Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 02.djvu/14

 whichever one is the dream, wouldn't bother me much—I'd know that it wasn't real, whatever happened."

He looked ruefully at himself. "As it is, I've got two lives to worry about. Not that Khal Kan does much worrying!"

His puzzled reverie was broken by the sleepy voice of his wife, calling a mechanical warning from the bedroom.

"Henry, you'd better hurry or you'll be late at the office."

"Yes, Emma," he replied dutifully, and hastened his toilet.

He loved his wife. At least, Henry Stevens loved her—whether or not Henry was real.

UT Golden Wings! There was a girl! His pulse still raced as he remembered her beauty, when he had seen her through Khal Kan's eyes.

How the devil was Khal Kan going to get out of the trap into which the girl's beauty had led him?

He couldn't guess what the reckless young prince would do—for Khal Kan and Henry Stevens had nothing in common in their personalities.

"Oh, forget it!" Henry advised himself irritably. "Thar must be a dream. Let Khal Kan worry about it, when the dream comes back tonight."

But he couldn't forget so easily. As he drove to town in his sedate black coupe, he kept turning the problem over in his mind. And he found himself brooding about it that afternoon over his statements, at his desk in the big insurance office.

If Khal Kan didn't get away, his father might send an expedition out of Jotan to search for him. And that would weaken Jotan at a time when the Bunts were menacing it. He must—

"Stevens, haven't you finished that Blaine statement yet?" demanded a loud voice beside his desk.

Henry started guiltily. It was Carson, the wasp-like little office manager, who stood glowering down at him.

"I—I was just starting it," Henry said hastily, grabbing the neglected papers.

"Just starting it?" Carson's thin lips tightened. "Stevens, you've got to pull yourself up. You're getting entirely too dreamy and inefficient lately. I see you sitting here and staring at the wall for hours. What's the matter with you, anyway?"

"Nothing, Mr. Carson," Henry said panically. Then he amended, "I've had a few troubles on my mind lately. But I won't let them interfere with my work again."

"I wouldn't, if I were you," advised the waspish little man ominously, and departed.

Henry felt a cold chill. There had been a significant glitter in Carson's spectacled eyes. He sensed himself on the verge of a terrifying precipice—of losing his job.

"If I don't forget about Thar, I will be in trouble," he muttered to himself. "I can't go on this way."

As he mechanically added figures, he was alarmedly trying to figure out a way to rid himself of this obsession.

If he only knew which was reality and which was dream! That was what his mind always came back to, that was the key of his troubles.

If, for instance, he could learn for a certainty that Khal Kan and his life in Thar were merely a dream, as they seemed, then he wouldn't brood about them. There wouldn't be any point in worrying about what happened in a dream.

On the other hand, if he should learn that his life as Khal Kan was real, and that Henry Stevens and his world were the dream, then that too would relieve his worries. It wouldn't matter much if Henry Stevens lost his job—if Henry were only a dream.

Henry was fascinated, as always, by that