“I’ll hypnotize you,” Heather said suddenly.

To have accepted an incredible fact as true gave her a rather heady feeling: if Orr’s dreams worked, what else mightn’t work? Also she had eaten nothing since noon, and the coffee and brandy were hitting hard.

He stared some more.

“I’ve done it. Took psych courses in college, in pre-law. We all worked out both as hypnotizers and subjects, in one course. I was a fair subject, but real good at putting the others under. I’ll put you under, and suggest a dream to you. About Dr. Haber—making him harmless. I’ll tell you just to dream that, nothing more. See? Wouldn’t that be safe—as safe as anything we could try, at this point?”

“But I’m hypnosis-resistant. I didn’t use to be, but he says I am now.”

“Is that why he uses vagus-carotid induction? I hate to watch that, it looks like a murder. I couldn’t do that, I’m not a doctor, anyway.”

“My dentist used to just use a Hypnotape. It worked fine. At least I think it did.” He was absolutely talking in his sleep and might have maundered on indefinitely.

She said gently, “It sounds like you’re resisting the hypnotist, not the hypnosis.... We could try it, anyhow. And if it worked, I could give you posthypnotic suggestion to dream one small what d’you call it, effective, dream about Haber. So he’ll come clean with you, and try to help you. Do you think that might work? Would you trust it?”

“I could get some sleep, anyway,” he said. “I ... will have to sleep sometime. I don’t think I can go through tonight. If you think you could do the hypnosis...”

“I think I can. But listen, have you got anything to eat here?”

“Yes,” he said drowsily. After some while he came to. “Oh yes. I’m sorry. You didn’t eat. Getting here. There’s a loaf of bread....” He rooted in the cupboard, brought out bread, margarine, five hard-boiled eggs, a can of tuna, and some shopworn lettuce. She found two tin pie plates, three various forks, and a paring knife. “Have you eaten?” she demanded. He was not sure. They made a meal together, she sitting in the chair at the table, he standing. Standing up seemed to revive him, and he proved a hungry eater. They had to divide everything in half, even the fifth egg.

“You are a very kind person,” he said.

“Me? Why? Coming here, you mean? Oh shit, I was scared. By that world-changing bit on Friday! I had to get it straight Look, I was looking right at the hospital I was born in, across the river, when you were dreaming, and then all of a sudden it wasn’t there and never had been!”

“I thought you were from the East,” he said. Relevance was not his strong point at the moment.

“No.” She cleaned out the tuna can scrupulously and licked the knife. “Portland. Twice, now. Two different hospitals. Christ! But born and bred. So were my parents. My father was black and my mother was white. It’s kind of interesting. He was a real militant Black Power type, back in the seventies, you know, and she was a hippie. He was from a welfare family in Albina, no father, and she was a corporation lawyer’s daughter from Portland Heights. And a dropout, and went on drugs, and all that stuff they used to do then. And they met at some political rally, demonstrating. That was when demonstrations were still legal. And they got married. But he couldn’t stick it very long, I mean the whole situation, not just the marriage. When I was eight he went off to Africa. To Ghana, I think. He thought his people came originally from there, but he didn’t really know. They’d been in Louisiana since anybody knew, and Lelache would be the slaveowner’s name, it’s French. It means The Coward. I took French in high school because I had a French name.” She snickered. “Anyway, he just went. And poor Eva sort of fell apart. That’s my mother. She never wanted me to call her Mother or Mom or anything, that was middle-class nucleus family possessiveness. So I called her Eva. And we lived in a sort of commune thing for a while up on Mount Hood, oh Christ! Was it cold in winter! But the police broke it up, they said it was an anti-American conspiracy. And after that she sort of scrounged a living, she made nice pottery when she could get the use of somebody’s wheel and kiln, but mostly she helped out in little stores and restaurants, and stuff. Those people helped each other a lot. A real lot But she never could keep off the hard drugs, she was hooked. She’d be off for a year and then bingo. She got through the Plague, but when she was thirty-eight she got a dirty needle, and it killed her. And damn if her family didn’t show up and take me over. I’d never even seen them! And they put me through college and law school. And I go up there for Christmas Eve dinner every year. I’m their token Negro. But I’ll tell you, what really gets me is, I can’t decide which color I am. I mean, my father was a black, a real black—oh, he had some white blood, but he was a black —and my mother was a white, and I’m neither one. See, my father really hated my mother because she was white. But he also loved her. But I think she loved his being black much more than she loved him. Well, where does that leave me? I never have figured out.”

“Brown,” he said gently, standing behind her chair.

“Shit color.”

“The color of the earth.”

“Are you a Portlander? Equal time.”

“Yes.”

“I can’t hear you over that damn creek. I thought the wilderness was supposed to be silent. Go on!”

“But I’ve had so many childhoods, now,” he said. “Which one should I tell you about? In one both my parents died in the first year of the Plague. In one there wasn’t any Plague. I don’t know.... None of them were very interesting. I mean, nothing to tell. All I ever did was survive.”

“Well. That’s the main thing.”

“It gets harder all the time. The Plague, and now the Aliens...” He gave a feckless laugh, but when she looked around at him his face was weary and miserable.

“I can’t believe you dreamed them up. I just can’t. I’ve been scared of them for so long, six years! But I knew you did, as soon as I thought about it, because they weren’t in that other—time-track or whatever it is. But actually, they aren’t any worse than that awful overcrowding. That horrible little flat I lived in, with four other women, in a Business Girls Condominium, for Christsake! And riding that ghastly subway, and my teeth were terrible, and there never was anything decent to eat, and not half enough either. Do you know, I weighed 101 then, and I’m 122 now. I gained twenty-one pounds since Friday!”

“That’s right. You were awfully thin, that first time I saw you. In your law office.”

“You were, too. You looked scrawny. Only everybody else did, so I didn’t notice it. Now you look like you’d be a fairly solid type, if you ever got any sleep.”

He said nothing.

“Everybody else looks a lot better, too, when you come to think of it. Look. If you can’t help what you do, and what you do makes things a little better, then you shouldn’t feel any guilt about it. Maybe your dreams are just a new way for evolution to act, sort of. A hot line. Survival of the fittest and all. With crash priority.”

“Oh, worse than that,” he said in the same airy, foolish tone; he sat down on the bed. “Do you—” He stuttered several times. “Do you remember anything about April, four years ago—in ‘98?”

“April? No, nothing special.”

“That’s when the world ended,” Orr said. A muscular spasm disfigured his face, and he gulped as if for air. “Nobody else remembers,” he said.

“What do you mean?” she asked, obscurely frightened. April, April 1998, she thought, do I remember April ‘98? She thought she did not, and knew she must; and she was frightened—by him? With him? For him?

“It isn’t evolution. It’s just self-preservation. I can’t— Well, it was a lot worse. Worse than you remember. It was the same world as that first one you remember, with a population of seven billion, only it—it was worse. Nobody but some of the European countries got rationing and pollution control and birth control going early enough, in the seventies, and so when we finally did try to control food distribution it was too late, there wasn’t enough, and the Mafia ran the black market, everybody had to buy on the black market to get anything to eat, and a lot of people didn’t get anything. They rewrote the Constitution in 1984, the way you remember, but things were so bad by then that it was a lot worse, it didn’t even pretend to be a democracy any more, it was a sort of police state, but it didn’t work, it fell apart right away. When I was fifteen the schools closed. There wasn’t any Plague, but there were epidemics, one after another, dysentery and hepatitis and then bubonic. But mostly people starved. And then in ‘93 the war started up in the Near East, but it was different. It was Israel against the Arabs and Egypt. All the big countries got in on it. One of the African states came in on the Arab side, and used nuclear bombs on two cities in Israel, and so we helped them retaliate, and....” He was silent for some while and then went on, apparently not realizing that there was any gap in his telling, “I was trying to get out of the city. I wanted to get into Forest Park. I was sick, I couldn’t go on walking and I sat down on the steps of this house up in the west hills, the houses were all burnt out but the steps were cement, I remember there were some dandelions flowering in a crack between the steps. I sat there and I couldn’t get up again and I knew I couldn’t. I kept thinking that I was standing up and going on, getting out of the city, but it was just delirium, I’d come to and see the dandelions again and know I was dying. And that everything else was dying. And then I had the—I had this dream.” His voice had hoarsened; now it choked off.