Radio Free Albemuth

PART ONE

Phil

My friend Nicholas Brady, who in his own mind helped save the world, was born in Chicago in 1928 but then moved right to California. Most of his life was spent in the Bay Area, especially in Berkeley. He remembered the metal hitching posts in the shape of horses" heads in front of the old houses in the hilly part of the city, and the electric Red Trains that met the ferries, and, most of all, the fog. Later, by the forties, the fog had ceased to lie over Berkeley in the night.

Originally Berkeley, at the time of the Red Trains and the streetcars, was quiet and underpopulated except for the University, with its illustrious frat houses and fine football team. As a child Nicholas Brady took in a few football games with his father, but he never understood them. He could not even get the team song right. But he did like the Berkeley campus with the trees and the quiet groves and Strawberry Creek; most of all he liked the sewer pipe through which the creek ran. The sewer pipe

I was the best thing on the campus. In summer, when the creek was low, he crawled up and down it. One time some people called him over and asked if he was a college student. He was eleven years old then.

I asked him once why he chose to live his life out in Berkeley, which by the forties had become overcrowded, noisy, and afflicted by angry students who fought it out at the Co-op market as if the stacks of canned food were barricades.

"Shit, Phil," Nicholas Brady said. "Berkeley is my home." People who gravitated to Berkeley believed that, even if they had only been there a week. They claimed no other place existed. This became particularly true when the coffeehouses opened up on Telegraph Avenue and the free speech movement started. One time Nicholas was standing in line at the Co-op on Grove and saw Mario Savio in line ahead of him. Savio was smiling and waving at admirers. Nicholas was on campus the day the PHUQUE sign was held up in the cafeteria, and the cops busted the guys holding it. However, he was in the bookstore, browsing, and missed the whole thing.

Although he lived in Berkeley for ever and ever, Nicholas attended the University for only two months, which made him different from everyone else. The others attended the University in perpetuity. Berkeley had an entire population of professional students who never graduated and who had no other goal in life. Nicholas's nemesis vis-a-vis the University was ROTC, which in his time was still going strong. As a child Nicholas had gone to a progressive or Communist-front nursery school. His mother, who had many friends in the Communist Party in Berkeley in the thirties, sent him there. Later he became a Quaker, and he and his mother sat around in Friends Meeting the way Quakers do, waiting for the Holy Spirit to move them to speak. Nicholas subsequently forgot all that, at least until he enrolled at Cal and found himself given an officer's uniform and an M-l rifle. Thereupon his unconscious fought back, burdened by old memories; he damaged the gun and could not go through the manual of arms; he came to drill out of uniform; he got failing grades; he was informed that failing grades in

ROTC meant automatic expulsion from Cal, to which—Nicholas said, "What's right is right."

However, instead of letting them expel him, he quit.

He was nineteen years old and his academic career was ruined. It had been his plan to become a paleontologist.

The other big university in the Bay Area, which was Stanford, cost far too much for him. His mother held the minor post of clerk for the US Department of Forestry, in a building on campus; she had no money. Nicholas faced going to work. He really hated the University and thought of not returning his uniform. He thought of showing up at drill with a broom and insisting it was his

M-l rifle. He never thought of firing the M-l rifle at his superior officers, though; the firing pin was missing.

Nicholas, in those days, was still in touch with reality.

The matter of returning his officer's uniform was solved when the University authorities opened his gym locker and took the uniform out of it, including both shirts. Nicholas had been formally severed from the military world; moral objections, more thoughts of brave demonstrations, vanished from his head, and in the fashion of students attending Cal he began roaming the streets of Berkeley, his hands stuck in the back pockets of his Levi's, gloom on his face, uncertainty in his heart, no money in his wallet, no definite future in his head. He still lived with his mother, who was tired of the 1 arrangement. He had no skills, no plans, only inchoate anger. As he walked along he sang a left-wing marching song from the International Brigade of the Loyalist Army of Spain, a Communist brigade made up mostly of Germans. The song went:

Vor Madrid im Schiitzengraben, In der Stunde der Gefahr, Mil den eisernen Brigaden, Sein Herz voll Hass geladen, Stand Hans, der Kommissar.The line- he liked best was "Sein Herz voll Hass geladen," which meant "His heart full of hate." Nicholas sang that over and over again as he strode along Berkeley Way, down to Shattuck, and then up Dwight Way back to Telegraph. Nobody noticed him because what he was doing was not unusual in Berkeley at that time. One often saw as many as ten students striding along in jeans singing left-wing songs and pushing people out of the way. "

At the corner of Telegraph and Channing the woman behind the counter at University Music waved at him, because Nicholas often hung around there browsing through the records. So he went inside.

"You don't have your uniform on," the woman said.

"I've dropped out of the fascist university," Nicholas said, which certainly was true.

Pat excused herself to wait on a real customer, so he took an album of the Firebird Suite into a listening booth and put on the side where the giant egg cracks open. It fitted his mood, although he was not certain what came out of the egg. The picture on the album cover just showed the egg, and someone with a spear evidently going to break the egg.

Later on, Pat opened the door of the listening booth, and they talked about his situation.

"Maybe Herb would hire you here," Pat said. "You're in the store all the time, you know the stock, and you know a lot about classical music."

"I know where every record in the store is," Nicholas said, excited at the idea.

"You'd have to wear a suit and tie."

"I have a suit and tie," Nicholas said.

Going to work for University Music at nineteen was probably the greatest move of his life, because it froze him into a mold that never broke, an egg that never opened - or at least did not open for twenty-five more years, an awfully long time for someone who had really never done anything but play in the parks of Berkeley, go to the Berkeley public schools, and spend Saturday afternoons at the kiddies" matinee at the Oaks Theater on Solano Avenue, where they showed a newsreel, a selected short subject, and two cartoons before the regular subject, all for eleven cents.

Working for University Music on Telegraph Avenue made him part of the Berkeley scene for decades to come and shut off all possibilities of growth or knowledge of any other life, any larger world. Nicholas had grown up in Berkeley and he remained in Berkeley, learning how to sell records and later how to buy records, how to interest customers in new artists, how to refuse taking back defective records, how to change the toilet paper roll in the bathroom behind the number three listening booth - it became his whole world: Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra and Ella Mae Morse, Oklahoma, and later South Pacific, and "Open the Door, Richard" and "If I'd Known You Were Coming I'd Have Baked a Cake." He was behind the counter when Columbia brought out LP records. He was opening cartons from the distributors when Mario Lanza appeared, and he was checking inventory and back orders when Mario Lanza died. He personally sold five thousand copies of Jan Peerce's "Bluebird of Happiness," hating each copy. He was there when Capitol Records went into the classical music line and when their classical music line folded. He was always glad he had gone into the retail record business, because he loved classical music and loved being around records all the time, selling them to customers he personally knew and buying them at discount for his own collection; but he also hated the fact that he had gone into the record business because he realized the first day he was told to sweep the floor that he would be a semi-janitor, semi-clerk the rest of his life - he had the sarrie mixed attitude toward it he had had toward the university and toward his father. Also, he had the same mixed attitude toward Herb Jackman, his boss, who was married to Pat, an Irish girl. Pat was very pretty and a lot younger than Herb, and Nicholas had a heavy crush on her for years and years, up until the time they all became older and did a lot of drinking together at Hambone Kelley's, a cabaret in El Cerrito that featured Lu Walters and his Dixieland jazz band.

I met Nicholas for the first time in 1951, after Lu Watters's band had become Turk Murphy's band and signed up with Columbia Records. Nicholas often came into the bookstore where I worked during his lunch hour, to browse among the used copies of Proust and Joyce and Kafka, the used textbooks the students at the university sold us after their courses - and their interest in literature - ended. Cut off from the university, Nicholas Brady bought the used textbooks from the poly sci and literature classes that he could never attend; he had quite a knowledge of English lit, and it wasn't very long before we got to talking, became friends, and finally became roommates in an upstairs apartment in a brown shingle house on Bancroft Way, near his store and mine.

I had just sold my first science fiction story, to Tony Boucher at a magazine called Fantasy and Science Fiction, for $75, and was considering quitting my job as book clerk and becoming a full time writer, something I subsequently did. Science fiction writing became my career.

The first of Nicholas Brady's paranormal experiences occurred at the house on Francisco Street where he lived for years; he and his wife, Rachel, bought the house for $3,750 when they first got married in 1953. The house was very old - one of the original Berkeley farmhouses -on a lot only thirty feet wide, with no garage, on a mud sill, the only heat being from the oven in the kitchen. His monthly payments were $27.50, which is why he stayed there so long.

I used to ask Nicholas why he never painted or repaired the house; the roof leaked and in wintertime during the heavy rains he and Rachel put out empty coffee cans to catch the water dripping everywhere. The house was an ugly peeling yellow.

"It would defeat the purpose of having such an inexpensive house," Nicholas explained. He still spent most of his money on records. Rachel took courses at the University, in the political science department. I rarely found her home when I dropped by. Nicholas told me one time that his wife had a crush on a fellow student, who headed the youth group of the Socialist Workers Party just off campus. She resembled the other Berkeley girls I used to see: jeans, glasses, long dark hair, assertive loud voice, continually discussing politics. This, of course, was during the McCarthy period. Berkeley was becoming extremely political.

Nicholas had Wednesdays and Sundays off from work.

On Wednesday he was home alone. On Sunday both he and Rachel were home.

One Wednesday - this is not the paranormal experience - when Nicholas was home listening to Beethoven's Eighth Symphony on his Magnavox phonograph, two FBI agents dropped by.

"Is Mrs Brady home?" they asked.They wore business suits and carried bulging briefcases. Nicholas thought they were insurance salesmen.

"What do you want from her?" he demanded with hostility. He imagined they were trying to sell her something.

The two agents exchanged glances and then presented Nicholas with their identification. Nicholas was filled with rage and terror. He started telling the two FBI agents, in a stammering voice, a joke he had read in Talk of the Town" in The New Yorker about two FBI agents who were checking up on a man, and, while interviewing a neighbor, the neighbor had said that the man listened to symphonies, and the agents asked suspiciously what language the symphonies were in.

The two agents standing on Nicholas's front porch; on hearing his garbled version of the story, did not find it funny.

That wasn't our office," one of them said.

"Why don't you talk to me? " Nicholas demanded, protecting his wife.

Again the two FBI agents exchanged glances, nodded, and entered the house. Nicholas, in a state of terror, sat facing them, trying to quell his shaking.

"As you know," the agent with the greater double chin explained, "it is our job to protect the liberties of American citizens from totalitarian intrusion. We never investigate legitimate political parties such as the Democratic or Republican parties, which are bona fide political parties under American law." He then began to talk about the Socialist Workers Party, which, he explained to Nicholas, was not a legitimate political party but a Communist organization devoted to violent revolution at the expense of American liberties.

Nicholas knew all that. He kept silent, however.

"And your wife," the other agent said, "could be of use to us, since she belongs to the student corps of the SWP, in reporting who attends their meetings and what is said there." Both agents looked expectantly at Nicholas.

"I'll have to discuss this with Rachel," Nicholas said. "When she comes home."

"Are you engaged in political activity, Mr Brady?" the agent with the greater double chin asked him. He had a notebook before him and a fountain pen. The two agents had propped one of their briefcases between Nicholas and them; he saw a square object bulging within it and knew he was being taped.

"No," Nicholas said, truthfully. All he did was listen to exotic rare foreign vocal records, especially those of Tiana Lemnitz, Erna Berger, and Gerhard Husch.

"Would you like to be?" the lesser agent asked.

"Um," Nicholas said.

"You're familiar with the International People's Party," the greater agent said. "Had you ever considered attending meetings of it? They hold them about a block from here, on the other side of San Pablo Avenue."

"We could use someone in there at the local group meeting," the lesser agent said. "Are you interested?"

"We can finance you," his colleague added.

Nicholas blinked, gulped, and then gave the first speech of his life. The agents were not pleased, but they listened.

Later on that day, after the agents had left, Rachel arrived home, loaded down with textbooks and looking cross.

"Guess who was here today looking for you," Nicholas said. He told her who.

"Bastards!" Rachel cried out. "Bastards!"

It was two nights later that Nicholas had his mystical experience.

He and Rachel lay in bed, asleep. Nicholas was on the left, nearer the door of their bedroom. Still disturbed by the recent visit of the FBI agents, he slept lightly, tossing a lot, having vague dreams of an unpleasant nature. Toward dawn, just when the first false white light was beginning to fill the room, he lay back on a nerve, awoke from the pain, and opened his eyes.

A figure stood silently beside the bed, gazing down at him. The figure and Nicholas regarded each other; Nicholas grunted in amazement and sat up. At once Rachel awoke and began to scream

"Ich bin's!" Nicholas told her reassuringly (he had taken German in high school). What he meant to tell her was that the figure was himself, "Ich bin's" being the German idiom for that. However, in his excitement he did not realize he was speaking a foreign language, albeit one Mrs Altecca had taught him in the twelfth grade. Rachel could not understand him. Nicholas began to pat her, but he kept on repeating himself in German. Rachel was confused and frightened. She kept on screaming. Meanwhile, the figure disappeared.

Later on, when she was fully awake, Rachel was uncertain whether or not she had seen the figure or just reacted to his start of surprise. It had all been so sudden.

"It was myself," Nicholas said, ‘standing beside the bed gazing down at me. I recognized myself."

"What was it doing there?" Rachel said.

"Guarding me," Nicholas said. He knew it. He could tell from having seen the expression on the figure's face. So there was nothing to be afraid of. He had the impression that the figure, himself, had come back from the future, perhaps from a point vastly far ahead, to make certain that he, his prior self, was doing okay at a critical time in his life. The impression was distinct and strong and he could not rid himself of it.

Going into the living room, he got his German dictionary and checked the idiom that he had used. Sure enough, it was correct. It meant, literally, "I am it."

He and Rachel sat together in the living room, drinking instant coffee, in their pajamas.

"I wish I was sure if I saw it," Rachel kept repeating. "Something sure scared me. Did you hear me scream? I didn't know I could scream like that. I don't think I ever screamed like that before in my life. I wonder if the neighbors heard. I hope they don't call the police. I'll bet I woke them up. What time is it? It's getting light; it must be dawn."

"I never had anything like that happen before in my life," Nicholas said. "Boy, was I surprised, opening my eyes like I did and seeing it - me - standing there. What a shock. I wonder if anybody else ever had that happen to them. Boy."

"We're so near the neighbors," Rachel said. "I hope I didn't wake them."

The next day Nicholas came around to my place to tell me about his mystical experience and get my opinion. He was not exactly candid about it, however; initially he told it to me not as a personal experience but as a science fiction idea for a story. That was so if it sounded nutty the onus wouldn't be on him.

"I thought," he said, "as a science fiction writer you could explain it. Was it time travel? Is there such a thing as time travel? Or maybe an alternate universe."

I told him it was himself from an alternate universe. The proof was that he recognized himself. Had it been a future self he would not have recognized it, since it would have been altered from the features he saw in the mirror. No one could ever recognize his own future self. I had written about that in a story, once. In the story the man's future self came back to warn him just as he, the protagonist, was about to do something foolish. The protaganist, not recognizing his future self, had killed it. I had yet to market the story, but my hopes were good. My agent, Scott Meredith, had sold everything else I had written.

"Can you use the idea?" Nicholas asked.

"No," I told him. "It's too ordinary."

"Ordinary!" He looked upset. "It didn't seem ordinary to me that night. I think it had a message for me, and it was beaming the message at me telepathically, but I woke up and that ended the transmission."

I explained to him that if you encountered your self from an alternate universe - or from the future, for that matter - you would hardly need to employ telepathy. That wasn't logical, since there would be no linguistic barrier. Telepathy was used when contact between members of different races, such as from other star systems, took place.

"Oh,"Nicholas said, nodding.

"It was benign?" I asked.

"Sure it was; it was me. I'm benign. You know, Phil, in some ways my whole life is a waste. What am I doing at my age, working as a clerk in a record shop? Look what you're doing - you're a full-time writer. Why the hell can't I do something like that? Something meaningful. I'm a clerk! The lowest of the low!" And Rachel is going to be a full professor some day, when she's through school. I should never have dropped out; I should have gotten my BA."

I said, "You sacrificed your academic career for a noble cause, your opposition to war."

"I broke my gun. There was no cause; I was just inept the day we had to take apart our gun and put it back together. I lost the trigger down inside the works. That's all."

I explained to him how his subconscious was wiser than his conscious mind, and how he ought to take credit for its vision, its sense of higher values. After all, it was part of him.

"I'm not sure I believe that," Nicholas said. "I'm not sure what I believe any more. Not since those two FBI agents came by and rousted me. They wanted me to spy-on my wife! I think that's what they were really after. They get people to spy on each other, like in 1984, and destroy the whole society. What does my life add up to, Phil, in comparison to yours, say? In comparison to anyone's? I'm going to Alaska. I was over the other day talking to the man at Southern Pacific; they have connections to Alaska through a yacht that goes up there three times a year. I could go on that. I think that's what my self from the future or an alternate universe was there to tell me, the other night, that my life doesn't add up to anything and I better do something drastic. I probably was about to find out what I was supposed to do, only I wrecked it all by waking up and opening my eyes. Actually it was Rachel who scared it off by screaming; that's when it left. If it wasn't for her I'd know how to organize my future, whereas as it stands I know nothing,

I'm doing nothing, I have no hopes or prospects except checking in the goddamn Victor shipment that's up there at the shop waiting for me, forty big cartons - the whole fall line they pushed on us, that even Herb went for. Because of the ten percent discount." He lapsed into gloomy silence.

"What did the FBI agents look like?" I asked, never having seen one. Everybody in Berkeley was scared of just such a visit as Nicholas had received, myself included. It was the times.

They have fat red necks and double chins. And little eyes, like two coals stuck into dough. And they watch you all the time. They never take their eyes off you. They had faint but detectable southern accents. They said they'd be back to talk to both of us. They'll probably be by to talk to you too. About your writing. Are your stories left-wing?"

I asked, "Haven't you read them?"

"I don't read science fiction," Nicholas said. "I just read serious writers like Proust and Joyce and Kafka. When science fiction has something serious to say, I'll read it." He began, then, to talk up the virtues of Finnegans Wake, in particular the final part, which he compared to the final part of Ulysses. It was his belief that no one but himself had either read it or understood it.

"Science fiction is the literature of the future," I told him, when he paused. "In a few decades they'll be visiting the moon."

"Oh, no," Nicholas said vigorously. "They'll never visit the moon. You're living in a fantasy world."

"Is that what your future self told you?" I said. "Or your self from another universe, whatever it was?"

It seemed to me that it was Nicholas who was living in a fantasy world, working in the record store as a clerk, meanwhile always lost in great literature of a sort divorced from his own reality. He had read so much James Joyce that Dublin was more real to him than Berkeley. And yet even to me Berkeley was not quite real but lost, as Nicholas was, in fantasy; all of Berkeley dreamed a political dream separate from the rest of America, a dream soon to be crushed, as reaction flowed deeper and deeper and spread out wider. A person like Nicholas Brady could never go to Alaska; he was a product of Berkeley and could only survive in the radical student milieu of Berkeley. What did he know of the rest of the United States? I had driven across the country; I had visited Kansas and Utah and Kentucky, and I knew the isolation of the Berkeley radicals. They might affect America a little with their views, but in the long run it would be solid conservative America, the Midwest, which would win out. And when Berkeley fell, Nicholas Brady would fall with it.

Of course this was a long time ago, before President Kennedy was assassinated, before President Ferris Fremont and the New American Way. Before the darkness closed over us completely.

Being politically oriented, Nicholas had already noted the budding career of the junior senator from California, Ferris F. Fremont, who had issued forth in 1952 from Orange County, far to the south of us, .an area so reactionary that to us in Berkeley it seemed a phantom land, made of the mists of dire nightmare, where apparitions spawned that were as terrible as they were real -more real than if they had been composed of solid reality. Orange County, which no one in Berkeley had ever actually seen, was the fantasy at the other end of the world, Berkeley's opposite; if Berkeley lay in the thrall of illusion, of detachment from reality, it was Orange County which had pushed it there. Within one universe the two could never coexist.

It was as if Ferris Fremont stood amid the deserts of Orange County and imagined, at the north end of the state, the unreal thralldom of Berkeley and shuddered and said to himself something on the order of That must go. If the two men, Nicholas Brady in the north and Ferris Fremont in the south, could have looked across the six-hundred-mile distance between them and confronted each other, both would have been appalled as he read in the Berkeley Daily Gazette about the rise to political power of the publisher from Oceanside who had gotten his chance in the Senate by defaming his Democratic rival, Margaret Burger Greyson, as a homosexual.

As a matter of record, Margaret Burger Greyson was a routine senator, but the defamatory charges had formed the basis of Fremont's victory, not her voting record. Fremont had used his newspaper in Oceanside to blast Mrs Greyson, and, financed by unknown sources, he had plastered the southern part of the state with billboards darkly alluding to Mrs Greyson's sex life.

CALIFORNIA NEEDS A STRAIGHT CANDIDATE!

DON"T YOU THINK THERE"S SOMETHING QUEER ABOUT GREYSON?

That kind of thing. It was based on a supposedly actual incident in Mrs Greyson's life, but no one really knew.

Mrs Greyson fought back but never sued. After her defeat she vanished into obscurity, or maybe, as Republicans joked, into the gay bars of San Diego. Mrs Greyson, needless to say, had been a liberal. In the McCarthy days there wasn't that much difference in the public's view between communism and homosexuality, so Fremont had little difficulty winning, once his smear campaign began.

At that time Fremont was a callow lout, fat-cheeked and sullen, with beetle brows and pasted-down black hair that looked greased into place; he wore a pinstripe suit and loud tie and two-tone shoes, and it was said that he had hair on his knuckles. He was frequently photographed at the target range, guns being his hobby. He liked to wear a Stetson hat. Mrs Greyson's only rejoinder to him that ever received any favor was a bitter remark, made after the returns had come in, that Fremont certainly was no straight shooter, straight or not. Anyhow, Mrs Greyson's political career was ended, Ferris F. Fremont's begun. He flew at once to Washington, DC, in search of a house for himself, his wife, Candy, and their two bulbous sons, Amos and Don.

Now, you should have seen the effects in Berkeley of all this shit. Berkeley did not take it well. The radical student milieu resented a campaign's being won on such a basis, and they resented Fremont's showing up in Washington even more. They did not so much care for Mrs Greyson as they resented the winner; for one thing, as Republicans pointed out, there were many gays in Berkeley, and there certainly were many pinkos: Berkeley was the pinko capital of the world.

The pinko capital of the world was not surprised when Senator Fremont was named to a committee investigating un-American activities. It wasn't surprised when the senator nailed several prominent liberals as Communist Party members. But it was surprised when Senator Fremont made the Aramchek accusation.

Nobody in Berkeley, including the Communist Party members living and working there, had ever heard of Aramchek. It mystified them. What was Aramchek? Senator Fremont claimed in his speech that a Communist Party member, an agent of the Politburo, had under pressure given him a document in which the CP-USA discussed the nature of Aramchek, and that from this document it was evident that the CP-USA, the Communist Party of America, was itself merely a front, one among many, cannon fodder as it were, to mask the real enemy, the real agency of treason, Aramchek. There was no membership roll in Aramchek; it did not function in any normal way. Its members espoused no particular philosophy, either publicly or privately. Yet it was Aramchek that was stealthily taking over these United States. You'd have thought someone in the pinko capital would have heard of it.

At that time I knew a girl who belonged to the Communist Party. She had always seemed strange, even before she joined, and after she joined she was insufferable. She wore bloomers and informed me that the sex act was an exploitation of women, and one time, in anger at my choice of friends, she dropped her cigarette in my cup of coffee at Larry Blake's restaurant on Telegraph Avenue. My friends were Trotskyists. I had introduced her to two of them in public, without telling her their political affiliations. You never did that in Berkeley. Liz came by my table the next day at Larry Blake's, not speaking; I think it got her in trouble with the Party. Anyhow one time kiddingly I asked her if she also belonged to Aramchek as well as to the Party.

"What a crock," she said. "What a fascist lie. There is no Aramchek. I would know."

"If it existed," I asked, "would you join it?"

"It would depend on what it does."

"It overthrows America," I said.

"Don't you think monopoly capitalism with its suppression of the working class and its financing of imperialist wars through puppet regimes should be overthrown?" Liz said.

"You'd join it," I said.

But even Liz couldn't join Aramchek if it didn't exist. I never saw her after she dropped her cigarette in my coffee at Larry Blake's; the Party had told her not to talk to me again, and she did what it said. Still, I don't believe she ever managed to rise high in the Communist Party; she was a typical low-echelon type, devoted to following orders but never really getting them right. Ever since, I've wondered what happened to her. I doubt if she ever wondered what happened to me; after the Party pronounced the ban on me I ceased to exist, as far as she was concerned.

One night I had dinner with Nicholas and Rachel where the topic of Aramchek came up. The Socialist Workers Party had passed a resolution denouncing both Senator Fremont and Aramchek: one the arm of US imperialism, the other the arm of militant Moscow.

That's covering both bases," Nicholas commented. "You SWP are certainly opportunists."

Rachel smiled the superior sneering smile of a Berkeley poly sci girl.

"Are you still seeing that guy?" Nicholas said, meaning the SWP organizer that his wife had a crush on.

"Are you still in love with your boss's wife?" Rachel demanded.

"Well," Nicholas muttered, fooling with his coffee cup.

"I think Fremont has a great concept there," I said. "Denouncing an organization that doesn't even exist -one Fremont made up and says it's taking over America. Obviously no one can destroy it. No one's safe from it. No one knows where it'll turn up next."

"In Berkeley," Nicholas said.

"In Kansas City," I said. "In the heartland. In Salt Lake City - anywhere. Fremont can form anti-Aramchek cadres, youth groups on the right dedicated to fighting it wherever it manifests itself, armed uniformed bands of kids ever vigilant. It'll get Fremont into the White House." I was kidding. But, as we all know, I turned out to be right. After the death of John Kennedy, and his brother's death, and the death of virtually every other major political figure in the United States, it took only a few years.

The purpose of killing the leading political figures in the United States by violent assassination, allegedly by screwed-up loners, was to get Ferris F. Fremont elected. It was the only way. He could not effectively compete. Despite his aggressive campaigns, he bordered on the worthless. Some time ago one of his aides must have pointed that out to him. "If you're going to get into the White House, Ferris," the aide must have said, "you've got to kill everyone else first." Taking him literally, Ferris Fremont did so, starting in 1963 and working his way forward during the administration of Lyndon Johnson.

By the time Lyndon Johnson had retired, the field was clear. The man who could not compete did not have to.

There is no point in dwelling on the ethics of Ferris Fremont. Time has already rendered its verdict, the verdict of the world - except for the Soviet Union, which still holds him in great respect. That Fremont was in fact closely tied to Soviet intrigue in the United States, backed in fact by Soviet interests and his strategy framed by Soviet planners, is in dispute but is nonetheless a fact. The Soviets backed him, the right-wingers backed him, and finally just about everyone, in the absence of any other candidate, backed him. When he took office, it was on the wave of a huge mandate. Who else could they vote for? When you consider that in effect Fremont was running against no one else, that the Democratic Party had been infiltrated by his people, spied on, wiretapped, reduced to shambles, it makes more sense. Fremont had the backing of the US intelligence community, as they liked to call themselves, and ex-agents played an effective role in decimating political opposition. In a one-party system there is always a landslide.

One asks, Why should such disparate groups as the Soviet Union and the US intelligence community back the same man? I am no political theoretician, but Nicholas one time said, "They both like figureheads who are corrupt. So they can govern from behind. The Soviets and the fuzz, they're all for shadow governments. They always will be, because basically each of them is the man with the gun. The pistol to the head."

No one had put a pistol to Ferris Fremont's head. He, was the pistol itself, pointed at our head. Pointed at the people who had elected him. Behind him stood all the cops in the world, the left-wing cops in Russia, the right-wing cops in the United States. Cops are cops. There are only divisions of rank, into greater and lesser. The top cop is probably never seen.

However, Nicholas was no political theoretician either. In point of fact he had no idea how the coalition behind Fremont had formed; in fact he had no idea it existed. Like the rest of us over those years, he simply stood amazed as prominent politicians were murdered and Fremont rose rapidly to power. What was happening made no sense. No pattern could be discerned.

There is a Latin motto, when one is seeking to know who has committed a crime, that goes, Look to see who gains. When John Kennedy was murdered, and Dr King, and Bobby Kennedy, and the others, when George Wallace was crippled, we should have asked, Who gains? All men in America lost by these dreadful senseless murders except one second-rate man whose way was now clear to the White House: clear to get in and clear to remain. Who otherwise would have had no chance.

We should forgive ourselves, though, for not figuring out who was doing it and why; after all, it had never happened in the United States before, although the history of other countries is full of it. The Russians know it well; so do the English - take Crookback Dick, as Shakespeare calls Richard HI. There was the paradigm for this: Richard, who murdered his way to the throne, killing even children, and all with the excuse that nature had made him ugly. Nature had made Ferris Fremont ugly too, inside and out. Personally, it never entered my mind. We thought of a lot of possibilities, but not really that. The Tartar mind had never schemed for the American throne until then.

I do not, however, propose to write about how Ferris Fremont got to power. I propose to write about his downfall. The former story is known, but I doubt if anyone understands the way he was defeated. I intend to write about Nicholas Brady, and about Nick Brady's friends.

Even though I had quit my job at the bookstore to write full-time, I still liked to drop into University Music to listen to the new LPs and say hello to Nicholas, who now spent much of his time with the salesmen from the various distributors or up in the office doing paperwork. By 1953 for all intents and purposes he managed University Music; the owner, Herb Jackman, had another store in Kensington and spent his time there. It was nearer his home. Pat still worked in Berkeley, and she and Nicholas were together most days.

What I didn't know was that Herb had a heart condition. He had suffered one heart attack in 1951, and his doctor ordered him to retire. He was only forty-seven and he would not retire; instead he bought a very small store in Kensington, and puttered around in it. The only day it did any business was on Saturday, whereas University Music employed five clerks and was busy all the time.

Nicholas and Pat, of course, knew about Herb's heart condition. Sometimes on Saturday night Herb and his buddies got together in the office at University Music and played poker, at which times I occasionally joined them. All his buddies knew about his heart condition. They were a rough bunch, but they liked him a lot; most of them were small businessmen in the neighborhood, and they had common interests, such as all the dopers moving onto Telegraph Avenue. They could see what lay ahead. Nicholas used to say later on that what killed Herb was the drug scene on Telegraph. Before Herb died he had time to see spade pushers offering joints to passersby openly across the street down toward Dwight. To a straitlaced man from Oklahoma like Herb, that would do it.

I also played poker with Tony Boucher and his friends, at his house on Dana; they, „like me, were all science fiction writers. Nicholas never played poker; he was too intellectual for that. Nicholas was your typical Berkeley intellectual, involved with books and records and the Avenue coffeehouses. He and Rachel, when they felt like going out, crossed the bay to San Francisco and headed straight for North Beach and the coffeehouses there, along Grant. Before that they stopped in Chinatown and ate dinner at exactly the same restaurant, the oldest one there, according to them: Yee Jun's, on Washington. You had to go downstairs to the basement, and the tables had marble tops. There was a short waiter there named Walter who, it was said, fed homeless students for free, the sort filling up San Francisco who would one day cease being the Beatniks, as Herb Caen termed them, and become the Haight-Ashbury hippies. Nicholas was never a Beatnik or a hippie - he was far too intellectual for that - but he resembled one, with his jeans and tennis shoes and his short beard and tousled hair.

The big problem for Nicholas was the prospect of remaining a record clerk all his life. Even managing University Music seemed to be that, and it was messing up his head, especially as his wife moved toward getting her degree. Instead of going to school he was putting his wife through school. He had the feeling that Rachel looked down on him. Berkeley being a college town, he felt that most people looked down on him. It was a difficult period for him. Obviously his boss would have another heart attack, at which point Pat, as the legal owner of University Music, would undoubtedly put him, Nicholas Brady, in charge of the store. He would be doing what Herb had been doing, which he was virtually doing already, and it came into his mind that probably he would wind up like Herb: dead from worry and overwork at a job that gave little back, dead at an early age, at his post from nine in the morning until midnight. Retail record selling, for the independent owner, was a losing proposition; the big chains were starting to come in, Music Box and the Wherehouse, the discount record stores.

At this time Nicholas had another paranormal experience. He told me about it the next day.

This one had to do with Mexico. He had never been to Mexico and knew little about it, and this was why the detail of the dream amazed him so: every car, every building, all the people on the sidewalks and in the restaurants were so sharply etched. And it was no return to a past life because he saw Yellow Cabs - it was truly modern, a big city such as Mexico City itself, very busy, very noisy, but with the sounds somehow muted and at a constant background level of murmuring. In the dream he never heard a single clear word. No one spoke to him; there were no characters, just cars£ taxis, street signs, stores, restaurants. It was entirely scenic. And it rolled on and on for hours, in a strange vivid shiny color, the kind, Nicholas said, you find in acrylic paint.

The dream had come to him oddly: during the day. At about two in the afternoon, on his day off, he had gotten sleepy and had lain down on the living room couch. The dream began at once. He was at a taco stand buying a taco. But then the scene rolled open, as if doors had swung wide or lifted up; all at once he no longer stood before the taco stand but, instead, faced a panorama of Mexico itself. Romantic and thrilling it was, sparkling with color in the night, drawing him toward it with many hints and promises. It fanned out in all directions, a vast foreign landscape not known to him, not a part of the contents of his own mind, lovely, compelling, leading him on so that after a short time he was in the midst of it, with the rich life spilling by on all sides: the murmur of people, the swish of traffic, and all so real, so unmistakably real.

At one point he found himself moving with a small group through a museum of some sort, located at the edge of the ocean. He saw many exhibits and pictures he could not later recall, but that section alone evidently lasted for hours. The total elapsed time of the experience, in real time, was almost eight hours. He had noticed what time it was when he lay down, and when he rose he rechecked it. Eight hours of scenic Mexico, and for no cost!

Later he said to me, "It was as if another mind were trying to communicate with me. Life unlived, I think. Where I might have lived. What I might have experienced."

I couldn't argue with that. His constricted Berkeley life certainly cried out for such a vivid trip.

"Maybe it means you should move to Southern Califor-. nia," I said.

"No, it was Mexico - a foreign country."

"Have you ever thought of moving to LA?"

He did not find that funny. "A vast mind was talking to me! Across endless miles of space! From another star!"

"Why?" I asked.

"I believe it has seen my needs. I believe it intends to direct my life toward some great goal presently unglimpsed. I - " Nicholas got a sly, secretive look on his face. "I have a name for it: Valisystem A. It stands for

Vast Active Living Intelligent System A. I call it "A" because it may be only one out of many. It has all those characteristics; it is vast, it is active, it is intelligent, and it forms a coherent system."

"You know all that from its showing you Mexico?"

"I sensed it there. I intuited its nature. Sometimes I lie awake at night and try to commune with it. All this has resulted from my appeals over the years; I've appealed for this many times."

I thought over the word "appeal" and then realized that the word he meant was prayer. He had prayed for this, was what he intended to say, but no one in Berkeley ever used the word "prayer." There was no religion in Berkeley, except among the Okies who had migrated out during World War II to work in the Richmond shipyards. Nicholas wouldn't be caught dead using the word "prayer."

I guessed, then, that he had had other experiences with Valis, as he called him.

As a matter of fact he had had other experiences, which he later told me about: dreams of a peculiar repetitive nature, in which large open books were held up before his eyes, with printing like that of old Bibles. In each dream he either read or tried to read the printing, with meager results - at least to his conscious mind. There was no telling how much he absorbed unconsciously and repressed or forgot on awakening: probably a great deal. I had the impression, from what he said, that he was shown enough writing in his dreams to have taken the equivalent of a crash course - in what, neither he nor I could tell.

This went on for some time. A year later when I ran into Nicholas he was still seeing written pages in his sleep, although not as frequently. One interesting thing he told me was that he had discovered, upon falling into and out of sleep, that the writing appeared in his dreams only between 3:00 and 4:00 A.M.

That must mean something," I said.

The only words he had been able to read clearly had to do with him, although he was certain that his name appeared frequently in other texts. This passage ran:

A RECORD CLERK IN BERKELEY WILL HAVE MANY TROUBLES, AND AT LAST HE WILL

No more; the rest had been forgotten or just plain blurred. In that dream the book was held by, of all people, me; I stood with the pages open and extended to him, inviting him to examine them, which he did.

"Are you sure it's not God talking to you?" I said.

That was an unpopular topic in Berkeley, when it was a topic at all; I said it just to needle him. But he himself had said that the great open pages, the large old-looking books, resembled Bibles he had seen. He had made the connection himself. However, he preferred his theory that an extraterrestrial intelligence from another star system was conversing with him, and for this reason he kept me posted about his experiences. Had he decided it was God, he undoubtedly would have ceased talking to me and consulted a minister or priest, so his theory was a lucky break for me.

Lucky, that is, insofar as I was interested in what he had to say. However, since he had seen me in his dream extending the written page, I was involved somehow. But although I was a professional science fiction writer, I could not really give credence to the idea that an extraterrestrial intelligence on another star system was communicating with him; I never took such notions seriously, perhaps because I was a writer of such things and was accustomed to dredging them up from my own mind in purely fictional form. That such things could genuinely occur was foreign to my way of thinking. I did not even believe in flying saucers. It was a hoax and fiction to me. So perhaps of all people he knew to confide in, Nicholas had picked the worst.

As far as I was concerned it was a chronic fantasy life that Nicholas's mind had hit on to flesh out the little world in which he lived. Communicating with Valis (as he called it) made life bearable for him, which it otherwise would not be. Nicholas, I decided, had begun to part company with reality, out of necessity. Being a record clerk in a city of educated intellectuals was too much for him to endure. This was a classic example of how the human mind, lacking real solutions, managed its miseries.

I stuck to this theory about Valis for several years - up to the day, in the late sixties, when I personally saw Valis heal Nicholas and Rachel's little son of a birth defect. But that came later.

There was a lot, it turned out, that Nicholas hadn't told me, from the start. He tailored what he said. It was his intention not to appear crazy, which is a desire indicating some residual smarts, some vestigial grip on reality after most of it had fled. He knew he shouldn't be experiencing what he was experiencing, and he knew that if indeed he was (which he was), he should not talk about it. He selected me to tell because I wrote science fiction and therefore, he presumed, I was more tolerant, more broad-minded in regard to contacts with nonhumans. That was one matter Nicholas was certain about. Valis was nonhuman.

Regarding all this, Rachel, his wife, took the crudest and most derisive attitude imaginable. Her Berkeley intellectual ferocity grew continually. Nicholas, if he tried to discuss Valis in front of her, was immediately subjected to sneers that beggared description. You would have thought that he had become a Jehovah's Witness, another area of boundless contempt on his overeducated wife's part. A Jehovah's Witness or a member of the Young Republicans - some abomination of such an absolute nature as that. Something that set him apart from reasonable man entirely. Which I guess the narrations about his experiences with Valis did. You could hardly blame her. Except, I always thought, the excessive harshness was unnecessary; she should simply have sent him over to California State Mental Hygiene for some group therapy. I still thought Nicholas should move to Southern California, mainly to get him out of Berkeley. He did go, but just to visit Disneyland. Still, that was a trip of sorts. It meant he had to get his car fixed up, with new tires; he and Rachel piled their sleeping bags, tent and Coleman stove into the back of their Plymouth and set out, with the intention of sleeping on the beaches in order to save money. Nicholas also had a secret mission, about which he did not tell his boss, Herb Jackman. According to Nicholas's official story, this was simply a vacation. In actuality (he confided to me, his best friend), he would be visiting Progressive Records in Burbank, where he knew someone: their West Coast representative, Carl Dondero. This little record outfit put out folk music records, which sold better in Berkeley than anywhere else, and since Nicholas was part of the Berkeley scene he spent a lot of time listening to such folk singers as Josh White and Richard Dyer-Bennet, owned as many Hudson Back Bay Ballad records as existed, and could tell you who revived the five-string banjo (Pete Seeger, Nicholas claimed, and then discoursed on the Almanac Singers, with whom Seeger had sung anonymously). The idea was that Nicholas, if he liked what he saw at Progressive Records and liked what he heard from the brass there, might go to work for them. I had met Carl Dondero once, and he and I both felt that Nicholas should get out of Berkeley. This was Dondero's way of accomplishing it.

What Carl Dondero had not thought out clearly is the ominous fact that Los Angeles is the nut capital of the world; that every religious, paranormal, and occult group originates there and draws its followers there; that Nicholas, were he to resettle in the southland, would be exposed to other people like himself and hence would probably worsen rather than mend. Nicholas would be moving to an area which ill defined the quality of sanity. What could we expect from Nicholas, if he were exposed to LA? Valis, most likely, would emerge into the open as Nicholas's meager contact with reality dwindled out of existence entirely.

Nicholas, however, did not in fact plan to move from Berkeley. He and it were too closely bonded. What he looked forward to was lunch with the brass from Artists and Repertoire at Progressive Records; they would woo him and wine him, and he could then triumphantly say no to them and return to Berkeley, having been given a viable alternative which he had turned down flat. For the rest of his life, as a record clerk on Telegraph Avenue, he could tell himself that he had chosen his life in preference to the disloyalty of moving to LA.

But when he got down to the LA area, in particular down to Orange County and Disneyland, and had had a chance to cruise around in his old Plymouth, he discovered something unexpected, although more or less in fun I had suggested it to him. Parts of that region resembled his Mexico dream. I had been right. Upon leaving the freeway near Anaheim - he took the wrong exit ramp and wound up in the town of Placentia - he discovered Mexican buildings, low-rider Mexican cars, Mexican cafes, and little wooden houses filled with Mexicans. He had stumbled onto a barrio for the first time in his life. The barrio looked like Mexico, except that there were Yellow Cabs. Nicholas had made actual contact with the world of his visionary dream. And this changed everything in regard to taking the job at Progressive Records.

He and Rachel returned to Berkeley, but not to stay. Now that he knew an actual world existed as depicted in his dream - as seen in his dream - Nicholas could not be stopped.

"I was right," he told me on returning to the Bay Area. "It wasn't a dream. Valis was showing me where I ought to be living. I have a destiny down there, Phil, that dwarfs anything you can imagine. It leads to the stars."

"Did Valis tell you what your destiny down there is?" I asked him.

"No." He shook his head. Til find that out when the time comes. It's the same principle as in the spy services; you're to know only what's necessary for you to know. If you understood the big picture it'd blow your head off. You'd go crazy."

"Nicholas," I said, "you'd quit your job and move down to Orange County because of a dream?"

"As soon as I saw the barrio in Placentia I recognized it," Nicholas said. "Every building and street, every car that passed - they were precisely as I dreamed them. The people walking along, the street signs, even. Down to the smallest detail. Valis intends for me to move down there."

"Ask him why before you do it. You have a right to know what you're getting into."

"I trust Valis."

"Suppose he's evil."

"Evil?" Nicholas stared at me. "He's the absolute force of good in the universe!"

"I'm not sure I'd trust him," I said, "if it were me and my life. I mean you are talking about your life, Nick. Here you are giving up your house and your job and your friends because of a dream he shows you - a preview. Maybe it's just precognition on your part. Maybe you're a precog." I had written several stories about precogs, in fact a novel, The World Jones Made, and I tended to view precognition as a mixed blessing. In my stories, and especially in the novel, it placed the character in a closed loop, a victim of his own determinism; he was compelled, just as Nicholas seemed now, to enact later what he foresaw earlier, as if by previewing it he was destined to fall victim to it, rather than obtaining the capacity to escape it. Precognition did not lead to freedom but rather to a macabre fatalism, just as Nicholas now displayed: he had to move to Orange County because, a year ago, he had experienced a preview vision of it. Logically it made no sense. Couldn't he avoid going just precisely because he had suffered a premonition? I was willing to admit that what Nicholas saw in his dream-vision was an accurate representation of the barrio down in the city of Placentia in Orange County. But I saw it more as a paranormal talent on Nicholas's part than a communication from an extraterrestrial entity in another solar system. One had to draw the line of common sense somewhere. Using Occam's Principle of Scientific Parsimony, the simplest theory was mine. One did not need to drag in another, more powerful mind.

However, Nicholas did not view it that way. "It's not a question of which theory is more economical; it's a question of what's true. I'm not in communication with myself. I have no way of knowing that my destiny lies down in Placentia. Only a greater mind, above human level, would know that."

"Maybe your destiny lies directly at the center of Disneyland. You could sleep under the Matterhorn ride and live on Coke and hot dogs, like they sell there. There're bathrooms. You'd have all you need."

Rachel, who was listening to all this, shot me a look of pure malice.

"Well, I'm just doing what you do," I said to her. "Making fun of him. You don't want to live in the LA area, do you, Rachel? Outside of Berkeley?"

"I'd never live in Orange County," Rachel said vehemently.

"There you are," I said to Nicholas.

Nicholas said, "We're thinking of splitting up. So she can continue on at the university and I can pursue my destiny down there."

That made it real. Divorce based on a" dream. What strange grounds. Cause of divorce? I left my wife because I dreamed about a foreign land... which proved to be ten miles from Disneyland, near a lot of orange trees.

Down in plastic-town USA. It was unreal, and yet Nicholas meant it. And they had been married for years.

The resolution to this came three years later when Rachel discovered that she was pregnant. Those were the days of the diaphragm, which wasn't all that good. This ended her university career; after she had little Johnny she didn't care where they lived. She got fat and sloppy; her hair became a mess; she forgot all she had learned at school and instead watched daytime TV.

In the mid-sixties they moved to Orange County. In a few years, Ferris F. Fremont would become president of the United States.

How are you to treat a friend whose life is directed from beyond the stars? What attitude do you take? I saw Nicholas rarely after he and Rachel moved down to Orange County, but when I did see him, when they drove up for a prolonged stay in the Bay Area or I flew down to visit them and take in Disneyland, Nicholas always filled me in on what Valis was up to. After he moved to Orange County, Valis communicated with him a lot. So from his standpoint the move was worth it.

Also, the job at Progressive Records turned out to be a vast improvement over working as a record clerk. Retail record selling was a dead end and Nicholas had always known it, whereas the recording field itself was wide open. Rock had become big, now, although that did not affect Progressive Records, which signed only folk artists. Even so, Progressive Records was getting them up there on the sales charts; they had some of the best folk artists under contract, many from the old San Francisco scene: from the Hungry i and the Purple Onion. They almost signed Peter, Paul and Mary, and, according to them, they had turned down the Kingston Trio. I heard about this through Nicholas; being in Artists and Repertoire, he himself auditioned new vocal artists, instrumentalists-, and groups, made tapes of them on location... although he did not have the authority to sign them. He did have the authority to reject them, however, and he enjoyed exercising this. It beat changing the toilet paper roll behind listening booth three, back up in Berkeley.

At last Nicholas's natural ear for a good voice was paying off. His talent plus what he had learned from listening to rare vocal records at University Music late at night were now underwriting him financially. Carl Don-dero hadn't erred; in doing Nicholas a favor he had done Progressive Records a favor as well.

"So you have a groovy job," I said, as he and I and Rachel sat around their apartment in Placentia.

"I'm driving to Huntington Beach to take in Uncle Dave Huggins and His Up-Front Electric Jugs," Nicholas said. "I think we should sign with them. Sign them up. It's folk rock, really. A little like the Grateful Dead does on some of their tracks." We were listening to an LP of the Jefferson Airplane at that moment, quite a jump from the classical music Nicholas had loved back in Berkeley. Grace Slick was singing "White Rabbit."

"What a groovy broad," Nicholas said. "One of the best," I said. I had just become interested in rock. The Airplane was my favorite group; one time I had driven over to Marin County to the town of Bolinas to gaze at the house reputed to be Grace Slick's. It was up over the beach but back away from the people and noise. "Too bad you can't sign her," I said to Nicholas.

"Oh, I see plenty of groovy broads," Nicholas said. "A lot of folksingers, aspiring folksingers, are broads. Most of them are what we in the industry call strictly no-talent. They've maybe listened repeatedly to tracks by Baez and Collins and Mitchell and imitated them - nothing original."

"So now," I said, "you have power over people."

Nicholas was silent, fooling with his glass of Charles Krug wine.

"How does it feel?" I asked.

"Well, I - " Nicholas hesitated. "I hate to see the expression on their faces when I say no. It's - " He gestured. "They have such high hopes. They come to Hollywood from all over the country with such high hopes. Like in the song by the Mamas & Papas, „Young Girls Are Coming ,to the Canyon." There was one girl today... she hitch-hiked from Kansas City, Kansas, with a fifteen-dollar Sears practice guitar... she knew perhaps five chords, and she had to read out of a songbook. We don't generally audition them unless they're booked somewhere already. I mean, we can't audition everybody." He looked sad as he said this.

"What's Valis have to say these days?" I asked. Perhaps with his new, more expanded life he was no longer hearing voices and seeing printed pages in his sleep.

Nicholas got a strange look on his face. For the first time since the topic came up he seemed reluctant to discuss it. "I've - " he began, and then he motioned me to go along with him, out of the living room of the apartment and into their bedroom. "Rachel has a rule now," he explained, shutting the door after us. "I'm not to ever mention it. Listen." He seated himself on the bed facing me. "I've discovered something. The clarity with which I can hear him - or her, or them; whichever it is - depends on the wind. When the wind is blowing - it blows in here from the desert to the east and north - I receive the communication better. I've been taking notes. Look at this." He opened a dresser drawer; there lay a stack of papers, typed on, about a hundred sheets. And in the corner of the bedroom stood a small typing table with a Royal portable on it. "There's a lot I haven't ever told you," he said, "about my contacts with them. I think it's them. They seem to be able to come together and form a single body or mind, like a plasmatic life form. I think they exist in the atmosphere."

"Goodness," I said.

Nicholas said earnestly, "To them, this is a polluted ocean we live in; I've had dream after dream from their viewpoint, and always they're looking down - I'm looking down - into a stagnant ocean or pond." „The smog," I said.

"They hate it. They won't descend into it. You're a science fiction writer; could life forms exist unsuspected in Earth's atmosphere, highly Evolved, highly intelligent life forms, which take an active interest in our welfare and can help us when they choose? You'd think there would have been reports over the ages. It doesn't make sense; someone would have discovered them long ago. Maybe - this is one of my theories - maybe they recently entered our atmosphere, possibly from another planet or plane. Another possibility I've considered is that they're from the future, come back here in time to assist us. They're very anxious to assist us. They seem to know everything. Christ, I guess they can .go anywhere; they don't have material bodies, just the energetic plasmatic forms, like electromagnetic fields. They probably merge, pool their information, and then separate. Of course I'm just theorizing. I don't know. That's the impression of them I get."

I said, "How come you can hear them and no one else can?"

"I have no theory about that."

"Can't they tell you?"

Nicholas said, "I really don't understand much of what they say. I just get impressions of their presence. They did want me to move down here to Orange County; I was right about that. I think it's because they can contact me better, being near the desert with the Santa Ana wind blowing a lot of the time. I've bought a bunch of books to do research, like the Britannica."

"If they exist, somebody else would have-"

"I agree." Nicholas nodded. "Why me? Why wouldn't they talk to the President of the United States?"

"Ferris F. Fremont?"

He laughed. "Well, I guess so; I see what you mean. But there're so many really important people... One time - listen to this." He began rummaging among the sheets of paper. "They showed me an engineering principle, a motor with two shafts turning in opposite directions. They explained the whole principle to me; I saw the damn thing, round and very heavy. With no centrifugal torque, because of the opposed shafts. The shafts worked through a gear train to a common drive, finally, I guess, but I couldn't see that; it was on the other side. In the dream I held the whole unit in my hands - it was painted red. I don't know what the power source was, probably electricity. And I remember this: it had a cam system, a chain with weights that was tossed from one spinning rotor to the other very rapidly, to act as a brake. They wanted me to write all this down when I woke up; they showed me a very sharp pencil and note pad. They said - and I'll never forget this - they told me, „This principle was known in your time." You see what that implies?" Nicholas had become very excited; his face was animated and flushed, and the words spilled out. "It tells me they're from the future."

"Not necessarily," I said. "It could just mean that in the future the motor you saw becomes well known. It may merely mean that they know our future."

Nicholas stared at me, his mouth working silently, in perplexity.

"See," I explained, "beings of that high order could have transcended the barrier of - "

"This is real," Nicholas said quietly.

"Pardon?" I said.

In a low, steady voice, Nicholas said, "This is not a story. I've got over twenty thousand words of notes I've taken on this. Theories, research; what I've seen, heard. What I know. You know what I know? This is moving toward something, but I can't see what. They don't want me to see what; I'll find out when the time comes, when they want me to. They're not telling me very much, not really; sometimes I think as little as they can. So don't screw around with spinning science fiction theories, Phil. You understand?"

There was silence. We faced each other. "What am I to say?"I asked finally. "Just be serious about it," Nicholas said. "Just take it for what it is: a very serious, maybe a very grim, matter. I wish I knew. I sense that they're in deadly earnest, playing a deadly game, on a scale beyond me, beyond all of us. Here for a purpose that - " He broke off. "Christ," he said, "this whole thing is getting to me. I wish there was someone I could tell; that's what bothers me, that I can't tell anyone. They moved me from Berkeley to Orange County ... I can't even tell that."

"Why can't you tell that?"

"I've tried." Nicholas did not elaborate.

"You seem more mature," I said.

"Well, I got out of Berkeley." He shrugged.

"You have real responsibilities now."

"I had real responsibilities then. I'm beginning to realize that it's not a game."

"Your job -"

"What I'm being told. When I'm asleep. Just because I don't remember it when I wake up means nothing. I've read enough to know it's remembered somewhere in the brain. It goes into the unconscious and is stored. Listen." He gazed at me intently. "Phil," he said, "I think I'm being programmed. I catch a phrase, a word; nothing more. Nothing I can go on either way. Just enough to make me think so. If I am being programmed, then it's inhibited, which is the way programming works, either in the brain or in electronic circuitry, and eventually I'll run into the disinhibiting stimulus, and all the programming will fire, either correctly or not, depending on how well it's laid down." He paused and then added remotely, "I've been reading about it. I'd never know."

"Even when the disinhibiting stimulus is encountered?"

"No, it would all seem natural, what I'd say and do. I'd think it was my idea. Like a posthypnotic suggestion; you incorporate it into your world view as logical. No matter how bizarre, or how destructive, or how - " Again he was silent, and this time he did not resume speaking.

"You've changed," I said. "Besides being more mature, but along those lines."

"Moving down here has changed me," Nicholas said, "and the research I've done has changed me; now I have the financial resources to get prime source material to go on. Herb Jackman never paid me beans, Phil. I just floundered around."

"It's more than doing research," I said. "Berkeley is full of people doing research. What sort of friends do you have down here? Who've you met?"

"People at Progressive, mostly," Nicholas said. "Professional people, in the music industry."

"Have you told them about Valis?"

"No."

"Have you talked to a psychiatrist?"

"Shit," Nicholas said wearily. "You know and I know this isn't a matter for a psychiatrist. I might have thought that a long, long time ago. Years ago and six hundred miles away, in a town that was nuts. Orange County isn't nuts; it's very conservative and very stable. The nuts are up north in LA County, not here. I missed the nut belt by sixty-five miles; I overshot. Hell, I didn't overshoot; I was deliberately shot down here, to central Orange County. To get out of parochial towns like Berkeley. To a place where I could think and introspect, get perspective and some kind of understanding. More confidence, really. That is what I think I've acquired, if anything."

"Maybe that's it."

Nicholas said, half to himself, "It all seemed sort of -like fun, back in Berkeley, these inner contacts with another mind, deep in the night, involuntarily, with me just lying there passive and having to hear whether I liked it or not. We were kids there in Berkeley; no one living in Berkeley ever really grows up. Perhaps that's why Ferris Fremont loathes Berkeley so."

"You're aware of him a lot," I said, "now that you're down here?"

"I'm aware of Ferris Fremont," Nicholas said cryptically. "Now that I'm down here, yes."

Because of an imaginary voice,.Nicholas had become a whole person, rather than the partial person he had been in Berkeley. If he had remained in Berkeley he would have lived and died a partial person, never knowing completeness. What sort of an imaginary voice is that? I asked myself, Suppose Columbus had heard an imaginary voice telling him to sail west. And because of it he had discovered the New World and changed human history... We would be hard put to defend the use of the term "imaginary" then, for that voice, since the consequences of its speaking came to affect us all. Which would have constituted greater reality, an "imaginary" voice telling him to sail west, or a "real" voice telling him the idea was hopeless?

Without Valis addressing him in his sleep, showing him visually a happier promise, speaking to him persuasively, Nicholas would have visited Disneyland and returned to Berkeley. I knew it and Nicholas knew it. Whether anyone else assessed it this way was unimportant; I knew him and I knew that on his own, unaided, he would have stayed in his rut forever. Something had intervened in Nicholas's life and destroyed the hold that bad karma had on him. Something had severed the iron chains.

This, I realized, is how a man becomes what he is not: by doing what he could never do - in Nicholas's case, the totally impossible act of moving from Berkeley to Southern California. All his compeers would still be up there; / was still up there. It was spectacular; here he was, raised in Berkeley, sitting in his modern apartment (Berkeley has no modern apartments) in Placentia, wearing a florid Southern California-style shirt and slacks and shoes; already he had become part of the lifestyle here. The days of bluejeans were gone.

The imaginary presence of Valis - whose name Nicholas had been forced to make up, for want of a real one - had made him into what he was not; had he gone to a psychiatrist he would still be what he was, and he would stay what he was. The psychiatrist would have focused his attention on the origin of the voice, not on its intentions or on the results. That very psychiatrist was probably still living in Berkeley. No nocturnal voices, no invisible presence sketching out a happier life, would have plagued him. How undisturbed, the sleep of the foolish.

"Okay, Nick," I said. "You win."

"Pardon?" He glanced at me, a little wearily. "Oh, I see. Yes, I guess I win. Phil, how could I have stayed in Berkeley so long? Why did it take someone else, another voice, not mine, to goad me into life? Why was that necessary?"

"Um," I said.

"The incredible part is not that I heard Valis, listened to Valis, and moved here, but that without him, or them, I wouldn't have contemplated it, let alone done it. Phil, the idea of leaving Berkeley, quitting my job with Herb Jackman - it wouldn't even have entered my mind."

"Yeah, that is the incredible part," I agreed. He was right. It said something about the normal trajectory of human existence, Homo unimpeded: allowed to trudge out his circular course, like a wedge of dead rock circling a dead sun, mindless and purposeless, deaf to the universe at large, as blind as it was cold. Something into which no new idea ever came. Barred forever from originality. It made you stop and reflect.

Nicholas said, "Whoever they are, Phil, I have no choice but to trust them. I'm going to be doing what they want anyhow."

"I think you'll know," I said, "when your programming fires." If indeed - sobering thought - he had been programmed.

"You suppose I'll notice? I'll be too busy to notice."

That chilled me: the thought of him in action all at once, blurring, as if possessing sixteen arms.

They-"Nicholas continued.

"I wish you wouldn't call them „they,"" I said. "It makes me nervous. I'd be a lot less nervous if you'd say „he.""

"It's the joke about the five-thousand-pound canary: where does it sleep?" Nicholas said.

"Anywhere it wants."

"I call them „they,"" Nicholas said, "because I've seen more than one of them. A woman, a man. Two for openers, and two is they."

"What'd they look like?"

After a pause, Nicholas said, "Of course you realize these were dreams. And dreams are distorted. The conscious mind sets up a barrier."

To protect itself," I finished.

Nicholas said, They had three eyes. The normal two, and then one with a lens, not a pupil. Dead center in the forehead. That third eye witnessed everything. They could turn it on and off, and when it was off it was entirely gone. Invisible. And during that time" - he took a deep shuddering breath - "they looked just like us. We - never guessed." He became silent.

"Oh, good God," I said aloud.

"Yep," Nicholas said, stoically.

"Did they speak?"

"They were mute. And deaf. -They were in round chambers like bathyspheres, with lots of wires running to them, like electronic booster equipment, communications equipment, phone-type wires. The wires and boosters were so they could communicate with us, so their thoughts would form words we could hear and understand, and so they could hear us back. It was difficult, a strain for them."

"I don't know if I want to hear this."

"Hell, you write about it all the time. I've been reading some of your novels, finally. You - "

"Writing fiction," I said. "It's all fiction."

Their craniums were enlarged," Nicholas said.

"What?" I was having trouble following him; it was too much for me.

"To accommodate the third eye. Massive craniums. A wholly different skull shape from ours, very long. The Egyptian Pharaoh had it - Ikhnaton. And Ikhnaton's two daughters, but not his wife. It was hereditary on his side."

I open the bedroom door and walked back into the living room where Rachel sat reading.

"He's crazy," Rachel said remotely, not looking up from her book.

"Right," I said. "Completely. Nothing left. Only thing is, I don't want to be here when his programming fires."

She said nothing; she turned a page.

Following me out of the bedroom, Nicholas approached the two of us; he held a piece of paper toward me, for me to see. "This is a sign they showed me several times, two intersecting arcs arranged - well, you can see. It's a little like the Christian fish sign, the side of the fish with the arcs forming its body. The interesting thing is, if an arc intersects once -"

From the design on the extended piece of paper a pinkish-purple beam of light, an inch in diameter, fired upward into Nicholas's face. He shut his eyes, grimaced with pain, dropped the sheet of paper, and swiftly put his hand to his forehead. "All of a sudden," he said thickly, "I have the most violent headache."

"Didn't you see that beam of light?" I said. Rachel had set down her book and was on her feet.

Nicholas removed his hand from his forehead, opened his eyes, and blinked. "I'm blind," he said.

Silence. The three of us stood there, unmoving.

"I can see phosphene activity now," he said presently. "An after-light. No, I didn't see any beam of light. But I see a phosphene circle. It's pink. Now I can make outla few things."

Rachel moved toward him, took him by the shoulder. "You better sit down."

In an odd, even voice, almost mechanical in quality, Nicholas intoned, "Rachel, Johnny has a birth defect."

"The doctor said nothing at all is -"

"He has a right inguinal strangulated hernia. It's already gone down into the scrota! sac. The hydroseal is broken, Johnny needs immediate surgery; go to the phone, pick it up, and dial Dr Evenston. Tell him you're bringing Johnny into the emergency room at St Jude Hospital in Fullerton. Tell him to be there."

"Tonight?" Rachel said, appalled.

Nicholas intoned, "He is in imminent danger of death." With his eyes shut he then repeated it, word for word, exactly as he had said it; watching him, I got the impression, suddenly, that even though his eyes were shut he was seeing the words. He spoke as if reading them off a cue card, like a performer. It was not his tone of voice, his cadence; he was following words written out for him.

I accompanied them to the hospital. Rachel drove; Nicholas was still having trouble with his eyes, so he sat beside her holding the little boy. Their physician, Dr Evenston, very irritable, met them at the emergency room. First he told them that he had examined Johnny several times for possible herniation and found nothing; then he took Johnny off; time passed; Dr Evenston eventually returned and said noncommittally that there was indeed a right inguinal hernia, reducible but needing immediate surgery, since there was always the possibility of strangulation.

On the way back to the Placentia apartment, I said, "Who are these people?"

"Friends," Nicholas said.

"They certainly are interested in your welfare," I said.

"And your baby's."

"Nothing wrong can happen," Nicholas said.

I said, "But such powers!"

"They transferred information to my head," Nicholas said, "but they didn't heal Johnny. They just - "

"They healed him," I said. Getting him to the doctor and calling the doctor's attention to the birth defect was healing him. Why exert supernatural powers when natural curative means lay at hand? I remembered something the Buddha said after he witnessed a supposed saint walk on water: "For a penny," the Buddha said, "I can board a ferry and do that." It was more practical, even for the Buddha, to cross the water normally. The normal and the supranormal were not antagonistic realms, after all.

Nicholas had missed the point. But he seemed dazed; as Rachel drove through the darkness he continued to massage his forehead and eyes.

The information was transferred simultaneously," Nicholas said. "Not sequentially. It's always that way. It's what's called analog, in computer science, in contrast to digital."

"You're sure they're friends?" Rachel said sharply.

"Anyone who saves my boy's life," Nicholas said, "is a friend."

I said, "If they could convey all that exact information directly to your head like that, in one burst of colored light, they could let you know any time they want who they are, where they are from, and what they intend. Any confusion on your part regarding any of those issues is deliberate withholding of knowledge on their part. They don't want you to know."

"If I knew, I'd tell people," Nicholas said. "They don't want to see - "

"Why not?" I said.

"It would defeat their purpose," Nicholas said, after a pause. "They're working against - " He ceased talking, then.

"There's a great deal you haven't told me," I said, "that you know about them."

"It's all in the written pages." He was silent for a few blocks and then said, "They're working against great odds. So it follows that they have to operate with great caution. Or it will fail." He did not elaborate. He probably didn't know any more. Most of what he believed probably consisted of shrewd guesses, hatched out over long months of pondering.

I had worked up a little speech to give; now I gave it. There is a slight chance," I said, "admittedly a very slight one, that what you're dealing with is religious, that in fact you are being informed by the Holy Spirit, which is a manifestation of God. We're all from Berkeley, raised there and limited by the secular viewpoint of a college town; we're not inclined to theological speculation. But healing is a typical miracle of the Holy Spirit, or so I understand. You ought to know about that, Nicholas, from having been a Quaker."

"Yes." He nodded. "When the Holy Spirit takes you over it does heal."

"Heard any non-English languages in your head?" I asked him. "That you don't know?"

Presently he nodded. "Yes. In my dreams."

"Glossolalia," I said.

"Koine Greek. I wrote down a few words phonetically, what I could, when I woke up. Rachel took a year of Greek; she recognized them. We both looked them up in her dictionary: Koine Greek."

"Is that still - "

"It qualifies. In the book of Acts in the Bible, other races recognized what the apostles were saying, in their own tongues, at Pentecost, when the Spirit first descended on them. Glossolalia isn't nonsense; it's foreign tongues you never knew. The Spirit brings them to your head so you can preach the gospel to every nation. It's generally misunderstood. I thought it was gibberish until I researched it."

"You've been reading the Bible?" I asked. "During your research?"

"The New Testament. And the Prophetic Books." Rachel said, "Nick never knew any Greek. He was sure they weren't real words." The cruel biting quality had left her voice; worry about Johnny, and shock, had done it.

"Nick very cautiously told a couple of people interested in the occult about dreaming in Greek, and they said, „It's a past life. You're the reincarnation of a Greek-speaking person." But I don't think that's it."

"What do you think it is?" I asked her.

"I don't know. The Greek words were the first thing that signified anything to me, that I ever took seriously about this. And now tonight, his diagnosing Johnny... and I saw that pinkish-purple spark of light beamed up at him for an instant. I just don't know, Phil; it doesn't fit anything I've ever heard of. Nick seems to be catching glimpses of benign supernatural manipulators of some kind we don't know about - just cryptic glimpses, what they want him to see. Not enough to extrapolate on. I get the impression they're very old - from the Koine Greek, which is two thousand years out of the past. If they lapse into that, maybe there's your one inadvertent clue."

In a hoarse voice Nicholas said abruptly, "Someone is waking up in me. After two thousand years, or almost that long. He's not awake yet, but his time is coming. He's been promised it ... a long time ago, when he was alive like us."

"Is he human?" I said.

"Oh, yes." Nicholas nodded. "Or he was once. The programming they're giving me - it's to wake him. They're having trouble, or anyhow it's very difficult; it takes a lot of things to do it. This man, this person, is important to them. I don't know why. I don't know who the man is. I don't know what he'll do." He lapsed into brooding silence for a time and then said, mostly to himself, as if he had said it or thought it many times before, "I don't know what's going to become of me when it happens. Maybe there are no plans for me at all."

"Are you sure you're not throwing six different theories up into the air to see which lands first?" I said. "I can tell theories when I hear them - speculation. You don't know, do you?"

"No," Nicholas admitted.

"How long have you had this one?"

"I don't know. They're all written down."

"In order of descending merit?"

"In the order they came to me."

"And each one," I said to him, "seemed equally true to you at the time."

Nicholas said, "One of them has to be true. Finally I'll find it. I have to."

"You could go to your grave not knowing," Rachel said. Til understand it eventually," Nicholas said doggedly. Maybe not, I thought; maybe she is right. Nicholas could flounder around forever, his stack of typed papers constantly growing with theory after theory, each one more lurid than the last, more comprehensive, more daring. Finally the man slumbering within him whom they were attempting to arouse back into wakeful life could appear, take charge, and finish Nicholas's thesis for him. Nicholas could write, I wonder if it's ... it may be that ... I'm sure that ... it has to be; and then the ancient man could rise into life and write down, He was correct; it is. I am.

"The thing that has worried me," Rachel said, "whenever you talked like this, is, What will he be like to me and Johnny if they're able to waken him, and I guess tonight shows that he'll take care of Johnny."

"With more than I can," Nicholas said.

"You're not going to fight?" I said. "You're just going to let it take you over?"

Nicholas said, "I'm looking forward to it."

To Rachel, I said, "Are there any vacant apartments in your building?" I was thinking to myself that as a freelance writer I could live anywhere. I didn't have to remain in the Bay Area.

Smiling a little, Rachel said, "You think you should be down here to help take care of him?"

"Something like that," I said.

They had both evidently accepted the invasion of Nicholas by this entity; they seemed resigned and not afraid. That was more than I could manage; the whole thing seemed unnatural and terrifying to me, something to be fought with all one had at one's disposal. The supplanting of a human personality by - whatever it was. Assuming Nicholas's theories were correct. In point of fact he could be totally wrong. Even so, perhaps because of this, I wanted to be down here. Over the many years Nicholas had been my best friend; he still was, even though six hundred miles separated us. And, like him, I had begun to like the Placentia area. I liked the barrio. There was nothing like it in Berkeley.

"It's a nice gesture," Rachel said, "to be with your friend at a time like this."

"It's more than a gesture," I said.

"Before you move to Placentia," Rachel said, "there is something I found out the other day by accident, that I don't think either of you realize. I was driving along one of those little palm-lined streets, just driving at random, trying to get Johnny to calm down and go to sleep before we got back to the apartment, and I saw a green clapboard house with a sign on it. „Birthplace of Ferris F. Fremont," it said. I asked the manager of our building, and he said, Yes, Ferris Fremont was born in Placentia."

"Well, he's not here now," Nicholas said. "He's in Washington DC, three thousand miles away."

"But how grotesque," Rachel said. To be living in the town where the tyrant was born. Like him, it's an ugly little house, a dreadful color. I didn't get out of the car; I didn't want to go near it, even though it seemed to be open, and people were walking around inside it. Like it was a little museum, probably with exhibits of his schoolbooks and the bed he slept in, like one of those California historical sites you see near the highway." Nicholas turned to gaze at his wife enigmatically. "And nobody mentioned this to you?" I said. "I don't think they like to talk about it much," Rachel said, "the people around here. I think they'd rather keep it secret. Fremont probably paid for it to be made into a historical site himself; I didn't see any official state marker."

"I'd like to go there," I said.

"Fremont," Nicholas ruminated. "The greatest liar in the history of the world. He probably wasn't actually born there; he probably had a PR firm pick it out as the kind of place he ought to have been born in. I'd like to see it. Drive by there now, Rachel; let's take a look at it." She made a left turn; presently we were moving along very narrow tree-lined streets, some of which weren't paved. This was Oldtown; I had been driven through it before.

"It's on Santa Fe," Rachel said. "I remember noticing that and thinking I'd like to ride Fremont out of town on a rail.".She pulled up to the curb and parked. "There it is, over there to the right." She pointed. We could see only dim outlines of houses. Somewhere a TV set played a Spanish program. A dog barked. The air, as usual, was warm. There were no special lights put up around the house where, allegedly, Ferris F. Fremont had been born. Nicholas and I got out of the car and walked over, while Rachel remained in the car, holding the sleeping baby.

"Well, there's not much to see, and we can't get inside tonight," I said to Nicholas.

"I want to determine if it's a place I foresaw in my vision," Nicholas said.

"You're going to have to do that tomorrow."

Together he and I walked slowly along the sidewalk; grass grew in the cracks, and once Nicholas stubbed his toe and swore. We arrived at last at the corner, where we halted.

Bending down, Nicholas examined a word incised in the cement of the sidewalk, a very old word put there some time ago, when the sidewalk had been wet. It was professionally printed.

"Look!" Nicholas said.

I bent down and read the word.

ARAMCHEK

"That was the original name of this street," Nicholas said, "evidently. Before they changed it. So that's where Fremont got the name of that conspiratorial group: from his childhood. From finding it written on the sidewalk. He probably doesn't even remember now. He must have played here."

The idea of Ferris Fremont playing here as a little boy the idea of Ferris Fremont as a little boy at all, anywhere was too bizarre to be believed. He had rolled his tricycle by these very houses, skipped over the very cracks we had tripped on in the night; his mother had probably warned him about cars passing along this street. The little boy playing here and inventing fantasies in his head about people passing, about the mysterious word ARAMCHEK inscribed in the cement under his feet, conjecturing over the weeks and months as to what it meant, discerning in a child's mind secret and occult purposes in it that were to blossom later on in adulthood. Into full-blown, florid, paranoid delusions about a vast conspiratorial organization with no fixed beliefs and no actual membership but somehow a titanic enemy of society, to be hunted out and destroyed wherever found. I wondered how much of this had come into his head while he was still a child. Maybe he had imagined the entire thing then. As an adult he had merely voiced it.

"Could be the contractor's name," I said, "rather than the original street name. They inscribe that too, sometimes, when they're done with a job."

"Maybe it means an inspector had gone by here and completed his job of checking all the arams," Nicholas said. "What's an aram? Or it could mean the spot where you check for arams. You stick a metal pole down through a little hole in the pavement and take a reading, like a water-meter reading." He laughed.

"It is mysterious," I said. "It doesn't sound like a street name. Probably, if it was, it was named after somebody."

"An early Slavic settler to Orange County. Originally from the Urals. Raised cattle and wheat. Maybe owned a big land-grant ranch, deeded to him from the Mexicans. I wonder what his brand would be. An aram and then a check mark."

"We're doing what Ferris did," I said.

"But along more reasonable lines. We're not nuts. How much can you get from a single word?"

"Maybe Ferris Fremont knows more than we do. Maybe he put investigators into it, after he grew up and had money; maybe that was a childhood dream fulfilled: to research the mysterious word ARAMCHEK and find out what it really meant and why they had thought to stick it into the sidewalk forever and ever."

"Too bad Ferris didn't ask someone what the word meant."

I said, "He probably did. And he's still asking. That's the problem; he still wants to know. He wasn't satisfied with any of the answers he got - like, „It's the old street name. It's a contractor." That wasn't enough. It portended more."

"It doesn't portend anything to me," Nicholas said. "It's just a weird word stuck in the cement sidewalk that's been here God knows how many years. Let's go." He and I returned to the car and presently Rachel was driving us all back to the apartment.

Several years after Ferris F. Fremont had been elected President of the United States, I moved from the Bay Area to Southern California to be with my friend Nicholas Brady. I had been doing well in my writing career; in 1963 I had won the Hugo award for best science fiction novel of the year for my novel The Man in the High Castle. That book had to do with an imaginary alternate Earth in which Germany and Japan had won World War II and had divided the United States between them, with a buffer zone in the middle. I had written several other well received novels and was beginning to get solid critical comment, especially on my really insane novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which had to do with long hallucinogenic trips by the characters under the influence of psychedelic drugs. It was my first work dealing with drugs, and it soon earned me the reputation of being involved with drugs myself. This notoriety paid off well in sales but came back later on to haunt me.

My real trouble concerning drugs came when Harlan Ellison in his anthology Dangerous Visions said in an introduction to a story of mine that it was "written under the influence of LSD," which of course was not correct. After that I had a really dreadful reputation as a doper, thanks to Marian's desire for publicity. Later on I was able to add a paragraph to the afterword of the story stating that Harlan had not told the truth, but the harm was done. The police began to become interested in me and in the people who visited me. This became particularly true when the tyrant became President in the spring of 1969 and the darkness of oppression closed over the United States.

In his inaugural statement, Ferris Fremont discussed the Vietnam War, in which the United States had been actively involved for a number of years, and declared it to be a two-front war: one front six thousand miles away and the other front here at home. He meant, he explained later, the internal war against Aramchek and all that it espoused. This was really one war fought in two areas of the world; and the more important battlefield, Fremont declared, consisted of the one here, for it was here that the survival of the United States would be decided. The gooks could not really invade us, he explained, and take us over; but Aramchek could. Aramchek had grown more and more during the last two administrations. Now that a Republican had been returned to office, Aramchek would be dealt with, after which the Vietnam War could finally be won. It could never be won, Fremont explained, so long as Aramchek operated at home, sapping the vitality and will of the American people, destroying their determination to fight. The antiwar sentiment in the United States, according to Fremont, derived from Aramchek and its efforts.

As soon as he had been sworn in as President, Ferris Fremont declared open war on the surface manifestations of Aramchek and fanned out from there in all directions.

The defensive operation at home was titled Mission Checkup, this term having obvious medical connotations. It had to do with the basic moral health of America, Fremont explained when he directed the intelligence" community to get under way. The basic premise was that antiwar sentiment sprang from a vast and secret subversive organization. President Fremont proposed to heal America of its sickness; he would destroy the "tree of evil," as he termed Aramchek, by "rooting out its seed," a metaphor that didn't even mix, let alone wash. The ‘seeds of the tree of evil" were the antiwar dissidents, of whom I was one. Already in trouble with the authorities for my alleged drug involvement, I was doubly in hot water due to my antiwar stand, both in my published writings and in discussions and speeches. The drug element made me vulnerable; it was a terrible liability for someone who wanted to oppose the war. All the authorities needed to do was nail me on a drug charge and they would forever destroy my effectiveness as a political person. I knew they knew that, too. It did not make for restful nights.

However, I was not the only worried person in America. Because of his old left-wing days in Berkeley, Nicholas was beginning to wonder how safe he was now that Ferris F. Fremont had come to power and had launched Mission Checkup. After all, Nicholas occupied a high position at Progressive Records, a firm doing very / well; it was the typical goal of Mission Checkup to discern people like Nicholas - ‘sleepers," Fremont deemed them - and expose them to the harsh light of day. For this purpose the government began to hire and employ what they called "Friends of the American People," agents out of uniform who went around and checked up on anyone suspected of being a threat to security, either for what he had once done, such as Nicholas, or what he was doing now, such as me, or for what he might do in the future, as was possible with all of us. Thus no one was entirely ruled out. The FAPers wore white armbands with a star-in-a-circle on it, and pretty soon they were seen everywhere in the United States, diligently investigating the moral state of hundreds of thousands of citizens.

In the flatlands of the Midwest the government had begun to build large detention facilities, for the restriction and housing of those brought in by the FAPers and other para-police agencies. These facilities would not be used, President Fremont explained in a televised speech, "unless and until necessary," meaning unless and until resistance to the war got significantly stronger. The message was clear to anyone contemplating opposition to the Vietnam War; he might find himself living in Nebraska and hoeing a collective turnip field. This therefore acted as a deterrent and since the camps did not see actual use they were not subject to juridical review. As threat they were sufficient.

Personally, I had one nasty run-in with a FAP undercover agent, one without an armband. He wrote me on letterhead paper, pretending to represent a small student FM station near Irvine; he wanted, he said, to interview me because the Irvine students were interested in my work. I wrote him and agreed, but after he showed up it was evident, before he had asked three questions, that he was a plainclothes FAPer. After asking me if I had secretly written any porno novels, he suddenly began to shout wild accusatory questions at me. Did I take drugs? Was I the father of any illegitimate black science fiction writers? Was I God as well as the head of the Communist Party? And, of course, was Aramchek financing me? It was an upsetting experience; I had to physically evict him - I could hear him standing outside still shouting at me even after I shut and locked the door. After that I was very careful as to whom I let interview me.

More damaging to me than the FAPer posing as an interviewer from a student radio station was the break-in of my house in late 1971, in which my files were forcibly blown open with plastic military explosives and thoroughly burglarized. I returned home to find water and rubble all over the floor, the file in ruins, and most of my business papers and all of my canceled checks gone. The entire house had been ransacked; windows in the back had been broken in, and door locks smashed. The police performed only a perfunctory investigation, telling me slyly that they believed I had done it myself.

"Why?" I asked the police inspector in charge.

"Oh," he said, grinning, "to throw suspicion off yourself, probably."

No one was ever arrested, although the police admitted at one point that they knew who had done it and where my stolen possessions now were. What they did say, though, of a positive nature, was that although I would not get my things back, on the other hand I would not be arrested. Evidently they had found nothing sufficient to incriminate me. That experience greatly colored my life. It made me aware how far the abuses of power and the destruction of our constitutional liberties had gone under President Fremont. I told as many people as I could / about the break-in and burglary of my house, but I discovered very quickly that most people did not want to know,, even antiwar liberals. They showed either fear or apathy, and several hinted, as the police had, that most likely I had done it myself, in order to "throw off suspicion"; of what they did not say.

Of my friends who were genuinely sympathetic, Nicholas remained foremost. However, he thought my house had been hit and my papers stolen because of him. He imagined that he was the real target.

"They wanted to find out if you were going to write about me," he said. "You're the one who could publicize them, by putting them in a science fiction novel. Millions of people would read it. The secret would be out."

"What secret?" I asked.

"The fact that I represent an extraterrestrial authority greater than any human power, whose time is destined to come."

"Oh," I said. "Well, I think they were interested in me, since it was my house they hit and my papers they read or stole."

"They wanted to see if we formed an organization."

They wanted to see who I know," I said. "And what organizations I belong to and give money to; that's why they took all my canceled checks, every last one of them, years, decades of them. That hardly suggests anything about you and your dreams."

"Are you writing about me?" Nicholas asked.

"No," I said.

"Just make sure you don't give my actual name. I have to protect myself."

"Christ," I said angrily, "nobody can protect themselves these days, with Mission Checkup going on and all those pimple-faced little FAPers creeping around peering through their Coke-bottle-bottom glasses. We're all going to wind up in the Nebraska camps and you fucking well know it, Nick. How can you expect to be spared? Look what happened to me - they took years of my notes for future books; they effectively wiped me out. Just the intimidation alone... hell, every time I write a few pages I know I can come home from the store and find it all gone again, like I did that day. Nothing is safe, nothing and no one."

"You think there've been other burglaries like yours?" Nicholas asked.

"Yes."

"I haven't read about them in the papers."

I gazed at him for a long time.

"I guess they wouldn't be reported," he mumbled lamely.

"Not really, no," I said. "Mine wasn't. It was just listed under all the thefts for the week in the county. „Six hundred dollars" worth of stereo reported stolen by Philip K. Dick of Placentia, on the night of November eighteenth, 1971." No mention of papers stolen or cancelled checks stolen or files blown open. As if it were an ordinary burglary by junkies for something they could sell. No mention of the wall beside the files burned black by the heat of the blast. No mention of the big heap of water-soaked towels and rugs piled in the bathroom, which they used to cover the file when they detonated the C-three; it creates such heat that if - "

"You certainly know a lot about it," Nicholas said.

"I've asked," I said shortly.

Nicholas said, "I wonder if my four hundred pages of notes are safe. Maybe I should put them in a safe deposit box in a bank somewhere."

"Subversive dreams," I said.

"They're not dreams."

"The dream-control police. Sniffing out subversive dreams."

"Are you sure it was the police who hit your house?" Nicholas said. "It could have been a private group, sore at you because, say - well, say because of the pro-drug stand in your books."

There never has been and never will be any „pro-drug stand" in my Sboks," I said angrily. "I write about drugs and drug use, but that doesn't mean I'm pro-drug; other people write about crime and about criminals, but that doesn't make them pro-crime."

"Your books are hard to understand. They may have been misinterpreted, especially after Harlan Ellison wrote what he wrote about you. Your books are so - well, they're nuts."

"I guess so," I said.

Nicholas said, "Really Phil, you write the strangest books of anybody in the US, really psychotic books, books about crazy people and people on drugs, freaks and misfits of every description; in fact, of the kind never before described. You can't blame the government for being curious about the kind of person who would write such books, can you? I mean, your main character is always outside the system, a loser who finally somehow - "

"£/ /", Nicholas," I said, with real outrage. "Sorry, Phil, but - well, why can't you write about normal people, the way other authors do? Normal people with normal interests who do normal things. Instead, when your books open, there is this misfit holding down some miserable low job, and he takes drugs and his girlfriend is in a mental institution but he still loves her - "

"Okay!" I interrupted. "I know it was the authorities who broke into my house because the house behind me was evacuated. And the black family that lives there has ten children, so someone is always there, constantly. The night of the burglary I noticed the house behind me was completely empty, and it stayed empty an entire week. And the broken windows and doors of my house were all in the rear, adjoining it. No private burglars would evacuate a whole house. It was the authorities." „ "They'll get you again, Phil," Nicholas said. "Probably they wanted to see what your next book is about. What is your next book about, anyhow?"

"Not you," I said. "I can tell you that."

"Did they find the MS?"

"The MS of my new book," I told him, "was in my attorney's safe. I transferred it there a month before the hit on my house."

"What's the book about?"

After a pause I said, "A police state in America modeled on the Soviet Gulag prison system. A police slave-labor state here. It's called Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said."

"Why'd you put the manuscript in your lawyer's safe?"

I said, reluctantly, "Well, I - shit, Nick. To tell you the truth, I had a dream."

Silence for a time.

Nicholas had been right to be apprehensive about the FAP interest in him. Not long thereafter, as he sat at his desk in his office at Progressive Records, listening to a tape of a new singer, two FAPers paid him a surprise visit.

The two government agents had fat red necks and both wore modern single-breasted polyester suits and stylish ties. They were middle-aged and heavyset; they carried briefcases, which they placed on the desk between them and Nicholas. Nicholas was reminded of the two FBI agents who had visited him years ago in Berkeley, but this time he was not scared and angry; he was just scared.

"Are we putting out too many protest songs?" he said, thinking to himself that he could readily show it not to be his personal responsibility but that of the chief of A and R, Hugo Wentz.

The greater of the two FAP agents said, "No, as a matter of fact your firm has a three-check rating with us, which is quite good. If anything, we're here to compliment Progressive Records, at least in contrast to findings obtained throughout the record industry."

"It's pretty bad," the other agent chimed in. "As I'm sure you realize, Mr Brady. A large number of Communist singers are being regularly recorded, and many protest songs are being aired these days, despite the general cooperation of the networks and major independent stations."

Nicholas knew it was not public policy for the radio stations to play protest songs; that was the reason Progressive Records didn't cut them. It was pointless; no DJ would air them. It was a matter of economics, not principle.

"We are here regarding the following spinoff of Mission Checkup," the greater of the agents said. "In the course of your work, Mr Brady, you must come in contact with many singers and groups whom you do not sign, correct? For every one you sign to a contract there must be a hundred you don't."

Nicholas nodded.

"We also know what salary you draw here," the greater agent continued. "And we know you have a small son who needs major dental work, that you're in debt, that you'd very much like to move out of your apartment into a house, that Rachel is talking about leaving you if you don't put Johnny in a special school, because of his stammering ... am I correct? We've talked it over with our superiors in an effort to find a way to assist you, and we've come up with this: If you will provide the government with a copy of the lyrics of each artist whom you come in contact with who shows pro-Communist sympathies, we will pay you a flat hundred dollars per artist. It's our estimate that you could enhance your salary by up to two thousand dollars a month this way, and you would not have to report it to the IRS; it would be tax-free. Of course, the determination as to which artists you report are pro-Communist and which are not belongs to us; but even if we accept only half the ones you pass on to us, you should be able to - "

"And we guarantee," the other FAP agent broke in, "that this will remain an arrangement known only to you and to us. No one else, either at Progressive or anywhere else, will find out. You'll receive a code name under which you report, and everything, including payments, will be filed under that. The identity of the coded informant will be known only to the two of us sitting here and to you."

"But if these artists aren't signed," Nicholas said, "what harm can they do?"

They can change the slant of their lyrics," the greater agent said, ‘so they're not pro-Communist, and get signed up somewhere else."

Nicholas said, "But if the lyrics aren't subversive any more, what does it matter? Why do you care about them then?"

The greater agent said, "Once they make it big they can again begin to sneak subversive poisons into their lyrics. And by that time it's very difficult to eradicate them, once they're known to the public, you see; once they've made it big. That's potentially a very dangerous situation: someone who slips something controversial in with ordinary lyrics and then begins to further slant them later on. So you can see why we don't merely go on who's recorded and being played; we need to know the names of those who aren't."

"They in some ways are the most dangerous," the other agent said.

That night Nicholas told me about this interview with the two government agents. He was angry by then, angry and shaking.

"You going to take them up on it?" I asked,

"Hell, no," Nicholas said. But then he said, "You know,

I can't really believe the government is concerned with those loser artists. I think it's my loyalty they're interested in. Those two FAPers; it was a ploy to test me. They knew all about me; obviously there's a file on me back in Washington."

"There's a file on all of us," I said.

"If they know about Johnny's overbite and what Rachel's been saying to me, they undoubtedly know about my contacts with Valis. I'd better burn my notes."

"What," I said, "would a file on Valis look like? A file on a superior life form in another star system ... I wonder how it'd be cross-indexed. I wonder if it'd have a special marking."

"They'll get at Valis through me," Nicholas said.

"Valis will protect you," I said.

Then you don't think I should do it?"

"Hell, no," I said. I was amazed at him.

"But they'll think I'm disloyal if I say no. That's what they're after: proof of disloyalty. They'll have it!"

"Fuck "em," I said. "Say no anyhow."

Then they'll know. And I'll be in Nebraska."

I said, They've got you, then. Either way."

That's right," Nicholas said. "Ever since the two FBI agents closed in on me back in the fifties. I knew it would catch up with me, my disloyal past. My Berkeley days -the reason I left the university."

"You broke your gun."

"I disabled my gun! I was a war protestor even then, one of the first. I knew Fremont's minions would find me out; they only had to examine their files. The computers popped me up, the first antiwar activist in America. And now it's cooperate with them or be arrested."

"I was never arrested," I said, "and I've done a lot more antiwar stuff than you. In fact, you haven't done any since you left Berkeley. Since the FBI came by that day."

That proves nothing. I'm a sleeper. They probably think it's Aramchek that contacts me in the night. Valis is my name for Radio Free Aramchek."

"Aramchek is a word on a sidewalk."

"Aramchek is anything that opposes Fremont. Listen, Phil." Nicholas inhaled a deep, ragged breath. "I think I'm going to have to play ball with them, or anyhow appear to."

"Why?"

"Because," Nicholas said, "look what happened to you. Your place broken into, half your papers gone - you haven't been able to write since, for psychological reasons, for practical reasons; good lord, look at you -your nerves are shot. I know you're not able to sleep any more, expecting them to come back and do it again, or maybe arrest you. I can see what it's done to you; after all, I'm your best friend." Til live," I said.

"You don't have a wife and little boy," Nicholas said quietly. "You live alone, Phil; you don't have any family-. What if the night they broke all the back windows and smashed down the doors your little son had been home, alone? They might have - "

"They waited," I said, "until I was out of the house; they were outside for a week getting ready - I saw them. They waited until the house was empty."

Nicholas said, "The government hires ex-"Nam special forces veterans for commando raids like that. Search and seize, they call it. A military operation with military personnel using plastic military explosives - I saw the combat boot point they left in the closet of your study; you showed it to me. Phil, those were armed soldiers who hit your house. And I have Rachel and Johnny."

"You go along with them," I said, "and maybe your body lives, but your soul dies."

Til feed them names they can't use," Nicholas said. "Lurid rock lyrics that don't mean anything."

"And how'll you explain it to yourself when they arrest one of the loser artists you rat on?"

Nicholas gazed at me unhappily. In all the years I had known him I'd never seen such a wretched expression on his face.

"Because they will," I said. "And you know it. They may still arrest me. It's still hanging over my head."

That's what I mean," Nicholas said. "And I don't want that hanging over my head, for Rachel's sake and for Johnny's sake. I want to be with my little son as he grows up; it's the most precious thing in my life. I don't want to be in a forced labor detention camp in the boondocks hoeing turnips."

"Ferris Fremont hasn't just taken over the country," I said. "He's also taken over human minds. And debased them."

The Bible says don't judge," Nicholas said.

The Bible says, „My kingdom is not of this world,"" I answered angrily. "Which means there's a lot of explaining to do later on."

Tve got plenty of explaining to do right here."

"Not half of what comes later. Have you asked Valis what to do?"

"I don't ask Valis; he, they, tell me."

Tell them to tell you not to cooperate."

"So far they've said nothing. If they say nothing then I go ahead as I normally would."

"You cooperate with Mission Fuck-Up," I said (this was what we all derisively called it), "and I'll bet you a buck Valis never communicates with you again."

"I will have to do what I have to do," Nicholas said.

"Are you going to report to them about me too?" I said. "About my writing?"

"They can read your writing; it's all published."

"You could clue them in about Flow My Tears, since it isn't out yet. You know what it's about."

"I'm sorry, Phil," Nicholas said. "But my wife and child come first."

"For this," I said bitterly, "I moved to Southern

California."

"Phil, I can't afford for them to find out about Valis. I'm sorry, but that is too important. More important than you or me or anyone else."

I didn't like the notion of a close friend of mine reporting regularly, for money, to the minions of Ferris Fremont. When I considered to myself that Nicholas knew everything there was to know about me, it became oppressively close and menacing in a very personal way. "If Valis exists," I said, "he'll protect you, as you told me a long time ago. And if he doesn't exist, then you have nothing to protect and therefore no motive for cooperating with them. Either way you should tell them to go shove it." In actuality I was thinking of my own self. I hadn't really done all that much antiwar activity, or contemplated that much yet to be done, but in the eyes of the FAPers it would be sufficient. And Nicholas had been informed of every iota of it.

It was the beginning of the first real rift in our friendship. Nicholas reluctantly agreed that he could hold out against the FAPers with their dossier on him, and still keep his family and job, but I could see that not only was he divided against me but against himself as well. The fact of the matter was that I could no longer trust my dearest friend Nicholas Brady, whom I had known and loved since the old days in Berkeley. The authorities had done their assigned job: they had driven another wedge between two men who had always trusted each other completely.

The destruction of our relationship was a mini-cosmos mirroring what was going on at all levels of American society under F.F.F. On the basis of what had happened to us I could infer that terrible tragedies were taking place everywhere. For instance, what about the young artists coming to Progressive Records to play and sing? The record company official who auditioned them was a paid cop, informing on them to higher police authorities. Undoubtedly this was taking place at all the other record companies as well. What about Nicholas's fellow employees? They now had - or potentially had - a paid informer in their midst, who augmented his salary at the expense of their safety and freedom. All this, so that little Johnny could go to the dentist. What a rationale.

The real motive, of course, was Nicholas's concern for his own freedom and safety. In effect it was a trade-off: he jeopardized, or proposed to jeopardize, the freedom and safety of others to secure his own. But the net effect of a lot of people doing this would be mutual hazard. For instance, suppose a couple of FAPers now approached me and asked me to report on Nicholas. I already knew that there was a fair chance he was reporting on me. What, then, would my reaction be? My ability to resist them would be substantially undermined.

The well-known police tactic of whiplashing would be coming into play; they would soon be saying to me, "You better report on Nicholas Brady before he reports on you," which meant, You had better get your friend before he gets you. We'd been put at each other's throats; the only winner would be Ferris F. Fremont. The police have been using the same tricks since the time of the Medes, and people are still falling for them. As soon as Nicholas reported on anyone, especially for money, he would be vulnerable to police blackmail forever. The police had laid a noose out before him, and Nicholas was obligingly placing his head in it. He was doing most of the work. Where was the man who had damaged his gun rather than submit to taking military training involuntarily as a price for his college degree? Gone down the drain of prosperity, evidently; now Nicholas had a cushy job and great prospects, not to mention power over other people. That was what had done it. Idealism had given way to more realistic motivations: safety and authority and the protection of a family. Time had worked a dismal magic on my friend; he no longer strode along the pavement chanting old marching songs from the Spanish Civil War; in fact, if some young artist were to come to him with such lyrics, Nicholas would be in a position to pick up an easy hundred dollars.

"Here is what I will do," I told Nicholas, "rf you spy for the government. First, I will phone the brass at Progressive and tell them. Second, I will park my car out front of your main entrance, and when I see young artists going up the walk with their guitars and high hopes and absolute trust in you, I will stop them and tell them you are a paid - "

"Shit," Nicholas said.

"I mean it," I said.

"Well, I guess I can't do it." He looked relieved.

„That's right," I said. "You can't do it."

"They'll destroy me. It's just like when the FBI men came by originally; it's me they're after. Do you know the possible consequences if they harm Valis?"

"Valis can take care of himself," I said.

"But I can't," Nicholas said.

"In that case you're no different from the rest of us," I said. "Because neither can I."

That appeared to be the end of the conversation. The moral of it, I could have pointed out to Nicholas, is that if you are contemplating informing on people you should tell no one. Telling me had been a mistake, since I had immediately been flooded by visions of his informing on me.

That night I myself received a phone call from a cop, one whom I knew.

"A lot of people have access to your house, don't they?" he asked.

"Yeah, I guess so," I said.

"I have a tip I'm passing on to you. Someone is hiding dope in your house and the local FAP knows about it. If we're sent over to look for it and we find it we'll have to arrest you."

"Even though you know someone else is hiding it?"

That's right," the cop said. "That's the law. Better find it and flush it before we're called to go over there."

I spent the rest of the night looking for it. In all I found five stashes of drugs in five separate places, one even inside the phone itself. I destroyed all of it, but for all I knew I missed some. There was no way I could be sure. And whoever it was could plant more.

The following day two FAPers came by to visit me. These were young: a slender youth in a white shirt, slacks, and tie, and with him a girl in a long skirt. They could have been Mormon missionaries, but both wore the FAR armband. It was the really young FAPers who were the worst, so I was not very happy to see these two people. The FAPer youth were the zealous spearheads.

"May we sit down?" the boy said brightly.

"Sure," I said, not moving. My friend the cop had warned me just in time.

The girl, seated on my couch with her hands folded, said, "We have mutual friends. Nicholas Brady."

"Oh," I said.

"Yes," the boy said. "We're friends of his. He's talked about you a great deal - you're a writer, aren't you?"

"Yep," I said.

"We're not interrupting your writing, are we?" the boy said. They were the epitome of grooming and politeness.

"Nope," I said.

"You've certainly written some important novels," the girl said. "Ubik, Man in the Castle - "

"The Man in the High Castle," I corrected her. Obviously they'd never read my work.

"You and Mr Brady together," the girl said, "have certainly contributed a great deal to our popular culture, you with your stories and he selecting which artists are to be recorded. Is this why you're both living down in this area, the entertainment capital of the world?"

"Orange County?" I said.

The Southland."

"Well, it makes it easy to meet people," I said vaguely.

"You and Mr Brady have been friends for years, haven't you?" the boy said. "You lived together in Berkeley, as roommates."

"Yep," I said.

"And then he moved down here, and after a few years so did you."

"Yeah, well, we're good friends."

"Would you be willing to sign a notarized statement, under oath, as to his and his wife's political loyalty?"

Taken by surprise, I said, "What?" >

"Or would you not be willing to?"

"Sure I would," I said.

"We would like you to draft such a statement during the next few days," the girl said. "We'll help in the preparation of the final draft down at our headquarters. And we will leave you several models to base yours on, as well as an instruction manual."

"What for?"I asked.

"To help your friend," the girl said.

"Why does he need help?" I said.

The boy said, "Nicholas Brady has a suspect background, from his Berkeley days. If he is to retain the position he now holds, he will need the support of his friends. You're willing to give that support, aren't you? You are his friend."

I said, "I'll give Nicholas any and all help I can." As I said it I knew instinctively that I had taken the bait; I was in some vague police trap.

"Good," the girl said, and smiled, whereupon both of them rose to leave. The boy placed a plastic package down on the coffee table.

"Your kit," he said. "Instructions, helpful hints, models; as an author you'll undoubtedly find this very easy. Along with your statement about your friend we'd like you to draft a short autobiographical sketch, so the person who reads your statement will know a little about you too."

"A sketch covering what?" I said, and now I was really afraid, really sure I had fallen into a trap.

There's instructions covering that as well," the girl said, and both of them left. I was alone with the red-white-and-blue plastic kit. Seating myself, I opened the kit and began looking through the instruction booklet, which was printed on fine glossy paper. It bore the Presidential seal and the printed signature of F.F.F.

Dear American:

You have been invited to write a short article on the subject you know best: yourself! It is entirely up to you what matters you consider pertinent and what you feel should be left out. However, you will be graded not only on your inclusions but on what you omit.

Perhaps you have been asked to do this by a delegation of your friends and neighbors, the Friends of the American People. Or perhaps you wrote for this kit on your own initiative. Or perhaps your local police suggested it to you as a way to ...

I turned to the instruction booklet oh the preparation of a notarized statement about a friend's loyalty.

Dear American: . • .

You have been invited to write a short article on a subject well known to you: a close friend! It is entirely up to you what matters you consider pertinent and what you feel should be left out. However, you will benefit your friend by the greatest inclusion. What you write about him will, of course, be kept completely confidential; this article is for official use only.

Perhaps you have been asked to do this by a delegation of your friends and neighbors, the Friends of ...

I went to my typewriter, put paper in it, and began to compose the autobiographical sketch.

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

I, Philip K. Dick, being of sound mind and reasonably good health, wish to admit to being a high official for a period covering many years of the organization known to its enemies as Aramchek. In the course of my training for subversion and espionage, I have learned to lie and if not outright lie to distort so effectively that what I say is worthless to those who hold power in this our target nation, the US of A. With these provisos in mind, I will now make a statement about my lifelong friend Nicholas Brady, who has, to my recollection, been a covert advocate and supporter of the policies of Aramchek for years, changing his mind as the official line of Aramchek continually changes in order that it be in accord with the policy 6f People's China and other Socialist powers, not excluding the USSR, one of our earliest acquisitions in the power struggle against man which we have waged since our inception in the Middle Ages.

Perhaps I should speak further of Aramchek, in order to better clarify my own situation. Aramchek, an offshoot of the Roman Catholic Church, is devoted to the principle that the means justify the end. We therefore employ the highest means possible, with no regard to the end, knowing that God will dispose of that which mere man has proposed. In connection with this we employ and have employed every artifice and strategy and resource available to us to thwart the goals of Ferris F. Fremont, current puppet tyrant of these the US of A. During his childhood, to cite one example, we arranged to stencil an indentation of the name of our organization on the sidewalk down the street from the house in which he was born, for the purpose of spooking him in a most forceful way as to the fact that eventually WE WOULD GET HIM.

I signed this document and then sat back to consider the situation I was in. It wasn't good. I recognized this red-white-and-blue plastic kit; it was the notorious "voluntary information" kit, the first step in drawing a citizen into the active intelligence system of the government. Like an income tax audit, sooner or later every citizen got one. This was our lifestyle under F.F.F.

If I failed to turn over my autobiographical sketch and statement about Nicholas, the FAPers would be back, and next time they would be less polite. If I turned in an inadequate report on Nicholas and myself, they would politely request more materiah It was a technique first employed by the North Koreans on captured American prisoners: you were given a piece of paper and a pencil and told to write down anything about yourself you felt like, with no suggestions from the jailers. It was amazing what revelations prisoners made about themselves, far surpassing what they would have confessed under suggestion. When it came time to inform, a man was his own worst adversary, his own ultimate rat. All I had to do was sit before my typewriter long enough and I would have told them everything there was about myself and Nicholas, and probably after I had told them the facts I would go on with fantastic inventions, all designed to nail the attention - and admiration - of my audience.

The human being has an unfortunate tendency to wish to please.

I was in effect exactly like those captured Americans: a prisoner of war. I had become that in November 1968 when F.F.F. got elected. So had we all; we now dwelt in a very large prison, without walls, bounded by Canada, Mexico, and two oceans. There were the jailers, the turnkeys, the informers, and somewhere in the Midwest the solitary confinement of the special internment camps. Most people did not appear to notice. Since there were no literal bars or barbed wire, since they had committed no crimes, had not been arrested or taken to court, they did not grasp the change, the dread transformation, of their situation. It was the classic case of a man kidnapped while standing still. Since they had been taken nowhere, and since they themselves had voted the new tyranny into power, they could see nothing wrong. Anyhow, a good third of them, had they known, would have thought it was a good idea. As F.F.F. told them, now the war in Vietnam could be brought to an honorable conclusion, and, at home, the mysterious organization Aramchek could be annihilated. The Loyal Americans could breathe freely again. Their freedom to do as they were told had been preserved.

I returned to the typewriter and drafted another statement. It was important to do a good job.

TO THE AUTHORITIES:

I, Philip K. Dick, have never liked you, and I know from the burglary on my house and the fact that you are busily at work hiding dope in trie light sockets and telephone as I sit here that you don't care for me either. However, as much as I dislike you, and you me, there is someone whom I dislike even more, to wit: Mr Nicholas Brady. I suggest that you dislike him too. Let me outline why.

First of all, Mr Nicholas Brady is not a human being in the usual sense of the word. He has been taken over by (or more accurately will one of these days to the surprise of us all be taken over by) an alien life form emanating from another star. Far-ranging speculations can begin from this premise.

Perhaps, because my profession is that of a science fiction writer, you imagine that I am spinning a trial fantasy to see how you react. Not so, authorities. I only wish it were so. I have myself with my own eyes seen Mr Nicholas Brady demonstrate fantastic supernatural powers, bestowed on him by the alien suprahuman entity known as Valisystem A. I have seen Mr Nicholas Brady walk through walls. I have seen him melt glass. One afternoon, to demonstrate the staggering magnitude of his powers, Mr Nicholas Brady caused Cleveland to materialize in the open pasture along the side of the 91 freeway and then disappear again with no one save ourselves the wiser. Mr Nicholas Brady abolishes the bounds of space and time when the mood seizes him; he can return to the ancient past or leap ahead centuries into the future. He can, if he wishes, transport himself directly to Alpha Centauri or any other...

Fuck it, I thought, and ceased writing. It had been my intention to so thoroughly overstate the case in lurid hyperbole that the FAPers wouldn't give it an instant's credence.

I began then, to think about the boy and girl who had brought me this plastic kit, this lethal thing. At the time I had hardly noticed them on a conscious basis, but the impression of their two faces had remained anyhow. The girl, I thought, hadn't been bad-looking: dark-haired, with green eyes, rather bright-looking, many years younger than me, but that hadn't bothered me before.

Picking up the red-white-and-blue kit I found a white card glued to it. On the card were their names and telephone numbers. Well, I thought to myself, maybe there is another way out of this. Other than complying. Maybe I should ask for further help in preparing these statements.

While I was getting my act together in regard to the black-haired FAP girl, the phone rang. It was Nicholas.

I told him what had happened that evening.

"Are you going to do it?" he asked. "Write a statement .about me?"

"Well," I began.

Nicholas said, "It's not so easy when it's you, is it?"

"Shit, man," I said, "they've been hiding dope in my house; a cop tipped me off last night. I spent the whole night looking for it."

"They've got something on me too," Nicholas said. "They either have it or they arrange to have it, as in your case. Well, Phil, we're in the same boat. You better decide what to do. But if you inform on me - "

"All I'm being asked to do is write a statement of support," I said, but I knew he was right. They had us both, really, in the same grip. The pressures were the same.

Nicholas was right when he said, It's not so easy when it's you. "Fuck "em," I had advised him. Well, so much for advice. The shoe was now on the other foot. And it hurt; it hurt deep into my soul, piercing and twisting and burning. And no solution lay at hand - none.

None except to call the FAP girl up and sweet-talk her. My freedom, my life, depended on it. And so did Nicholas's.

The girl's name was Vivian Kaplan. I waited an hour, to be sure she had arrived back home, and then dialed.

"Hello?"

I said hello, told her who I was, and then explained that I had tied myself up in knots trying to write my statement about Nicholas. "Maybe," I said, "it's because I know so much about him. More than anyone else does. It's hard to know what to put down and what not .to. After all, I want a good grade." I figured that would get her.

"I'm certain you can do it," Vivian Kaplan said. "You are a professional writer; why, housewives and mechanics are getting the knack of it.1

"Maybe it is precisely because I am a professional writer," I said.

"Meaning what?"

"Well, I am a fiction writer. I'm used to making things up."

Vivian said, "You're not to make anything up on these documents, Phil."

I said, "Some of the truth about Nicholas reads like the wildest fiction, so help me God."

That did gaff her. "Oh?"

The disgrace," I said, "that forced him - the three of us - to leave Berkeley and migrate down here. Most of the secret he's still kept locked up in his heart."

""Disgrace,"" Vivian echoed. ""Secret.""

"He couldn't remain in Berkeley. Do you suppose you could come back here and we could talk about it?"

"For a little while," Vivian said. "But not for long."

"Just to help me get started," I said, pleased.

Half an hour later a small red Chevy II pulled up in my driveway. Vivian Kaplan got out, purse in hand, wearing a short imitation leather coat. I guided her into the house.

"I really appreciate this," I told her as I seated her in the living room. I took her coat and hung it in the closet.

Producing a small writing pad and pen from her purse, Vivian prepared to write. "What caused Mr Brady's disgrace back in Berkeley? You dictate and I'll transcribe it."

From the kitchen I brought a bottle of wine, a five-year-old Louis Martini.

"None of that for me, please," Vivian said.

"Just a taste. It's a good year."

"Maybe a taste."

I poured us both wine. In the background I had music playing, and low lights. Vivian, however, did not seem to notice; she was waiting intently for what I had to say. She did not touch her wine.

"Nicholas," I said, "talks to God."

She stared at me, mouth agape.

"He started it in Berkeley. As a child he was a Quaker, you know. I'm sure you have that in your records. The Quakers believe that the Holy Spirit can come to you and talk to you. All his life Nicholas waited for God - which is the same as the Holy Spirit, especially if you are a trinitarian, which Nicholas and I are - to come to talk to him. A couple of years before we left Berkeley, in the early sixties it was, God first spoke to him."

Vivian, listening, had written nothing.

"Since then," I said, "Nicholas has maintained an intimate relationship with God. He speaks to him as you and I are speaking to each other now."

"Christ," Vivian said impatiently, "that isn't any good; I can't report that."

"Do you know anybody else who communes regularly with God?" I said. "Nicholas's whole life is built around it; speaking with God and hearing God speak back is everything to him. As well it might be. I envy his experience."

Vivian put her pen away. "Are you sure he isn't crazy? It sounds crazy to me."

"You should be writing this down," I said. "I'm going to reveal to you some of the things God has told him."

"I don't care about that!" Vivian said, with agitation. "It has no political bearing! What can we do with information like that?"

"God said," I told her, "that he is going to cause plagues to fall on this entire order of things and wash it away; Wet plagues, I'd guess, from the sound of it; something about water."

"Oh, balls," Vivian said.

"I believe he also said he would place a rainbow in the sky," I said. "Afterward, as a sign of peace between God and man."

Sharply, Vivian said, "Is this the best you can do?"

"I told you I was having trouble getting things down. This is why I wanted you to come over." I seated myself on the couch beside her and took her ballpoint pen from her. Til put down the opening sentence. „Nicholas Brady-„"

"You got me over here for a religious thing? There's nothing we can do with a religious thing; there's nothing unpatriotic about God. God is not on our list. Can't you come up with anything else?"

"In Berkeley," I said, "talking to God is a disgrace. Nick was ruined there, when he confided it to people. They drove him off like an animal."

That's Berkeley," Vivian said. "Where there's nothing but atheists and Commies. I'm not surprised. But this is Orange County. This is the real world."

"You mean down here it's okay?"

"Of course it's okay."

I breathed a sigh of relief. "Then Nicholas is safe at last."

"Phil," Vivian said, "there must be other things you know about Nicholas which would - you know what I mean - would offset this about God."

"It is not possible," I said, "to offset God. He is all-powerful and all-knowing."

"I mean in terms of the political file we're drawing up."

"Have some of the wine," I said, holding her glass toward her.

"No, I don't drink wine," Vivian said in agitation. "But I brought some good grass with me." She opened up her purse and rummaged inside.

I really wasn't surprised. It figured.

"I need a small box," she said, "to manicure it in. And a card such as a credit card. Here, this will do." She found a white business card in her wallet.

"Let me see that," I said, extending my hand. Vivian placed the lid of grass in it; I then carried the grass from the living room into the bathroom, where at once I locked the door behind me. In an instant I had dumped the marijuana into the toilet and had flushed it down; the contraband would not be found in my house, not this lid of it.

"What are you doing?" Vivian called sharply, from outside the locked door; she began to knock. "What did you do?"

I flushed the toilet once more, to be absolutely sure, and then leisurely unlocked the door.

"Did you flush it?" she demanded incredulously.

"Yes I did," I said.

"Why? Well, never mind; what's done is done. I have a little high-grade hash we can smoke. Fortunately I brought my hash pipe with me." She returned to the living room; I followed after her. It would be harder getting the hash away from her, I realized. No one voluntarily surrendered hash, especially after what I had just done.

Vivian sat on the couch, her shoes off, legs drawn up, lighting the tiny cube of hash in her hash pipe. "Here." As smoke came from it she handed it to me. "This is the best hash I've had in months. It'll really get you off."

"I don't want drugs in my house," I said.

"No one can see in."

"I'm being set up," I said.

"Everyone thinks they're being set up. I've been turning on for two years and I've never been busted."

"Yes, but you're a FAPer."

"That makes it more dangerous for me," Vivian said. "Most FAPers are straight; it's very risky to be with FAP and to turn on at the same time. I have to wait until I'm around people like you before I can do it. That's one reason I was glad when they assigned me to cover you.

That's why I came over here tonight when you called, so we could turn on together."

"I don't turn on," I said.

"Of course you do. Everyone knows you do. You're one of the biggest dopers in America. It's in your bio material published with your books - look what Harlan Ellison wrote in Dangerous Visions. We have that in triplicate. And all your friends say you turn on."

„That was made up," I said, "to sell books."

"You turn on," Vivian said. "Here, give me my hash pipe back. It's my turn for a hit."

I could scarcely flush her hash pipe down the toilet, so I returned it to her. Vivian inhaled deeply, her face flushed.

As she passed it back to me she said, coughing, "Hash makes me horny."

"Oh," I said, "Well."

"Does it make you horny?" She-took another hit from her pipe, her eyes beginning to glaze over now, becoming unfocused; her whole body seemed limp, and at grateful ease.

"Let's go in the bedroom," I said.

"In a minute. When we're through with the hash." She continued to smoke, ritualistically now, in a lazy, blithe way. Her cares, her agitation about my political report, my dumping the lid of grass, had vanished.

The time had now come to turn the tables on the tyranny oppressing me. Once I had made little Vivian Kaplan my mistress, I could stop worrying about my political report. Taking her by the hand, I set her hash pipe down and lifted her to her feet. "Are you on the pill?" I asked her as I guided her down the hall toward my bedroom. I had to hold on to her to keep her from weaving into the wall.

"Of course I am," Vivian said. She was reflexively starting to unbutton her blouse as we approached the open bedroom door; humming and smiling from the hash, she entered the bedroom, and I kicked the door shut after us.

"Just a minute," I said as she sat on the edge of the bed removing her skirt. Til be right back." I returned to the living room where she had left her hash pipe. Placing it carefully back in her purse I closed the purse around it, thinking, this way if they break in and find the dope it'll obviously be hers. Despite her efforts, they won't be able to pin it on me.

"Hurry up," Vivian called from the bedroom. Tm starting to crash." I hurried back down the hall to the bedroom and found her lying nude on the bed, her clothes in a pile on my typing chair. "Hash makes me sleepy sometimes," she said. "I have to get it on right away or I'm too out of it."

We made love. Toward the end Vivian did fall into a deep, untroubled sleep. Well, I said to myself as I padded down the hall to the bathroom to take a shower, I am now master - rather than victim - of the situation. This girl is not going to spy on me any longer. I have turned an enemy into something even better than a friend: a co-conspirator in sexuality.

After I had taken my shower I reentered the bedroom to find her asleep with the top sheet pulled over her. "Vivian," I said, touching her on the shoulder, "is there anything I can get you? Something to drink?"

"I'm hungry," Vivian murmured sleepily. "After I make out I'm always terribly hungry. When I first was making out I used to eat up everything in the refrigerator afterward. Half a chicken, a pizza, two hamburgers, and a quart of milk... whatever I could find."

"I can fix you a frozen beef pie," I said.

"Got any soft drinks, like a Pepsi?"

I had a can of Coors beer, which I brought her. Vivian sat in her underwear on the bed, drinking the beer.

"What do you do," I asked her, "when you're not working for FAP? I mean, you can't run errands for FAP all the time."

"I go to school," Vivian said.

"Where? Cal State Fullerton? Santa Ana College?"

"Valentia High," Vivian said. "I'm a senior. I graduate this June."

"High School!" I said, stricken. "Vivian - " I could hardly speak; I was shaking with fear. "How old are you, for chrissakes?"

"Seventeen," Vivian said, sipping the beer. "I'll be eighteen this September."

Oh, my God, I realized. She's underage. It's statutory rape! A felony! As bad as the dope - in fact, worse. All she has to do is mention it to the police; arrest is automatic.

"Vivian," I grated, "it's illegal for you to go to bed with me. Don't you know that?" I began getting her clothes together. "You have to get right out of here!"

"Nobody knows I'm here," Vivian said calmly; she continued drinking the Coors beer. "Except Bill."

"Who the hell is „Bill"?"

"The boy I was with earlier today, when we came as a team. I told him I'd call him when I got home, so he'd know I'm all right. We're engaged."

It was too much for me; I sank down on the chair facing her and just stared at her.

"He won't mind," Vivian said. "Just so long as you file your political response in time. That's all he cares about, racking up points at headquarters. We're on a quota system, but Bill, he always exceeds his quota and scores extra points. He's the most gung-ho FAPer among us. That's why I like him; he sort of offsets my own, you know, my indifferent attitude, as they call it. I don't really care about the quota or the points; I just enjoy meeting the people they assign us to."

And I had done it to myself. It had been my idea, my scheme, to lure the girl back to my house at night on a phony pretext, in order to go to bed with her. I had put my ass in the bed and my neck in the noose, all in the same move. Wonderful. Now what was I supposed to do? They really had me. I cooperated or I went to the Orange County Jail. And people died - were clubbed to death -at the Orange County Jail; it happened all the time. Especially political prisoners.

I'll be writing confessions the rest of my life, I said to myself. And articles on my friends. If they asked me to do a whole book on Nicholas I'd have to comply. Vivian Kaplan has me. I think I was set up, I thought suddenly. She got me to do this; that's why they send attractive young girls around, underage girls that don't look underage. Girls with dope and long legs and a welcoming innocent smile, who are glad to drive over to your house late at night, alone. Girls whose phone numbers are typed on the front of the goddamn informer kit, big as life. A veritable come-on.

"Now, about the God business," Vivian said, in a practical tone of voice. The hash had worn off, she was no longer mellow. "You can't use it, Phil; we're not interested in Nicholas Brady talking to God. What we'd like to know about are the Communist Party ties he still has left over from his old activist days at Berkeley. My superior feels that Brady got his job at Progressive Records so that he could very carefully slip aspiring new left-wing artists into the public eye. It's a common technique they use; meanwhile, of course, Brady remains personally inactive. But he must have links with the people who instruct him, even if it's just by mail. You're in a position to read his mail, aren't you? That's how the Party maintains control: by mail from New York, where the KGB operates. That connects the operator here with Moscow and the international planning network. We want to know which artists he's signed are crypto-Communists and who he gets his orders from; those are the twin prongs of - "

"Nicholas is just trying to make a buck," I said wearily. "So his kid can go to the dentist."

"He doesn't meet with anyone from New York? What about phone calls?"

"Tap his phone," I said, "for all I care."

"If you could get possession of his phone statement," Vivian continued, "and see if he's called New York; that would -"

"Vivian," I said, "I'm not going to do it."

"Not going to do what?"

"Spy on Nicholas. Or anyone else. You can fuck yourself. Take your kit back. I've had it."

After a pause Vivian said, "We have quite a bit on you, Phil. A lot of people know a lot about you."

"So what," I said, resigned and bitter at it all, ready to throw in the sponge, come what might. There was just so much they could do to me, just so much and no more.

Vivian said, "I've read the file on you."

"So?"

"So a case could be made against you that would stand up in court."

"You're wrong about that," I said, but it was I who was bluffing, not her. And we both knew it; I could see the sense of certitude on her face.

"Do you want us to go after you instead of Nicholas?" she asked.

I shrugged.

"It could be arranged. Really, we could get both of you together; your lives are intertwined. If one of you falls, the other falls automatically."

"Is that what your superior at FAP GHQ told you?" I said.

"We discussed it. A number of us."

"Then do your damnedest," I said. "I already know about the dope you've been hiding around here; I found it and destroyed it. I was tipped off."

"You couldn't have found it all," Vivian said.

"Is there an infinite amount?"

"No, but the person hiding it - " She broke off.

"If he can hide it," I said wearily, "I can find it. And if I can find it, that's the end of it. Like the lid of grass you brought. A FAPer smoking grass - it doesn't compute. You and your goddamn hash pipe - Christ, as soon as you brought out the grass I knew you were setting me up."

Vivian said, "Phil, you were set up a long time ago. What I did tonight is very little. Going to bed with me -"

"Let me take a look at your California driver's license." Suddenly something occurred to me. Maybe she wasn't underage after all. I hurried past her, out of the bedroom and down the hall in the direction of the living room; Vivian scuttled right behind me, trying to overtake me. It was no use; I wedged myself in the hallway and beat her to the living room and her purse.

"Get out of my purse!" she shrieked.

I grabbed up her purse, sprinted with it into the bathroom, locked the bathroom door after me. In an instant I had shaken the contents out onto the bathroom rug.

The driver's license gave her age as nineteen. She was not underage. That too had been a police trap, and an empty one. So much for that. But it showed me how close I was to the edge, how little separated me from a fall to oblivion.

I unlocked the bathroom door. Vivian was nowhere to be seen. Listening, straining, I heard her voice far off; she was on the phone in the bedroom.

When I entered the bedroom she hung up and stood facing me defiantly. "May I have my things back?" she said.

"Sure," I said. "They're on the bathroom rug. You can pick them up yourself." I accompanied her to the bathroom, where she knelt down and began to gather up her papers, cosmetics, wallet, and assorted possessions. "What did you do," I asked, "call FAP to tell them the plan didn't work?"

Vivian stuffed her possessions back into her purse, straightened up, returned to the bedroom silently to put on her shoes, walked down the hall to the living room, where she slid into her coat, and then, all her things gathered together, including her hash pipe, she opened the front door of the house and walked up the driveway to her parked car.

I went with her. The night was warm and pleasant. I felt good indeed; I had parried another police trap.

"I'll see you again, Phil," Vivian said.

"No, you won't," I said, opening her car door for her. "I have no wish to see you again. In bed or out of it."

"You'll see me again," Vivian said, getting in and starting up the motor.

I said, "You have nothing on me; I don't have to see you."

"Ask me what I did while you were taking your shower."

I looked down at her as she sat calmly behind the wheel of her car. "You did -"

"I hid it where you'll never find it," Vivian said; she began rapidly rolling up her window.

"Hid what?" I grabbed at the window, but it continued to roll up; I grabbed at the door handle, but she had locked it.

"Cocaine," Vivian said. Her window closed, she shifted into gear, the car suddenly roared off into the street and made a sharp right turn, its tires squealing. I stood impotently watching her go.

Bull, I said to myself. Another crock, like her being underage. But - how could I be sure? I had been in the shower at least fifteen minutes. Vivian Kaplan had had fifteen unobstructed free minutes to hide anything she wanted around my house - to hide stuff, to pry, to read, to see where things were... anything she cared to do. Possibly, I thought, the whole going to bed with me had been only a ploy - designed to tie me up by distraction, so that I lost sight of the real issue. And what was the real issue? The fact that an admitted government agent, wearing an armband, openly identified as such, had obtained from me fifteen minutes of absolute privilege to come and go in my house, alone. She had been legally there. I had invited her over. And this, after my pal the friendly cop had warned me.

There is no use warning me, I said to myself with savage, helpless wrath. I am too fucking stupid. The warning is wasted; I just keep on truckin" anyhow. I invite them over; then I lock myself up in the shower for fifteen minutes, giving them the run of the house. She could have planted a gun and dope as well; there I go, down the tubes, forever. Victim of a police trick carried off to perfection, in that I did most of the work myself.

And suppose it's another lie. Suppose she didn't hide any coke. Quantities of coke are minute; I could look for days, weeks, and never find it, and if there isn't any I could drive myself nuts, work myself into a paranoid psychotic frenzy and not find it - not find it and never know if it was an inch away or if it never existed. Meanwhile, every second of the night and day, waiting for the cops to come in on a tip and bust me - tear open a wall and find the coke right away: a ten-year sentence.

Suddenly chilled, I thought, Maybe her phone call was the tip. The tip the police were waiting for; not that the drugs are there, but that the drugs had been placed there successfully, that when they break in and examine the house they will find something.

Then my days - my hours - are numbered, I thought. There is no use searching. Better just to sit. Just walk back into the house and sit.

I did so. I closed the front door and seated myself on the couch; presently I got up to turn on the FM. Again I sat down. I listened to a performance of the Beethoven Emperor Concerto, sitting, listening, waiting, listening not to the familiar music but for the sounds of approaching cars. It was a hell of an experience. Time stretched out immeasurably. I had to go into the kitchen, finally, to look at the stove clock in order to obtain any idea of how late it was. One hour, two hours, passed. No one came: no cars, no pounding on the door, no pump shotguns and men in uniform. Just the radio playing and the house empty except for me.

I felt my forehead; it was hot and sweaty."Going into the bathroom I got the thermometer, shook it down, and took my temperature. It was 102 degrees: a fever from fear and tension. My body made ill by the stress it was under, unfair and unjust stress, but very real. She was smart to shoot right out of here, I said to myself. After she told me that, whether it was true or not. Jammed down the gas pedal and laid rubber. If she shows up here again I'll murder her. She knows it; she'll stay away.

If I get out of this safe and alive, I said to myself, I will write a book about this. Somehow I will figure out a way to work it into a novel. So other people will know. Vivian Kaplan will go down in history for what she is, for what she does. That is my promise to myself, to keep myself going.

Never walk over a writer, I said to myself, unless you're positive he can't rise up behind you. If you're going to burn him, make sure he's dead. Because if he's alive, he will talk: talk in written form, on the printed, permanent page.

But am I alive? I asked myself.

Only time could tell. I felt at this moment as if a mortal blow had been delivered to me, a blade thrust deep; the pain was unbearable. But I might survive. I had survived the attack on my house; I had survived many things. Probably I would survive this. If I did, FAP was in trouble, Vivian Kaplan in particular.

I told myself that, but I didn't really believe it. What I believed was that FAP and its master Ferris Fremont had me. And I had sprung the trap myself - that was the worst part, the part that really hurt. My own cunning had betrayed me, had delivered me to the enemy. That was hard to bear.

The cops never came; whatever Vivian Kaplan had been up to fizzled out, and I was able to relax. In the following days my temperature went down to normal, probably my blood pressure as well. I began to think more reasonably. However, I asked my lawyer what to do about them hiding dope in my house.

"Write a letter to Orange County Drug Abuse," he told me. Tell them the situation."

"Will that - ?"

"They may still bust you, but when they find the letter in their files they may be lenient."

Anyhow, nothing happened. I began to sleep at night again. Vivian evidently had been bluffing; I was beginning to notice a lot of bluffing going on. The police seemed fond of that tactic; it had to do with getting the suspect to perform the hard work himself, as I had demonstrated my willingness to.

They eat people like me for breakfast, I said to myself. My engineering a roll in the hay with Vivian had severely crippled my faith in my own tactics. I could not regain the conviction that in the end I, and people like me, would prevail. To prevail I would have to become a lot less stupid.

I of course told Nicholas the whole thing. He of course was incredulous.

"You did what?" he said. "You went to bed with an underage FAP girl who was carrying dope in her purse? My God; if they gave you a hacksaw in a cake you'd saw your way into jail. You want me to provide the cake? Rachel will be glad to bake it. Get your own saw."

"Vivian was working so many numbers on me at once that I got confused," I said.

"A seventeen-year-old girl puts an intelligent grown man in jail. Even when he's being super-cautious."

I said, truthfully, "It wouldn't be the first time."

"Stay away from her from now on," Nicholas said. "Entirely away. Spend your time with knotholes, if necessary. Anything but her."

"Okay!" I said irritably. But I knew I'd see Vivian Kaplan again. She would seek me out. There would be another round with the authorities - perhaps several. Until they had netted Nicholas and me to their satisfaction. Until we were harmless.

I wondered if the alleged protection which Valis supplied Nicholas extended to me. After all, we were in it together: two major stations in the network of pop culture, as the FAPers had put it. Kingpins, so to speak, in the vox populi.

Perhaps the only entity we could turn to for help in this tyrannical situation was Valis. Valis against F.F.F. The Prince of this World - Ferris Fremont - and his foe from another realm, a foe Fremont didn't even know existed. A product of Nicholas Brady's mind. The prognosis was not comforting. I would have preferred something or someone more tangible. Still, it was better than nothing; it provided a certain psychological comfort. Nicholas, in the privacy of our intimate rap sessions, could envision vast operations by Valis and his transcendent forces against the cruel bondage we were in. It certainly beat watching TV, which now consisted mostly of propaganda dramas extolling the police, authority in general, war, car crashes, and the Old West, where simple virtues had prevailed. John Wayne had become the official folk hero of America.

And then there was the weekly "Conversation with the Man We Trust," Ferris F. Fremont speaking from a firelit alcove in the White House.

It was a real problem to get the masses to watch Ferris Fremont deliver his speeches, because he spoke in such a dull way. It was like sitting through an endless lecture on some obscure aspect of economics - exactly like that, since Fremont invariably gave a rundown of figures from all departments. Evidently, behind his nondescript figure a powerful White House staff lurked, never seen, who fed him an infinitude of typed information on every topic bearing on his rule. Fremont did not appear to regard all this as dull. "Iron production," he would stumble along, reading half the words off the cue card wrong, "is up three percent, giving rise to a justified optimism in agricultural quarters." I always had the feeling I was back in school, and the tests we had to fill out afterward reinforced this sensation.

This did not make Ferris Fremont a figurehead, however, fronting for the staff who fed his facts to him; on the contrary, when he departed from his prepared script the real savagery in him came out. He liked to depart when matters concerning America and its honor and destiny were mentioned. East Asia was a place where American boys were demonstrating that honor, and Fremont could not let a reference to that topic pass without an extempore comment, at which times his sallow face would furrow with intensity and he would stumble out words of grim determination to all who would challenge American might. We had a plethora of American might, to hear Fremont speak of it. Half his time was spent warning unmentioned enemies of that might. I usually assumed he meant the Chinese, although he seldom saw cause to mention them by name. Being from California, Fremont kept a special place in his heart for the Chinese; to hear him speak you would have thought they had overcharged us in their laying of railroad track - a matter he could not, and honor would not allow him to, forget.

Really, he was the worst speechmaker I had ever heard. I often wished the invisible White House staff who formed his compatriots would rise up, select one of their number who could talk, and delegate him to finish Fremont's prepared speech. Given the right pinstriped suit and loud tie, few people would notice.

These synthetic chats were carried by all networks in prime time, and it was a good idea to listen. You were supposed to do so with your front door open, so that roving bands of FAPers could make spot checks. They passed out little cards on which various simple-minded questions about the current speech were asked; you were to check the right answers and then drop the card in a mailbox. The enormous White House staff scrutinized your answers to make sure you understood what you were hearing. It was mandatory to put your social security number on the card; the authorities had taken to organizing all their files on the basis of social security numbers. Your mail-in cards went into your permanent file, for what reason no one knew. We calculated that these cards must be making the files very large. Maybe there were subtle trick questions, such as the K scale in the Minnesota MultiPhasic, the so-called "lying" scale.

Sometimes the questions did seem devious, with the high possibility of making an accidental incriminating answer. One went:

Russia is becoming (1) weaker; (2) stronger; (3) about the same in relationship to the Free World.

Naturally, Rachel and Nicholas and I, doing our cards in unison, marked (2). The ideology of the authorities always stressed Russia's increasing strength, and the need for the Free World to continually double its arms budget in order just to keep up.

However, a later question rendered this one suspect.

Russian technology is (1) very good; (2) adequate; (3) typically inept.

Well, if you marked (1) ycru seemed to be paying the Communists a compliment. (2) was probably the best bet, since it probably was true, but the way (3) was worded seemed to suggest that the right-thinking citizen would reflexively mark it. After all, what could one expect from captive Slavic minds? Certainly, typical inept-ness. We were very good, not them.

But if their technology was typically inept, then how could (2) be the correct answer on the previous question? How did a nation with typically inept technology become stronger than ourselves? Nicholas and Rachel and I returned to the previous question and changed our answers to (1). That way it dovetailed with typically inept. The weekly questionnaire had many pitfalls. The USSR, like a Japanese wrestler, was both dumb and clever at the same time, strong and weak, likely to win and a sure bet to lose. All we in the Free World had to do was never falter. We managed this by turning in our cards regularly. It was the least we could do.

The answer to the above dilemma was imparted to us by Ferris Fremont the next week. How did a nation with typically inept technology become stronger than ourselves? Through subversion here at home, a sapping of the will of Americans through the guile of defeatism. There was a question on the next card about that:

The greatest enemy America faces is (1) Russia; (2) our high standard of living, highest the world has ever known; (3) secret infiltrators in our midst.

We knew to put (3). However, Nicholas that night was in a crazy mood; he wanted to check (2).

"It's our standard of living, Phil," he told me with a wink. "That's what's going to doom us. Let's all three of us check (2)."

"What's going to doom us is screwing around with these answer cards," I told him. "They take these answers seriously."

They never read them," Rachel said. "It's just to make sure you listen to Fremont's weekly speech. How could they read all these cards? Two hundred million of them every week."

"Computer read," I said.

"I vote we mark (2) on that question," Nicholas said, and did so.

We filled out our cards, and then on Nicholas's suggestion he and I walked to the mailbox together, the three cards in the pre-franked envelope which the government provided.

"I want to talk to you," Nicholas said to me, as soon as we were outside.

"Okay," I said. I thought he meant about the cards. But it was not the cards he had on his mind. As soon as he began to talk I understood why he had behaved so erratically.

"I received the most compelling reception of Valis so far," he said in a low, very serious voice. "It completely shook me up. Nothing so far has - well, I'll tell you. What I saw visually was the woman again. She was seated in a modern living room, on the floor near a coffee table. A bunch of men were around on all sides of her, all wearing expensive Eastern-style suits, establishment suits.

The men were young. They were deep in discussion. The woman suddenly, when they were aware of her, she - " He paused. "She turned on her third eye, the one with the lens instead of the pupil; she turned it on them, and, Phil - she read into their hearts. What they had done and weren't admitting, what they intended to do: everything about them. And she kept on smiling. They never guessed she had that eye with that all-seeing lens and was reading deep into them. There were no secrets left, nothing she didn't know. You know what she learned about them?"

Tell me," I said.

"They were conspirators," Nicholas said. "They had plotted the murders of everyone who's been assassinated: Dr King, the two Kennedys, Jim Pike, Malcolm X, George Lincoln Rockwell the Nazi Party leader ... all of them. Phil, I tell you as God is my witness, she saw that. And as I looked at her I was made to understand what she was: the sibyl. The Roman sibyl who guards the republic. Our republic."

We had reached the mailbox. Nicholas stopped there, turned toward me, and placed his hand on my shoulder.

"She made me understand that she had seen them and she knew what they had done, and they would be brought to justice. The fact that she had seen them ensured that. There's no way they can escape paying for what they've done."

I said, "And they weren't conscious of her."

They didn't even guess that their deeds are known, and known to her. It never entered their minds - they were still joking and laughing, like a bunch of pals, and there she was overseeing them with that third eye, that lensed eye, and she was smiling along with them. And then the eye and its lens disappeared and again she looked like an ordinary person. Same as anyone else."

"What is the purpose of the conspiracy?"

Nicholas said hoarsely, They are all cronies of Ferris Fremont. Without exception. I was given to understand -I did understand - that the scene was in a Washington, DC, hotel room, a lavish hotel."

"Jesus," I said. "Well, I see two separate pieces of information in that. Our situation is worse than we thought; that's one piece. The other piece is that we're going to be helped."

"Oh, she'll help us, all right," Nicholas said. "I tell you, man, I wouldn't want to be in their shoes. And they were still grinning, still shooting the bull back and forth. They think they have it made. They don't. They're doomed."

"I thought we were the ones who were doomed."

"No," Nicholas said. "It's them."

"Do we do anything?"

"I don't think you do," Nicholas said. "But - " He hesitated. "I think I'm going to have to. I think they're going to use me, when the time comes. When they begin to act."

I said, "They're already acting now; they told you, for one thing. If they tell enough people, that's it there. The truth about how our present regime got into power. Over a bunch of corpses, the corpses of some of the best men of our times."

"It's heavy," Nicholas said.

"Are you sure you didn't just dream this all up?" I said.

"It did come in a dream," Nicholas admitted. There never was anything like this beamed at me before. Phil, you saw what happened that night about Johnny. When - "

"So Ferris Fremont arranged their deaths," I said.

That's what the sibyl discovered, yes."

"Why you?" I said. Of all people to pass it on to.

"Phil," Nicholas said, "how long does it take to get a book out? From the time you start writing it?"

"Too long," I said. "A year and a half minimum."

"That is too long. She's not going to wait that long; I could tell. I could feel it."

"How long is she going to wait?"

Nicholas said, "I don't think she is going to wait. I think that for them to plan is the same as acting. They plan and act simultaneously; to think it is to do it. They are a form of absolute mentation, pure minds. She is an all-knowing mind from which nothing is hidden. It's scary." ,

"But this is very good news," I said.

"Good news for us anyhow," Nicholas said. "We won't be mailing in these damn cards much longer,"

"What you ought to do," I said, "is write Ferris Fremont and tell him he and his henchmen have been seen by the Roman sibyl. What do you know about the Roman sibyl? Anything?"

"I researched her this morning in my Britannica" Nicholas said. "She's immortal. The original sibyl was in Greece; she was an oracle of the god Apollo. Then she guarded the Roman republic; she wrote a bunch of books which they used to open and read when the Republic was in danger." He added, "I'm thinking now of the great Bible-like books I saw held open to me originally, when my experiences began. You know, the sibyl became sacred to the Christians. They felt she was a prophet like the Hebrew prophets. Guarding God-fearing good men against harm."

It sounded like the exact thing we needed. Divine protection. The guardian of the Republic had answered from down the corridors of time, in her customary way. After all, was the United States not an extension through linear time of the Roman republic? In many ways it was. We had inherited the Roman sibyl; since she was immortal she had continued on after Rome vanished... vanished but still existent in new forms, with new linguistic systems and new customs. But the heart of the Empire remained: one language, one legal system, one coinage, good roads - and Christianity, the later legal religion of the Roman Empire. After the Dark Ages we had built back up to what had been and even more. The prongs of imperialism had been extended all the way to Southeast Asia.

And, I thought, Ferris F. Fremont is our Nero.

"If it didn't take so long to produce a book," Nicholas was saying, "I'd think Valis told me so I could tell you and you could use it for a plot idea. But the time factor rules that out... unless you've already done so." He eyed me hopefully.

"Nope," I said, in all candor. "Never used a thing you told me. Too fucked."

"You believe this, don't you?"

"I believe it all. As an FBI agent once said to me while shaking me down, „You believe everything you hear.""

"And - you can't use it?"

"It's for you, Nicholas," I said. "They want you, not me. So start truckin"."

Til „start truckin"" on the signal," Nicholas said. "The disinhibiting signal." He was still waiting for that. The wait must have been hard, but certainly not as hard as having to choose what to do and when. All he had to do was wait until the signal came of its own accord and disinhibited the centuries-old entity slumbering within him.

"If Valis is going to throw Ferris Fremont out of office," I said, "I wonder how he's going to accomplish it."

"Maybe by giving his sons birth defects."

At that I laughed. "You know who that sounds like, don't you? Jehovah against the Egyptians."

Nicholas said nothing. We continued to walk.

"Are you positive it isn't Jehovah?" I asked him.

"It's hard to prove a negative, that it isn't something."

"But have you seriously considered the possibility that it is? Because if it is, we can't lose; they can't win."

"They are doomed," Nicholas said.

"Do you know what they are going to get?" I said. "Blood clots, high blood pressure, heart trouble, cancer; their planes will crash; bugs will eat their gardens; their swimming pools in Florida will get lethal mold growing on the surface - do you know what it's like to try to stand against Jehovah?"

"Don't tell me," Nicholas said. "I'm not doing it. I wouldn't be caught dead doing it."

"You'd be better off caught dead," I said.

Suddenly Nicholas ducked his head, caught hold of my arm. "Phil - all I can see are dazzling pinwheels. How"m I going to get home?" His voice shook with fear. "Pinwheels of fire, like fireworks - my good God, I'm practically blind!"

It was the beginning of the transformation in him. How inauspiciously it had started: I had to lead him home, as if he were a child, to his wife and son. All the way he muttered in fear, cringing and hanging onto me. I had never seen him so frightened.

During the next week the fiery pinwheels remained, obscuring Nicholas's vision, but only at night; it was his night vision that had become impaired. A doctor who examined him told him that it resembled poisoning by alkaloids of belladonna; had he taken a lot of allergy medicine recently? No, Nicholas said. He had to stay home from work, after a few days; he was becoming dizzy, and when he tried to drive his car his hands shook and there was no sensation in his feet. His doctor suspected some form of poisoning or intoxicant, but he could not determine which one it was.

I checked up on Nicholas every day. One day when I showed up at his apartment I found him seated with several bottles of vitamins, including an enormous plastic container of vitamin C.

"What's all this about?" I asked him.

Seated there pale and worried, Nicholas explained that he was attempting in his own way to flush the toxin out of his system; water-soluble vitamins, he had learned from his reference books, acted on the system as a diuretic; he hoped, by taking enough of them, he could rid himself of the flashing wheels of jagged, colored fire that plagued him at night or when he blinked.

"Are you sleeping?" I asked him.

"No," he admitted. "Not at all." He had tried leaving his bedside radio on to mild bubble-gum rock, but, he said, after a few hours the music assumed an ominous, menacing sound; the lyrics underwent a grotesque change, and he had to shut the radio off.

The doctor thought it might be blood pressure problems. He also alluded to the possibility of drugs. But Nicholas wasn't on anything; I was certain of that.

"And if I do get to sleep," Nicholas said shakily, "I have dreadful nightmares."

He told me one of them. In the dream he was shut in a tiny cage under the Colosseum in ancient Rome; in the sky overhead, huge winged lizards were searching for him. All at once the flying lizards detected his presence under the Colosseum; they swept down and in an instant were tearing open the door of his cage. Trapped, with death at hand, all Nicholas could do was hiss at the lizards; evidently he was a small mammal of some kind. Rachel woke him from that dream, and partially awake, he had extended his tongue and continued his hissing in a furious, inhuman way, even though, she told me, his eyes were wide open. After that he had come to and had told her a rambling story about walking toward the cave in which he lived, guided by his cat, Charley. Looking around their bedroom, Nicholas had begun to lament in fear that Charley was missing; how could he find his way, now, without the cat, seeing as how he was blind?

After that he kept the radio on playing bubble-gum rock. Until one night he heard the radio talking to him. Talking in a foul, malevolent way.

"Nick the prick," the radio was saying, in imitation of the voice of a popular vocalist whose latest record had just been featured. "Listen, Nick the prick. You're worthless and you're going to die. You misfit! You prick, Nick! Die, die, die!!"

He sat up, heard it while fully awake. Yes, the radio was saying "Nick the prick" all right, and the voice did resemble that of the well-known singer; but, he realized with horror, it was only an imitation. It was too cruel, too metallic, too artificial. It was a mechanical travesty of her voice, and anyhow she would not be saying that, and if she had said it the station would not have aired it. And it was addressed directly to him.

After that he never turned on the radio again. During the day he took greater and greater quantities of the water-soluble vitamins, in particular C, and at night he lay wide awake, his thoughts racing in fear, the jagged, wildly colored buzz saws spinning before his eyes, completely obscuring the door. What if an emergency occurred at night? he asked himself. What if Johnny got sick? There was no way Nicholas could possibly drive him to the hospital; in fact, if the apartment building caught fire it was unlikely that Nicholas could even find his way out. One evening the girl across the hall had asked him downstairs to look at the master circuit-breaker box; he had accompanied her down the outside stairs all right but then later when she ran up again to answer the phone he had floundered around blindly in the dark, in overwhelming panic and confusion, until at last Rachel came down and rescued him.

Eventually he found his way to a psychiatrist, for the first time. The psychiatrist diagnosed him as manic and gave him a course of lithium carbonate to take. So now he was dropping tablets of lithium carbonate as well as his vitamins. Shaking and frightened, not knowing what was happening to him, he withdrew into his bedroom, not wishing - not able - to see anyone.

The next tragedy that struck was an abscessed and impacted wisdom tooth. Nicholas had no choice but to make an immediate appointment with Dr Kosh, the best oral surgeon in central Orange County.

The Sodium Pentothal was a great relief to him; probably it was the first time in three weeks he had become completely unconscious. He returned home in good spirits - until the procaine wore off and pain flashed through his stitched-up jaw. The rest of the day he lay tossing and turning; all that night the pain was so great that he forgot the whirling buzz saws; the next day he phoned Dr Kosh and pleaded for oral pain medication.

"Didn't I give you a prescription?" Dr Kosh said, absentmindedly. Til phone the pharmacy and have them send it right out. I'm prescribing Darvon-N for you; that tooth had grown down into the jawbone; we had to sort of - well, crack the jawbone to get the pieces of tooth out."

Nicholas sat with a moist teabag between his jaws as he waited for the pharmacy delivery boy to ring the doorbell.

The doorbell rang at last.

Still woozy from the pain, Nicholas made his way to the door and opened it. A girl stood there with heavy black hair, hair so black that the coils of it seemed almost blue. She wore an absolutely white uniform. Around her neck he saw a gold necklace, with a gold fish suspended between links of golden chain. Fascinated, staring at the necklace in a hypnoidal twilight state, Nicholas could not speak.

"Eight forty-two," the girl said. Nicholas, as he handed her a ten, said, "What - is that necklace?"

"An ancient sign," the girl said, raising her left hand to point to the golden fish. "Used by the early Christians."

He stood holding the bag of medication, watching her go. He was still there when Rachel came to tap him and rouse him to full consciousness.

The medication helped the pain, and in a few days Nicholas seemed okay. But he was, of course, under the weather from the oral surgery and stayed in bed resting.

The buzz saws, mercifully, were now gone; he had not seen them since visiting Dr Kosh.

"I have a favor to ask," he said to Rachel one day as she was getting ready to go shop at Alpha Beta. "Could you get me a few votive candles and a glass candleholder? The candleholder has to be white and the candles have to be white."

"What's a votive candle?" Rachel asked, puzzled.

"One of those little short fat candles," Nicholas said. "Like you see burning in Catholic churches."

"Why do you want them?"

Truthfully, Nicholas said, "I don't know. For - I guess healing. I need to get well." He was calmer these days, but very weak from the surgery. Anyhow, he seemed unfrightened; the fear and disorientation, the franticness we had seen on his face, was at last gone.

"How's your eyesight?" I asked him that night when I dropped over.

"Fine." Nicholas lay on his back in his bed, fully dressed; on the table beside him a white votive candle burned.

After I had shut the bedroom door Nicholas said, staring at the ceiling, "Phil, I really heard the radio saying that. „Nick the prick, Nick the prick" over and over again." I was the only one he had told about it. "And I know," he said, "I know equally that it could not have been saying that. I can still hear the voice in my mind. Speaking very slowly, very insistently. Like when someone is trying to program you. You understand? Programming me to die. A demon voice. It wasn't human. I wonder how many times I've heard it in my sleep and not remembered it. If I hadn't had insomnia - "

"Like you say,"I said,"it isn't possible."

"There are technical possibilities. They do exist. Such -as electronic signal override, by a small gain transmitter located very nearby, say in the next apartment. That way it wouldn't affect any other receivers. Just mine. Or from a satellite passing overhead."

"A what?"

"There's a lot of illicit satellite override of US radio and TV stations," Nicholas said, "Usually the material is subliminal. I must have somehow transliminated it, which I wasn't supposed to do. They fouled up somehow in their transmission. It sure as hell woke me thoroughly up, and that's exactly what it was not supposed to do."

"Who'd do that?"

Nicholas said, "I don't know. I have no theory. Some branch of the government, I suppose. Or the Soviets. There are a lot of secret Soviet transmitters overhead these days, beaming down to populated areas like this. Broadcasting filth and garbage and kinky suggestions, God knows what."

"But your name."

"Maybe everyone listening heard his own name," Nicholas said. „Pete, you beat your meat." Or, „Mike, you're a dike." I don't know. I'm exhausted from trying to figure it out." He pointed to the slightly flickering votive candle.

"So that's why you want that burning all the time," I said, understanding. "To drive -"

"To keep me sane," Nicholas interrupted.

"Nick," I said, "you're going to come out of this just fine. I have a theory. The whirling pinwheels of fire, they were due to poisons, toxins, from your infected wisdom tooth. So was what you heard on the radio. You were highly toxic without knowing it. Now that the oral surgery's done, you'll cease to be toxic and be okay. That's why you're better already."

"Except," he said, "what about the golden necklace the girl wore? And what she said?"

"How does that fit in?"

Nicholas said, "I've been expecting her at the door all my life. I recognized her when I saw her. There she was, and wearing what I knew she'd be wearing. I had to ask her what it was; there was no way I could keep from it. Phil, I was programmed to ask that question. It was my destiny."

"But that wasn't bad, like the buzz saws and what you heard from the radio."

"No," Nick agreed. "That was the most important experience I ever had, like a glimpse of - "He was silent for a time. "You don't know what it's like to wait year after year, wondering if it, if she, is ever going to show up, and at the same time knowing she is. Eventually. And then when you least expect it, but when you need it most - " He smiled up at me.

Most of his stress had departed, but, he told me, he still saw colors at night. Not the jagged pinwheels but rather vague patches, simply drifting. The colors seemed to change according to his thoughts; there was a direct connection. When he thought, in the long hypnagogic states preceding sleep, about erotic topics, the patches of fog-like color turned red. Once he thought he saw Aphrodite, naked and lovely and huge-breasted. When he thought about holy topics, the colored patches turned pure pale white.

It remined me of what I'd read in the Tibetan "Book of the Dead, the Bardo Thodol existence after death occurs. The soul moves along encountering different-colored lights; each color represents a different kind of womb, a different type of rebirth. It is the job of the departed soul to avoid all bad wombs and come at last to the clear white light. I decided not to tell Nicholas this; he was screwed-up enough already.

"Phil," he said to me, "as I move along through these different-colored patches of light, I feel - it's very strange. I feel as if I'm dying. Maybe the oral surgery did something fatal to me. But I'm not scared. It seems... you know: natural." It was anything but that. "You are on strange trips, Nick," I said. He nodded. "But something is happening. Something good. I think I'm past the worst part. The radio voice mocking me and insulting me in that gross way, and the whirling jagged buzz saws that were nearly blinding me -that was the worst part. I feel better with this candle." He pointed to the small narrow candle flame beside his bed. "It's strange ... I wasn't even sure what the word „votive" meant; I don't remember ever using it before. It just came to me, as the proper word. This was the kind of holy candle I wanted, and I knew how to ask for it."

"When are you going back to work?" I said. "Monday. Officially I'm on leave, on my own time. Not on sick leave any longer. It was awful to be nearly blind, and so goddamn dizzy. I was afraid it would last forever. But when I saw the girl standing there, and the golden fish sign - you know, Phil, the Greek Orphic religion, around 600 B.C., they used to show the initiate a golden sign and they'd tell him, „You are a son of earth and of starry heaven. Remember your birth."" It's interesting: „Of starry heaven.""

"And the person would remember?"

"He was supposed to. I don't know if it really worked. He was supposed to lose his amnesia and then start to recall his sacred origins. That was the purpose of the whole mystery ceremonies, as I understand it. Anamnesis, it was called: abolishment of amnesia, the block that keeps us from remembering. We all have that block. There's a Christian anamnesis, too: memory of Christ, of the Last Supper and the Crucifixion; in Christian anamnesis those events are remembered in the same way, as a real memory. It's the sacred inner miracle of Christian worship; it's what the bread and wine cause, „Do this in remembrance of me," and you do it, and you remember Jesus all at once. As if you had known him but had forgotten. The bread and wine, partaking of them, bring it back."

"Well," I said, "the girl told you the fish, the golden necklace sign, was an ancient Christian sign, so if you experience what you said - anamnesis, whatever - you'll remember Christ."

"Guess so."

"I have a feeling," I said, "a theory, actually, that you have seen that dark-haired girl with the fish necklace before. She was delivering medication from the pharmacy; don't you sometimes have them deliver? Couldn't she have come by before? Or you could have seen her at the pharmacy. Delivery people hang around a pharmacy when they aren't delivering; sometimes they even double as clerks. That would explain the shock of recognition, with you still half stoned from the Sodium Pentothal; deja vu, I mean, occurring during great pain and under the lingering haze of the - "

"The pharmacy he called," Nicholas broke in, "is near his office, which is in Anaheim. I've never been there before; I never got anything from that pharmacy in my life. My pharmacy is in Fullerton, by my doctor's office."

Silence.

"Guess that shoots that," I said. "But you did fixate on what she wore because of the pain and stress and the residual haze of the Pentothal. It acted as a hypnotically fixating object, like a moving watch. Or like this candle flame." I pointed at the votive candle. "And the mention of „early Christians" suggested to you to get a votive candle. You've been highly suggestive, almost in a hypnotic trance, since your surgery. It always happens."

"Are you sure?"

"Well it seems logical."

Nicholas said, "I had the uncanny feeling, God help me - I had the incredible experience, Phil, for a few minutes after I saw her necklace, that I was back in early Rome, in the first century A.D. So help me. She said that, and all at once it was real, completely real. The present world -Placentia, Orange County, the USA - it was all gone. But then it returned."

"Hypnotic suggestion," I said. After a pause, Nicholas said, "If I'm dying -"

"You're not dying," I said.

"If I die," Nicholas continued, "who or what is going to run my body for the next forty years? It's my mind that's dying, Phil, not my body. I'm leaving. Something has got to take my place. Something will; I'm sure of it."

Into the bedroom walked Nicholas's sheeplike cat, Pinky. The big tomcat hopped up onto the bed and kneaded with his paws, purring; he gazed affectionately at Nicholas.

"That's a strange-looking cat you have there," I said.

"You notice the change in him? He's beginning to change. I don't know why; I don't know in what direction."

Bending down I petted the cat. He seemed less wild than usual, more sheeplike, less catlike. The carnivore qualities seemed to be leaving him.

"Charley," I said, referring to Nicholas's dream.

"No, Charley is gone," Nicholas said, and then at once caught himself. "Charley never existed," he amended.

"Not for a while, anyhow,"! said.

"Charley was very different from Pinky," Nicholas said. "But they both served as my guide. In different ways. Charley knew the forest. He was more like a totem cat, the kind an Indian would have." Half to himself, Nicholas murmured "I really don't understand what's happening to Pinky. He won't eat meat any longer. When we feed him meat he. starts trembling. As if there's something wrong about eating meat; as if he's been hit."

"Wasn't he gone for a while?"

"He recently came back," Nicholas said vaguely. He did not elaborate. "Phil," he said presently, "this cat began to change the same day I first saw the buzz saws and you had to lead me home. After you left I was lying on the couch with a towel over my eyes, and Pinky got up as if he understood there was something wrong with me. He began searching for it. He wanted to locate it and heal it, make me okay. He kept walking over me and on me and around me, searching and searching. I could sense it about him, his concern, his love. He never found it. Finally he lay down on my stomach, and he stayed there until I got up. Even with my eyes shut I could sense him there still trying to locate the problem. But with that small a brain... cats have really small brains."

Pinky had lain down on the bed near Nicholas's shoulder, purring, gazing at him intently.

"If they could talk," Nicholas murmured.

I said, "It looks as if he's trying to communicate with you."

To the cat, Nicholas said, "What is it? What do you want to say?"

The cat continued to gaze up into his face with the same intentness; I had never seen such an expression on an animal's face before, not even a dog's.

"He was never like this before," Nicholas said. "Before the change. The buzz saws, I mean; that day."

"That strange day," I said. The day, I thought, when everything began to become different for Nicholas, leaving him weak and passive, as he was now: ready to accept whatever came. "They say," I said, "that in the final days, in the Parousia, there will be a change in the animals. They'll all become tame."

"Who says that?"

"The Jehovah's Witnesses say it. I was shown a book they peddle; there was a picture, and it showed all the various wild animals lying around together, no longer wild. It reminds me of your cat here."

""No longer wild,"" Nicholas murmured. "You seem to be the same way yourself," I said. "As if all your fangs had been pulled... Well, I guess there's a reason for that." I laughed.

"Earlier today," Nicholas said, "I fell into a half-sleep and I dreamed I was back in the past, on the Greek island of Lemnos. There was a gold and black vase on a three-legged table, and a lovely couch ... It was the year 842 B.C. What happened in the year 842? That was during the Mycenaean period, when Crete was such a great power."

"Eight forty-two," I said, "was the price you paid for your pain pills. It's a sum, not a date. Money." He blinked. "Yes there were gold coins too." The girl said to you, „Eight forty-two."" I was trying to get him to focus, to become alert again. "Remember?" To myself I thought, Come back, Nicholas. To this world. The present. From whatever other world you're drifting away to from pain and fear - fear of the authorities, fear of what lies ahead for all of us in this country. We've got to put up one last fight. "Nick," I said, "you've got to fight."

"What's happening to me is not bad. It's strange, and it started out terrible, but it isn't now. I think this is what I was expecting."

They're sure putting you through the wringer," I said. Td resent it."

"Maybe it's the only way it can be done. What do we know about processes of this sort? Nothing at all. Who of us has ever seen one take place? I think they used to take place a long time ago, but not any more. Except for me."

I left him that evening feeling worried. Nicholas had decided to succumb and that was that. No one could tell him otherwise, including me. Like a boat launched without paddles into a current, he was moving along without control, going wherever it took him, into the indiscriminate darkness beyond.

I guess it was a way of getting away from the presence of Ferris F. Fremont and all he represented. Too bad I couldn't do likewise; then I could forget my worries about FAPers breaking down the door with warrants, dope hidden in my house, Vivian Kaplan going to the District Attorney on a trumped-up complaint of some sort.

When Nicholas went to bed that night he found, as usual, that he could not sleep. His thoughts raced faster and faster, and with them the external patches of color projected by his head into the semi-gloom of his bedroom. Finally he got up and padded barefoot into the kitchen for some vitamin C.

That was when he made a discovery of importance. He had assumed from the start that the capsules in his great bottle were, as in the previous bottle, one hundred milligrams. However, these were"time-release vitamin C, and each capsule contained not one hundred milligrams but five hundred. Nicholas was therefore taking five times the amount of vitamin C he had supposed. Making a quick tally he discovered that he was taking in excess of seven grams per day, plus the other vitamins. At first this scared him, but then he reasoned to himself that it meant nothing; since vitamin C was water-soluble, it was excreted from his system every twenty-four hours and so did not build up. However, seven grams a day certainly was a large quantity. Seven thousand milligrams or more! He had really saturated his system. Well, he said to himself, that ought to wash out everything bonded at a cellular level, including the lithium carbonate, it's going out as fast as it comes in.

He returned to bed, a little frightened now, lay on his back, and pulled the covers up. The votive candle burned on the table to his right. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom he saw the floating patches of color, but they were receding from him faster and faster as his thoughts - manic, the psychiatrist had said - matched their velocity. They're escaping, he thought, and so is my head; my mind is going along with them.

There was no sound. To his left, Rachel ...