Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley by Robert Sheckley

softly under his breath. Having just discovered that he was in love, he wasn’t going to let a little thing like a voice in his mind disturb him.
    â€œI really don’t see how I can be of any help,” Anders said, brushing a bit of lint from his jacket. “You don’t know where you are, and there don’t seem to be any distinguishing landmarks. How am I to find you?” He turned and looked around the room to see if he had forgotten anything.
    â€œI’ll know when you’re close,” the voice said. “You were warm just then.”
    â€œJust then?” All he had done was look around the room. He did so again, turning his head slowly. Then it happened.
    The room, from one angle, looked different. It was suddenly a mixture of muddled colors, instead of the carefully blended pastel shades he had selected. The lines of wall, floor, and ceiling were strangely off proportion, zigzag, unrelated.
    Then everything went back to normal.
    â€œYou were very warm,” the voice said.
    Anders resisted the urge to scratch his head, for fear of disarranging his carefully combed hair. What he had seen wasn’t so strange. Everyone sees one or two things in his life that make him doubt his normality, doubt sanity, doubt his very existence. For a moment the orderly Universe is disarranged and the fabric of belief is ripped.
    But the moment passes.
    Anders remembered once, as a boy, awakening in his room in the middle of the night. How strange everything had looked! Chairs, table, all out of proportion, swollen in the dark. The ceiling pressing down, as in a dream.
    But that also had passed.
    â€œWell, old man,” he said, “if I get warm again, tell me.”
    â€œI will,” the voice in his head whispered. “I’m sure you’ll find me.”
    â€œI’m glad you’re so sure,” Anders said gaily, switched off the lights, and left.
    Lovely and smiling, Judy greeted him at the door. Looking at her, Anders sensed her knowledge of the moment. Had she felt the change in him, or predicted it? Or was love making him grin like an idiot?
    â€œWould you like a before-party drink?” she asked.
    He nodded, and she led him across the room, to the improbable green-and-yellow couch. Sitting down, Anders decided he would tell her when she came back with the drink. No use in putting off the fatal moment. A lemming in love, he told himself.
    â€œYou’re getting warm again,” the voice said.
    He had almost forgotten his invisible friend. Or fiend, as the case could well be. What would Judy say if she knew he was hearing voices? Little things like that, he reminded himself, often break up the best of romances.
    â€œHere,” she said, handing him a drink.
    Still smiling, he noticed. The number two smile—to a prospective suitor, provocative and understanding. It had been preceded, in their relationship, by the number one nice-girl smile, the don’t-misunderstand-me smile, to be worn on all occasions, until the correct words have been mumbled.
    â€œThat’s right,” the voice said. “It’s in how you look at things.”
    Look at what? Anders glanced at Judy, annoyed at his thoughts. If he was going to play the lover, let him play it. Even through the astigmatic haze of love, he was able to appreciate her blue-gray eyes, her fine skin (if one over-looked a tiny blemish on the left temple), her lips, slightly reshaped by lipstick.
    â€œHow did your classes go today?” she asked.
    Well, of course she’d ask that, Anders thought. Love is marking time.
    â€œAll right,” he said. “Teaching psychology to young apes—”
    â€œOh, come now!”
    â€œWarmer,” the voice said.
    What’s the matter with me, Anders wondered. She really is a lovely girl. The gestalt that is Judy, a pattern of thoughts, expressions, movements, making up the girl I—
    I what?
    Love?
    Anders shifted his long body uncertainly