"What did the FBI agents look like?" I asked, never having seen one. Everybody in Berkeley was scared of just such a visit as Nicholas had received, myself included. It was the times.

They have fat red necks and double chins. And little eyes, like two coals stuck into dough. And they watch you all the time. They never take their eyes off you. They had faint but detectable southern accents. They said they'd be back to talk to both of us. They'll probably be by to talk to you too. About your writing. Are your stories left-wing?"

I asked, "Haven't you read them?"

"I don't read science fiction," Nicholas said. "I just read serious writers like Proust and Joyce and Kafka. When science fiction has something serious to say, I'll read it." He began, then, to talk up the virtues of Finnegans Wake, in particular the final part, which he compared to the final part of Ulysses. It was his belief that no one but himself had either read it or understood it.

"Science fiction is the literature of the future," I told him, when he paused. "In a few decades they'll be visiting the moon."

"Oh, no," Nicholas said vigorously. "They'll never visit the moon. You're living in a fantasy world."

"Is that what your future self told you?" I said. "Or your self from another universe, whatever it was?"

It seemed to me that it was Nicholas who was living in a fantasy world, working in the record store as a clerk, meanwhile always lost in great literature of a sort divorced from his own reality. He had read so much James Joyce that Dublin was more real to him than Berkeley. And yet even to me Berkeley was not quite real but lost, as Nicholas was, in fantasy; all of Berkeley dreamed a political dream separate from the rest of America, a dream soon to be crushed, as reaction flowed deeper and deeper and spread out wider.