Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 02.djvu/22

 "I want you to take this memory across into the dream-life with you tonight," Doctor Thorn said earnestly. "I want you, when you awake as Khal Kan, to say over and over to yourself—'This isn't real. I'm not real. Henry Stevens and Earth are the reality'."

"You think that will have some effect?" Henry asked doubtfully.

"I think that in time your dream-world will begin to fade, if you keep saying that," the psychoanalyst declared.

"Well, I'll try it," Henry promised thoughtfully. "If it has any effect, I'll be sure then that Thar is the dream."

Doctor Thorn remarked, "Probably the best thing to happen would be if Khal Kan got himself killed in that dream-life. Then, the moment before he 'died,' the dream of Thar would vanish utterly as always in such dreams."

Henry was a little appalled. "You mean—Thar and Jotan and Golden Wings and all the rest would be gone forever?"

"That's right—you wouldn't ever again be oppressed by the dream," encouraged the psychoanalyst.

Henry Stevens felt a chill as he drove homeward. That was something he hadn't forseen, that the death of Khal Kan in that other life would destroy Thar forever if Thar was the dream.

Henry didn't want that. He had spent just as much of his life in Thar, as Khal Kan, as he had done here on Earth. No matter if that life should turn out to be merely a dream, it was real and vivid, and he didn't want to see it utterly destroyed.

He felt a little panic as he pictured himself cut off from Thar forever, never again riding with Brusul and Zoor on crazy adventure, never seeing again that brooding smile in Golden Wings' eyes, nor the towers of Jotan brooding under the rosy moons.

Life as Henry Stevens of Earth, without his nightly existence in Thar, would be tame and profitless. Yet he knew that he must once and for all settle the question of which of his lives was real, even though it risked destroying one of those lives.

"I'll do what Doctor Thorn said, when I'm Khal Kan tonight," Henry muttered. "I'll tell myself Thar isn't real, and see if it has any effect."

He was so strung up by anticipation of the test he was about to make, that he paid even less attention than usual to Emma's placid account of neighborhood gossip and small household happenings.

That night as he lay, waiting for sleep, Henry repeated over and over to himself the formula that he must repeat as Khal Kan. His last waking thought, as he drifted into sleep, was of that.

HAL KAN awoke with a vague sense of some duty oppressing his mind. There was something he must do, or say—

He opened his eyes, to look with contentment upon the dawn-lit interior of his own black stone chamber in the great palace at Jotan. On the wall were his favorite weapons—the sword with which he'd killed a sea-dragon when he was fourteen years old, the battered shield with the great scar which he had borne in his first real battle.

Golden Wings stirred sleepily against him, her perfumed black hair brushing his cheek. He patted her head with rough tenderness. Then he became aware of the tramp of many feet outside, of distant clank of arms and hard voices barking orders, and rattle of hurrying hoofs.

His pulse leaped. "Today we go south to meet Egir and the Bunts!"

Then he remembered what it was that dimly oppressed his mind. It was something from his dream—the queer nightly dream in which he was the timid little man Henry Stevens on that strange world called Earth.

He remembered now that Henry