“Trying to get back to town. There was some kind of bombing pattern we ran into, they blew up the road just ahead of the car. Car bounced around a lot. Turned over, I guess. Heather was behind me, and stopped in time, so her car was all right and we came on in it. But we had to cut over to the Sunset Highway because 99 was all blown up, and then we had to leave the car at a roadblock out near the bird sanctuary. So we walked in through the Park.”

“Where the hell were you coming from?” Haber had run hot water in his private washroom sink, and now gave Orr a steaming towel to hold to his bloody face.

“Cabin. In the Coast Range.”

“What’s wrong with your leg?”

“Bruised it when the car turned over, I guess. Listen, are they in the city yet?”

“If the military knows, it’s not telling. All they’ll say is that when the big ships landed this morning they split into small mobile units, something like helicopters, and scattered. They’re all over the western half of the state. They’re reported to be slow-moving, but if they’re shooting them down, they don’t report it.”

“We saw one,” Orr’s face emerged from the towel, marked with purple bruises, but less shocking now the blood and mud were off. “That’s what it must have been. Little silvery thing, about thirty feet up, over a pasture near North Plains. It seemed to sort of hop along. Didn’t look earthly. Are the Aliens fighting us, are they shooting planes down?”

“The radio doesn’t say. No losses are reported, except civilians. Now come on, let’s get some coffee and food into you. And then, by God, we’ll have a therapy session in the middle of Hell, and put an end to this idiotic mess you’ve made.” He had prepared a shot of sodium pentothal, and now took Orr’s arm and gave him the shot without warning or apology.

“That’s why I came here. But I don’t know if—”

“If you can do it? You can. Come on!” Orr was hovering over the woman again. “She’s all right. She’s asleep, don’t bother her, it’s what she needs. Come on!” He took Orr down to the food machines, and got him a roast beef sandwich, an egg and tomato sandwich, two apples, four chocolate bars, and two cups of coffee with. They sat down at a table in Sleep Lab One, sweeping aside a Patience layout that had been abandoned at dawn when the sirens began to howl. “O.K. Eat. Now, in case you think that clearing up this mess is beyond you, forget it. I’ve been working on the Augmentor, and it can do it for you. I’ve got the model, the template, of your brain emissions during effective dreaming. Where I went wrong all month was in looking for an entity, an Omega Wave. There isn’t one. It’s simply a pattern formed by the combination of other waves, and over this last couple of days, before all hell broke loose, I finally worked it out. The cycle is ninety-seven seconds. That means nothing to you, even though it’s your goddamn brain doing it. Put it this way, when you’re dreaming effectively your entire brain is involved in a complexly synchronized pattern of emissions that takes ninety-seven seconds to complete itself and start again, a kind of counterpoint effect that is to ordinary d-state graphs what Beethoven’s Great Fugue is to Mary Had a Little Lamb. It is incredibly complex, yet it’s consistent and it recurs. Therefore I can feed it to you straight, and amplified. The Augmentor’s all set up, it’s ready for you, it’s really going to fit the inside of your head at last! When you dream this time, you’ll dream big, baby. Big enough to stop this crazy invasion, and get us clean over into another continuum, where we can start fresh. That’s what you do, you know. You don’t change things, or lives, you shift the whole continuum.”

“It’s nice to be able to talk about it with you,” Orr said, or something like it; he had eaten the sandwiches incredibly fast, despite his cut mouth and broken tooth, and was now engulfing a chocolate bar. There was irony, or something, in what he said, but Haber was much too busy to bother about it.

“Listen. Did this invasion just happen, or did it happen because you missed an appointment?”

“I dreamed it.”

“You let yourself have an uncontrolled effective dream?” Haber let the heavy anger lie in his voice. He had been too protective, too easy on Orr. Orr’s irresponsibility was the cause of the death of many innocent people, the wreckage and panic loose in the city: he must face up to what he had done.

“It wasn’t,” Orr was just beginning, when a really big explosion hit. The building jumped, rang, crackled, electronic apparatus leaped about by the row of empty beds, coffee slopped in the cups. “Was that the volcano or the Air Force?” Orr said, and in the midst of the natural dismay the explosion had caused him, Haber noticed that Orr seemed quite undismayed. His reactions were utterly abnormal. On Friday he had been going all to pieces over a mere ethical point; here on Wednesday in the midst of Armageddon he was cool and calm. He seemed to have no personal fear. But he must have. If Haber was afraid, of course Orr must be. He was suppressing fear. Or did he think, Haber suddenly wondered, that because he had dreamed the invasion, it was all just a dream?

What if it was?

Whose?

“We’d better get back upstairs,” Haber said, getting up. He felt increasingly impatient and irritable; the excitement was getting too extensive. “Who’s the woman with you, anyway?”

“That’s Miss Lelache,” Orr said, looking at him oddly. “The lawyer. She was here Friday.”

“How’d she happen to be with you?”

“She was looking for me, came to the cabin after me.”

“You can explain all that later,” Haber said. There was no time to waste on this trivia. They had to get out, to get out of this burning exploding world.

Just as they entered Haber’s office the glass burst out of the great double window with a shrill, singing sound and a huge sucking-out of air; both men were impelled toward the window as if toward the mouth of a vacuum cleaner. Everything then turned white: everything. They both fell over.

Neither was aware of any noise.

When he could see again, Haber scrambled up, holding on to his desk. Orr was already over by the couch, trying to reassure the bewildered woman. It was cold in the office: the spring air had a moist chill in it, pouring in the empty windows, and it smelled of smoke, burnt insulation, ozone, sulfur, and death. “We ought to get down into the basement, don’t you think?” Miss Lelache said in a reasonable tone, though she was shivering hard.

“Go on,” Haber said. “We’ve got to stay up here a while.”

“Stay here?”

“The Augmentor’s here. It doesn’t plug in and out like a portable TV! Get on down into the basement, we’ll join you when we can.”

“You’re going to put him to sleep now?” the woman said, as the trees down the hill suddenly burst into bright yellow balls of flame. The eruption of Mount Hood was quite hidden by events closer at hand; the earth, however, had been trembling gently for the past few minutes, a sort of fundamental palsy that made one’s hands and mind shake sympathetically.

“You’re fucking right I am. Go on. Get down to the basement, I need the couch. Lie down, George.... Listen, you, in the basement just past the janitor’s room you’ll see a door marked Emergency Generator. Go in there, find the ON handle. Have your hand on it, and if the lights fail, turn it on. It’ll take a heavy pressure upward on the handle. Go on!”

She went. She was still shaking, and smiling; as she went she caught Orr’s hand for a second and said, “Pleasant dreams, George.”

“Don’t worry,” Orr said, “It’s all right.”

“Shut up,” Haber snapped. He had switched on the Hypnotape he had recorded himself, but Orr wasn’t even paying attention, and the noise of explosions and things burning made it hard to hear. “Shut your eyes!” Haber commanded, put his hand on Orr’s throat, and turned up the gain. “RELAXING,” said his own huge voice. “YOU FEEL COMFORTABLE AND RELAXED. YOU WILL ENTER THE—” The building leaped like a spring lamb and settled down askew. Something appeared in the dirty-red, opaque glare outside the glassless window: an ovoid, large object, moving in a sort of hopping fashion through the air. It came directly toward the window. “We’ve got to get out!” Haber shouted over his own voice, and then realized that Orr was already hypnotized. He snapped the tape off and leaned down so he could speak in Orr’s ear. “Stop the invasion!” he shouted. “Peace, peace, dream that we’re at peace with everybody! Now sleep! Antwerp!” and he switched on the Augmentor.