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Further experiments convinced him he couldn’t bring anybody from the previous day into his dream. Except perhaps Veronica, who was still sleeping in the bed, part of the dream decor, but he didn’t want to bring her any further into the dream—there were too many chances that whatever happened would get back to Mother Isobel if he didn’t hit on the right way to suppress or distort her memories. Feeling silly, he went through the magazines in his living room until he found the latest issue of L’Evenement du Jeudi, leafed through it until he found the picture he remembered, an aspiring Italian starlet swimming nude at a hotel in Cannes.

With a little experimentation he found he could enlarge the picture, extract the girl and make her life-size and more or less three-dimensional, but he couldn’t make her look like a real human being, only a big, glossy inflatable doll. When he tried to make the doll move it twitched once or twice, and he found himself back in bed with his pajamas on.

So he needed other people to play the other roles in these dream-scenarios. Maybe that was how all dreams really worked, by telepathic contact between people’s sleeping minds. Immersion in a truly collective unconscious for purposes of wish fulfillment. In which case, being a telepath wasn’t what made him different, because everybody was a telepath; the difference was that he’d somehow learned to enter that collective state while maintaining his conscious will and lucidity.

If he was correct he could put his last doubts about morality to rest: he wasn’t doing anything anyone else wasn’t doing; the only difference was that he was able to take conscious control of his participation. So he wasn’t just inventing excuses for himself, no matter what Mother Isobel said.

But that still left unanswered the question of how to make contact with the girls’ sleeping minds. Perhaps he only had access to the dreams of people he’d already come across in his re-experienced waking time. Which meant that tonight there wouldn’t be anyone but Veronica.

He looked at her, sleeping, realized he could use her to find out if he could make the people he brought into his dream world forget what happened, so long as what he did was innocuous enough that it wouldn’t give her reason to suspect anything, even if she did remember. In any case, he’d probably be safer experimenting with her, for all her loyalty to her sister, than with someone with no reason to dream about him.

He climbed back into bed, closed his eyes, pretended to be asleep again, then made the phone ring. You can wake up now, Veronica, he thought. The phone’s ringing.

She took a long time to come awake. She seemed confused and recalcitrant, so he just kept the phone ringing until she got out of bed, stumbled into the hall, and picked it up.

“Hello?” he heard her say. “Hello?”

There’s nobody on the other end of the line, he thought. Put the phone back and come to bed.

He opened his eyes, watched her coming back into the room. There was a little light, not much, from the moon, and in it she looked younger, more graceful than usual. Almost the way he remembered from when he first met her at the University of Wisconsin and she’d looked like a slightly older Terri or June, before she’d taken on the solidity and practicality she now shared with her sister.

That’s how she sees herself in her dreams, who she really is inside, he realized. He felt an unexpected surge of desire for her, suppressed it: he couldn’t risk complicating his experiment too much, at least not this first time.

When she started to climb back into bed, he made the phone ring again. She answered it, found there was no one there, hung up, and was on her way back into the bedroom when he made it ring again.

He went through the whole thing three more times before he was satisfied. The last time he didn’t make the phone ring, just suggested she could hear it ringing—but then as she went back wearily to pick it up again he heard it ringing, too, as loudly and realistically as when he’d made it ring himself, though this time she had to be the one who was sustaining the experience’s reality. When she picked it up he suggested she leave it off the hook this time and come back to bed, go to sleep. As soon as she was asleep he told her that she wouldn’t wake up again until the alarm went off in the morning and that she wouldn’t remember having heard the phone ring when she did.