The Project Gutenberg EBook of Freudian Slip, by Franklin Abel

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Title: Freudian Slip

Author: Franklin Abel

Illustrator: Harrington

Release Date: April 24, 2010 [EBook #32126]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Transcriber's Note:

This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction May 1952.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.

Freudian Slip

By FRANKLIN ABEL

Illustrated by HARRINGTON

Things are exactly what they seem? Life is real? Life is
earnest? Well, that depends.

* * * * *

On the day the Earth vanished, Herman Raye was earnestly fishing for
trout, hip-deep in a mountain stream in upstate New York.

Herman was a tall, serious, sensitive, healthy, well-muscled young man
with an outsize jaw and a brush of red-brown hair. He wore spectacles
to correct a slight hyperopia, and they had heavy black rims because
he knew his patients expected it. In his off hours, he was fond of
books with titles like _Personality and the Behavior Disorders_,
_Self-esteem and Sexuality in Women_, _Juvenile Totem and Taboo: A
study of adolescent culture-groups_, and _A New Theory of Economic
Cycles_; but he also liked baseball, beer and bebop.

This day, the last of Herman's vacation, was a perfect specimen: sunny
and still, the sky dotted with antiseptic tufts of cloud. The trout
were biting. Herman had two in his creel, and was casting into the
shallow pool across the stream in the confident hope of getting
another, when the Universe gave one horrible sliding lurch.

Herman braced himself instinctively, shock pounding through his body,
and looked down at the pebbly stream-bed under his feet.

It wasn't there.

He was standing, to all appearances, in three feet of clear water with
sheer, black nothing under it: nothing,