wall
twice, with about a one second interval."

They found the food compartment, discovered row on row of cans, boxes,
jars. Temple opened one of the cans, gazed in disappointment on a
sorry looking thing the size of his thumb. Brown, shriveled, dry and
almost flaky, it might have been a bird.

Sophia turned up her nose. "If that's the best this place has to
offer, I'm not so hungry anymore."

Suddenly, she gaped. So did Temple. A savory odor attracted their
attention, steam rising from the small can added to their interest.
Amazing things happened to the withered scrap of food on exposure to
the air. Temple barely had time to extract it from the can, burning
his fingers in the process, when it became twice the can's size. It
grew and by the time it finished, it was as savory looking a five
pound fowl as Temple had ever seen. Roasted, steaming hot, ready to
eat.

They tore into it with savage gusto.

"Stephanie should see me now," Temple found himself saying and
regretted it.

"Stephanie? Who's that?"

"A girl."

"Your girl?"

"What's the difference? She's a million light years and fifty
centuries away."

"Answer me."

"Yes," said Temple, wishing he could change the subject. "My girl." He
hadn't thought of Stephanie in a long time, perhaps because it was
meaningless to think of someone dead fifty centuries. Now that the
thoughts had been stirred within him, though, he found them poignantly
pleasant.

"Your girl ... and you would marry her if you could?"

He had grown attached to Sophia, not in reality, but in the second of
their dream worlds. He wished the memory of the dream had not lingered
for it disturbed him. In it he had loved Sophia as much as he now
loved Stephanie although the one was obtainable and the other was a
five-thousand year pinch of dust. And how much of the dream lingered
with him, in his head and his heart?

"Let's forget about it," Temple suggested.

"No. If she were here today and if everything were normal, would you
marry her?"

"Why talk about what can't be?"

"I want to know, that's why."

"All right. Yes, I would. I would marry Stephanie."

"Oh," said Sophia. "Then what happened in the dream meant ...
nothing."

"We were two different people," Temple said coolly, then wished he
hadn't for it was only half-true. He remembered everything about the
dream-which-was-more-than-a-dream vividly. He had been far more
intimate with Sophia, and over a longer period of time,