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

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

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

"Um," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

They-"Nicholas continued.

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

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

"Anywhere it wants."

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

"What'd they look like?"

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

To protect itself," I finished.

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

"Oh, good God," I said aloud.

"Yep," Nicholas said, stoically.

"Did they speak?"

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

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

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

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

Their craniums were enlarged," Nicholas said.

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

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

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

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

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

She said nothing; she turned a page.

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

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

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

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

Silence. The three of us stood there, unmoving.

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

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

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

"The doctor said nothing at all is -"

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

"Tonight?" Rachel said, appalled.

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

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

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

"Friends," Nicholas said.

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

"And your baby's."

"Nothing wrong can happen," Nicholas said.

I said, "But such powers!"

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

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

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