seems to be a jigsaw puzzle. None of the pieces fit together. You begin to wonder if it is a puzzle, or just nonsense pieces. Then you find two that fit together. The edge of one fits into the edge of the other.
I was Fred Martin. That certainty persisted. Right now it was my only certainty. But I had been Orville Snyder who worked in the lab at Rexlo Research, although I had never heard of him before. That was one of the pieces. It fitted, somehow, against the obvious fact that I was now David Thordsen who worked there.
And yet I wasn't David Thordsen. The woman who must be his wife was a stranger to me, just as the woman who must be Orville Snyder's wife was a stranger.
There was one additional thing. When I had seemed to be Orville, I had looked in the mirror, and my features had been my own. As David Thordsen I had looked in the mirror, and my features were my own. Still the same face, the same eyes looking at me.