"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."