“Oh, yes, I see,” he said vaguely. Dr. Haber had got his directorship the day after Orr had got his cabin. The cabin dream had been during the one all-night session they had had; they never tried another. Hypnotic suggestion of dream content was insufficient to a night’s dreaming, and at 3 A.M. Haber had at last given up and, hooking Orr to the Augmentor, had fed him deep-sleep patterns the rest of the night, so that they could both relax. But the next afternoon they had had a session, and the dream Orr had dreamed during it had been so long, so confused and complicated, that he had never been altogether sure of what he had changed, what good works Haber had been accomplishing that time. He had gone to sleep in the old office and had wakened in the O.O.I, office: Haber had got himself a promotion. But there had been more to it than that—the weather was a little less rainy, it seemed, since that dream; perhaps other things had changed. He was not sure. He had protested against doing so much effective dreaming in so short a time. Haber had at once agreed not to push him so fast, and had let him go without a session for five days. Haber was, after all, a benevolent man. And besides, he didn’t want to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.

The goose. Precisely. That describes me perfectly, Orr thought. A damned white vapid stupid goose. He had lost a bit of what Miss Lelache was saying. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I missed something. I’m kind of thick-headed just now, I think.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, fine. Just sort of tired.”

“You had an upsetting dream, about the Plague, didn’t you. You looked awful after it. Do these sessions leave you this way every time?”

“No, not always. This was a bad one. I guess you could see that. Were you arranging for us to meet?”

“Yes. Monday for lunch, I said. You work downtown, don’t you, at Bradford Industries?”

To his mild wonder he realized that he did. The great water projects of Bonneville-Umatilla did not exist, to bring water to the giant cities of John Day and French Glen, which did not exist. There were no big cities in Oregon, except Portland. He was not a draftsman for the District, but for a private tools firm downtown; he worked in the Stark Street office. Of course. “Yes,” he said. “I’m off from one to two. We could meet at Dave’s, on Ankeny.”

“One to two is fine. So’s Dave’s. I’ll see you there Monday.”

“Wait,” he said. “Listen. Will you—would you mind telling me what Dr. Haber said, I mean, what he told me to dream when I was hypnotized? You heard all that, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but I couldn’t do that, I’d be interfering in his treatment. If he wanted you to know he’d tell you. It would be unethical, I can’t.”

“I guess that’s right.”

“Yes. I’m sorry. Monday, then?”

“Goodby,” he said, suddenly overwhelmed with depression and foreboding, and put the receiver back without hearing her say goodby. She couldn’t help him. She was courageous and strong, but not that strong. Perhaps she had seen or sensed the change, but she had put it away from her, refused it. Why not? It was a heavy load to bear, that double memory, and she had no reason to undertake it, no motive for believing even for a moment a driveling psycho who claimed that his dreams came true.

Tomorrow was Saturday. A long session with Haber, four o’clock until six or longer. No way out.

It was time to eat, but Orr wasn’t hungry. He had not turned on the lights in his high, twilit bedroom, or in the living room which he had never got around to furnishing in the three years he’d lived here. He wandered in there now. The windows looked out on lights and the river, the air smelled of dust and early spring. There was a woodframe fireplace, an old upright piano with eight ivories missing, a pile of carpeting mill ends by the hearth, and a decrepit Japanese bamboo table ten inches high. Darkness lay softly on the bare pine floor, unpolished, unswept.

George Orr lay down in that mild darkness, full length, face down, the small of the dusty wooden floor in his nostrils, the hardness of it upholding his body. He lay still, not asleep; somewhere else than sleep, farther on, father out, a place where there are no dreams. It was not the first time he had been there.

When he got up, it was to take a chlorpromazine tablet and go to bed. Haber had tried him with phenothiazines this week; they seemed to work well, to let him enter the d-state at need but to weaken the intensity of the dreams so that they never rose to the effective level. That was fine, but Haber said that the effect would lessen, just as with all the other drugs, until there was no effect at all. Nothing will keep a man from dreaming, he had said, but death.

This night, at least, he slept deep, and if he dreamed the dreams were fleeting, without weight. He didn’t wake until nearly noon on Saturday. He went to his refrigerator and look in it; he stood contemplating it a while. There was more food in it than he had ever seen in a private refrigerator in his life. In his other life. The one lived among seven billion others, where the food, such as it was, was never enough. Where an egg was the luxury of the month —”Today we ovulate!” his halfwife had used to say when she bought their egg ration.... Curious, in this life they hadn’t had a trial marriage, he and Donna. There was no such thing, legally speaking, in the post-Plague years. There was full marriage only. In Utah, since the birth rate was still lower than the death rate, they were even trying to reinstitute polygamous marriage, for religious and patriotic reasons. But he and Donna hadn’t had any kind of marriage this time, they had just lived together. But still it hadn’t lasted. His attention returned to the food in the refrigerator.

He was not the thin, sharp-boned man he had been in the world of the seven billion; he was quite solid, in fact. But he ate a starving man’s meal, an enormous meal— hard-boiled eggs, buttered toast, anchovies, jerky, celery, cheese, walnuts, a piece of cold halibut spread with mayonnaise, lettuce, pickled beets, chocolate cookies—anything he found on his shelves. After this orgy he felt physically a great deal better. He thought of something, as he drank some genuine nonersatz coffee, that actually made him grin. He thought: In that life, yesterday, I dreamed an effective dream, which obliterated six billion lives and changed the entire history of humankind for the past quarter century. But in this life, which I then created, I did not dream an effective dream. I was in Haber’s office, all right, and I dreamed; but it didn’t change anything. It’s been this way all along, and I merely had a bad dream about the Plague Years. There’s nothing wrong with me; I don’t need therapy.

He had never looked at it this way before, and it amused him enough that he grinned, but not particularly happily.

He knew he would dream again.

It was already past two. He washed up, found his raincoat (real cotton, a luxury in the other life), and set off on foot to the Institute, a couple of miles’ walk, up past the Medical School and then farther up, into Washington Park. He could have got there by the trolleys, of course, but they were sporadic and roundabout, and anyhow there was no rush. It was pleasant, passing through the warm March rain, the unbustling streets; the trees were leafing out, the chestnuts ready to light their candles.

The Crash, the carcinomic plague which had reduced human population by five billion in five years, and another billion in the next ten, had shaken the civilizations of the world to their roots and yet left them, in the end, intact. If had not changed anything radically: only quantitatively.

The air was still profoundly and irremediably polluted: that pollution predated the Crash by decades, indeed was its direct cause. It didn’t harm anybody much now, except the newborn. The Plague, in its leukemoid variety, still selectively, thoughtfully as it were, picked off one out of four babies born and killed it within six months. Those who survived were virtually cancer-resistant. But there are other griefs.