No factories spewed smoke, down by the river. No cars ran fouling the air with exhaust; what few there were, were steamers or battery-powered.

There were no songbirds any more, either.

The effects of the Plague were visible in everything, it was itself still endemic, and yet it hadn’t prevented war from breaking out. In fact the fighting in the Near East was more savage than it had been in the more crowded world. The U.S. was heavily committed to the Israeli-Egyptian side in weapons, munitions, planes, and “military advisers” by the regiment. China was in equally deep on the Iraq-Iran side, though she hadn’t yet sent in Chinese soldiers, only Tibetans, North Koreans, Vietnamese, and Mongolians. Russia and India were holding uneasily aloof; but now that Afghanistan and Brazil were going in with the Iranians, Pakistan might jump in on the Isragypt side. India would then panic and line up with China, which might scare the USSR enough to push her in on the U.S. side. This gave a line-up of twelve Nuclear Powers in all, six to a side. So went the speculations. Meanwhile Jerusalem was rubble, and in Saudi Arabia and Iraq the civilian population was living in burrows in the ground while tanks and planes sprayed fire in the air and cholera in the water, and babies crawled out of the burrows blinded by napalm.

They were still massacring whites in Johannesburg, Orr noticed on a headline at a corner newspaper stand. Years now since the Uprising, and there were still whites to massacre in South Africa! People are tough....

The rain fell warm, polluted, gentle on his bare head as he climbed the gray hills of Portland.

In the office with the great corner window that looked out into the rain, he said, “Please, stop using my dreams to improve things, Dr. Haber. It won’t work. It’s wrong. I want to be cured.”

“That’s the one essential prerequisite to your cure, George! Wanting it.”

“You’re not answering me.”

But the big man was like an onion, slip off layer after layer of personality, belief, response, infinite layers, no end to them, no center to him. Nowhere that he ever stopped, had to stop, had to say Here I stay! No being, only layers.

“You’re using my effective dreams to change the world. You won’t admit to me that you’re doing it. Why not?”

“George, you must realize that you ask questions which from your point of view may seem reasonable, but which from my point of view are literally unanswerable. We don’t see reality the same way.”

“Near enough the same to be able to talk.”

“Yes. Fortunately. But not always to be able to ask and answer. Not yet.”

“I can answer your questions, and I do.... But anyway: look. You can’t go on changing things, trying to run things.”

“You speak as if that were some kind of general moral imperative.” He looked at Orr with his genial, reflective smile, stroking his beard. “But in fact, isn’t that man’s very purpose on earth—to do things, change things, run things, make a better world?”

“No!”

“What is his purpose, then?”

“I don’t know. Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.”

There was a slight pause, and when Haber answered his tone was no longer genial, reassuring, or encouraging. It was quite neutral and verged, just detectably, on contempt.

“You’re of a peculiarly passive outlook for a man brought up in the Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist West. A sort of natural Buddhist. Have you ever studied the Eastern mysticisms, George?” The last question, with its obvious answer, was an open sneer.

“No. I don’t know anything about them. I do know that it’s wrong to force the pattern of things. It won’t do. It’s been our mistake for a hundred years. Don’t you—don’t you see what happened yesterday?”

The opaque, dark eyes met his, straight on.

“What happened yesterday, George?”

No way. No way out.

Haber was using sodium pentothal on him now, to lower his resistance to hypnotic procedures. He submitted to the shot, watching the needle slip with only a moment of pain into the vein of his arm. This was the way he had to go; he had no choice. He had never had any choice. He was only a dreamer.

Haber went off somewhere to run something while the drug took effect; but he was back promptly in fifteen minutes, gusty, jovial, and indifferent. “All right! Let’s get on with it, George!”

Orr knew, with dreary clarity, what he would get on with today: the war. The papers were full of it, even Orr’s news-resistant mind had been full of it, coming here. The growing war in the Near East. Haber would end it. And no doubt the killings in Africa. For Haber was a benevolent man. He wanted to make the world better for humanity.

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means. Orr lay back on the couch and shut his eyes. The hand touched his throat, “You will enter the hypnotic state now, George,” said Haber’s deep voice. “You are... ”

...dark.

In the dark.

Not quite night yet: late twilight on the fields. Clumps of trees looked black and moist. The road he was walking on picked up the faint, last light from the sky; it ran long and straight, an old country highway, cracked blacktop. A goose was walking ahead of him, about fifteen feet in advance and visible only as a white, bobbing blur. Now and then it hissed a little.

The stars were coming out, white as daisies. A big one was blooming just to the right of the road, low over the dark country, tremulously white. When he looked up at it again it had already become larger and brighter. It’s enhuging, he thought. It seemed to grow reddish as it brightened. It enreddenhuged. The eyes swam. Small blue-green streaks zipped about it zigzagging Brownian round-ianroundian. A vast and creamy halo pulsated about big star and tiny zips, fainter, clearer, pulsing. Oh no no no! he said as the big star brightened hugendly BURST blinding. He fell to the ground, covering his head with his arms as the sky burst into streaks of bright death, but could not turn onto his face, must behold and witness. The ground swung up and down, great trembling wrinkles passing through the skin of Earth. “Let be, let be!” he screamed aloud with his face against the sky, and woke on the leather couch.

He sat up, and put his face in his sweaty, shaking hands.

Presently he felt Haber’s hand heavy on his shoulder. “Bad time again? Damn, I thought I’d let you off easy. Told you to have a dream about peace.”

“I did.”

“But it was disturbing to you?”

“I was watching a battle in space.”

“Watching it? From where?”

“Earth.” He recounted the dream briefly, omitting the goose. “I don’t know whether they got one of ours or we got one of theirs.”

Haber laughed. “I wish we could see what goes on out there! We’d feel more involved. But of course those encounters take place at speeds and distances that human vision simply isn’t equipped to keep up with. Your version’s a lot more picturesque than the actuality, no doubt. Sounds like a good science-fiction movie from the seventies. Used to go to those when I was a kid.... But why do you think you dreamed up a battle scene when the suggestion was peace?”

“Just peace? Dream about peace—that’s all you said?”

Haber did not answer at once. He occupied himself with the controls of the Augmentor.

“O.K.,” he said at last. “This once, experimentally, let’s let you compare the suggestion with the dream. Perhaps we’ll find out why it came out negative. I said—no, let’s run the tape.” He went over to a panel in the wall.

“You tape the whole session?”