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

"I have no theory about that."

"Can't they tell you?"

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

"If they exist, somebody else would have-"

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

"Ferris F. Fremont?"

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

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

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

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

"This is real," Nicholas said quietly.

"Pardon?" I said.

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

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

"Why can't you tell that?"

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

"You seem more mature," I said.

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

"You have real responsibilities now."

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

"Your job -"

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

"Even when the disinhibiting stimulus is encountered?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Have you told them about Valis?"

"No."

"Have you talked to a psychiatrist?"

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

"Maybe that's it."

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

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

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

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

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

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