Stu smiled.
"But lately, I've had an extremely bad dream. It recurs, like my dream of being crushed to death under the lift, but it makes that one look like a pu**ycat in comparison. It's like no other dream I've ever had, but somehow it's like all of them. As if... as if it were the sum of all bad dreams. And I wake up feeling bad, as if it wasn't a dream at all, but a vision. I know how crazy that must sound."
"What is it?"
"It's a man," Bateman said quietly. "At least, I think it's a man. He's standing on the roof of a high building, or maybe it's a cliff that he's on. Whatever it is, it's so high that it sheers away into mist thousands of feet below. It's near sunset, but he's looking the other way, east. Sometimes he seems to be wearing bluejeans and a denim jacket, but more often he's in a robe with a cowl. I can never see his face, but I can see his eyes. He has red eyes. And I have a feeling that he's looking for me - and that sooner or later he will find me or I will be forced to go to him... and that will be the death of me. So I try to scream, and..." He trailed off with an embarrassed little shrug.
"That's when you wake up?"
"Yes." They watched Kojak come trotting back, and Bateman patted him while Kojak nosed in the aluminum dish and cleaned up the last of the poundcake.
"Well, it's just a dream, I suppose," Bateman said. He stood up, wincing as his knees popped. "If I were being psychoanalyzed, I suppose the shrink would say the dream expresses my unconscious fear of some leader or leaders who will start the whole thing going again. Maybe a fear of technology in general. Because I do believe that all the new societies which arise, at least in the Western world, will have technology as their cornerstone. It's a pity, and it needn't be, but it will be, because we are hooked. They won't remember - or won't choose to remember - the corner we had painted ourselves into. The dirty rivers, the hole in the ozone layer, the atomic bomb, the atmospheric pollution. All they'll remember is that once upon a time they could keep warm at night without expending much effort to do it. I'm a Luddite on top of my other failings, you see. But this dream... it preys on me, Stu."
Stu said nothing.
"Well, I want to get back," Bateman said briskly. "I'm halfway drunk already, and I believe there will be thundershowers this afternoon." He walked to the back of the clearing and rummaged there. A few moments later he came back with a wheelbarrow. He screwed the piano stool down to its lowest elevation, put it in, added his palette, the picnic cooler, and balanced precariously on top of everything else, his mediocre painting.
"You wheeled that all the way out here?" Stu asked.
"I wheeled it until I saw something I wanted to paint. I go different ways on different days. It's good exercise. If you're going east, why don't you come back to Woodsville and spend the night at my house? We can take turns wheeling the barrow, and I've got yet another six-pack of beer cooling in yonder stream. That ought to get us home in style."
"I accept," Stu said.
"Good man. I'll probably talk all the way home. You are in the arms of the Garrulous Professor, East Texas. When I bore you, just tell me to shut up. I won't be offended."
"I like to listen," Stu said.
"Then you are one of God's chosen. Let's go."
So they walked on down 302, one of them wheeling the barrow while the other drank a beer. No matter which was which, Bateman talked, an endless monologue that jumped from topic to topic with hardly a pause. Kojak bounced alongside. Stu would listen for a while, then his thoughts would trail off for a while, following their own tangents, and then his mind would come back. He was disquieted by Bateman's picture of a hundred little enclaves of people, some of them militaristic, living in a country where thousands of doomsday weapons had been left around like a child's set of blocks. But oddly, the thing his mind kept returning to was Glen Bateman's dream, the man with no face on top of the high building - or the cliff-edge - the man with the red eyes, his back to the setting sun, looking restlessly to the east.
He woke up sometime before midnight, bathed in sweat, afraid he had screamed. But in the next room, Glen Bateman's breathing was slow and regular, undisturbed, and in the hallway he could see Kojak sleeping with his head on his paws. Everything was picked out in moonlight so bright it was surreal.