Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 02.djvu/13

 thought "And who knows what the Bunts will be up to in that time?"

Out of the mirror, his own newly-shaven face regarded him. It was the thin, commonplace face of Henry Stevens, thirty-year-old insurance official of Midland City—a face far different from Khal Kan's hard, bronzed, merry visage.

"I suppose I'm crazy to worry about Jotan, when it may be all a dream," Henry muttered thoughtfully. "Or is it this that's the dream, after all? Will I ever know?"

He was facing the mystery that had baffled him all his life.

Was Khal Kan a dream—or was Henry Stevens the dream?

All his life, Henry Stevens had been beset by that riddle. It was one that had begun with his earliest childish memories.

As far back as he could remember, Henry had had the dream. As a child, he had every night dreamed that he was a child in a different world far removed from Midland City.

Each night, when little Henry Stevens had lain down to sleep, he had at once slipped into the dream. In that dream, he was a boy in the city Jotan, on the shore of the Zambrian Sea, on the world of Thar. He was Khal Kan, prince of Jotan, son of the king, Kan Abul.

All through his years of youth and manhood, the dream had persisted. Every night, as soon as he slept, he dreamed that he was awaking. And then, in the dream, he seemed to be Khal Kan again. As Khal Kan, he lived through the day on Thar. And when Khal Kan lay down to sleep, he dreamed that he awoke as Henry Stevens, of Earth!

The dream was continuous. There was nothing incoherent or jerky about it. Day followed day consecutively in the life of Khal Kan, as logically as in the life of Henry Stevens.

Henry Stevens grew up through boyhood and youth, attending his school and playing his games and going off to college, and finally getting a job with the insurance company, and marrying.

And each night, in Henry's dream Khal Kan was similarly pursuing his life—was learning to ride and wield a sword, and explore the mountains west of Jotanland, and go forth in patrol expeditions against the hated Bunts of the south who were the great enemies of Jotan.

When he was awake and living the life of Henry Stevens, it always seemed to him that Khal Kan and his colorful, dangerous world of Thar were nothing but an extraordinarily vivid dream. All that world, with its strange cities and enormous mountains and forests and alien races, its turquoise seas and crimson sun, were surely nothing but dream.

That was how it seemed to Henry Stevens. But when he was Khal Kan, in the nightly dream, it was exactly the opposite. Then it seemed to Khal Kan that Henry Stevens and his strange world of Earth were the dream.

Khal Kan seldom doubted that. The hardy young prince of Jotan knew there could be no such world as this Earth he dreamed about each night. A world where he was a timid little man who worked with papers at a desk all day long, a world where men dressed and acted differently, where even the sun was not red but yellow. Surely, Khal Kan thought, that could be nothing but a dream that somehow had oppressed him all his life.

Henry Stevens was, not so sure about which was real. There were many times when it seemed to Henry that maybe Thar was the real world, and that Earth and Henry Stevens were die dream.

They couldn't both be real! One of these existences of his must be the real one, and the other a strange continued dream. But which?

"If I only knew that," Henry muttered to his reflection in the mirror. "Then,