Innerspace

Harry is a retired working-class stiff who has always attracted more than his share of everyday oddities. Bizarre coincidences happen to him all the time, and at night he dreams himself into spaces unlike anyplace on Earth.

But Harry has developed some unwelcome new talents: music and language skills out of nowhere and an inexplicable shift in time and space. At his dying wife's insistence he seeks help. His brain scans turn up only another, deeper mystery: he really shouldn’t be alive, much less walking and talking.

Harry finds himself in a medical research program for people with his rare and strange condition, in the course of which he relates his voyages in dream space to several neurologists and psychiatrists and to one of them confesses he has brought things back from other times and places.

One day a bizarre jump into a completely different time and space in the company of a terrified stranger means that Harry has to be “taken out of service,” as his handler(s), appearing abruptly during a session, explain(s) to his stunned psychiatrist. The handler(s) describe(s) to her what Harry actually is and how crucial he has been to the multiverse.

In the final chapter we meet yet another Harry, unlike his other personas and blissfully unaware of his approaching “service disconnect”— if indeed it is approaching. In the end we have to determine just which version of Harry and Harry's many worlds is the real one. Or are none of them?