Radio Free Albemuth

PART TWO

Nicholas... slept on and on, unaware that anything was happening. Pinky dozed, somewhere off in the living room, probably in his special place on the couch, and in his nursery Johnny was sound asleep in the single bed we had gotten him to replace his crib. The apartment was totally silent, except for the faint whirr of the refrigerator in the kitchen.

My God, I thought, the colors are receding faster and faster as if achieving escape velocity; as if they are being sucked out of the universe itself. They must have reached the edge of the world and are vanishing beyond. And my thoughts with them? The universe, I realized, was being turned inside out - reversed. It was an eerie feeling, and I felt terrible fear. Something was happening to me, and there was no one to tell it to.

For some reason it did not occur to me to wake up my wife. I,simply continued to lie there, staring at the patches of foglike color.

And then, winking on abruptly, a square of particolors appeared directly above me. Violent phosphene activity, I realized; and now the idea came to me that somehow the immense doses of vitamin C I was taking had set this off. I was responsible for all this myself, in my efforts to heal myself.

The exaggerated particolored square shimmered and altered at the direct center of my field of vision. It resembled a modern abstract painting; I could almost name the artist, but not quite. Rapidly, at the terrific rate of permutation which in the TV field they call flash-cutting, the frame of balanced, proportioned colors gave way to another frame, equally attractive. Within a few given seconds I had seen no less than twenty of them; as each frame, each abstract, appeared, it at once gave way to another. The overall effect was dazzling. Paul Klee, I said to myself excitedly. I am seeing a whole lot of Paul Klee prints - or, rather, the actual pictures themselves, an entire gallery display! It was, in many respects, the most wonderful and astonishing sight I had ever seen. Scared as I was, puzzled as I was to account for this, I made the decision to lie there and enjoy it. Certainly no such experience had ever come my way before; this was an extraordinary - in fact, unique - opportunity.

The dazzling presentation of modern abstract graphics continued all through the night, with Paul Klee giving way to Marc Chagall, and Chagall to Kandinsky, and Kandinsky to an artist whose style I did not recognize. There were literally tens of thousands of graphics by each master artist in turn... which caused a peculiar thought to enter my mind after two hours had passed. These great artists had never produced so many works; it was patently impossible for them to have done so. Of the Klees alone I had now seen more than fifty thousand, although admittedly they had gone so rapidly that I had not been able to glimpse any distinct details, but rather only the general impression of fluctuating balance points in the various pictures, changing proportions of dark and light colors, adroit black strokes of the brush that gave harmony to what would otherwise have been less than high art. I had the intense impression that this was a telepathic contact of some sort from a very remote point, that a TV camera was sweeping out the various displays of pictures in a museum somewhere; I recalled, presently, that the Leningrad Museum was said to possess an extraordinary collection of French abstracts, and it came to me that a Soviet TV crew was sweeping out the displays over and over again and then transmitting them at enormous velocity, six thouasnd miles across space, to me. But that was so unlikely I could not accept it. More likely, the Soviets were conducting a telepathic experiment, using their museum of modern abstracts as material to be sent to a target person somewhere, and for reasons unknown I was overhearing - whatever the verb - this experiment, tuning in on it by accident. The sender was not sending-with me in mind; nonetheless I was seeing this marvelous display of modern graphics, the entire collection at Leningrad.

All night I lay happily awake tuned in on this Soviet show or whatever it was; when the sun came up I was still flat on my back, fully awake, not frightened, not worried, having been bathed in the intense fluctuations of brilliant colors for over eight hours. Rachel got up, grumbling, to feed Johnny. I found, as I myself got out of bed, that I could see all right, except when I shut my eyes. When I shut my eyes I saw a perfectly stable, unchanging phos-phene representation of what I had just been looking at: my bedroom, and then a moment later the living room with its bookcases and record cases, lamp, TV set, furniture. There was even a reverse-color Pinky, sound asleep in his special spot on the far end of the couch, next to a reverse-color New Yorker magazine.

I thought, I have a new kind of vision. A new sight. As if, up to now, I have been blind. But I don't understand it.

Usually I buttonholed my wife and narrated to her in great detail my nocturnal experiences, but not this time. It was too - puzzling. Where had the telepathic transmission come from? Was there anything I should do in the way of response? Write to Leningrad somehow and say I'd received them?

Maybe the vitamin C affected the metabolism of my brain, I conjectured. After all, it's highly acid; such quantities in the system would produce a highly acid brain. Mentation, neural firing, improves under conditions of acidity. Perhaps the vivid phosphene activity, the multicolored graphics, had been projections of rapid synchronous neural firing along never-before-used circuits. In that case Leningrad had nothing to dq with it; everything was a function and an activity within my head.

GABA fluid, I suddenly realized. What I saw was the effect of a vast drop in GABA fluid. There was new neural firing, along otherwise inhibited circuits. Good thing I haven't written Leningrad yet.

I wonder what kind of neural circuits they are, I asked myself. Probably I will find out, in time.

I stayed home from work that day. Toward noon the mail came; I walked unsteadily down the outside stairs to the row of metal mailboxes, retrieved the mail, and came back in.

As I laid the letters and ads out on the coffee table in the living room, an acute impression came over me and I said to Rachel, "A letter will be coming the day after tomorrow, from New York. It is highly dangerous. I want to be here to get it, as soon as it comes." I felt this overwhelmingly.

"A letter from who?" Rachel said.

"I don't know," I said.

"Will... you recognize jt?"

"Yes," I said.

No mail at all came the next day. But the day after that seven letters arrived. Most of them were from aspiring young artists, the letters forwarded to me from Progressive. After I had glanced at the envelopes without opening them, I turned to one last remaining letter; my name and address were on it, but no return address at all. That's the one," I said to Rachel. "Aren't you going to open it?"

"No," I said. I was trying to think what I was supposed to do with the letter.

Til open it," Rachel said, and did so. "It's just a printed ad," she said, laying the contents out on the coffee table; instinctively, for reasons not known to me, I turned my head so as not to see it. "For shoes," she said. "Mail-order shoes. Something called „Real World Shoes." With a special sole so that -"

"It's not an ad," I said. "Turn it over." She did so. "Somebody's jotted their name and address on the back," she said. "A woman. Her name is - "

"Don't read it aloud," I said sharply. "I don't want to know her name; if you read it to me I'll remember it. It'll go into my memory banks."

"She must be the distributor," Rachel said. "But Nick, this isn't anything; it's just shoes."

"Get me a pen and about three sheets of typing paper," I said, "and I'll show you." Meanwhile I was still trying to introspect and come up with the answer as to what to do about this - with it and about it. Acute dread hung over me as I sat at the table with this shoe ad, as Rachel got the pen and paper.

I had to read it to decode it. Superimposed on the black type, in a liquid, bright red, I saw certain words of the ad as if embossed. Rapidly, I copied them onto a separate piece of paper and then, when I had finished, handed it to Rachel. "Read it," I said. "But just to yourself, not to me." Rachel said falteringly, "It's a message to you. Your name is in it."

"What does it tell me to do?"

"Something about recording certain - it has to do with your job, Nick. Something about Party members who - I can't make sense out of it. Your handwriting is - "

"But it is to me," I said. "And it does have to do with Progressive and my job there, and recording Party members."

"How can it be?" Rachel said. "In a printed ad for shoes? I saw you with my own eyes get this message out of it, by picking words here and there... the words are really in it; I can see them myself now, when I look at the ad. But how did you know which words to pick?"

"Different in color," I said. They're in color and the other words are ordinary black, without color."

"All of the ad is black!" Rachel protested.

"Not to me," I said. I was still deep in heavy fearful thought. "Code from the Party," I said. "Instructions and the name of my - whatever she is - my boss; it's written in her hand on the back. My official contact."

"Nick," Rachel whispered, "this is awful. Are you -"

"I'm not a Communist," I said truthfully.

"But you knew this was coming. And you knew how to decode it. You were waiting for it." She stared at me wide-eyed.

I picked up the shoe ad, for the first time, turned it over, and as I did so a voice spoke inside my head. A transforming of my own thought processes, to confer on me a message.

The authorities."

Just those two words - the authorities - as I held the piece of paper. This had not come from a KGB agent operating out of New York, as it appeared to have. It was not instructions from the Party. It was a forgery. The thing operated on three levels: on the surface, to Rachel's eyes, it was an ordinary ad. For some reason, unexplained, I had been able to penetrate to the encoded information within the meaningless data. Never mind why, I thought; all that matters is that I did, I had been able to, readily. On the third and deepest level it was a fake, a plant by the police. And here I sat with it in the living room of my own apartment: prime evidence of my treasonable activities. Enough to send me to jail for life and completely ruin me and my family.

I have to get rid of this, I realized. Burn it. But what good will that do? There will be more like this coming to me in the mail. Until they have me.

The voice inside my head spoke again. I identified it now. The sibyl's voice, as I had heard her in my visionary dreams.

"Phone FA P in LA. I will talk for you."

Getting the phone book I looked up the emergency number of the main FAP headquarters for Southern California, located in Los Angeles.

"What are you doing?" Rachel said apprehensively, following me. "You're going to call - FAP? But why? Good lord, Nick, you're going to destroy yourself. Burn the thing!"

I dialed.

"Friends of the American People."

Inside my mind the sibyl stirred, and at once I lost power over my own vocal apparatus; I was struck dumb. And then she began to speak for me, using my voice.

Calmly, implacably, she spoke to the FAP agent on the other end of the line.

"I wish to report," my voice said, in a measured way not at all resembling my own cadences, "that I am being threatened by the Communist Party. For months they have been attempting to obtain my cooperation in a business matter and I have refused. They now are attempting to get their wish by coercion, force, and intimidation. Today I received a coded message from them in the mail, telling me what I must do for them. I will not do it, even if they murder me. I would like to turn this coded message over to you."

After a pause the FAP agent on the other end said, "Just a moment, please." A few clicks, then silence.

Time is of the essence," I said to Rachel.

"Hello," a different voice said, older in sound. "Would you repeat what you just told the operator?"

"The Communist Party," I said, "is blackmailing me to force me to cooperate with them in a business matter. I've refused."

"What kind of business matter?"

"I'm an executive at a recording firm," I said. "We record folk artists. The Party wants to compel me to record pro-Communist singers so their message, including coded messages, will be played on American radios."

"Your name."

I gave him my name, address, and telephone number. Rachel stricken, merely gazed mutely at me. She could not believe I was doing what I was doing. Neither could I.

"How are they blackmailing you, Mr Brady?" the voice asked.

"I'm beginning to receive hit mail from them," I said.

""Hit mail"?"

I said, "Mail designed to provoke a reaction out of fear

>f reprisal. In code. I can't read all the code, but - "

"We'll send someone over. Hang on to the written material you have in your possession. We will want to see it."

I said, or rather my voice uttered, „They've given me the name of someone back east to contact."

"Don't contact them. Don't leave your residence. Just wait until our representative comes by. You'll be instructed how to proceed. And thank you for contacting us, Mr Brady. It was very patriotic." The man at the other end clicked off.

"I did it," I said to Rachel; I felt flooded with relief. What I did," I said, "is I got out of the noose. This apartment would probably have been raided within the next hour. Certainly within the next day." Now it didn't matter even if they hit us; I had made the right call. The emergency was over, thanks not to me or any solution of mine but to the sibyl.

"But suppose," Rachel said frantically, "it turns out it is from the Party?"

"It's not from the Party. I don't know anyone in the Party; I'm not even sure there is a Party. If there is, they wouldn't be writing me, especially in code."

"It could be a mistake of some kind. They intended to write to someone else."

"Fuck "em then," I said. Anyhow, I knew it was the authorities; or rather the sibyl knew. Valis knew. Valis, who had come through at the critical time and saved me.

Rachel said, They'll think you're a Communist, from what you told them."

"No, they won't. No Communist would have phoned them in the first place, let alone said what I said. They'll know I am exactly what I am: a patriotic American. Fuck them and fuck the Party; they're one and the same, as far as I'm concerned. It's the party that kills its political rivals in purges - Ferris Fremont is the Party, and the Party killed the Kennedys and Dr King and Jim Pike to take power in America. We have one enemy and that's it. That's Comrade Ferris Fremont." My wife stared at me dumbfounded. "Sorry," I said, "but it's true. That's the great secret. That's what the people aren't supposed to know. But I know. I was told."

"Fremont isn't a Communist," Rachel said feebly, her face ashen. "He's a fascist."

The USSR turned fascist in Stalin's time," I said. "Now it's totally fascistic. America was the last stronghold of freedom and they took us over, internally, under fake names. We go too much on names - labels. Fremont is the first Communist Party president, and I'm going to get him out."

"Jesus Christ!" Rachel said. "Right," I said.

"I've never seen you display such animosity, Nick." „That letter today," I said savagely, "that alleged shoe ad - that's murder, murder aimed at me. I am going to get the sons-of-bitches for that - for sending that to me -if it's the last thing I do."

"But... you never showed such hate for the Party before. In Berkeley - "

"They never tried to kill me before," I said. "Can..." She could scarcely talk; trembling, she seated herself on the arm of the couch, by Pinky. The cat still dozed. "Can FAP help you?"

TAP the enemy," I said. "Finessed back onto itself. I will get it to do all the work; I already have."

"How many other people do you think know? About President Fremont, I mean?"

"Look at his foreign policy. Trade deals with Russia, grain sales at a loss to us; he gives them what they want. The US is their supplier; it does what they say. If they're out of grain they get grain; if they're low on -"

"But our big military establishment."

"To keep our own people down. Not theirs."

Rachel said, "You didn't know this yesterday."

"I knew it when I saw the shoe ad," I said. "When I saw the message from the Communist Party that was also from FAP. They are working with the KGB in New York, not against it; how could it operate openly if FAP didn't let it? There is one intelligence community and one only. And we are all its victims, wherever we live."

"I need a drink," Rachel managed to say.

"Take heart," I said. "The beginning of the change has set in. The turning point has come. They will be exposed; they will stand in court, every one of them, and answer for crimes they have committed."

"Because of you?" She gazed timidly at me.

"Because of Valis," I said.

Rachel said, "It's not you any longer, Nick. You're not the same person."

"That is right," I said.

"Who are you?"

I said, „Their adversary. Who is going to see them hunted down."

"You can't do it by-"

"I'll be given the names of others."

"Like yourself?"

I nodded.

So that letter," Rachel said, "that shoe ad - it would never have gotten in the mail without the permission and cooperation of the American authorities."

That's right," I said.

"What about Aramchek?"

I said nothing.

"Is Valis Aramchek?" Rachel asked hesitantly. "Or maybe you shouldn't tell me; maybe I'm not supposed to know."

Til tell you - " I began, but all at once I felt two great invisible hands grip me by the upper arms; they held so tightly that I grunted in pain. Rachel stared at me. I could not speak any further; all I could do was try to withstand the pressure of the invisible hands holding me. Then, at last, they released me. I was free.

"What happened?" Rachel asked.

"Nothing." I took in deep, unsteady breaths.

"The look on your face - something had hold of you, didn't it? You started to say something you shouldn't have." She patted me gently on the arm. "It's okay, Nick; you don't have to say. I don't want you to say."

"Maybe some other time," I said.

Toward the end of the day two FAPers, both of them lean and alert young men, showed up at my door.

Silently, they examined the shoe ad I had received in the mail. I showed them the piece of paper on which I had written the encoded message that I had extracted.

"I am Agent Townsend," the first FAPer said. "And this is my teammate, Agent Snow. It was very alert of you to report this, Mr Brady."

I said, truthfully, "I knew it would be coming. I even knew the day."

"I imagine," Agent Townsend said, "that the Communists would very much like to control someone in your position. You have power over a large number of recording artists, do you not?"

"Yes," I said.

"You can sign up and record whomever you wish?"

"I need the approval of two other executives," I said. "But usually they go along with me."

"They have come to respect your judgement?"

"Yes," I said.

"How has the Party contacted you before?" Agent Snow asked.

"They never before - "

"We realize they never turned the screws before. But did they contact you through mutual friends, or by phone, or mail? Or directly, through their agents?"

"I don't know," I said. "I know the contact, the pressure has been there, but it's been too devious and subtle up until now to put my finger on."

"No one person in particular."

"No," I said.

Agent Townsend said, "This is the first time they've come out overtly, then."

"Yes," I said.

"In your case," Agent Townsend said, "they made a mistake. We have a mail intercept on you, Mr Brady; we rntercepted this document and decoded it ourselves. We knew the hour of its arrival in your mailbox. You were watched as you took it upstairs to this apartment. You were timed as to how long it took you to react to it. And of course we were looking to see your reaction. Frankly, we didn't expect you to call us. We assumed you'd destroy it."

"My wife suggested I destroy it," I said. "But that could have been taken two ways."

"Oh, yes," Agent Townsend said. Two ways easily. You read the encoded message and then burned it; that's a normal process for Party members; they wouldn't leave something like this lying around after they had assimilated its contents; it'd be incriminating."

The sibyl had directed me right. Inwardly, without any visible sign, I sighed with relief. Thank God for her, I said to myself; on my own, like Rachel, I most likely would have destroyed it, imagining that was enough. And thus incriminated myself forever.

Destroying it would have proved I had read it. That I knew what it was. One does not carry a harmless shoe ad to the bathroom and set fire to it in the bathtub.

Studying the name and address written on the back of the document, Agent Townsend said to Agent Snow, This looks like... you know, that girl's handwriting." To me he said, "Your friend Phil Dick knows a girl named Vivian Kaplan. Do you know her?"

"No," I said, "but he's mentioned her."

"You wouldn't have any samples of her handwriting around?" Agent Townsend asked.

"No," I said.

"Vivian is a rather far-out person," Agent Townsend said with a half smile. "She reported about you recently, Mr Brady, that you hold prolonged conversations with God. Is that true?"

"No,"I said.

"She got it from his friend," Agent Snow pointed out to Agent Townsend.

"What," Agent Townsend continued, "would possibly give rise to such an idea in her head? Can you think of anything?" „

I said, "I never met the girl."

"She is reporting on you," Agent Townsend said.

"I know that," I said.

"What would your feelings toward her be," Agent Townsend said, "if evaluation of this shoe ad document showed that it emanated from her?"

"I would want nothing to do with her," I said.

"Well, we are not really sure," Agent Townsend said, "and in all likelihood it emanated from the KGB in New York, but until we are positive we have to consider the outside possibility that one of our own posts mailed it off to you."

I said nothing.

"What we'd like you to do," Agent Snow said, "is pass on to us any further documents of this sort which you may receive, or any contacts with suspicious persons coming in any form whatever, phone or mail, or at your door. You realize, of course, that the Party may have decided to destroy you for your unwillingness to cooperate with them."

"Yes," I said. "I know that."

"I mean physically destroy. Kill."

I felt cold, hearing that, terribly cold.

"There is not much we can do to help you," Agent Snow said, "in that regard. If someone wants to kill a person they usually can."

"Could you assign anyone to stay with me?" I said.

The two FAP agents exchanged glances. "Afraid not," Agent Townsend said. "It exceeds our authority. And we don't have the manpower. You can if you wish buy a handgun. That might be a good idea, especially in view of ihe fact that you have a wife and small child."

Til do that," I said.

"We will okay it," Agent Townsend said.

Then you don't think one of your own posts sent this," I said.

"Frankly, I doubt it very much," Agent Townsend said. "We'll conduct a routine inquiry. It would certainly simplify everything, from our standpoint. May I take this ad and the envelope?"

"Certainly," I said. I was glad to have it out of my hands.

That night I sat out alone on the patio of our apartment, gazing up at the stars. By now I knew what had happened to me; for reasons I did not understand, I had become plugged into an intergalactic communications network, operating on a telepathic basis. Sitting there in the dark by myself I experienced the stars overhead and the enormous amount of traffic flowing between them. I was in touch with one station in the network, and I gazed up trying to locate it, although most likely locating it was impossible.

A star system with a name out of our own devising; I knew the star's name. It was Albemuth. But I could find no such star listed in our reference works, although the prefix Al was common to stars, since it signified the word "the" in Arabic.

There I sat, and there overhead twinkled and glowed the star Albemuth, and from its network came an infinitude of messages, in assorted unknown tongues. What had happened was that the AI operator of Albemuth's station, an artificial intelligence unit, had raised me at some prior time and was holding the contact open. Therefore information reached me from the communications network whether I liked it or not.

It was the voice of the AI unit which I saw in dreams as the "Roman sibyl." In point of fact it was not the Roman sibyl, not at all, and really not a woman; it was a totally synthetic entity. But I loved the sound of her voice - I still thought of the entity as her - since whenever I beard it, either in my head during a hypnagogic or hypnopompic state or in dreams, it meant that I would soon be informed of something. Beyond the AI voice, the synthetic female voice, lay Valis himself, the ultimate constituent link to the universe-wide communications network. Now that I had peaked in my rapport with it, enormous amounts of material were flooding across; ever since the phosphene activity they were evidently jamming it to me, feeding me as much as possible, in case, perhaps, the contact was broken.

They had never visited Earth - no actual extraterrestrials had landed ships and walked around here - but they had informed certain humans now and then throughout the ages, especially in ancient times. Since my contact came in most strangely between 3:00 and 4:00 A.M., I realized that probably a booster satellite, of alien origin, orbited Earth, a slave communications satellite that had been sent here thousands of years ago.

"What are you doing sitting out on the patio?" Rachel asked me.

"Listening," I said.

"To what?"

To the voices of the stars," I said, although more accurately I meant the voices from the stars. But it was as if the stars themselves spoke, as I sat there in the chilly dark, alone except for my cat, who was out there out of custom anyhow; each night Pinky sat on the railing of the patio, communing as I was but over a longer period of time, over his entire adult life. Seeing him now I understood that he was picking up information in the night, from the night, from the pattern of blinks that came by starlight. He was hooked up with the universe as he sat here now, like myself, gazing upward silently.

The Fall of man, I further realized, represented a falling away from contact with this vast communications network and from the AI unit expressing the voice of Valis, which to the ancients would be the same as God. Originally, like the animal beside me, we had been integrated into this network and had been expressions of its identity and will operating through us. Something had gone wrong; the lights had gone out on Earth.

These realizations came to me not as speculation or even as logical deduction, but as insights presented me by the sympathetic AI operator at work at my station. She was making me aware of that which man had ceased to understand: his role and place in the system of things. I saw on the inner screen of my mind an inferior agency creeping into our world, combating the wisdom of God; I saw it take over this planet with its own dreary plans and will, supplanting the benign will of God... or Valis, as I still preferred to call him. Over the ages God had played a great game for the relief of this planet, but lifting the siege had still not been accomplished. Earth was still an unlit button on the exchange board of the intergalactic communications network. We had not yet begun to function as our first ancestors had, in communion with our creator and the lord of the universe. Such examples as me were random flukes - I had not achieved it; it had happened to me, due to a combination of circumstances. One of the deformed progeny had lifted the receiver of the long-abandoned telephone, so to speak, and was now hearing the sympathetic, informative voice that he and all his kind should have known by heart.

The new personality in me had not awakened from a sleep of two millennia; it had, more accurately speaking, been printed out by the alien satellite, impressed on me afresh from outside. It was an addition, not a substitution in place of me but a kind of package identity based on the total knowledge of the satellite. It was to raise me to the highest level possible in my ability to cope. The satellite, itself linked to higher life forms, was concerned with my capacity to live; it or they, the totality of them, had seen me faltering under the oppression, and their response was reflexive. It amounted to a rational attempt to give aid to whoever was in touch with them, who was capable of assimilating their printout. I had been selected for that reason alone. Their concern was universal. They would have assisted anyone they could reach.

The tragedy lay in their inability to reach the people of our planet. It went back to the original invasion of our world by the malign entity that did not wish to hear. It had contaminated our world with its presence; it was not merely around us, it was also in us. We bore its mark. Probably the maximum harm it had done us was to sever us from the communications network. Due to its opaqueness it probably was not even aware of what it had done. Or if it understood, it did not consider it a toss.

It certainly was a loss as far as I was concerned, now that I had heard the mild voice of the AI system as it relayed information to me and accepted questions in response. Were I never to hear it again I would remember that sound the rest of my life. It was far off; whenever I queried it, there was a measurable lag before it responded. I wondered how many stars away it lay: deep in the heavens, perhaps, and perhaps serving many worlds.

Already the AI voice had saved my life once, by taking over and guiding me in the face of imminent police arrest. The only fear I had now was loss of contact.

The AI voice, I soon understood, possessed the capacity to educate and inform human beings on a sublim inal level, during times when they were relaxed in contem plation or in outright sleep. But this was not enough; on waking, the humans generally overrode these quiet promptings, which they correctly identified with the voice of conscience, and went their own way

I asked the name of the opaque antagonist. The answer: it had no name. The messengers of the communications network continually baffled it by their wisdom, since it could not, as they could, see ahead in time; but it held out by its physical power, blind as it was.

The capacity to see ahead in time was now granted to me to a certain extent. Its first manifestation had come when I saw what I took to be the Roman sibyl expounding on the fate of the conspirators. This had been merely the precognitive statement of the AI monitor, transformed by my head to a visible entity familiar from Earth's history. She or it had merely stated what was coming, without interpretive comment. The forces that would unhinge the conspirators were as yet unstated; the monitor could foresee the consequences of certain acts without error, but either she could not see how those acts came about or she elected not to inform me. I believed it to be the latter. There was a great deal I still did not know.

Since I could question the AI unit, I asked her why the opaque adversary had not been removed a long time ago; obligingly, she furnished me with a diagram which showed the adversary drawn steadily deeper into the fulfillment of the general plan. Having materialized, the adversary w as grist for the mill like everything else; I watched as the agency of creation simply incorporated the adversary and its projects along with whatever else its eyes fell on, making no distinction between what we would call good and what we would dismiss as bad. Instead of abolishing the blundering adversary, Valis had put it to work.

In all its activity of continually re-creating the universe, -improving and shaping within the constant flow, the artisan employed the most economical means possible. Although it drew on everything, arranging it and most of all joining otherwise separate sections into totally new and unexpected entities, it took only what it absolutely needed. Thus its reshaping process took place within the universe, turning the universe into a kind of gigantic warehouse of parts, an almost infinite stockpile, in which ihe agency could find anything it desired.

The temporal process, it seemed to me, was a medium by which this proliferation of forms was capable of taking place, for the benefit, ultimately of this shaping entity, which, I could see, moved backward through time from the far end of the universe. The plan by which the shaping entity worked seemed to be the form of the entity itself, as if it were transforming the sprawling, chaotic universe into a stupendous replica of its own eidos - form. But of this I couldn't be sure; the enormity of its creation made the distant outlines, both in terms of space and of time, beyond my scope. It was creating around me and right past me, as I sat there.

Once more the impression had begun to come over me by slow degrees that I was in Rome, not in Orange County, California. I sensed the Empire without seeing it, sensed a vast iron prison in which human slaves toiled. I saw as if superimposed on the black metal walls of this huge prison certain rapidly scurrying figures in gray robes: enemies of the Empire and its tyranny, a remnant opposed to it. And I knew, from a deep internal clock down within my own self, that the true time was A.D. 70, that the Savior had come and gone but would soon return. The gray-robed hurrying remnant, with a feeling of joy, awaited and prepared for his return.

Overwhelmed with this, I experienced, too, a barrage of foreign words flooding through my head, words I did not understand but whose impression was clear in any case: I was in deadly danger from the spies of Rome, from those angry armed men who moved everywhere, detecting anything opposed to the imperial glory. I had to be alert, watch what I said, guard with sealed lips the secret that was mine: my link to the intergalactic communications network and Valis himself. Aware of this link, the Roman agents would kill me in an instant; it was Empire policy.

It was an ancient fight I was in, not a new one; it had been fought without cease for two thousand years. Names had changed, faces had changed, but the adversaries remained a permanent constant. The slave Empire against those who struggled for justice and truth - not freedom exactly, in the modern sense, but for virtues obscured today, buried under the bulk of an Empire that embraced both the United States and the Soviet Union as twin, equal manifestations. The US and the USSR, I understood, were the two portions of the Empire as divided up by the Emperor Diocletian for purely administrative purposes; at heart it was a single entity, with a single value system. And its value system was the concept of the supremacy of the state. The individual counted in its scales as nothing, and individuals who turned against the state and generated their own values were the enemy.

We were the enemy, we who wore the gray robes and waited with eager anticipation for our King to return. I saw the Savior not as a martyr who had died for us but as our legitimate King, who would return, claim his kingdom, and rule with justice and truth over his own people. An Empire ruled subject people, but our King ruled only his own. We would not be enslaved by him, forced to adopt the customs of the Empire; we would share his customs as our own; they were our own. And where his people ended, his rule ended; that was a rightful kingship compared to the tyranny of Caesar.

It would be necessary to teach my wife certain codes, the use of meaningful terms to notify her when one of the Romans was in our midst. We constituted a voluntary secret community, who scratched cryptic signs in the dust; we had special handshakes to identify ourselves to each other; collectively, we waited for the coming event to free us. Outwardly we appeared the same as Caesar's people, and that was our strength. The question that gripped us was not, Would our King return? but, Would we be able to survive against the Romans - by stealth, since we held no worldly power - until he returned? Or would he return to find us gone or, worse, assimilated into the customs of the Empire, our own memory of what we actually were lost forever - or, perhaps, lost until, by his return, he could restore such memories? Reawaken in sleeping men a forgotten knowledge of who they were... ?

I did not feel that it was a matter of my returning to a former life, of moving backward through time to some past existence. Rome was here now; it had invaded the landscape, rising up from within it, manifesting itself from its centuries-long place of inner concealment. Rather than me being back in the ancient world, Rome had revealed itself as the underlying reality of our present-day world; hidden still from the eyes of other Americans, it was nonetheless blatantly visible to me. The Empire had never died; it had only receded out of sight. My vision now enhanced by Valis, I saw Rome clearly as the landscape of our country; we had inherited it without realizing it. Stripped away were the mere accidental accretions; this was fundamental, what I saw now.

However much I hated Rome, I feared it more. My Inemory had become elongated, stretching out over a span of two thousand years, but what it encountered was a dreadful sameness: Rome lay spread out everywhere across the ages. What a giant entity it was, to extend that far in time. There lay no relief from it either in the past or the present, although in a sense I experienced no past, just a continual present of vast immensity.

So this was the antagonist ... or, rather, the physical manifestation of the antagonist. This was the corpus malus, the evil body; but within and behind it lay an evil spirit which had made the Empire what it was. Once it had been benign, but those days, when it had been a Republic - those had been swallowed up when free men had been swallowed up by the presence of oppression. How very much it weighed. Rome weighed down the world, armored as it was, huge with its black iron walls and cells and streets, its chains and rings of metal, its helmeted warriors. It seemed surprising that it had not sunk through the crust of the earth.

And now, in our midst at this latter time, the old battle continued on, the oppressor lying behind the iron body, striking at those who were not expressions of the Empire - ourselves, who served a King and walked other ways. We wore no armor, no metal, only the robes, sandals, and perhaps a golden fish in bracelet or necklace form. Our steps were lighter than those who complied with Roman customs, but we were vulnerable to death; we had no physical protection. Many of us had fallen already, to awaken later when the King returned. How soon would it be? Soon, but not yet. And when he returned he would not teach at the periphery of the Empire but would strike at its source, its heart; he would drive into its center and pull it down; this appearance of the King would be quite a surprise, quite a shock to the tyrant; quite different.

Before, the King had come quietly, at the margin of Roman affairs, simply to observe and to teach. He had not wished to be found by the Romans, cornered, tried, and murdered. That was the risk he had run and he had realized it. It was not his intention then to fight; he was King in identity, in spirit, but not in act. He had not died like Kings do but as criminals do, in disgrace. In the centuries since his dreadful murder he had lingered on, invisibly, with no body like ours, dancing outside our lives among the rows of newborn corn, dancing in the mists, pale and thin. People had seen him and mistaken him for a corn king, for the spirit of new life in the spring, the annual and permanent awakening after the death of winter. He had allowed them to imagine that he was nothing more; these were the centuries when knowledge of his real purpose was virtually lost. Mankind was acclimated to the idea of tyrannical rule. The King was visible only as mist itself, mist dancing in the mist, to bring the new crop to life; as if no men but only the corn now heard his voice.

But he had spoken to men originally, and he would speak to them again. He had promised his followers that they would hear his voice, and when they heard it they would recognize it. All promises he had made would be kept in time. He was stronger, now. It would not be much longer. The horn of freedom had begun to blow again, but, more important, the presence of the King was forming and strengthening; and this time he carried a sword.

The sword he carried was an instrument of judging. This time he would not be judged in a human court by human beings; he himself would judge.

I had already glimpsed him dancing toward me among the rows of new corn, with his large, expressive, dark eyes, his thin dark ragged beard, his hollow, rather sad face and small coronet, his linen robe and greaves... . But when he returned to judge, he would not appear as this gentle figure. He would breach through into our linear time, our world: mounted on a great white horse, he would ride into existence followed by his mounted host, all of them with swords and shields and glistening helmets. Colors would glow as banners waved, tassels bounced, helmets glinted. And the black iron walls of the prison would fall before him.

He could not lose. He could not be defeated or destroyed. He knew everything, and this time Valis had given him absolute power. The books would be unsealed and the records shown for the first time.

These were the large open books I had seen held up to me when my experiences began: the great volumes opened at last, as prophesied. It meant that the beginning of the end of time had arrived. The first stages had commenced.

For two thousandvEarth years the clock of eternity had been stopped at 70 A.D. Now that clock showed a new time; its hands had at last moved forward. The. King had chosen his battlefield. It was our world. Our portion of time. It was now.

He was in a sense still the corn king. Two thousand of our years ago he had come here, and had planted a crop,

J then gone away. Now he had returned - or would soon - to harvest that crop. He knew that he would find his crop oppressed and stunted and stumbling and imprisoned away from the sun. He knew what had been done to it. And for that crop he held out an imperishable reward. Two thousand years would be wiped away. The destruction of the adversary would be complete; it never would have existed in the first place. The oppression never took place. Even the category of time was subject to his power and rule; he could abolish even that. When he was done, the memory of Rome's existence itself would be gone. And those who served the Empire would not have lived.

Those who had defied it, even to their deaths, would live forever.

Viewing this, receiving this panorama of information, I saw my relinkage to the information network less as an accident, a fluke. I saw it now in its rightful place: arranged for long in advance, even in my childhood, by Valis himself. So that I could be coached and educated in order to participate in the battle which lay ahead: in the throwing-down of Rome.

My experience was a phenomenon of the end time. And there undoubtedly were others like me. Re-creation, I thought, of the gray-robed messengers who hurried about the great iron walls, aiming to pull those walls into rubble: and filled, all the while, with the joy of welcoming their King back. What I was doing, born and created to do, was an act of-celebration.

I had been restored to life. After two thousand years.

Born again. A fresh, new entity entirely. Born again into completeness. With faculties and functions I had never had, which were lost, stripped away, in the original Fall. Stripped away, not from me as an individual; stripped away from our race.

I, Nicholas Brady, understood that these primordial faculties and abilities had been restored to me only temporarily, that their existence in me depended on my relatedness to the communications web. Once I fell away from that again, the faculties and abilities would fall away too, and I would drop back down into the state of blindness in which I had lived up to now.

That was how I felt as I sat out on the patio, reading with intense satisfaction and joy the information visible in the light of the stars. I had been blind up until now, and I would be blind again. There was no way it could be made to last, not as long as the adversary continued to live on our planet. And the time had not yet come for his removal. The best we could hope for now was to roll him back a little - a small, defensive victory merely to stabilize our own situation.

Only when the King breached through linear time with his armed host, all riding their great horses into battle, would the change be permanent and for everyone. The veils would lift and we would see the world as it was. And ourselves as well.

The help we were being given now consisted of information only. We were being lent Valis's wisdom but not his power. The power would be given only to the rightful King; we could not be trusted with it - we would misuse it.

That night when I went to bed I experienced one of the most vivid dreams so far, one which made a great impression on me.

I found myself watching an enormously powerful scientist at work named James-James; he had wild red hair and flashing eyes and was virtually godlike in the range and scope of his activities. James-James had constructed a machine which chug-chugged and flashed radioactive particles in showers from it as it operated; thousands of people sat about in chairs silently watching as the machine produced first an amorphous living slime and then a rough-cast baby; then, whirling and sparking and thumping, it cast up on the floor before us all a lovely young girl: pinnacle of perfection in the cosmic process of evolution.

Beside me in the dream, my wife, Rachel, rose from her seat, wishing to see better what James-James had accomplished. Immediately filled with rage at her audacity in standing up, James-James seized her and threw her to the floor, splintering her kneecaps and her elbows in his fury. At once I stood upright in protest; I moved down the stairs toward James-James, calling on the rows of silent people to complain. There then moved into this large assembly hall men in greenish-brown khaki uniforms, on motorcycles, carrying with them as they rapidly and smoothly advanced the emblems of Rommel's Afrika Korps: the sign of the palm tree.

To them I croaked in hoarse appeal, "We need medical assistance!" As the dream ended, the first scouts of the invading, rescuing Afrika Korps heard me and turned toward me, with fine, noble faces. They were dark-skinned men, rather small and delicate, a race apart from James-James, with his too-pale skin and bright red hair. Their eyes were large, gentle and expressive, dark; they were, I realized, the vanguard of the King.

Waking up from this disturbing dream, I sat by myself in the living room; the time was about 3:00 A.M. and the apartment was totally silent. The dream suggested a limitation to what James-James - who was Valis - could do for us, or rather would do; that his power was in fact even dangerous to us if misused. It was to the rightful King that we would have to turn for ultimate help, expressed in the dream as "medical assistance," the thing we most needed in order to repair the damage done by the historical, evolutionary process that the original creator James-James had set in motion. The King was a correcting agent against the abuses of that temporal process; powerful and heroic as it was, it had claimed innocent victims. Those victims, at least eventually, would be healed by the legions of the rightful King; until he arrived, I realized, we would receive no such help.

Radioactive particles, I thought - remembering the rapid-fire emission of bits of light from James-James's cosmic machine - like you find in cobalt therapy. The double-edged sword of creation: radioactivity in the form of cobalt bombardment cures cancer, but radioactive emissions in themselves are cancer-producing. James-James's cosmic machine got out of hand and injured Rachel, who stepped out of line in the sense that she stood up. That was enough to enrage the cosmic lord of creation. We need a defender as well. An advocate on our side, who can intervene.

Cancer ... the process of creation gone wild, I thought. And then, in an instant, the AI operator transferred an explanation to my mind; I saw James-James the creator as master of all prior or efficient causes, of the deterministic process moving forward up the manifold of linear time, from the first nanosecond of the universe to its last; but I also saw another creative being at the far end of the universe, at its point of completion, directing, accepting, shaping, and guiding the flow of change, so that it reached the proper conclusion. This creative entity, possessing absolute wisdom, guided rather than coerced, arranged rather than created; she or it was the architect of the plan and the controller of final or Ideological causes. It was as if the original creator of the universe lobbed it like a great softball on a long blind trajectory, whereupon the receiving entity corrected its course and led it right into her glove. Without her, I realized, the great softball which was the universe - however well and hard it had been thrown - would have wandered out into left field somewhere and come to rest at some random, unpremeditated spot.

This dialectic structure of the change process of the universe was something I had never glimpsed before. We had an active creator and a wise receiver of what he created; this did not fit any cosmology or theology I had ever heard of. The creator, standing before the creation, his creation, had absolute power, but from my James-James dream I could see that in a very real sense he lacked a kind of knowledge, a certain vital foresight. This was supplied by his weak but absolutely wise counter-player at the far end; together they performed in tandem, a god, perhaps, divided into two portions, split off from himself, so as to set up the dynamics of a kind of two-person game. Their goal was the same, however; no matter how much they might seem to conflict or work against each other, they commonly desired the successful outcome of their joint enterprise. I had no doubt, therefore, that these twin entities were manifestations of a single substance, projected to different points in time, with different attributes predominating. The first creator predominated in power, the final one in wisdom. And in addition there was the rightful King, who at any time could breach the temporal process at some point of his selection and, with his hosts, enter creation.

Like cancer cells, the original constituents of the universe proliferated without direction, a total panoply of newness. Allowed to escape, they went wherever casual chains drove them. The architect who imposed form and order and deliberate shape was, in the cancer process, somehow missing. I had learned a great deal from my James-James dream; I could see that blind creation, not subjected to pattern, could destroy; it could be a steamroller that crushed the small and helpless in its eagerness to grow. More accurately, it was like one immense living organism which spread out into all the space available to it, without regard for the consequences; it was only impelled by the drive to expand and increase. What became of it largely depended on the wise receiver, who pruned and trimmed it as each step of the growth took place.

Seated on the couch by myself I passed from a contemplation of this into a trancelike state, bordering on sleep but not quite sleep; I was still conscious enough to be aware of myself and, to a certain extent, to think. I found myself confronting a modern-looking teletype attached to wires that led into ultrasophisticated electronic assemblies far superior to anything we humans actually have.

IDENTIFY YOURSELF.

I watched the words print themselves out, and as they were printed I heard the same chug-chug made by James-James's radioactive cosmic machine of creation. I said, "I am Nicholas Brady of Placentia, California." After a measurable pause the teletype printed out:

SADASSA SILVIA.

"What does that mean?" I asked.

Again a pause, and then again the chug-chug. But instead of seeing words printed out I saw a snapshot: a girl with Afro-natural hair, a small worried face, and glasses. The girl held a notebook and clipboard. Across the bottom of the snapshot the teletype printed out a phone number, but I could not see it clearly enough to read it; the figures blurred. I understood that I was supposed to remember it, but there was no way I could. The transmitter was arriving from too distant a transmitter.

"Where are you?" I asked.

The teletype printed out: i DON"T KNOW. It seemed puzzled by the question; evidently it was a very low order of AI entity along the network.

"Look around you," I told it. "See if you can find something in the way of writing. An address."

Obligingly, the minor AI operator searched its environment; I could sense its local activity.

I HAVE FOUND AN ENVELOPE.

"What's the address on it?" I said. "Read it."

The ultramodern teletype printed out: F WALLOON.

PORTUGUESE STATES OF AMERICA.

That made no sense to me. Portuguese States of America? An alternate universe? I was as puzzled as it was; neither of us knew where the transmission came from.

And then contact broke. The teletype machine faded out and I could no longer sense its presence. Bewildered, I woke to full consciousness. Had this interchange signified anything? Or, despite my subjective impression of lucidity, had I been totally befuddled by a dream state, altered consciousness without true rationality? Perhaps "Portuguese States of America" merely symbolized a long distance away, another cosmos entirely. As far away as I could imagine: not to be taken literally.

I could still remember the face of the girl in the snapshot and the name Sadassa Silvia. Perhaps the low-order AI operator had reversed it; more likely it had been intended to read SILVIA SADASSA. The name meant nothing to me. I had never heard it before. Nor had I ever seen the little worried face with its mouth turned down at the corner as if in weary depression. The phone number, plus any other data it had intended for me, was lost forever; that had not gotten through, at least not to my conscious mind. I wondered what the snapshot and name signified. No way to tell. Nothing, now, no meaning at all. Perhaps, in time, higher-placed operators in the AI spectrum, along the communications network, would eventually fill in the missing pieces of information and make it clear.

I had already noticed that, rather than arriving in linear fashion, network printouts tended to reach me in staggered clusters, placed at random, so that no pattern could be discerned until the final - and most important -cluster had been transmitted. That way the transmitter held the key segment in its possession until the last moment possible, reducing what it had previously given me to a cipher.

As I returned to the bedroom, Johnny called to me _from his bed. "Daddy, can I have a drink?"

From the tap in the bathroom I got him a glass of water. And then, in a state of half-sleep, not fully recovered from the disquieting experience with the low-level AI unit, I took a piece of bread from the kitchen; carrying the bread and the water I entered Johnny's room. He was sitting up, reaching grumpily for the glass of water.

"Here is a game," I said. It had to be done stealthily and rapidly, because of the Romans, and it had to be done in such a manner that if they happened to see they would understand nothing and think only that I was giving my son bread and water. Bending down, I gave him the piece of bread, and then, before he took the water, I inclined the glass playfully, as if by accident, and managed to splash it on his hair and forehead. Then, wiping it off with the sleeve of my pajama, I traced with my finger a cross of water on his forehead and said very quietly, under my breath so that only he and I could hear, words in Greek that I did not know the meaning of. Then, at once, I gave him the glass of water to drink from, and as he handed it back I kissed him and hugged him, as if spontaneously. It was done in an instant, this ritual of ceremony, this series of actions, whatever it was, something ancient which I knew to do by instinct. As I let go of my son I said into his ear, for only him to hear: "Your secret name is Paul. Remember that."

Johnny gazed at me quizzically and then smiled. It was over. His real name had been given him, and under the correct circumstances.

"Good night," I said aloud, and left his bedroom; behind me he rubbed at his moist hair and, sleepily, lay back in his bed.

What was all that about? I asked myself. In the dream transmission something had been freighted across to nfe on an unconscious level, instructions rather than information, concerning the welfare of my son.

When I returned to bed I had another dream concerning Sadassa Silvia. I heard music as I lay in sleep, astonishingly lovely music, a woman singing, accompanied by an acoustic guitar. Gradually the guitar gave way to a small studio combo, and I heard, then, subtracks with backup vocals and the faint hint of an echo chamber. It was a professional production.

I thought, We should sign her up. She's good.

Presently I found myself in my office at Progressive Records. I could still hear the girl singing, again with the solo guitar. She sang:

You have to put your slippers on To walk toward the dawn.

As I listened, I picked up a new album which we had mastered. A mock-up of the artwork and layout had already been prepared: inspecting it critically, I saw that the singer was Sadassa Silvia; there, in addition to her name on the album cover, was her picture, the same Afro-natural hairstyle, the small worried face, the glasses. There was blurb material on the back, but I could not read it; the small letters blurred away.

That dream remained clear in my mind when I woke up the next morning. What a voice, I said to myself as I showered and shaved. In all my life I had never heard such a pure voice, so compelling; absolutely accurate in pitch, I realized critically. A -soprano, something like Joan Baez; what we could do in the way of marketing a voice like that!

Thinking about Sadassa Silvia reawakened my concern about my job at Progressive. I had missed a lot of time; maybe I was ready now to go back. The dream was telling me that.

Think you can make out okay alone?" I asked Rachel.

"Is your eyesight - "

"I can see well enough," I said. "I think it was all the vitamin C I was taking; it's finally flushed out of my system, taking everything else with it."

I spent one whole day walking around Placentia, enjoying myself immensely. There was a beauty in the trash of the alleys which I had never noticed before; my vision now seemed sharpened, rather than impaired. As I walked along it seemed to me that the flattened beer cans and papers and weeds and junk mail had been arranged by the wind into patterns; these patterns, when I scrutinized them, lay distributed so as to comprise a visual language. It resembled the trail signs which I understood American Indians used, and as I walked along I felt the invisible presence of a great spirit which had gone before me -walked here and moved the unwanted debris in these subtle, meaningful ways so as to spell out a greeting of comradeship to me, the smaller one who would follow.

You can almost read this stuff, I thought to myself. But I couldn't. All I could gather from the arrangements of trash was a participation in the passage of the great figure who had preceded me. He had left these discarded objects placed so that I would know he had been there, and in addition a golden illumination lay over them, a glow that told me something about his nature. He had brought the dust out of its obscurity into a kind of light; this was a good spirit indeed.

I had an acute feeling that the animals always saw this way, always were aware of who and what had passed along the alleys ahead of them. I was seeing with the hypervision associated with them. What a better world than our own, I reflected; it is so much more alive.

It was not so much that I had been exalted upward from my animal nature to the realm of the transcendent; actually I seemed closer to the animal world, more tuned to actual matter. Perhaps this was the first time I had really been at home in the world. I accepted all I saw and enjoyed it. I did not judge. And since I did not judge, there was nothing to reject.

I was ready to return to work. I felt cured. Having handled the shoe ad certainly helped. The crisis had come and gone. It did not disturb my tranquility to know that in point of fact I had not dealt with the shoe ad, but, rather, that it had been handled for me, by unseen entities. What would have demoralized me would have been their absence: if they had let me fall, incompetent and confused, alone.

My incompetence had called these invisible friends forth. Had I been more gifted I would not now know of them. It was, in my mind, a good trade. Few people had the awareness I now possessed. Because of my limitations an entire new universe had revealed itself to me, a benign and living hyperenvironment endowed with absolute wisdom. Wow, I said to myself. You can't beat that. I had caught a glimpse of the Big People. It was a lifetime dream fulfilled. You'd have to go back to ancient times to find a comparable revelation. Things like this didn't happen in the modern world.

One week after I returned to Progressive Records, Mrs Sadassa Silvia walked in and asked for a job. She did not want to be recorded by us, she informed us; she wanted a job such as I had: auditioning other artists. She stood before my desk, wearing pink bell-bottoms and a man's checkered shirt, her coat over her arm, her small face pale with fatigue. It looked as if she had walked a long way.

"I don't hire," I told her. "That's not my job."

"Yes, but you have the desk nearest the door," Mrs Silvia said. "May I sit down?" Without waiting, she seated herself in a chair facing my desk. She had come into my office; I had left the door open. "Do you want to see my resume?"

"I'm not personnel,"I repeated.

Mrs Silvia gazed at me through her rather thick glasses. She had a pretty, pert face, very much as it had appeared in the two dreams. I was amazed at her small size; she seemed unusually thin, and I had the impression that she was not physically strong, that in fact she was not well. "Well, can I just sit here a second and get my breath?" she said.

"Yes," I said, rising to my feet. "Can I get you anything? A glass of water?"

Mrs Silvia said, "Do you have a cup of coffee?"

I fixed her coffee; she sat there gazing inertly ahead, slumped a little in the chair. She was well dressed, and in good taste, in a very modern way, a Southern California style. She had a little white hat on, down deep in her Afro-natural black hair.

"Thank you." She accepted the coffee from me and I noticed the beauty of her hands; she had long fingers and fastidiously manicured nails, lacquered but unpainted. This is a very classy girl, I said to myself. I judged her age as early twenties. When she spoke, her voice was cheerful and expressive, but her face remained impassive, without warmth. As if weighed down, I thought. As if she has had a good deal of trouble in her life.

"You want a job as what?" I said.

"I take shorthand and type and I have two years of college as a journalism major. I can copyedit your blurb copy for you; I worked on the school publications at Santa Ana College." She had the most perfect, lovely teeth I had ever seen, and rather sensuous lips - in contrast to the severity of her glasses. It was as if the lower half of her face had rebelled against an asceticism imposed on her by childhood training; I got the impression of an ample physical nature, checked by deliberate moral restraint. This girl, I decided, calculates everything she does. Calculates its worthiness before she does it. This is a highly controlled person, not given to spontaneity.

And, I decided, very bright.

"What kind of guitar do you own?" I asked.

"A Gibson. But I don't play professionally."

"Do you write songs?"

"Only poetry."

I quoted, " „You have to put your slippers on / To walk toward the dawn.""

She laughed, a rich, throaty laugh. "Oh, yes. „Ode to Empedocles.""

"What?" I said uncertainly.

"You must have read it in my high school yearbook."

"How could I read it in your high school yearbook?"

Mrs Silvia said, "When did you read it?"

"I forget," I said.

"A friend of mine wrote it under my picture. She meant I'm too idealistic, I guess. That I don't have my feet on the ground, but go charging off in all directions. ... I get into different causes. She was very critical of me."

"You better go and see personnel," I told her.

Some aspects of the dream had been correct. In other regards it was completely off. As precognition, which is what Phil would have called it, faulty reception or faulty transduction and interpretation by my dreaming mind had badly disfigured the information. I could hardly record someone who took dictation. We wouldn't sell much of that. I could hardly act out the instructions of the dream, whether it came from Valis or not.

Still, it was amazing that this much was accurate. The dream had the name right, and she did look, in real life, as she had appeared in the snapshot and on the album cover. If nothing more, it proved the reality of dream precognition; nothing more, in all likelihood, in that it appeared to end here. If she got any kind of job with us it would be a miracle; as far as I knew we were overstaffed already.

Setting down her coffee cup, Mrs Silvia rose and gave me a brief, spirited smile. "Maybe I'll be seeing you again." She departed from my office, walking in slow, almost unsteady steps; I noticed how thin her legs seemed, but it was hard to judge with the bell-bottoms.

After I shut my office door I discovered that she had left her resume and her keys. Born in Orange County in the town of Yorba Linda, in 1951. ... I couldn't help glancing over the resume" as I carried it out of my office and down the hall after her. Maiden name: Sadassa Aramchek.

I halted and stood holding the resume. Father: Serge Aramchek. Mother: Galina Aramchek. Was this why the AI monitor had steered me to her?

As she emerged from the ladies" room I approached her, stopped her.

"Did you ever live in Placentia?" I asked her.

"I grew up there," Sadassa Silvia said.

"Did you know Ferris Fremont?"

"No," she said. "He had already moved to Oceanside when I was born."

"I live in Placentia," I said. "One night a friend and I found the name „Aramchek" cut into the sidewalk."

"My little brother did that," Sadassa Silvia said with a smile. "He had a stencil and he went around doing that."

"It was down the block from the house where Ferris Fremont was born."

"I know," she said.

"Is there any connection between - "

"No," she said very firmly. "It's just a coincidence. I used to get asked that all the time when I used my real name."

""Silvia" isn't your real name?"

"No; I've never been married. I had to start using another name because of Ferris Fremont. He made it impossible to live with the name „Aramchek." You can see that. I chose „Silvia," knowing that people would automatically turn it around and think I was named Silvia Sadassa." She smiled, showing her perfect, lovely teeth.

I said, "I'm supposed to sign you up to a recording contract."

"What doing? Playing my guitar?"

"Singing. You have a marvelous soprano voice; I've heard it."

Matter-of-factly, Sadassa Silvia said, "I have a soprano voice; I sing in the church choir. I'm an Episcopalian. But it's not a good voice; it's not really trained. The best I can do is when I get a little drunk and sing bawdy hymns in the elevator of my apartment building."

I said, "I can only tell you what I know." Evidently much of what I knew didn't add up. "Do you want me to go with you to personnel?" I asked. "And introduce you?"

"I talked to him."

"Already?"

"He was coming out of his office. He says you're not hiring. You're overstaffed."

"That's true," I said. We stood facing each other. "Why did you pick Progressive Records," I asked, "to try for a job?"

"You've got good artists. Performers I like. I guess it was just a wish-fulfillment fantasy, like all my ideas. It seemed more exciting than working for a lawyer or an oil-company executive."

I said, "What about your poems? Can I see some of them?"

"Sure," she said, nodding.

"And you don't sing when you play your guitar?"

"Just a little. I sort of hum."

"Can I buy you lunch?"

"It's three thirty."

"Can I buy you a drink?"

"I have to drive back to Orange County. My eyesight goes out entirely when I drink. I was totally blind when I was sick; I used to bump into walls."

"What were you sick with?"

"Cancer. Lymphoma."

"And you're okay now?"

Sadassa Silvia said, "I'm in remission. I had cobalt therapy and chemotherapy. I went into remission six months ago, before I finished my course of chemotherapy."

That's very good," I said.

„They say if I live another year I probably could live five years or even ten; there're people walking around who've been in remission that long."

It explained why her legs were so spindly and why she gave the impression of fatigue and weakness and ill health. "I'm sorry," I said.

"Oh, I learned a lot from it. I'd like to go into the priesthood. The Episcopal church may ordain women eventually. Right now it doesn't look so good, but by the time I finish college and seminary I think they will."

"I admire you," I said.

"When I was very sick last year I was deaf and blind. I still take medication to prevent seizures ... the cancer reached my spinal column and the fluid of my brain before I went into remission." After a pause she added in a neutral, contemplative tone, The doctor says it's unknown for anyone who had it get into their brain to -survive. He says if I live another year he'll write me up."

"You really are quite a person," I said, impressed by her.

"Medically I am. Otherwise all I can do is type and take dictation."

"Do you know why you went into remission?"

They never know that. It was prayer, I think. I used to tell people that God was healing me; that was when I couldn't see and I couldn't hear and I was having seizures - from the medication - and I was all bloated up and my hair had" - she hesitated - "fallen out. I wore a wig, I still have it. In case."

"Please let me buy you something," I said.

"Want to buy me a fountain pen? I can't grip a regular ballpoint pen; it's too small. I only have a little strength for gripping in my right hand; that whole side is still weak. But it's getting stronger."

"You can hold a fountain pen okay?"

"Yes, and I can use an electric typewriter."

"I've never met anybody like you before," I said.

"You're probably lucky. My boyfriend says I'm boring. He always quotes Chuckles the Chipmunk from A Thousand Clowns in regard to me: „Boring, boring, boring, boring, boring."" She laughed.

"Are you sure he really loves you?" It didn't sound as if he did.

"Oh, I'm always running errands and making shopping lists and sewing; I spend half my time sewing. I make most of my own clothes. I made this blouse. It's so much cheaper; I save an awful lot of money."

"You don't have much money?"

"Just the Social Security for disability. It just pays my rent. I don't have very much left over for food."

"Christ," I said, Til buy you a ten-course meal."

"I don't eat very much. I don't have much of an appetite." She could see I was looking her up and down. "I weigh ninety-four pounds. My doctor says he wants me up to one-ten, my normal weight. I was always thin, though. I was premature. One of the smallest babies born in Orange County."

"You live in Orange County still?"

"In Santa Ana. Near my church, the Church of the Messiah. I'm a lay reader there. The priest there, Father Adams, is the finest person I have ever met. He was with me all the time I was sick."

It occurred to me that I had found someone with whom I could discuss Valis. But it would take a while to get to know her, especially considering that I was married. I took her to a stationery store, found her the right kind of fountain pen, and then said goodbye to her for the time being.

Actually I could discuss everything with my science fiction author friend, Phil Dick. That evening I told him about the AI teletype printing out "Portuguese States of America." It seemed to him a very important discovery.

"You know what I think?" he said, in agitation, sniffing reflexively at a tin of Dean Swift snuff. "Your help is reaching you from an alternate universe. Another Earth which took a different line of historical development from ours. It sounds like one in which there was no Protestant revolution, no Reformation; the world probably divided between Portugal and Spain, the first major Catholic powers. Their sciences would evolve as servants of religious goals, instead of secular goals as we have in our universe. You have all the constituents for this: help of an obviously religious sort, from a universe, an America, controlled by the first great Catholic sea power. It fits together."

"There probably are other alternate worlds then, too," I said.

"God and science working together," Phil said excitedly; he dove for more tins of snuff. "No wonder it sounds so far away when it talks to you. No wonder you dream about electronic booster equipment and people who are deaf and mute - they're distant relatives of ours who've evolved that way. It might make a good novel." This was the first time he had seen anything in my experience which might be used in a book, or anyhow had admitted to that.

That would explain a dream I had which didn't make any sense," I said.

I had dreamed of a row of fish tanks, with the water in each stagnant and silted over. We were gazing down at the first one, only to see the life which lived at the bottom of the tank gasping and dying from the pollution. We -the great figures which looked down - turned to the next tank and found less pollution there; at least the little crustaceans and crabs were visible down in the murk. In the dream I suddenly realized that we were looking down at our own world. I was one of the small crabs living at the bottom, shyly concealed behind a boulder. "Look," the great but invisible person beside me said; he took a small shining object, a trinket of some sort, and held it down to the small crab in the tank which was me. The crab emerged cautiously, took the trinket in its claws, inspected it, and then retreated behind the boulder. I assumed the crab had made off with our trinket, but no; presently it was back with something to trade for the trinket. The great person beside me explained that this was an honest life form, that it did not take but made exchanges - barter, not theft. We both found ourselves admiring this humble life form, although at the same time I continued to understand that it was me, seen from his high vantage point, the vantage point of a superior life form.

Now we turned to a third tank which was not polluted at all. Creatures like helium-filled balloons waggled their way up to the surface from the mud, escaping the final end which befell the life forms in the previous tanks. This was a better one.

This one was a better universe, I now realized. Each of the fish tanks, with the life at the bottom, on the surface of the bottom in the mud and silt - each was an alternative universe or alternate Earth. We were in the worst.

"I guess," I said, "we're the only one in which Ferris F. Fremont came to power."

"The worst possibility," Phil agreed. "So those in one of the more advanced universes are assisting us. Breaking through from their world into ours."

"You see no transcendent religious power at work, then?"

"At work, yes, but in their world; theirs is a religious world, a Roman Catholic world with Christian sciences available to them. Obviously they've made a breakthrough in a scientific area we haven't, the ability to move between parallel worlds. We don't even admit the existence of parallel worlds, let alone know how to go from one to another."

„That's why it keeps seeming religious to me," I realized, "as well as technological."

"Sure thing," Phil said.

"It's interesting that the science in a religious world would be more advanced than ours."

"They never fought a Thirty Years War," Phil said. „That war set Europe back five hundred years ... the first great religious war, between Protestants and Catholics. Europe was reduced to barbarism - to cannibalism, in fact. Look what internecine religious warfare has done to us. Look at the deaths, the destruction."

"Yeah," I admitted. Maybe Phil was right. His explanation was purely secular, but it would account for the facts. The low-level AI operator had given me the one firm clue; "Portuguese States of America" could be nothing other than an alternate world. It was not the future helping, or the past, or extragalactic entities from another star - it was a parallel Earth, steeped in religiosity, coming to our aid. To assist what to them must have seemed a murked-over hell world where physical force ruled. Force, and the power of the Lie.

I thought, We finally have the explanation. It accounts for all the facts. We finally got the one good solid clue. The equivalent to the shift in the sun's apparent position during that eclipse, which verified Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Minute but absolutely accurate. The statement of a minor AI network operator, reading from an envelope it found, reading without understanding, merely doing it obligingly. Simply because it had been asked.

I now told Phil about the girl I had met, Sadassa Silvia. He did not react particularly until I came to the Aramchek part.

"Her real name," Phil said thoughtfully.

"That's why it was incised into the sidewalk," I said.

"If you have any more dreams about this girl," Phil said, "tell me. Anything."

This is important, isn't it?" I said. "Them arranging for me to meet this girl."

They just told you it was important."

I said, They brought her into Progressive. They maneuvered both of us."

"You don't know that. All you know is the precog-"

"I knew you'd say that," I said. ""Precog," shit - it's an arranging of both our lives by supernatural forces."

"By a bunch of Portuguese scientists," Phil said.

"Bull. They brought us together. They didn't just tell me something; they did something." I couldn't prove it but I was certain of it.

I had not told Phil, or anyone else for that matter, about the shoe ad. All I had told him was that the personality of the telepathic sender had, recently, overpowered me completely for a limited and critical period of time. It did not seem to me a good idea to go into detail; it was a matter between me and my unseen friends. And, evidently, the FAPers. I tended anyhow to think of it as a past issue; Valis had settled it once and for all. Now we could get on to positive issues, such as Miss Silvia, Mrs Silvia, or Miss Aramchek, whatever it was.

Phil was saying, "I'd like to know more about the sender overpowering you with his personality. What kind of personality was it? Does it fit with the alternate world theory?"

As a matter of fact it certainly did; the sender was highly religious in terms of executing the sacred rites of Christianity. I had, in stealth with Johnny, gone through three or four of the sacraments of the ancient liturgical church. And I had viewed the world, not as I customarily view it but from the eyes of a dedicated Christian. It was a different world entirely. Seeing what he saw, I knew what he knew; I understood the mysteries of the church.

I, who had grown up in Berkeley, singing Spanish Civil War marching songs in its radical streets!

A lot of the recent events remained known only to me; I had not told Phil and did not intend to. Perhaps I had made a mistake in admitting that the telepathic sender had taken possession of me; telling things like that might frighten people ... Well, the entire subject was inherently frightening, for that matter, and so I had restricted my audience to people such as Phil and a few professional people. These recent occurrences certainly should not be told, I had decided. They amounted to a description of a godlike power seizing me and turning me into its instrument, a benign power and benign instrument, but nonetheless those were the true dynamics of the situation, for better or worse.

If I accepted Phil's theory that it was a breaching through from an alternate parallel world, some of the eeriness was removed, but the awesome power remained, tremendous power and knowledge, of a sort unknown to our world. Perhaps ancient accounts of theolepsy -possession by a god, such as Dionysos or Apollo -described the identical event. Even so, it was not something to make public. This theory made it less threatening, but it did not defang it entirely. Nothing would. No words strung together could truly account for an experience of this magnitude, for an experience of such vast force. I would have to live with it to some degree unexplained. I doubted if any human theory, at least by the people I could tell, would completely subsume everything I had gone through and was still going through. For example, the precognition, the fact that they knew Sadassa Silvia was going to approach Progressive Records. Well, if they had covertly motivated her to come there, that would explain it; but it explained away one event by revealing another evqn more awesome one.

I was evidently not the sole human in their power, acting on their advice and authority. But that comforted me rather than frightened me. And it was to be expected. They would want to bring together those who acted as extensions of them. One could assess this as a ‘safety in numbers" situation. For one thing, it eased my worries about being wiped out. Suppose I were the only human on this planet they had established contact with. Too much would be riding on my shoulders. This way, with the appearance of Sadassa Silvia, I was relieved of that burden; they could work through any number of other people. And there was the black-haired girl with the fish necklace. I had already gone by the pharmacy to ask about her. They did not remember any such girl working for them; the pharmacist merely smiled. "They come and go," he told me. "Those delivery girls." It was what I had more or less expected. But that made three people I knew of.

The tyranny of Ferris Fremont would be toppled by a number of extensions of the intergalactic communications web. It seemed evident that I would meet and get to know only those who would be working directly with me: those few and no more. If I went to FAP I could tell them only so much.

In fact, I had reflected that morning driving to work, what could I tell FAP anyhow - at least that they would believe? My experiences had taken, perhaps by design, a lunatic form; I would appear a religious nut, babbling about the Holy Spirit or a conversion to Christ or being born again, a mixture of ecstatic but irrational contacts with the Deity... . FAP and any other normal group would dismiss my witnessing upon first hearing. As a matter of fact, Phil had already informed FAP that I talked with God - much to their disappointment and disgust; as the FAP girl had said, We can't do anything with that.

"You going to answer me?" Phil was saying.

I said, "I think I've said enough. I don't really feel like finding all this in one of those dozens of paperback books you write for Ace and Berkley."

Phil flushed with anger at the jibe. "I've got enough already," he said. "And I can fill in the rest out of my own head. So tell me."

With reluctance I told him.

"Sufferin" succotash," Phil said, when I had finished. "A totally different human personality from yours. Taking over, acting and thinking. You know..."He rubbed the snuff from his nose, reflexively. "There's that business in the Bible: in Revelation, I think it is. The first fruits of the harvest, the first Christian dead coming back to life. That's where they get the figure of 144,000. They return to help create the new order, as the Bible calls it. Long before the others are resurrected."

We both pondered that.

"How does it say they'll return?" I asked. I had read it but couldn't remember; I had read so much.

They will join the living," Phil said solemnly.

"Really?"

"Really. In a way not specified. I remember when I read that I wondered where they'd get their bodies from. Do you have a Bible here I can look it up in?"

"Sure." I gave him a copy of the Jerusalem Bible, and he soon had the passage.

"It doesn't say what I thought it said," Phil said. "But the rest is somewhere in the New Testament scattered about in different places. At the end times the first Christian dead will begin to return to life. When you consider how few of them there were in the apostolic age, ten or fifteen, then a hundred, I would think the first appearance of them - assuming this all has some relevance - would be like one here, another there, then maybe a fourth, fifth, and sixth. Scattered around the world... But in what kind of bodies? Their bodies, the original ones, wouldn't be the ones they'd return in; Paul makes that clear. Those were corruptible bodies. Sarx was the Greek term he used."

"Well," I said, "the only other bodies around are ours."

"Right," Phil said, nodding. "Let me suggest the following to you. Suppose one of the firstfruits returned to life, not outside in his own body, of whatever sort, but like the Holy Spirit does - manifests itself inside you. Tell me, how would this differ from what you've experienced?"

I had nothing to say; I just looked at him as he sat surrounded by his ubiquitous yellow tins and cans of snuff.

"You'd suddenly find an entity talking to you in Koine Greek," Phil said. "Ancient Greek. From inside your head. And it would view the world the way an early - "

"Okay," I said irritably. "I see your point."

"This „telepathic sender who overpowered you with his personality" is in your own head. Broadcasting from the other side of your skull. From previously unused brain tissue."

"I thought you favored the alternate universe theory," I said, surprised.

"That was fifteen minutes ago," Phil said. "You know how I am with theories. Theories are like planes at LA International: a new one along every minute. Instead of another parallel universe, more likely it's a parallel hemisphere in your head."

"In any case," I said, "it's not me."

"Not unless you somehow learned ancient Greek as a child and have forgotten it consciously. And all the rest, like the information you suddenly had about Johnny's birth defect."

"I'm going to look up Sadassa Silvia," I told him. Rachel was not around to hear, fortunately.

"You mean look her up again."

"Yeah, well, I did buy her a fountain pen."

"Something to write with," Phil said meditatively. "An odd thing to buy a girl the first time. Not flowers or candy or theater tickets."

"I explained why -"

"Yes, you explained why. You buy someone a fountain pen so they can write. That's why. That's called final or Ideological cause - the purpose of something. All this that you're involved with ultimately has to be judged in terms of its goal or purpose, not its origin. If a flock of philanthropic baboons decided to oust Ferris F. Fremont we should rejoice. Whereas if angels and archangels decided tyranny was nice we should groan our hearts out. Right?"

"Fortunately," I said, "we don't have that dichotomy to worry about."

Tm just saying," Phil said, "that we shouldn't become too embroiled as to the identity of your mysterious friends; it's what they intend we should concern ourselves with."

I had to agree. The only thing I had to go on was the statement about the conspirators by the Roman sibyl, which is to say, the embodiment of the intergalactic communications network - I still saw it as that. For now, that had to be enough.

That night I received, in my sleep, further information about Sadassa Silvia. In the dream, which shone in vivid sparkling lit-up colors, a great leather-bound book was held up to me. I saw its cover clearly. In gold leaf was stamped:

ARAMCHEK

The book was opened by invisible hands and then laid on a table. All at once, who should show up but Ferris F. Fremont, with his sullen face and heavy jowls; scowling, Ferris Fremont took a large red fountain pen and wrote his name in the book, which, I could see, was a lined ledger.

Now came an old lady with white hair tied up in a bun; she wore a white uniform such as nurses wear, and she peered through thick glasses, like Sadassa's. Smiling in a busy, efficient way, the old lady shut the ledger and hurried off with it under her arm. She resembled Sadassa. And as I witnessed all this, a voice spoke, the familiar quasi-human AI voice I had come to recognize.

"Her mother."

That was all. One printed word, two spoken words -just three words in all. But, instantly awake, I sat up in bed, then got up and left the bedroom, to fix myself a cup of coffee.

Aramchek was of course her mother's name. Aramchek - Sadassa's mother. Her mother signing up none other than Ferris F. Fremont, but signing him up to what? Aramchek, the ledger had said. Her name, the name of a covert subversive organization. A red fountain pen much like that I had bought Sadassa.

Red, subversive, signed up, Sadassa's old mother.

Jesus Christ! I said to myself as I sat in the living room waiting for the coffee water to boil.

It was not a dream; it was an information printout, clear, economical, and direct. It had pulled no punches; like a political cartoon, it had conveyed its message by graphic and verbal means: word and picture combined.

And in conjunction with the literal printout came a flood of auxiliary information, supplied by the same source. This was why my meeting Sadassa was so important: not Sadassa but her mother, who was now dead; I knew that, understood that. The scene I had witnessed happened years ago, when Ferris Fremont was young. He had been in his late teens; it was during World War II, before America got in. Mrs Aramchek was an organizer for the Communist Party, and she had recruited the teenage boy Ferris Fremont; they both lived on the same block in Placentia. The Party had been active among the Mexican-Americans who picked crops in Orange County. Signing up the Fremont boy was an accidental spinoff.

It had not been a one-shot deal, a mere interlude in Ferris Fremont's youth. Because of his personality traits - unscrupulousness and deathless ambition to rise to power over other humans, lack of any fixed value system, an underlying nihilism - Ferris had proved to be exactly what Mrs Aramchek was looking for. She had buried the facts of his Party membership and put him in a special category. Ferris Fremont would be her sleeper, to grow unannounced until the day came, if it could be manipulated into coming, when he held office on the American political scene.

This was grave and frightening, this awareness I now had. Sadassa knew that her mother had been an organizer for the California branch of the CP-USA. She had been a child, then, and automatically recruited - she had seen Ferris Fremont, and later, when he entered politics, after her mother's death, she had recognized him. She had never told anyone, however. She was afraid to.

No wonder she had changed her name.

I wished fervently that my invisible friends had not conferred this knowledge on me; it was too much. And not only this knowledge but acquaintanceship with Mrs Aramchek's still-living daughter. What the hell was next?

Sadassa Aramchek, as she herself knew - as perhaps only she knew - was a living witness to the fact that the President of the United States was a sleeper for the Communist Party. That in fact, as the communications network continued to draw my thinking along the lines of truth, the CP in conjunction with Soviet political assassins, no doubt trained by the KGB, had taken over the United States in the name of anticommunism.

Sadassa Aramchek, who was in remission from lymphatic cancer, knew this; I knew this; the Party in the USSR or at least members of it knew this; and Ferris Fremont knew this.

The shoe ad would have wiped me out; one less who knew it. A poisoned arrow from God knew who aimed at my heart a few days before I met Sadassa. Coincidence? Maybe. But no wonder Valis and his AI web operators had emerged to protect me overtly; I had been only hours away from falling victim to FAP on the eve of encountering the girl I was to link up with.

The antagonist had almost aborted us, powerful as my friends were. Only the omniscience of Valis had warded it off. How close, I thought, it had been.

And what was I supposed to do? Why had Valis selected me out of hundreds of millions of people? Why not an editor of a large newspaper, or a TV newsman, or a famous writer, or one of Ferris's political foes?

I remembered an earlier dream, then, starkly, and my heart slowed almost to a halt, thudding with discomfort. The dream of a record album of Sadassa Silvia. Which meant, graphically and obviously:

SADASSA SILVIA SINGS

That had been the title of the album; I remembered now; although at the time it seemed self-evident that the first LP by Sadassa Silvia should be called that. The other meaning of the verb ‘sing": to spill her story out.

As an executive of Progressive Records I could sign her up. And now I looked back, impressed and awed, at how I had been maneuvered to this valuable point, this position in a successful Burbank recording firm with many top folk artists under contract. Starting back years ago, the prevision of what I took to be Mexico. I would have been worth nothing as a record clerk in Berkeley; what could I have done then? Now I could do something. Sadassa played a guitar; she was good enough, despite what she said, to own and play a Gibson, the most expensive - and professional - acoustic guitar in the business. And she wrote lyrics. The fact that she could not or would not sing was not important; any singer could sing her lyrics. Progressive supplied material to its singers routinely. There were singers who couldn't write and writers who couldn't sing. We matched them up, when necessary; we were the master brokers. We were where it all came together.

And there was less FAP supervision of folk music than there was of the news media: TV, radio, news programs, and magazines. They looked only for songs protesting the Vietnam War. It was simple-minded censorship in the medium of pop music, because the messages were invariably simpleminded.

Sadassa Silvia was a smart, educated girl. I had a deep intuition that her lyrics were not obvious, at least not on . the first go-round. Maybe on reflection, as the implications gradually sank in ...

Through our distributors we were in a position to market a new folk artist on radio stations, in record stores and drugstores and supermarkets, with ads, even concerts... across the entire United States simultaneously. And Progressive had a good reputation for keeping its nose clean. We had never gotten into trouble with FAP, as had some offbeat record firms. The closest FAP had come, to my knowledge, was their pitch to me to report on novice artists, and I had had the clout to throw that off,

Novice artists. Had the two fat-necked middle-aged FAPers who'd approached me been thinking specifically of Sadassa? Was she being watched? Surely Ferris Fremont would have her watched. But perhaps he didn't know she existed.

It showed how risky this all was, the visit by the two FAPers so recently. With Sadassa coming just now. First the two FAPers, then the shoe ad in the mail, now Sadassa. Valis had timed his intervention precisely; it could not have been delayed. Things were in motion, for me and for Phil; consider his visitors too. We were both being watched constantly ... or at least I had been until I phoned FAP and gave them my pitch - Valis's pitch.

Perhaps I was temporarily free of supervision, Valis having arranged it with this in mind: my meeting with Sadassa.

Her lyrics, I reflected, set to sure-fire ballads, when repeated over and over again on AM rock stations would certainly get across to a large audience. And if her information were put in subliminal form the authorities might not -

Subliminal form. Now, for the first time, I comprehended the purpose of my nasty experience with the gross subliminal messages I had managed to transliminate. That, regrettably, had been necessary; I had to become consciously aware - in a manner I could never forget - of what could be done with subliminal cueing in popular music. People listening while half asleep, absorbing by night what they would soon think and believe the next day!

Okay, I said to Valis in my head. I forgive you for putting me through that ordeal. You made your point, all right. So it's fine. I guess there was no way to inform me of everything at once; it had to unfold in successive stages.

A further insight came to me, sharp and lucid. My friendship with Phil, him and his dozens of popular science fiction thrillers bought in drugstores and Greyhound bus stations, is a false lead. That is what the authorities are looking for: something showing up in those pulp novels. Those are winnowed thoroughly by the intelligence community, every single one. We, too, in the recording industry, are winnowed, but more for pro-dope subtracks, pro-dope and sexually suggestive stuff. It is in the field of science fiction that they look for political material.

At least, I thought, I hope so. I don't think we could get away with this as material stuck into a book, even subliminally. I think in pop tunes we have a better chance. And evidently that is what Valis feels too.

Of course, I realized, if we're caught they'll kill us. How will Sadassa feel about that? She's so young ... and then I remembered the sad fact that she was in temporary remission from cancer; she could only expect to live a little while. It was a deeply sobering thought, but Sadassa did not have that much to lose. And probably she would see it that way. Before they could get her, the lymphoma would.

Perhaps this was the underlying reason why Sadassa had approached a recording firm for a job. An unconscious awareness that at a recording firm her story might be -but I was speculating now. The AI operators had not coached my thinking along these lines. Nor had they led me to wonder if Sadassa had been afflicted with cancer in order to push her to make public what she knew; it was my own individual mind conjecturing about that. I doubted it; more likely that was coincidence. And yet, I had heard it said that God brought good out of evil. The cancer was evil and Sadassa had it; wasn't this something good which Valis had managed to extricate from it?

The next day at work I stepped into the personnel office and had a chat with Allen Sheib, who had told Mrs Silvia that we were overstaffed.

"Hire her," I told him.

"Doing what?"

"I need an assistant."

Til have to check with payroll and with Fleming and Tycher."

"Do it," I said. "And if you do, I owe you one. A favor."

"Business is business," Sheib said. Til do what I can. As a matter of fact, I think I owe you a favor. Anyhow, I'll try to swing it. What sort of wages?"

"That isn't important," I said. I could, after all, help finance her out of the funds I controlled - our under-the-table funds, so to speak: payoffs we did not report. In our confidential bookkeeping, Sadassa would be listed with a variety of local DJs. No one would be the wiser.

"You want me to interview her, see what she can do, so she thinks the job is legitimate?" Sheib asked.

"Fine," I said.

"You have her number?"

I did. I gave it to Sheib with instructions to say there was now a job opening and to come in to be interviewed.

Just to make sure there was no foul-up I telephoned her myself.

"This is Nicholas Brady," I said when she answered. "At Progressive Records."

"Oh, did I leave something behind? I can't find my -"

"I think we have a job for you," I said.

"Oh. Well, I've decided I really don't want a job. I put in an application for a scholarship at Chapman College and since I talked to you they accepted my application, so I can now go back to school."

I was at a loss. "You won't come in?" I said. "And be interviewed?"

Tell me what kind of job it is. Filing and typing?"

"As my assistant."

"What would I do?"

I said, "Go with me to audition new performers."

"Oh." She sounded interested.

"And possibly we could use your lyrics."

"Oh, really?" She perked up. "Maybe I could do both: go to school and that too."

I had a strange feeling that in her guileless, innocent say she had bumped us up ten notches in the kind of job she could expect from us. This interchange gave me a different impression of her. Perhaps coping with - and surviving - cancer had taught her lessons. A certain kind of grit, a certain tenacity. And she had, probably, only a short time left to fulfill her needs, to extract whatever she was going to extract from life.

"Please come in and talk to us about it," I said.

"Well, I could do that, I guess. I really should ... I had a dream about your record company."

Tell me." I listened intently.

Sadassa said, "I dreamed I was watching a recording session through the soundproof glass. I was thinking how wonderful the singer was, and I was impressed by all the professional mixers and mikes. And then I saw the album jacket and it was me. Sadassa Silvia Sings, it was called. Honest." She laughed.

There wasn't much I could say.

"And I got the strong impression," Sadassa continued, "when I woke up, that I'd be working for you. That the dream was a good omen."

"Yeah," I said. "Most likely so."

"When should I come in?"

I told her at four o"clock today. That way, I figured, I could take her to dinner afterward.

"Have you had any other unusual dreams?" I asked, on impulse.

"That wasn't really unusual. What do you mean by unusual?"

"We can talk about it when you get here," I said.

Sadassa Silvia showed up at four o"clock wearing a light brown jumpsuit, a yellow sweater, hooped earrings to match her Afro-natural hair. She had a solemn expression on her face, as before.

Seated across from me in my office she said, "As I drove up here I asked myself why you might be interested in any unusual dreams I have had. I keep a notebook for my shrink in which every morning I'm supposed to write down my dreams-before I forget them. I've been doing that as long as I've been seeing Ed, which is almost two years."

Tell me," I said.

"Do you want to know? Do you really want to? All right, I've had the feeling for three weeks now - it began on a Thursday - that someone is talking to me in my sleep."

"Man? Or woman?"

Sadassa said, "In between. It's a very calm voice, modulated. I only retain an impression of it when I wake up ... but it's a favorable impression. The voice is very lulling. I always feel better after I've heard it."

"You can't remember anything it says."

"Something about my cancer. That it won't come back."

"What time of night - "

"Exactly three thirty," Sadassa said. "I know because my boyfriend says I try to talk back to it; I mean, converse with it. I wake him up trying to talk, and he says it's always the same time of night."

I had forgotten about her boyfriend. Oh, well, I said to myself; I have a wife and family.

"It's as if I'd left the radio on very low," Sadassa continued. "To a faraway station. Like you get on shortwave late at night."

"Amazing," I said.

Sadassa said calmly, "I came to Progressive Records in the first place because of a dream, very much like the one I had last night. I was in a lovely green valley with very high grass, out in the country, fresh and nice, and there was a mountain. I floated along, not on the ground but weightlessly floating, and as I came toward the mountain it turned into a building. On the building they had put words, on a plaque over the entrance. Well, one word: PROGRESSIVE. But in the dream I could tell it was Progressive Records because I could hear the most incredibly dulcet music. Not like any music I have ever heard in actuality."

"You did the right thing," I said, "to act on that dream."

"Did I come to the right place?" She studied my face intently.

"Yes," I said. "You interpreted the dream right."

"You seem sure."

"What do I know?" I said jokingly. "I'm just glad you're here. I was afraid you wouldn't show up."

"I go to school - I will be going - during the day. Can we audition performers at night? I would expect so. We have to fit the job in around my school schedule."

"You don't want much," I said, a little nettled.

"I've got to go to school again; I lost so much time while I was sick."

"Okay," I said, feeling guilty now.

"Sometimes," Sadassa said, "I get the feeling that the government gave me cancer. Gave me a carcinogen to deliberately make me sick. It's only by a miracle that I survived."

"Good God," I said, jolted; I hadn't thought of that. Maybe it was so, everything considered. With her background. With what she knew, what she was. "Why would they want to do that?"

"I don't know; why would they? I'm paranoid, I realize that. But strange things happen these days. Two of my friends have disappeared. I think they're sticking "em in those camps."

My phone rang. I picked it up and found myself talking to Rachel. Her voice shook with excitement. "Nick - "

Tm with a client," I said.

"Have you seen today's LA TimesT

"No," I said.

"Go get it. You have to read it. Page three, the right-hand column."

Tell me what it says," I said.

"You've got to read it. It explains the experiences you've been having. Please Nick; go look at it. It really does!"

"Okay," I said. "Thanks." I hung up. "Excuse me," I said to Sadassa. "I have to go out front to the newspaper thing." I left my office, went down the hall to the big outside glass doors.

A moment later I had a copy of the Times and was carrying it back, reading it as I walked.

On page three in the right-hand column I found this article:

SOVIET ASTROPHYSICIST REPORTS RADIO SIGNALS FROM INTELLIGENT LIFE

Not from outer space as expected but emanating close to Earth.

Standing there in the hall, I read the article. The foremost Soviet astrophysicist, Georgi Moyashka, using a collection of interlinked radio telescopes, had picked up what he believed to be deliberate signals from a sentient life form, these signals containing the characteristics that Moyashka had anticipated finding. The big surprise, however, was their point of origin: within our solar system, which no one, including Moyashka himself, had anticipated. The US space people had already gone on record as saying that the signal undoubtedly emanated from old satellites put into space and then forgotten, but Moyashka was certain that the signals were of alien origin. So far he and his team had been unable to decode them.

The signals came in short bursts from a moving source that seemed to be circling Earth, perhaps six thousand miles away; they came on an unexpected ultrahigh frequency, rather than as short-wave emissions with greater carrying distance. The transmitter appeared to be powerful. One odd point that Moyashka had noted which he could not account for was the fact that the radio signals came only when the source was above Earth's dark or night side; during the day the signals ceased. Moyashka conjectured that the so-called Heaviside layer might be involved.

The signals, although short in duration, seemed "highly information rich" because of their sophistication and complexity. Curiously, the frequency changed periodically, a phenomenon found in transmissions seeking to avoid jamming, Moyashka stated. Further, his team had discovered, entirely by accident, that animals in their Pul-kovo laboratory underwent slight but regular physical changes during the time of signal transmission. Their blood volume altered and their blood pressure readings increased. Provisionally, Moyashka conjectured that radiation accompanying the radio signals might account for it. The Soviets (the article finished) planned to launch a satellite of their own to intercept the orbit of this Earth-rotating transmitter to confirm their theory that it was a satellite not of terrestrial origin. They hoped to photograph it.

From the pay phone in the hall I called Rachel back. "I read it," I said. "But Phil and I already have a theory."

Bitingly, Rachel said, "This isn't a theory; this is a fact. I heard it on the noon news, too. It's real, even if we deny it, the US denies it. I looked up Dr Moyashka in your Britannica; there's an article on him. He discovered volcanic activity on the moon and some kind of thing on Mercury; I didn't understand it, but every time, people said he was wrong or crazy. Stalin had him in a forced labor camp for years. He's highly esteemed; he's a big wheel in the Russian space program, and the radio today says he heads their CETI Project - „Contacting Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence." They're using telepathy and everything; they're really wild."

"Did the radio say how long they think the satellite's been transmitting?"

"The Russians just picked it up recently. They don't know anything about before that. But listen - short intense high-frequency bursts, always at night. Don't you receive your pictures and words around three A.M.? It fits, Nick! It does! You and Phil were thinking anyhow maybe it's a satellite orbiting Earth! I remember both of you talking about that!"

"Our new theory -" I began

"The hell with your new theory," Rachel said. "This is the biggest news in the history of the world! I'd think you'd be out of your mind with excitement!"

"I am," I said. "Catch you later." I hung up and returned to my office, where Sadassa Silvia sat, smoking a cigarette and reading a magazine.

"Sorry to keep you waiting," I said to her.

"The phone rang while you were out of the office," Sadassa said. "I didn't think I should answer it."

"It'll ring again," I said.

The phone rang. I picked it up and said hello. It was Phil; he had heard the news on the radio. Like Rachel, he was highly excited.

"I read about it in the Times," I informed him.

"Did the Times article mention that it broadcasts on the same frequencies our FM and TV sound travels on?" Phil said. The scientist I heard commenting, from some US space laboratory, says that virtually rules out the possibility that it's one of our own satellites since ours don't broadcast on commercial frequencies. Listen, Nick; he said its signals would interfere with FM and TV reception so we might have to destroy it. But what I was thinking -remember when you heard that weird shit on your radio at night, as if it were talking to you? And we conjectured about a satellite override? Nick, this may be it! This thing when it transmits might very well override. And the scientist said, the one I heard commenting, that it doesn't broadcast in the strict sense of the word, that it's narrow tight beams, directed; „broadcast" means in all directions, everywhere equally. This satellite's signals don't propagate in all -"

"Phil," I broke in, "I've got somebody with me right now. Can I get back to you tonight?"

"Sure," Phil said, mollified. "But you know, Nick, this could explain it; it really could. You're transducing these unusual alien signals."

"Catch you later, Phil," I said, and hung up. I did not want to discuss it in front of Sadassa Silvia. Or anyone else, for that matter. Although, I thought, I may be discussing it with Ms Silvia one of these days, when the time is right; when I've sounded her out sufficiently beforehand.

Sadassa said, "Was it the article in the Times about „prisons are a source of wealth"? That pitch for slave labor under the guise of psychological rehabilitation? „Convicts need not be indoors, wasting years of their lives in idleness, rather, th^y could - „ Let's see, how did they put it? „Convicts could work out under the warm sun in labor groups rebuilding slums, contributing to urban renewal, and hippies could make their contribution to society, side by side with them and also the youth who can't get jobs. ..." I felt like writing in to say, „And when they die of overwork and starvation they can contribute their bodies in giant ovens, and we can melt them down into useful bars of soap.""

"No," I said, "it wasn't that article." The alien satellite, then?" Presently I nodded. Sadassa said, "It's a fake. Or rather, it's one of ours and we won't admit it. It's a propaganda satellite we use to beam down subliminal material to the Soviet people. That's why it broadcasts on commercial FM and TV frequencies and alters its transmission frequency at random intervals. The Soviet people get eighth-of-a-second stills of happy Americans eating all the food they want, shit like that. The Russians know it and we know it. They beam down to us from unauthorized satellites and we do the same to them. They're going to shoot it down; that's what they're up to. I don't blame them."

It sounded convincing, except that it scarcely explained why the Soviet Union's foremost astrophysicist would make the announcement he had made - Moyashka had put his vast reputation on the line again, claiming the satellite to be extraterrestrial in origin. It seemed doubtful that a man of his probity would become embroiled in a strictly political matter.

"Do you really think a famous scientist like Georgi Moyashka would - " I began, but Sadassa, irr her gentle but strict little voice, interrupted imperturbably.

"He does what they tell him. AH Soviet scientists do and say what they're told. Ever since Topchiev purged the Soviet Academy of Sciences back in the fifties. He was the Party hatchetman in the Academy, then, its official secretary; he personally sent to prison hundreds of the USSR's top scientists. That's why their space program is so chunky, so far behind ours. They haven't even managed to miniaturize their components. They have no microcircuitry at all."

"Well," I said, nonplussed. "But in some areas - "

"Big booster rockets," Sadassa agreed. "They're still using tubes! The average stereo built in Japan is more advanced than the components used in a Soviet missile."

"Let's get down to the business of your job," I said.

"All right." She nodded sensibly.

"We can't pay you very much," I said. "But the work should be interesting."

"I don't need much," Sadassa said. "How much is much?"

I wrote down a figure and turned it to show her.

"That certainly isn't much," she said. Tor how many hours a week?"

"Thirty hours," I said.

"I guess I could work that into my schedule."

Exasperated, I said, "I don't think you're being realistic. For that few hours it's good pay, and you're unskilled. This isn't typing and filing; this is creative work. I'd have to train you. I think it's a good deal. You should be glad to get it."

"What about publishing my lyrics? And using them?"

"We'll use them. If they're good enough."

"I brought some along." She opened her purse and brought out an envelope. "Here."

Opening the envelope I removed four pieces of" paper on which she had written verses in blue fountain-pen ink. Her handwriting was legible but shaky, the aftereffects of her illness.

I read over the poems - they were poems, not lyrics -but my mind was on what she had just said. The Soviet Union was going to do what? Shoot the satellite down? What, then, would become of me? Where would my help come from?

"I'm sorry," I said, "I'm having trouble concentrating. They're very good." I said it reflexively, without conviction; maybe they were good, maybe not. All I could think of was the dreary, heartbreaking thing she had told me, her conjecture about Soviet intentions. It seemed obvious, now that she had uttered it. Of course they weren't merely going to shoot it down. They weren't going to allow an extraterrestrial vehicle, an intruder into our buttoned-down world, to beam split-second subliminal communications to our people, overriding our own managed TV and FM transmissions. Adding God-knew-what information we weren't supposed to know, Radio Free Alpha Centauri, I said to myself bitterly. Radio Free Albemuth, as I had come to call it. How long are you going to last now that you've been found out? They can't get you with a missile; they will launch a satellite with an H-warhead and simply detonate you in the general blast. No more tight-beamed messages. And, I thought, no more dreams for me.

"Can I take these poems home?" I asked Sadassa. "And read them more leisurely?"

"Of course," she said. "Hey," she said suddenly, "what upset you? The poem about my lymphoma? Was that it? Most people are upset by that ... I wrote it when I was so sick; you can tell by the content. I didn't expect to live."

"Yeah," I said. "That's what did it."

"I shouldn't have shown that to you."

"It's a very powerful poem," I said. "I'm not sure, frankly, how a poem about someone having cancer could be adapted to use as lyrics for a song. It certainly would be a first." We both tried to smile; neither of us made it.

The others aren't so heavy," Sadassa said; she reached out and patted me on the hand. "Maybe you could use one of them."

"I'm sure we can," I said. What a charming, unhappy girl, I thought, struggling against such odds.

I changed my mind and did not ask Sadassa Silvia out for dinner; instead I took off early and drove directly back down to Orange County and home. My mind remained on the new item, on what Sadassa had said - the whole situation frightened and appalled me.

Put very simply, I had come to regard Valis and the AI operators along the communications network as divine, which meant they were not subject to mortal death. One does not blow up God. Here, however, were my wife and my best friend nattering at me that the source of my divine help had been pinpointed: satellite orbiting Earth, beaming down information, and caught in the act now by the USSR's leading astrophysicist, their great scientific sleuth - Earth's cosmic cop, armed with radio telescopes, countersatellites with warheads, and God knew what else. As thrilling as the thought was - that an extraterrestrial intelligence from another star system had put one of their vehicles into orbit around our planet and was beaming down covert information to us - it reduced something limitless to a finite reality, vulnerable to ordinary hazards. The entity I had assumed to be omniscient and omnipotent was about to be shot out of the sky. And with it, I realized, went the possibility of deposing Ferris Fremont. When the Soviets, no doubt operating in conjunction with our more sophisticated tracking stations, brought down the ETI satellite, the hopes of free men in both nations died.

Unless, of course, there was no connection between the newly discovered satellite and my experiences. But, as both Rachel and Phil had already noticed, it was too much of a coincidence; it was too close.

God, I thought, I've been doing what it told me for years. Moving down to Southern California, going to work for Progressive Records - what am I going to do when they shoot it down? What'll my life be built around? But then I thought, Maybe Valis will install another satellite in its place. He could do that; with his foresight he would know the Soviet intentions long in advance -from the start, in fact. You cannot take him by surprise.

Or maybe you can.

It is possible, I said to myself as I tailgated a big truck in the righthand lane, that the satellite has done its job. Already transmitted everything in its banks. But I'm used to hearing its voice, that lovely AI voice, informing me, comforting me, helping me ... look what it did for Johnny; look what it had done for me. To be deprived of that ...

What else have I got to live for? I asked myself. What else did I ever have to live for? My relationship with Rachel isn't all that much; I love my son, but I see him so rarely; my work is important but not that important. Something such as I have had, to hear that AI voice - it is worse to lose it than it was good ever to have had it. It hurts so much.

Pain of loss, I thought; the greatest pain in the world. My friend will one day soon cease talking with me. That day lies imminently ahead, as surely as the fact that right now the USSR is preparing to launch an intercept satellite. The worldwide tyranny has spotted its enemy and now moves. The big blind engine is being cranked up.

When they blow that satellite out of the sky, I realized, they might as well blow me out of the sky as well. Being rescued from that shoe ad letter accomplishes nothing, now. All the help, all the knowledge and insight, all the coaching and guiding - down the rathole, for nothing: gone. And not just for me; for everybody who wanted a just society, who wanted to be free. For those who heard the AI voice and those who did not: our fate is the same. The one friend we had will one of these days be wiped away as if it never existed.

I felt the decay of the universe as I drove along the freeway: coldness and illness and final oblivion.

I suppose, I said to myself, I could rationalize it and say that because of Valis's help I have met a nice new girl, attractive and smart ... with a life expectancy measured in inches. We have been brought together just in time to go up in smoke. Plans, hopes, dreams - all reduced to smoke. Particles of a satellite which came here to be destroyed, the same as us: born to be blown up. The hell with it all, I thought wretchedly. Better not to have started this or tried. Better not to have even known help existed, to have imagined something happier for us in our lives.

When you attack a tyranny you must expect it to fight back. Why not? Why shouldn't it? How could I, with some idea of its nature, expect anything else? An H-warhead for the ETI satellite; cancer for Sadassa Silvia; if the shoe ad trap had worked, prison for me - prison or death.

Meditating about this I did not comprehend - or maybe I comprehended well enough and didn't care - that the truck ahead of me had slowed. Its brake lights came on; I didn't notice. I kept on going in my little VW bug, right on into the tail assembly, the huge iron rear bumper, of the truck. I heard nothing and felt nothing, no concussion or shock. All I saw was my windshield turn into a billion broken Coke bottle bottoms, a strange pattern like a giant spiderweb engulfing me. Fallen into the spiderweb, I remember thinking. To be eaten later. The spiderweb, but where is the spider? I thought. Gone away.

Liquid had spilled over my neck and chest. It was my own blood.

The din around me was terrible. Wheeled down a ramp, strapped flat; I tried to turn my head but could not. Voices, movement; a face peered down at me, a woman's face, and I heard a woman's voice. She was flashing a light in my eyes and telling me to do something. I could not do it. Sorry, I thought.

"Are you in a health plan?" another voice asked insistently. "Do you have Blue Cross? Can you sign this form, if I hold it for you? Here's a pencil. You may sign it with your left hand if you wish."

The hell with you, I thought.

I could see two California Highway Patrolmen in their brown uniforms, standing off to one side with a clipboard, looking bored. Wheelchairs, gurneys. Little young nurses in short skirts, and a crucifix on the wall.

Beside me a Highway Patrol officer bent down and said, "Don't let your insurance company fix up your car. It's leaking oil from the motor. The block is tracked."

"Okay," I managed to whisper. I felt nothing, thought nothing.

"I'm going to have to cite you, Mr Brady," the Highway Patrol officer said. "For following too close and driving at an unsafe speed. I have your license; we're checking for warrants. You're going right into surgery, so I'll return your license to the personal property office of the hospital. It'll be with your other things, your wallet and keys and money."

"Thank you," I said.

The officer departed. I lay there alone, thinking to myself. What the hell, what the hell. They should call somebody, I thought. Rachel. They ought to notify her; I should tell them. Remind them. What do they care? I" thought, I wonder what hospital this is. I was driving -where? Just into Orange County. I never made it back to Placentia, back home. Well, so much for that. I'll take his advice, I decided. Not let them fix the car. They can total it and auction it. What do I care what I get for it? What do I care about anything?

Two nurses took hold of my gurney and began to wheel it cheerfully. Bump, bump, roll. Stop for the elevator; they stood together, with smiles. I stared fixedly straight up. There was an IV bottle mounted above me. Five percent glucose, I read from the label. To keep a vein open, I decided.

Incredibly bright white lights beamed down on me. This was the operating room. They put a mask over the lower part of my face; I heard male voices, conferring. A needle stuck into my arm. It hurt. It was the first thing I had felt. The bright white lights suddenly turned black, like dead coals.

I floated across a desert landscape which showed red and brown far below me. Far off the outline of mesas. A great void in which I moved, suspended and effortless.

Someone approached me. Far off, beyond the dry mesas. Invisible presence, shining with love. It was Valis.

I recognized his being; he was familiar: the concern, the understanding, the desire to help.

We exchanged no words. I heard no voice, no sound at all except a continual gentle roaring, like wind. The sounds of the wasteland, the desert, the great open places of the world. Wind and water rushing ... but they did not seem impersonal; they seemed alive, as if part of Valis. Expressions of him, as kind and warm and loving as he was; he animated the mesas.

Valis asked me, silently, if I thought he had forgotten me.

I said, What if they shoot down the satellite?

No matter. It is a pinpoint in the sky. Behind it lies only light. A sheet of light, not sky.

Did I cash in? I asked.

No response.

I'm coming here eventually, I said. I know that. I recognize this place; I have been here before.

You were born here. You have come back.

This is my homeland, I said.

I am your father, Valis said.

Where are you?

Above the stars, Valis said.

I came from above the stars?

Yes. Many times.

Then, I said, that was me? Who took over when the ad came in the mail?

That was yourself, remembering who you are.

Who am I? I said.

Everyone.

Amazed, I said, Everyone?

No response, only the pulsations of love.

What am I going to do? I asked.

You asked to be broken down, Valis answered. And healed. This is that breaking down and healing. You will be changed.

And go on? I asked.

The warmth of his love consumed me like an invisible^ cloud of light. He responded, And go on. Nothing is ever lost.

I can't be lost? I asked.

There is nowhere for anything to go. There is only here and us. For all time.

I realized then, that Valis and I had never beerr separated, that he had only fallen silent from time to time. I felt tired, now; I had drifted low over the mesas and I wanted to rest. There was a lessening sense of Valis's presence, as if he were withdrawing. Yet he still remained, like a lamp turned down, down but not off. Like a child, I has assumed that something no longer seen no longer existed. To an infant, when its parents leave the room they cease to be. But as he grows older he understands differently. They are there whether or not he can see them or touch them or hear their voices. It is an early lesson. But sometimes perhaps not completely learned.

So now I knew who Valis was; he was my father, my real father, from whose race I came repeatedly into this world, to leave again, to return again, to work toward some distant goal unseen, not as yet comprehended. The search, perhaps, was the goal. As I achieved a little motion toward it, I understood it. Overthrowing the tyranny of Ferris Fremont was a stop along the way, not a goal but a moment of decision, from which I then continued as before. Changed to some extent, but changed by my father, not by what I had done. For, I understood, Valis himself did it, through me. The virtue lay with him.

We are gloves, I realized, which our father puts on in order to achieve his objectives. What a pleasure to be that, to be of use. Part of a greater organism: its extensions into space and time, into the world of change. To influence that change - the greatest joy of all.

I can instruct you, Valis's thoughts came, without the satellite. It is a thing to show them, a shiny toy. To make them understand. When it fired it did its task; it served to open your mind and other minds. Those minds, opened once, will never close. The contact is established and the circuit is in place. It will remain that way. I am linked up then, I realized. For all time. You have remembered. You know. There is now no forgetting. Be of good cheer. Thank you, I said.

The reddish mesas, the level plain below me, faded; the sky closed and the sound of rushing wind slowly diminished.

Valis was out of my sight now, his face turned away from me, retractile in his cycle. I experienced this time no loss, as I always had before.

Son of Earth and starry heaven. The old rite, the disclosure to the ancient initiate. I had undergone the Orphic ceremonies, down in the dark caves, to emerge suddenly into the chamber of light, to see the gold tablet that reminded me of my own nature and my past: trip across space from Albemuth, the far star, migration to this world, to blend here in escape from our molelike enemy. That enemy had soon followed, and the garden we built had been polluted and made toxic with his presence, with his wastes. We sank into the silt; we became half blind; we forgot until reminded. Reminded by the rotating voice from the nearby sky, placed there long ago in case a calamity occurred, a break in the chain of continuity. Such a break did come. And, presently, the voice automatically fired. And informed us, as best as it could, of what we no longer knew.

If the Russians did photograph the ETI satellite, the invader, they would find it old and pitted. I had been there thousands of years. What a surprise that would be; they, too, might remember... until the molelike adversary closed up their minds and they forgot again. Were made to forget again, as the deformed landscape, clouded over by the poisoned atmosphere, occluded their senses and thoughts and they fell again, as before.

Recurrent cycles, I realized, of coming awake for a time, then falling back into sleep. I had, like the others, been asleep, but then I had woken up; or, rather, I had been awakened out of my sleep deliberately. The voice of a friend had called to me, as it moved among the rows of new corn, new life, and I had heard and recognized it. That voice was always calling, always attempting to wake us up, we who slept. Perhaps eventually we all would awaken. To communicate once again with our parent race beyond the stars... as if we had never left.

Albemuth. Our first home. We were wanderers, exiles, all of us, whether we knew it or not. Perhaps most of us wanted to forget. Memory - to be aware of our true condition, our identity - was too painful. We would make this place our home and we would recall nothing else. It was easier that way.

The simplicity of unawareness. The easier way. Deadly in its outcome: without memory we had fallen victim to our adversary. We had forgotten him, too, and been overtaken and surprised. That was the price we paid. We paid it now.

When I returned to consciousness I found myself in the recovery room, with a nurse taking my pulse. My chest hurt, I had difficulty breathing. An oxygen mask covered my nose. And I was terribly hungry.

"My," the nurse said brightly. "We really ran our little car into a lot of trouble."

"What happened to me?" I managed to say.

"Dr Wintaub will discuss your surgery with you," the nurse said. "After you're taken to your room."

"Did you notify... ?"

"Your wife is on the way here."

"What city is this?" I said.

"Downey."

"I'm a long way from home," I said.

Half an hour after I had been taken upstairs to a two-patient room, Dr Wintaub entered to examine me.

"How do you feel?" he asked, taking my pulse.

"A bad headache," I said. I could not remember having had such a headache; it was equaled only by the pain I had experienced the night Valis had informed me of Johnny's birth defect. And my sight seemed impaired again, as well.

"You've been through a lot," Dr Wintaub pulled the covers back, inspected my bandages. "Your lung was punctured by a broken rib," he said. "That was why we entered the chest cavity. You're going to be here, I'm afraid, for some time. The steering wheel of your car caught you head on and did most of the damage - " His voice abruptly came to a halt.

"What is it?" I said, afraid at what he had found.

Til be back in a minute, Mr Brady." Dr Wintaub departed from the room; I was left to wonder about it. Presently he returned with two male technicians. "I want his bandages removed," Wintaub said. "And the splints. I want to examine the wound."

. They began removing the bandages, with extreme gentleness. Dr Wintaub watched critically. I felt nothing, no discomfort, no pain. The headache remained; it was like a migraine headache, with a flashing grid of extraordinarily intense pink light in my right eye, a field of blurred color slowly moving from left to right.

There, doctor." The technicians stepped back.

Dr Wintaub came close; I felt his deft fingers touch my chest. "I performed this surgery," he murmured. "About two hours ago." He studied his wristwatch. "Two hours and ten minutes ago."

"Could you look at my eyes?" I said. "That's where the pain is."

Impatiently, Dr Wintaub flashed a light in my eyes. "Follow the light," he murmured. "You're tracking okay." He returned to my chest. To the two technicians he said, "Take him down to X-ray and do a full chest series."

"All right to move him, doctor?" one of the technicians asked.

"Just be extremely careful," Wintaub said.

I was wheeled down to X-ray and chest plates were made, several of them, and then I was returned to my room. While waiting at X-ray I managed to sit up enough to see my own chest.

A firm pink line crossed it. The incision had healed.

No wonder Dr Wintaub wanted immediate X-rays; he had to know if the internal damage had mended as well.

Shortly, two unfamiliar doctors entered and began to examine me; with them they brought nurses and equipment. I lay silently, staring at the ceiling. My headache had begun to abate, for which I was thankful, and my vision was clearing, except for a residual pink phosphene color. From what I had seen of my chest, plus my knowledge of the meaning of the pink phosphene light, I understood the situation. Valis had handled my case, as he had handled Johnny's, in the most economical fashion possible: normal surgical procedure and then, under the influence of the satellite and its emissions, unnaturally rapid repair. Probably I was ready to leave the hospital.

The problem, however, lay with the doctors. They had never encountered such a thing.

"How soon do you think I'll be out of here?" I asked Dr Wintaub when he appeared after dinnertime; I was sitting up eating a regular meal. I felt fine, now. The doctor could see this. It did not appear to please him.

This is a teaching hospital," he said.

"You want the student doctors to see me," I said.

"That is correct."

"The chest cavity has repaired itself?"

"Completely so, as nearly as we can tell. But we'll need to keep you under observation; it may be superficial repair."

"Has my wife been called?" I asked. "Yes, she's on her way. I told her the operation was successful. Mr Brady, have you ever had surgery before?"

"Yes," I said.

"Did they note a highly accelerated rate of repair? Of tissue recovery?" I said nothing.

Dr Wintaub said, "Can you account for this, Mr Brady?"

"Hormone production," I said.

"Not possible."

"I'd like to be discharged," I said. "So I can go home tonight with my wife."

"That is out of the question, Mr Brady. After an operation of this severity - "

Til sign out AMA," I said. "Against medical advice. Bring me the forms."

"No way, Mr Brady. I won't cooperate with you. We are going to study you until we know what has taken place in your body following surgery. When you came in liere, one lung was almost - "

"Bring me my clothes," I said.

"No." Dr Wintaub left the room; the door shut after him.

I got out of bed and searched the closet and drawers, No clothes, except for a hospital gown. I put that on. If I had to I would leave that way. Neither Dr Wintaub nor the hospital could hold me in view of my complete recovery.

There was no doubt of my recovery. I could feel it physically, and in my mind I was aware of it, as aware as I had been that night I comprehended Johnny's birth defect. The only problem I had was getting home. And that was a minor one.

I left the hospital room and walked down the hall, looking into rooms with open doors, until I saw a room with no one in it. The patients were out getting exercise after finishing dinner. Entering the room I opened the clothes closet. All I could find were a pair of fuzzy carpet slippers, a woman's bright print dress with plunging backline, and a turban made of pastel fabric. It would be better if I resembled a woman, I realized; they would be looking for a man. Fortunately, the woman whose clothes these were had an enormous build; I was able to get into all of them, and, after picking up a pair of dark glasses from a drawer, I set out into the hall again.

No one stopped me or interfered with me as I made my way down the corridor to a stairwell. Moments later I had reached the ground floor and had come out onto the parking lot. All that remained was to sit on a bench watching the incoming cars until I saw Rachel's Maverick.

I found a bench to one side, seated myself, and waited.

An unspecified interval later - my watch was gone, either destroyed or in the patients" property safe - the green Maverick pulled hastily into a slot and Rachel and Johnny emerged, both distraught and disheveled.

As Rachel hurried up the walk past my bench I stood up and said, "Let's take off."

Halting, she stared at me in amazement.

"I wouldn't have recognized you," she said finally.

They didn't want me to leave." I walked toward the car, motioning her to accompany me.

"Can you leave? I mean, are you well enough? The doctor said you'd undergone major surgery on your chest -"

"I'm fine," I said. „The satellite healed me."

"Then the satellite is what you've been experiencing."

"Yep," I said, getting into the car.

"You do seem physically okay... but you certainly look funny in those clothes."

"You can pick up my personal effects tomorrow," I said, slamming the car door after me. "Hi, Johnny," I said to my son. "Recognize Daddy?"

My son stared at me sourly and with suspicion.

"The satellite could have provided you with better clothes," Rachel said.

"I don't think it does that," I said. "You have to find your own. That's what I did."

"Maybe you should have waited until it thought of something," Rachel said. She shot me a glance as she drove from the hospital parking lot. "I'm glad you're all right."

As we found our way out onto the freeway, I thought to myself, I certainly got a printout while I was under the anesthetic. Did Valis engineer my accident so he could speak to me? No, Valis engineered my recovery so he could work through me. He took advantage of a bad situation and brought something out of it: the best colloquy we have had and probably will ever have. What I know now, I realized, is boundless. The major pieces are in place. The delight of finding each other, Valis and I. Father and son, together again. After millennia. The relationship restored.

But I understood something else which was not good. We really did not have a chance of toppling Fremont. Not really. Because of my position at Progressive Records we could do something; we could distribute what we knew in subliminal form on an LP, buried in subtracks and backup vocals, scrambled about in the sound-on-sound that our mixers provided us. Before the police got us we could pass on what we knew, Sadassa and I, to hundreds, thousands, or even millions of Americans. But Ferris Fremont would stay in power. The police would destroy us, would forge counterdocumentation and proof; we would go and the regime would survive.

Still, it was worth doing. I knew that absolutely; Valis had set this in motion and Valis could not err. He would not have brought Sadassa and me together, flooded me with help and information, if it wasn't worth it. To make it worth it, we did not have to win completely. We needed only a certain victory, one within reason. We could, perhaps, initiate a process that others more numerous and powerful would complete someday in the future.

Valis's will was not fully realized on Earth. This was the adversary's realm, the Prince of this world. Valis could only work within this world, work with a small remnant of men; he was the minority party, here, speaking as a still small voice to one man or a handful, from a bush, in sleep, during an operation. Eventually he would win. But not now. These were not the end times after all. The end times were always coming but never here, always nearby and influencing us but never realized.

Well, I decided, we would do the best we could. And know by faith that it was worth it.

As we drove along, I said to Rachel, "I have met this girl. I've got to work with her. You may not approve -no one may approve - but it has to be done. It may destroy us all."

Rachel, driving carefully, said, "Valis told you?"

"Yes," I said.

"Do what you have to do," Rachel said, in a low, tight voice. "I will," I said.

I had not talked to Sadassa Silvia yet about her mother. As far as she knew I had no information about her past. That was the first step to be taken, to discuss Mrs Aramchek. To get her to tell me openly what Valis and the intercommunications network had already transferred from their information banks to my mind. We could not work together otherwise.

The best place to talk to her, I decided, would be at a good quiet restaurant; that way we could avoid the possibility of being picked up by a government bug. I therefore phoned her from work and invited her out to dinner.

"I've never been to Del Key's," she said. "But I've heard of it. They have a cuisine like the San Francisco restaurants. I'm free Thursday night."

On Thursday night I swung by her apartment, picked her up, and soon we were seated in a secluded booth in the main dining room at Del Key's.

"What is it you want to tell me?" she said, as we ate our salads. "I know about your mother," I said. "And Ferris

Fremont."

"What do you mean?"

In a voice low enough for our safety, I said, "I know that your mother was an organizer for the Communist

Party."

Sadassa's eyes flew open behind her thick glasses. She stared at me; she had stopped eating.

"I know further," I said quietly, "that she signed up Ferris Fremont when he was in his late teens. I know that she trained him as a sleeper, to go into politics with no sign of his real views or his real affiliations."

Still staring at me, Sadassa said, "You are really crazy."

"Your mother is dead," I said, "and so the Party - Ferris Fremont - thinks the secret is safe. But as a child you saw Fremont with your mother and you overheard enough. You're the only person outside the higher ranks of the Party who knows. That's why the government tried to kill you off with cancer. They found out you're alive despite your name change and that you know. Or they suspect you know. So you have to be killed."

Sadassa, frozen in one spot, fork half-raised, continued to gaze at me in stricken silence.

"We are intended to work together," I said. "This information will go onto a record, a folk LP, in the form of subliminal bits of data distributed so that in repeated playings a person will unconsciously absorb the message. The record industry has techniques to accomplish that; it's done all the time, although the message has to be simple. „Ferris Fremont is a Red." Nothing elaborate. One word in one track, another in the next - maybe eight words maximum. Juxtaposed in the playback. Like code. I will see that the record saturates this country; we'll flood the market with it - a huge initial pressing. There will be only one pressing and one distribution, because as soon as people begin to transliminate the message the authorities will step in and destroy all -"

Sadassa found her voice. "My mother is alive. She's active in church work; she lives in Santa Ana. There's no truth in what you say. I never heard such garbage." Standing, she set down her fork, dabbed at her mouth; she seemed on the verge of tears. "I'm going home. You're completely spaced; I heard about your accident on the freeway; it was in the Register. You must have gotten your marbles scrambled; you're crazy. Good night." She walked rapidly away from the booth, without glancing back.

I sat alone in silence.

All at once she was back, standing by me, bending over and speaking in a low, grim voice into my ear. "My mother is a down-to-earth Republican and has been all her life. She has never had anything to do with left-wing politics, certainly .not the Communist Party. She never met Ferris Fremont, although she was present at a rally at Anaheim Stadium where he spoke - that's the closest she ever got to him. She is just an ordinary person, saddled with the name „Aramchek," which means nothing. The police have investigated her repeatedly because of it. Do you want to meet her?" Sadassa's voice had risen wildly. Til introduce you to her; you can ask her. It's saying crazy things like this that gets people into -oh, never mind." Again she strode off; this time she did not return.

I don't understand, I said to myself. Is she lying?

Shaken I managed to finish my meal, hoping she would show up again, reseat herself, and take back what had been said. She did not, I paid the check, got in the Maverick, and slowly drove home.

When I opened the apartment door, Rachel greeted me with one brittle sentence. "Your girlfriend called."

"What did she say?" I said.

"She's at the La Paz Bar in Fullerton. She told me to tell you she walked there from Del Key's, that she doesn't have any money for cab fare, so she wants you to drive back to Fullerton, to the bar, and pick her up and take her home."

"Okay,"I said.

"Do you think you and she can throw Ferris Fremont out of office?" Rachel called after me sardonically. "You and she and Valis? That satellite?"

Pausing at the door, I answered, "No. I don't. Maybe some lesser tyranny in another universe. Some despotic ruler of America in an alternate world that's not so bad , as this - but this world, this tyrant, no."

"I envy the people in that universe."

"Me too." I left the apartment and drove from Placentia to the La Paz Bar on Harbor Boulevard in Fullerton.

The La Pa/ Bar is extremely dark, and when I entered I could not see her anywhere. At last I made out her small figure; she sat alone at a small table in the rear, her purse in front of her beside an empty drink glass and a dish of corn chips.

Seating myself, I said, Tm sorry I said those things."

"It's all right," Sadassa said. "You were supposed to say them. I just didn't know how to react - I had to get out of that restaurant. Too many people, too crowded. I had no instructions then as to what to say; you took me by surprise."

"Was it true, then? What I said? About your mother?"

"Basically, yes. I've received instructions since I saw you; I know what I'm supposed to say. You are to sit here until I've finished talking."

"Okay," I said.

Sadassa said, "What you told me came from the satellite. There is no other way you could have known it."

"That's right," I said.

"The information you told me introduced you to me as a member of our organization, a new one; that information is an initial step in understanding the situation, but it is not the full story. I'm to further initiate you into the organization by - "

"What organization?" I said.

"Aramchek," Sadassa said.

"Then Aramchek exists."

"Certainly it does. Why should Ferris Fremont spend half his time trying to stamp out a group that's imaginary? Aramchek includes hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, here and in the Soviet Union. I don't really know how many. The satellite reaches each of us directly and on an individual basis, so only the satellite knows who, how many, where, and what we are to do."

"What is Aramchek?" I said.

"I just told you. People here and there contacted and informed by the satellite. The satellite itself is called Aramchek; we get our name from it. You're a member of Aramchek, brought into it on the initiative of the satellite. It is always by the volition of the satellite that someone is brought in - exactly as you were: picked out, selected. We, you and I and the others, are the Aramchek people, exponents of a composite mind emanating from the satellite, which in turn receives its instructions by web from the planets of the Albemuth system.

"Albemuth is the correct name for the star we call Fomalhaut. We came from there originally, but the mind controlling the satellite is not like ours; rather, it is" - she paused - "much superior. The dominant life form on the planets of Albemuth. Whereas we were a less-evolved life form. We were given our freedom tens of thousands of years ago, and we migrated here to set up our own colony. When we fell into overwhelming difficulties, the satellite was dispatched to help us, to serve as a link back to the Albemuth system."

"I knew most of this already," I said.

Sadassa continued, There is one thing you do not know, or rather do not realize. What has been happening is a transfer of plasmatic, highly evolved life forms from the Albemuth planets via the communications network to the satellite, and from there to the surface of this planet. Technically speaking, Earth is being invaded. That is what is really happening.

The satellite has done it before - two thousand years ago, to be exact. It didn't work out that time. The receivers were eventually destroyed and the plasmatic life forms escaped into the atmosphere, taking the receivers" energy with them.

"You yourself personally were invaded by a plasmatic life form sent in energy form to take control of you and direct your actions. We, the members of the organization, are receptor sites for these plasmatic life forms from the home planets, a sort of collective brain - that's what we now consist of, to our own advantage. They are coming in a very small number, however, for the purpose of helping us; this is not a mass invasion but rather a small, highly selective one. It was with great deliberation that you were picked out as a receptor site; I was, too. Without this possession we could not succeed. We may not succeed anyhow."

"Succeed at what?"

"Dislodging Ferris Fremont."

Then that is a major goal."

"Yes." She nodded. "A major goal here, in the limited terms of this planet. You have become a composite entity, part human and part - well, they have no name. Being energy, they merge together, split apart, and re-form into their composite form, as a band in the atmospheres of their home planets. They are highly evolved atmospheric spirits who once had material bodies. They are very old; this is why, when your theoleptic-like experience began, you had the impression of a very ancient person seizing possession of you, with ancient memories."

"Yes," I said.

"You thought it was a human being who had died," Sadassa said. "Didn't you? I thought so too when it happened to me. I imagined all sorts of things - I tried out every theory in the book. Valis let us - "

"I made up that word," I broke in.

"You were given that word; it was placed in your head.

It is how we all refer to him. Of course it isn't his name; it is merely a label, an analysis of his properties. Valis allows us an interval in which to formulate theories acceptable to our own minds in order to minimize the shock. Eventually, when we are ready, we are given the truth. It is a hard blow to take, Nick, to discover that Earth is in the process of being selectively invaded; it conjures up horrific scenes of Martian insects, tall as buildings, landing and kicking over the Golden Gate Bridge. But this is not like that; this is for our benefit. It is selective, cautious, and considerate, and its only antagonist is our own antagonist."

"Will these plasmatic life forms leave after Fremont is destroyed?" I asked.

"Yes. They've come several times before in the past, given help and knowledge - medical knowledge in particular - and departed. They are our protectors, Nick; they come when we need them and then go away."

"It fits what I already know," I said. I found that my body was trembling, as if I were cold. "Can I have the waitress bring me a drink?" I asked Sadassa.

"Of course. If you have enough money, I'd like another. A margarita."

I ordered two margaritas.

"Well," I said as we sat sipping our drinks, "it's a lot easier for me now. I don't have to convince you."

"I already have the material written out," Sadassa said.

"What material?" I said, and then I understood. To be inserted as subliminal information on the record album. "Oh," I said, startled. "Can I see it?"

"I don't have it with me. I'll give it to you during the next few days. It's to go in an album you expect to sell well; you can have anyone record it, preferably one of your most popular artists. It should be, if at all possible, a hit record. This project has been building for years, Sick. For ten or twelve years. It must not misfire."

"What is the message like?" I asked.

"You'll see it. In time." She smiled. "It reads like nothing at all."

"But do you know what's really in it?"

"No," Sadassa sard. "Not completely. It's a song about „party time." It goes something like, „Come to the party." It sounds of course like a fun party; you know. Then later the vocal line goes, „Join the party." The singer says, „Everybody join the „party." And a subtrack goes, „Is everybody at the party? Is everybody present at the party?" Only if you listen carefully, they're saying, „Is everybody president at the party" at the same time the word „president" is said - repeated, in fact, by an ensemble answer: „President, president, president, join -joined - the party," and so forth. I could make out that part. But the rest I couldn't."

"Wow," I said. It terrified me; I could see how the sound-on-sound would be dubbed in as voice override.

"But this record," Sadassa said, "which you at Progressive will create and release, contains only half the information. There is another record in production; I don't know who by or where, but Valis will synchronize its release with yours, and together the information bits on the two records will add up to the total message. For instance, a song on the other record might begin, „In nineteen hundred and forty-one," which was the year Fremont teamed up with the Communist Party. Alone, that figure means nothing; but the DJs will be playing a track on first the Progressive disc and then the other one, and eventually people will be hearing all the information run together as a single total message. Random chance will join the two halves together on station after station."

"We will wind up with people walking along humming, „The president joined the Party in 1941"?" I said.

"Something like that, yes."

"Anything more?"

" „What a grand chick,"" Sadassa said.

"Beg pardon?"

""What a grand chick." Shortened in the song to „Grand chick" or „A grand chick." Except that the backup vocals will occasionally change it from „A grand chick" to „Aramchek." Consciously, people listening will continue to construe the words as „A grand chick," but on an unconscious level they will absorb the altered information. It goes back to the famous -"

"I know what it goes back to," I said. "The famous LP track still selling in the millions with the „Smoke dope, smoke dope, everybody smoke dope" backup vocal subtrack."

She laughed her throaty laugh. "Right."

"Ferris Fremont knows about the satellite, does he?" I asked.

"They've guessed. Guessed right. They've been searching for it, and now of course Georgi Moyashka has located it, in cooperation with our own stations. Between the US and the USSR, Aramchek - the satellite - has been pinpointed. The satellite that Moyashka is sending up is of course armed. It will „accidentally" explode, taking the Aramchek satellite with it."

"Can another satellite be dispatched?" I asked. "From Albemuth?"

Sadassa said, "It takes thousands of years."

Stunned, I sat simply gazing at her. "And they haven't started one -"

"One is coming. It will arrive long after every human alive today on this planet is dead. The Aramchek satellite presently in our sky has been there since the time of the great Egyptian Empire, since the time of Moses. Remember the burning bush?"

I nodded. I knew the sensation of phosphene activity, blinding my vision: the manifestation of unending fire. We had been helped in our fight against slavery for a long time. But now the days of the satellite were numbered. The Russians could get a satellite up in - suddenly I realized: they've probably had one on the launch pad, waiting. As the final stage of a rocket, all in place. All they have to do is program its route.

"Liftoff," Sadassa said, as if reading my thoughts, "will be at the end of this week. And then the satellite dies. The help and information cease."

"How can you be so calm about it?" I said.

"I'm always calm," Sadassa said. "I taught myself to be calm. We've known for months, that this was coming. We have the information we need - we have all we're going to get. It should be enough; the Aramchek satellite lasted until its work was done. There are enough of the plasmatic life forms here on Earth to - "

"I don't think we're going to be able to do it," I said.

"But we will make the record."

"Oh, yes," I said. "We can start tomorrow. Tonight, if you want. I have a couple of ideas who we can get to record it. Releases we were planning anyhow, good ones. Major ones we intended to promote."

"Fine," Sadassa said.

"Why did the satellite pick the Jews back in ancient times," I asked, "to speak to?"

"They were shepherds, out under the stars, not city dwellers cut off from the sky. There were two kingdoms, Israel and Judah; it was to Judah, the farmers and shepherds, that Valis spoke. Haven't you noticed that you hear the AI operator better when the wind is blowing in from the desert?"

"I wondered about that," I said.

"What we receive," Sadassa said, "is pararadio signals, a radiation enclosure of the radio beam, so that if the radio message is decoded it signifies nothing. That is why Dr Moyashka has never been able to unscramble the instructions passing from the satellite to Earth; the radio signal alone is only half the total information. The violent phosphene activity you experience from time to time, especially when the plasmatic personality was beaming down, is stimulated by radiation, not the radio signal. That kind of radiation is unknown to us here. Except for the phosphene response it passes unnoticed, and only the receiving person experiences the phosphene response. Other organisms may experience changes in blood volume and pressure, but that is all."

I said, That can't be the only reason the ancient Jews were selected, because they lived outdoors."

"No, that's not the only reason. That's why they were accessible to approach and contact. The position of ancient Judah to the tyrannical empires was the same as ours is to Ferris Fremont; they were an unassimilated remnant of mankind, unsullied by power and majesty. They always fought the empires, whatever they were; they always strove for independence and freedom and individuality; they were the spearhead of modern man, opposed to the crushing uniformity of Babylon, and Assyria, and most of all Rome. What they were to Rome then, we are to Rome now."

"But remember what happened in 70 A.D.," I said, "when they revolted against Rome. Complete massacre of their people, destruction of the temple, and dispersion forever."

Sadassa said, "And you're afraid of that happening now,"

"Yes,"I said.

"Ferris Fremont will destroy us whether we attack him or not. At the end of this week he will shoot the Aramchek satellite down, via Soviet technology. Meanwhile the FAPers are trying to locate all the tandem personalities created by the satellite - people like you and me, Nick. That's why the confession kits, that's why the growing police supervision. You didn't know what they were searching for when they came to you, but they did."

"Have they caught very many of us?"

"I don't know," Sadassa said. "Since we rarely have contact with one another... such as you and I have as we sit here. But I've been told that half the organization has been discovered - on a person-by-person basis - and killed. We are killed, when we are found, not imprisoned. Often killed as they tried to kill me: by toxin. The government arsenals possess very potent toxins, as a weapon of domestic war. They leave no traces in the body; no coroner can ascertain the cause of death."

"But you lived on," I said.

The fact that Valis healed me," Sadassa said, "was unexpected to them. Metastasizing cancer had riddled my body before he intervened and healed me. I was healed of it in a day; all the cancer cells, even in my spinal column and brain, disappeared. The doctors could find no trace."

"What happens to you when the satellite is destroyed?"

"I don't know, Nick," she said calmly. "I guess I succumb once more. Maybe not; maybe Valis's healing is permanent."

If it is not, I realized, then I regain my internal chest injuries from the auto accident. But I said nothing.

"What frightens you the most about this whole situation?" Sadassa asked. "The invasion? That was what - "

„The end of the satellite," I said.

"Then you're not frightened at what has happened to you. To each of us."

"No," I said. "Well, frightened in a good way because it was such a surprise. And I didn't understand it. But it saved me from the police."

"You got something in the mail."

"Yes," I said.

"They can detect the general area of a massive transmission print out. They knew the beam went to someone in your area. They probably mailed - the police cryptographers, I mean - probably mailed similar material to everyone near you. What did you do with it?"

"Phoned up FAP. But it wasn't me, it was - " I hesitated, not knowing how to refer to it.

"Firebright," Sadassa said.

"What?" I said.

"That's how I refer to the plasmatic entity in me; I call it „firebright." That's a description, not a name; he's like a little egg of pale, cold fire. Glowing with life up here." She touched her forehead. "It's strange to have him inside me, alive and unnoticed. Hidden in me, as he's hidden in you. Others can't see him. He's safe." She added, "Relatively safe."

"If I am killed," I said, "will he die with me?"

"He's immortal." She gazed at me for a time. "So are you now, Nicholas. Once firebright bondecl to you, you became an immortal creature. As he goes on, you go on with him; when your body is destroyed and he leaves he will take you with him. They won't desert us. As you and I have housed and sheltered them, they will take us along, into eternity."

"A reward?" I asked.

"Yes. For what we've done, or tried to do. They value the effort, the attempt, as equal to the achievement. They judge by the heart. By intention. They know we can only do so much, that if we fail we fail. We can only try."

"You think we're going to fail too," I said. Sadassa said nothing. She sipped her drink.

At the end of the week the Soviet Union announced that there had been a mysterious explosion aboard the intercept satellite which they had launched to photograph the ETI satellite. The force of the blast had destroyed both satellites. Cause of the mighty explosion was unknown, but presumed to be in the Soviet satellite's fuel supply. Dr Moyashka had ordered a full inquiry-.

Only two pictures of the ETI satellite had been transmitted before it was destroyed; surprisingly, they showed it to be pitted and evidently partially damaged from metebr showers. The implication, Dr Moyashka said, was that the ETI satellite had crossed a great deal of interstellar space before reaching its position in orbit around Earth. The conclusion that it was a very old satellite, long in orbit, was rejected as unscientific and not in accord with Marxist-Leninist reasoning.

So much for that, I said to myself as I watched the news item on TV. They shot down God, or rather God's voice. Vox del, I said to myself. Gone now from the world.

There must be many happy parties going on in Moscow.

Well, I thought glumly, a great epoch in the history of man has reached its end. Nothing will instruct us, nothing exists in our sky to cheer us when we are down, to lift us up and keep us alive, to heal our wounds. In Washington and Moscow they are saying, "Man has finally come of age; he doesn't need paternalistic help." Which is another way of saying, "We have abolished that help, and in its place we will rule," offering no help at all: taking but not giving, ruling but not obeying, telling but not listening, taking life and not giving it. The slayers govern now, without interference; the dreams of mankind have become empty.

That night as Rachel, Johnny, and I, plus Pinky our cat, lay together on the big bed in our bedroom, a pale white light began to appear and fill the room.

Lying in my place on the bed I realized that no one could see the pale light but me; Pinky dozed, Rachel dozed, Johnny snored in his sleep. I alone, awake, saw the light grow, and I saw that it had no source, no location; it filled all spaces equally and made every object strikingly clear. What is this? I wondered, and a deep fear filled me. It was as if the presence of death had entered the room.

The light became so bright that I could make out every detail around me. The slumbering woman, the little boy, the dozing cat - they seemed etched or painted, unable to move, pitilessly revealed by the light. And in addition something looked down at us as we lay as if on a purely two-dimensional surface; something which traveled and made use of three dimensions studied us creatures limited to two. There was no place to hide; the light, the pitiless gaze, were everywhere.

We are being judged, I realized. The light has come on without warning to expose us, and now the judge examines each of us. What will his decision be? The sense of death, my own death, was profound; I felt as if I were inanimate, made of wood, a carved and painted toy... we were all carved toys to the judge who gazed down at us, and he could lift any - and all - of us off our painted surface whenever he wished.

I began to pray, silently. And then I prayed aloud. I prayed, strangely, in Latin - a Latin I did not know -phrases and whole sentences and always begging to be spared. That was what I wanted. That was what I asked for over and over again, in many languages now, in every language: for the judge to pass over me and let me go.

The pale, uniform light gradually faded out, and I thought to myself, it's because the satellite is gone. That's why. Death has flooded in to fill up the vacuum. Once life has been destroyed, that which remains is inert. I am seeing death return.

The next day Rachel noticed that Pinky seemed sick; he sat without moving, and once, as he sat, his head fell forward and struck the floor, as if from unbearable weariness. Seeing him, I understood that he was dying. Death had claimed him, not me.

I drove him to the Yorba Linda Veterinary Hospital, and the doctors there decided that he had a tumor. They operated while I drove back home. "We probably can save him," they told me as I left, seeing how disheartened I was, but I knew better. This was what had been ushered in, for all the world; the first victim was, of course, the smallest.

Half an hour after I got back to the apartment one of the veterinarians phoned. "It's cancer," she told me. There is no renal function, no urine production. We can sew him back together and he'll live a week, but - "

"He's under the anesthetic still?" I said.

"Yes, he's still open."

"Let him drift away," I said. Beside me, Rachel began to cry. My guide, I thought. Dead now. Like Charley. Look at the forces in the world that are now unchecked.

"He must have had these malignant tumors growing for some time," the vet was saying. "He's underweight and dehydrated, and -"

"He died last night," I said, and I thought, He was taken instead of me. Me or Johnny or Rachel. Maybe, I thought, he wanted it that way; he offered himself, knowing. "Thanks," I said. "I know you did what you could. I don't blame you."

The satellite had passed from our world and, with it, the healing rays, like those of an invisible sun, felt by creatures but unseen and unacknowledged. The sun with healing in its wings.

Better not to tell Sadassa, I decided. At least what

Pinky died of.

That night, while I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom, I abruptly felt a firm, strong hand placed on my shoulder from behind: the grip of a friend. Thinking it was Rachel, I turned. And saw no one.

He has lost his animal form, I realized. He never was a cat. Supernatural beings mask themselves as ordinary creatures, to pass among us, to lead and guide us.

That night I dreamed that a symphony orchestra was playing a Brahms symphony, and I was reading the album notes. The words came to an end and there was the name:

HERBERT

My old boss, I thought. Who's been dead these years from his heart condition. Who taught me what devotion to duty meant. A message to me from him.

After the name there appeared a musical stave strung in catgut, indented into the soft paper as if by five claws. Pinky's signature; after all, Pinky could not write. I thought, My dead boss, who taught me so much and who is dead, reborn as Pinky? To lead me once again, and then go away, as before? When he couldn't stay any longer ... a final note from him or them, whichever it was. From my friend. In any case, he guided me through many years; he helped form me; and then he died.

God be with him, I thought in my sleep, and I listened to the Brahms symphony, which was coming from a record booth at University Music - booth number three, behind which I had so often changed the toilet paper rolls in the bathroom, as part of my job, so many years ago. And yet he had been here just now, his firm hand gripping my shoulder with affection. In farewell.

At Progressive Records we had begun taping sessions on the new LP - the catalog item into which Aramchek's subliminal information would be fed, track by track. I had gotten permission from the company brass to give my material to the Playthings to cut; the Playthings were our hottest new group. The only part that worried me was the possible reprisals to them, once the authorities became aware of the subliminal material. It would be necessary to set up machinery in advance to exonerate them. Them, and everyone else at Progressive.

I therefore made extensive memos showing that the decision regarding their material lay entirely in my hands, that I had obtained and prepared the lyrics, that the recording group itself lacked any authority to remove or alter the lyrics - it took me almost two weeks of precious time to ensure their safety, but this was essential; both Sadassa and I agreed. The reprisals, when they began, would be great. I hated to involve the Playthings at all; they were an amiable group, with malice toward none; but someone had to cut the LP tracks, someone who was a hot property. By the time I had completed the documentation, including signed letters from the Playthings protesting vigorously against the lyrics as not being suited to them, I was reasonably sure of their ultimate survival.

One day as I sat in my office listening to some preliminary takes for the album - to be called Let's Play! - my intercom came to life.

"A young lady to see you, Mr Brady."

Assuming it was a performer asking about an audition, I told the secretary in the front office to send her in.

A girl with short black hair and green eyes entered, smiling at me. "Hi," she said.

"Hi," I said, shutting off the takes of Let's Play! To the girl I said, "What can I do for you?"

"I'm Vivian Kaplan," the girl said, seating herself. I now noted the FAP armband and recognized her; this was the FAPer my friend Phil had told me about, the one who had wanted him to write a political loyalty report on me. What was she doing here? On my desk, on the portable Ampex tape recorder, was the reel of takes from Let's Play! in plain sight of the girl. But fortunately off.

Seating herself, Vivian Kaplan arranged her skirt, then brought out a note pad and pen. "You have a girlfriend named Sadassa Aramchek," she said. There is also the subversive organization calling itself Aramchek. And the extraterrestrial slave satellite which the Soviets just blew up has sometimes been called the „Aramchek satellite."" She glanced at me, writing a few words with her pen. "Doesn't that seem to you an astonishing coincidence, Mr Brady?" I said nothing.

"Do you wish to make a voluntary statement?" Vivian Kaplan said.

"Am I under arrest?" I said.

"No, not at all. I tried without success to get a statement of political loyalty about you from your friends, but none of them cared enough about you to comply. In investigating you we came across this anomaly, the word „Aramchek" showing up repeatedly in relation to you - "

"The only one that's related to me," I broke in, "is Sadassa's maiden name."

"You have no relationship to the organization Aramchek or the satellite?"

"No," I said.

"How did you happen to meet Ms Aramchek?" I said, "I don't have to answer these questions."

"Oh, yes, you do." From her purse Vivian Kaplan got a black flatpack of identification; I gazed at it, seeing that she was a bona fide police agent. "You can talk to me here in your office or you can come downtown with me. Which do you prefer?"

"Can I call my attorney?"

"No." Vivian Kaplan shook her head. „This is not that kind of investigation - yet. You haven't been charged with any crime. Please tell me how you met Sadassa Aramchek."

"She came here looking for a job."

"Why did you hire her?"

"I felt sorry for her, because of her recent bout with cancer."

Vivian Kaplan wrote that down. "Did you know her actual name to be Aramchek? She goes under the name Silvia."

"The name she gave me was Mrs Silvia." That certainly was true.

"Would you have hired her if you knew her true name?"

"No," I said. "I don't think so; I'm not sure."

"Do you have a personal relationship with her as well as a business one?"

"No," I said. "I'm married and I have a child." ."You were seen together at Del Rey's Restaurant and at the La Paz Bar, both in Fullerton; once at Del Rey's and six times at the La Paz Bar, all recently."

"They serve the best margaritas in Orange County," I said.

"What do you two talk about when you go to the La Paz Bar?" Vivian Kaplan asked.

"Various things. Sadassa Silvia -"

"Aramchek."

"Sadassa is a devout Episcopalian. She's been trying to convert me into going to her church. She tells me all the church gossip, though, and that turns me off." This was true too.

"We taped your last conversation at the La Paz Bar," Vivian Kaplan said.

"Oh?" I said with fear, trying to remember what we had said.

Vivian Kaplan said, "What is this record you are going to be bringing out? There was a good deal of emphasis on it. A new LP by the Playthings."

That's going to be our new hit record," I said; I could feel the sweat standing out on my forehead, and my pulse racing. "Everybody at Progressive is talking about it."

"You supplied the lyrics for the record?"

"No," I said. "Just supplementary material, not the basic lyrics."

Vivian Kaplan wrote all this down.

"It's going to be one hell of a record," I said.

"Yes, it sounds as if it would be. You're going to press how many copies?"

"We hope to sell two million." I said. "The initial pressing will be only fifty thousand, however. To see how it goes over." Actually, I planned to get them to press three times that number.

"When can you make a copy available to us?"

"It isn't even mastered yet," I said.

"A tape, then?"

"Yeah, we could get a tape to you sooner." It came into my mind that I could give her a tape which lacked the subliminal material; we would simply not add that layer of sound-on-sound.

"It is our opinion," Vivian Kaplan said, "after examining the evidence, that you are having a sexual affair with Ms Aramchek."

"Well," I said, "you can stick it up your ass."

Vivian Kaplan gazed at me for a time; then she wrote a few words with her pen.

"It's my business entirely," I said.

"What does your wife say?"

"She says fine."

"She knows, then?"

I could think of no answer to that. I had walked into a verbal trap, but one which meant nothing; they were on the wrong track entirely. I thought, They have the wrong ball; let them run it to the wrong goal line. Fine.

"As far as we can tell," Vivian Kaplan said, "you have completely severed your ties with your leftist Berkeley past. Is that so, Mr Brady?"

"It is so," I said.

"Would you like to draw up a statement of political loyalty about Ms Aramchek for our files? Since you know her and can speak reliably with her?"

"No," I said.

"We have great confidence in you, Mr Brady, in terms of your patriotism."

"You should have," I said.

"Why would you turn this chance down to ratify your standing? This would virtually close your files."

"Nobody's file is ever closed," I said.

"Inactive, then."

"Sorry," I said. Ever since the displacement of my own will by the ETI helper I had found it difficult to lie. "I can't oblige you," I said. "What you want is evil and immoral; this is what is destroying the fabric of our society. Mutual spying by friend upon friend is the most insidious wickedness that Ferris Fremont has inflicted on a formerly free people. You can write that down, Miss Kaplan, and put it in my file; better yet, you can paste it on the outside of my file as my official statement to all of you."

Vivian Kaplan laughed. "You must feel you have a pretty good lawyer."

T feel I have a pretty good grasp of the situation," I said. "Now if you're through, get out of my office. I have tapes to listen to."

Rising, Vivian Kaplan said, "When will you have the tape for us?"

"A month."

"It will be the tape you'll use to transfer onto the master?"

"More or less." >

""More or less" is not good enough, Mr. Brady. We want the exact master tape."

"Sure," I said. "Whatever."

Lingering for a moment, Vivian Kaplan said, "We got a telephone tip from one of your sound engineers. He said there's some very funny stuff in some of the subtracks."

"Hmmm," I said.

"It made him suspicious."

"Which sound engineer is that?"

"We protect the anonymity of our informants."

"You certainly should," I said.

"Mr Brady," Vivian Kaplan said briskly, "I want to inform you at this time that you are terribly, terribly close to arrest, you and Ms Aramchek, in fact your entire record firm and anyone connected intimately with you, your families, and friends."

"Why?"

"We have reason to believe that there will be subversive sentiments expressed in the Let's Play! album, put there probably by you and Ms Aramchek and possibly others. We are giving you the benefit of the doubt, however; we will examine the record before its release and if we find nothing in it, you may release it on schedule and distribute as planned. But after analysis, if we find anything - "

"The curtain comes down," I said.

"Pardon?"

"The Iron Curtain," I said.

"What does that mean, Mr Brady?"

"Nothing," I said. "I'm just tired of all the suspiciousness, all the spying and accusing. All the arrests and murders."

"What murders, Mr Brady?"

"Mine," I said. "I'm thinking specifically of that."

She laughed. "You're highly neurotic, as your profile indicates. You worry too much. You know what is going to kill you, Mr Brady, if anything does? Screwing around with that Aramchek girl at your age. The last time you had a physical exam you showed elevated blood pressure; that was when you were admitted to the hospital in Downey following -"

"The elevated blood pressure," I said, "was because -" I broke off.

"Yes?"

"Nothing."

Vivian Kaplan waited for an interval, and then she said in a low, quiet voice, "You don't have the satellite to help you any more, Mr Brady. They got the satellite."

"I know," I said. "You mean the ETI one? Yes, the Russians blew that up; I saw that on TV."

"You're by yourself now."

"What do you mean?" I said.

"You understand what I mean."

"I don't," I managed to say; it was an effort to lie, a dreadful effort, an offense against myself. I could hardly do it. "I thought the official US position on that satellite was that it - what crap did I hear? „A discarded satellite of our own?" or something like that. Not from outer space; worthless. Our own obsolete signals coming back to us."

"That was before the Soviet Union photographed it."

"Oh," I said, nodding. "So now the line has changed."

"We know what that satellite was," Vivian Kaplan said.

"Then how could you destroy it? What kind of demented mind could give the signal to destroy it? I don't understand you. You don't understand me and I don't understand you. To me you are insane." I ceased; I had said too much.

"You want an alien entity ruling your mind? Telling you what to do? You want to be a slave to -"

"What the hell do you think you are, Ms Kaplan?" I said. That's what FAP is, a bunch of robots receiving their orders blindly and going out blindly to coerce everyone else who isn't already in the net into becoming a robot like them, all following the will of the leader. And what a leader!"

"Goodbye, Mr Brady," Vivian Kaplan said, and my office door shut after her; she had gone.

I just put my head in the noose, I said to myself. Like Phil did with her; she seems to have an ability to get you to do it one way or another. Phil did it one way, I did it another. I hope they pay her a good salary, I said to myself. She deserves it. She could entrap anybody.

They have enough on me now, I realized, to execute a warrant any time they want. But they have always had enough. It makes no difference. They taped our conversation at the La Paz Bar; they have all they need. And due process, the constitutional guarantees, are no longer observed anyhow; the national security issue is always invoked in matters like this. So the hell with it. I'm glad I said it. I lost nothing I hadn't already lost.

There isn't much, I said to myself, that has not been lost. Now that the satellite is gone.

Within my mind, firebright stirred; I felt his presence. He was still alive, still there within me. Tucked away out of harm's way: safe.

I was not completely alone. Vivian was wrong.

I met Sadassa in the middle of an orange grove in Placentia; we walked together, holding hands, speaking in low voices. Perhaps they were picking up what we said, perhaps not. In any case we had to confer. I had to keep her informed.

First there was something I wanted to ask her about.

"The satellite is gone," I said as we walked, "but every now and then I still see something, superimposed and in color, as if it's a further satellite transmission to me." Everything I had ever been shown before had been comprehensible, at least with sufficient analysis; this, however, I could not fathom. "It has to do with - " I broke off; I. had been about to mention Pinky.

What I was seeing now was a door, proportioned by the measure which the Greeks had called the Golden Rectangle, which they had considered the perfect geometric form. I repeatedly saw this door, marked with letters of the Greek alphabet, projected onto natural formations that resembled it: a dictionary stand, a basalt block, a speaker cabinet. And one time, astonishingly, I had seen Pinky pressing outward from beyond the door into our world, only not as he had been: much larger, more fierce, like a tiger, and, most of all, filled to bursting with life and health.

I now told Sadassa about my witnessing the outline of the door, and she listened silently, nodding. At the end I told her what I glimpsed beyond the door: a static landscape, nocturnal, a quiet black sea, sky, the edge of an island, and, surprisingly, the unmoving figure of a nude woman standing on the sand at the edge of the water. I had recognized the woman; it was Aphrodite. I had seen photographs of Greek and Roman statues of her. The proportions, the beauty and sensuality, could not be mistaken.

"You are seeing," Sadassa said somberly, "the last receding image of love, moving away from you now that the satellite is gone. A kind of afterimage."

"My dead cat," I said, "is over there."

"It is the far shore," Sadassa said. "The other land, which we are now cut off from. You'll see it a few days longer and then it will be gone, and that will be the last; you won't see anything again." She laughed, but not happily. "It's like when you shut off your TV set; the picture dwindles before it fades out entirely. A residual charge."

"It's very beautiful," I said. "Perfect balance." I remembered, then, the original abstract graphics, the phosphene activity that had initiated the satellite's overwhelming of my human mind with its superior view. "I keep thinking there ought to be a way to cross over there."

"There is a way."

"What way?" I said, and then I remembered Pinky. "Oh," I said. "I see what you mean."

"Aphrodite was the goddess of the generation of life," Sadassa said, "as well as love. I see it too, Nicholas; I see the door through which we can't go. I see the static landscape we can't reach. There, the source of life exists; it once orbited our sky. This is a residual message already placed in us by the satellite, before its destruction, a goodbye to each of us. To remember - to keep with us. A goodbye and a promise."

I said, "I have never seen anything so beautiful."

Changing the subject, Sadassa said, "What are you going to do about Vivian Kaplan? That's the immediate problem."

"We'll give them a tape," I said, "lacking the subliminal material. That'll satisfy them for a while. Then we'll begin to press the records. I'll have a few records made from a master lacking the subliminal material and turn one over to them. I'll keep more of the clean pressings around my office, so if they break in and steal them, what they get will confirm their tape. Finally we'll take the plunge and start shipping the discs with the subliminal material on them. And then sit back and wait for the police. They'll go from one radio station to the next, and one record store to the next, confiscating the records, but maybe some will survive and some will get played before that happens. And of course when they pick us up, us and our families, they will kill us. There is no doubt of that."

"Yes," Sadassa said.

"What I feel bad about," I said, "is that I know we are in the trap already. They are aware of what we're doing; they know about the record. At least they know there is this record and we are probably planning some political act in -connection with it. They want to see the record mastered; they want to see it produced, so they can play it and determine its content. We're doing what they want us to do. Well, maybe not; maybe they're not sure -they're guessing and wondering, playing hunches. The police are so full of lies. Maybe there was no sound engineer who phoned in a tip. Maybe they didn't pick up our conversation at the La Paz Bar. All they may know is that Let's Play! is our hottest new album, that we've got a lot of time and effort invested in it, so the naturally suspicious police mind is alerted to come down hard on us, ask for a tape, ask for a copy before distribution, rather than monitoring it the usual way."

"I say they're lying," Sadassa said. "Bluffing. That is certainly a possibility. We should go on."

"If we stop now," I said, "they won't kill us."

"Let's go on," Sadassa said.

"Knowing we have no chance of escape?"

She nodded silently.

"I'm just thinking of Johnny," I said. "Valis had me anoint him and everything... even give him a secret name. I guess that name will perish with him, one of these days soon."

"If Valis had you do that, your boy will live on."

"Are you sure?" I said.

"Yes," she said.

"I hope you're right."

"Valis may not be here now," Sadassa said, "but within each of us -"

"I know," I said. "I felt him stir the other day. The new life within me. The second birth ... the birth from above."

"That is eternal. What more could we hope for? Bonded to that. If your body or my body is destroyed, firebright escapes into the atmosphere and our own spark goes with him. There we will gather, ultimately, as one entity, always together. Until Valis returns. All of us: you, me, the rest. However many."

"Okay," I said. "Sounds good to me."

"Let me ask you," Sadassa said. "Of all that the satellite showed you, what was the ... I don't know how to say it."

The final view of things?"

"Yes. The deepest. Penetrating farthest. Because when it overpowers you it shows you so much about the universe." I said, Tor a little while I saw the universe as a living body."

"Yes," she said, nodding somberly. "And we are in it. The experience was so strange - it's hard to express it. Like a hive of bees, millions of bees, all communicating over vast distances by means of colored light. Patterns of light, exchanged back and forth, and us deep inside. Continual signaling and response from the -well, bees or whatever they were; maybe they were stars or star systems of sentient organisms. Anyhow, this signaling went on all the time, in shifting patterns, and I heard a humming or a bell-like sound, emitted by all the bees in unison."

"The universe is a great group mind," Sadassa said. "I saw that too. The ultimate vision imposed on us, as to how things are in comparison to how they simply appear." I said, "And all the bees, as they signal across great distances to one another, are in the process of thinking. So the total organism thinks by means of this. And throughout it exerts pressure, also across great distances, to coordinate every part, so it's synchronized into a common purpose."

"It is alive," Sadassa said. "Yes,"I said."It is alive."

"The bees," Sadassa said, "were described to me as stations. Like transmitting and receiving on a grid. Each lit up as it transmitted. I guess the colors were prearranged different frequencies of the light spectrum. A great universe of transmitting and receiving stations, but, Nicholas, sometimes many of them, differing at different moments, were dark. They were temporarily inactive. But I kept watching lit-up stations receiving transmissions from distances so far off that - I guess we use the word parsecs for distances like that."

"It was beautiful," I said. "The pattern of shifting lights formed by the active stations."

Sadassa said, "But into it, Nicholas, had crept something which snuffed out some of the stations. Abolished them so they never lit up again. And replaced them with itself, like a cloak falling over them here and there."

"But new stations were opened up to replace them," I said. "In unexpected spots."

This planet does not receive or transmit," Sadassa said, after a moment. "Except for the few of us - a few thousand out of three billion - governed by the satellite. And now we're not. So we've gone dark."

"Until the replacement satellite arrives."

Sadassa said, "Did we see a kind of brain?"

"More like a jungle gym that kids play on," I said, "with colored buttons stuck all over." Her analogy was too heavy for me: the universe as a giant brain, thinking.

This is a very great thing we were shown," Sadassa said. To see from that vantage point, the ultimate vantage point. We should always treasure it. Even if the stations in this local region or sector are all overshadowed and don't light up any longer, it is a sight to remember. With this the satellite presented us with its final insight into the nature of things: synapses in a living brain. And the name we give to its functioning, its awareness of itself and its many parts - " She smiled at me. "It's why you saw the figure of Aphrodite. That's what holds all the trillions of stations into harmony."

"Yes," I said, "it was harmonized, and over such distances. There was no coercion, only agreement."

And the coordination of all the transmitting and receiving stations, I thought, we call Valis: Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Our friend who cannot die, who lies on this side of the grave and on the other. His love, I thought, is greater than empires. And unending.

Sadassa cleared her throat. "When do you expect to have a tape?"

"At the end of the month."

"And the master discs?"

"First the mother and then the masters. It won't take long, once we have the tape. I have nothing to do with that. My part will be over when the tape is prepared and authorized."

Sadassa said somberly, "Be prepared for them to show up and seize a stamper at any time. Right in the middle of production."

"Right," I said. "We'll have some clean stampers and some with the subliminal material - maybe they'll get a clean one. Maybe luck will be with us."

"It will all depend," Sadassa said, "on which they seize, one with material or one without it."

She was right. And over that we had no control. Nor did they.

"By the way," Sadassa said, "I want you to, wish me luck; I have an appointment the last day of the month to see my doctor. To find out if I'm still in remission."

"I wish you all the luck in the world," I said.

"Thank you. I'm sort of worried. I'm still losing weight ... I just can't seem to eat. I'm down to ninety-two pounds. And now that the satellite no longer exists - " She smiled wanly at me.

I put my arm around her, hugged her against me; she was light and frail, like a mere bird. I kissed her, then, for the first time. At this she laughed a tiny, low laugh deep in her throat, almost a chuckle, and pressed against me.

"They will arrest your friend Phil," Sadassa said. „The one who writes the science fiction."

"I know," I said.

"Is it worth it? To abolish his career along with yours?" And, I thought, his life ...