For an instant, he was sure he must have come awake again despite what the clock seemed to say. He glanced down at himself, told himself that if he really were dreaming, he could change his pajamas into anything else he wanted, like his swimming suit.

His pajamas were gone. He was wearing his swimming suit. So he was dreaming.

He left the dream-Veronica sleeping soundly and padded out into the hall. Dreams were symbolic; if he wanted to get in touch with somebody what better way than by telephone? He switched the dial so that each number became a different girl's name, picked up the phone, and dialed Marcia. No answer, not even a busy signal. He tried the others. Nothing.

Closing his eyes, he imagined himself lying in the sun by the swimming pool, but when he opened his eyes again he was back lying on the bed, though he'd seemed to feel the sun on his chest and face for an instant. He imagined himself a three-piece tweed suit over his swimming trunks, then added the shirt, tie, socks, and shoes he'd forgotten, and went out into the hall to get his car keys out of the ashtray where he kept them. The phone was next to the ashtray; he saw that the dial had reverted to normal.

No one was waiting in romantic ambush outside. When he tried to drive off in his car, the whole night landscape around him faded out of existence and he found himself back in bed, wearing his pajamas. The clock said 4:20.

A few more experiments convinced him he couldn't get more than a few hundred yards from his sleeping body, and couldn't alter more than a few things at a time before finding himself back where he'd started from.

Further experiments convinced him he couldn't bring anybody from the previous day into his dream. Except perhaps Veronica, who was still sleeping in the bed, part of the dream decor, but he didn't want to bring her any further into the dream-there were too many chances that whatever happened would get back to Mother Isobel if he didn't hit on the right way to suppress or distort her memories. Feeling silly, he went through the magazines in his living room until he found the latest issue of L'Evenement du Jeudi, leafed through it until he found the picture he remembered, an aspiring Italian starlet swimming nude at a hotel in Cannes.

With a little experimentation he found he could enlarge the picture, extract the girl and make her life-size and more or less three-dimensional, but he couldn't make her look like a real human being, only a big, glossy inflatable doll. When he tried to make the doll move it twitched once or twice, and he found himself back in bed with his pajamas on.

So he needed other people to play the other roles in these dream-scenarios. Maybe that was how all dreams really worked, by telepathic contact between people's sleeping minds. Immersion in a truly collective unconscious for purposes of wish fulfillment. In which case, being a telepath wasn't what made him different, because everybody was a telepath; the difference was that he'd somehow learned to enter that collective state while maintaining his conscious will and lucidity.

If he was correct he could put his last doubts about morality to rest: he wasn't doing anything anyone else wasn't doing; the only difference was that he was able to take conscious control of his participation. So he wasn't just inventing excuses for himself, no matter what Mother Isobel said.

But that still left unanswered the question of how to make contact with the girls' sleeping minds. Perhaps he only had access to the dreams of people he'd already come across in his re-experienced waking time. Which meant that tonight there wouldn't be anyone but Veronica.

He looked at her, sleeping, realized he could use her to find out if he could make the people he brought into his dream world forget what happened, so long as what he did was innocuous enough that it wouldn't give her reason to suspect anything, even if she did remember. In any case, he'd probably be safer experimenting with her, for all her loyalty to her sister, than with someone with no reason to dream about him.

He climbed back into bed, closed his eyes, pretended to be asleep again, then made the phone ring. You can wake up now, Veronica, he thought. The phone's ringing.

She took a long time to come awake. She seemed confused and recalcitrant, so he just kept the phone ringing until she got out of bed, stumbled into the hall, and picked it up.

"Hello?" he heard her say. "Hello?"

There's nobody on the other end of the line, he thought. Put the phone back and come to bed.

He opened his eyes, watched her coming back into the room. There was a little light, not much, from the moon, and in it she looked younger, more graceful than usual. Almost the way he remembered from when he first met her at the University of Wisconsin and she'd looked like a slightly older Terri or June, before she'd taken on the solidity and practicality she now shared with her sister.

That's how she sees herself in her dreams, who she really is inside, he realized. He felt an unexpected surge of desire for her, suppressed it: he couldn't risk complicating his experiment too much, at least not this first time.

When she started to climb back into bed, he made the phone ring again. She answered it, found there was no one there, hung up, and was on her way back into the bedroom when he made it ring again.

He went through the whole thing three more times before he was satisfied. The last time he didn't make the phone ring, just suggested she could hear it ringing-but then as she went back wearily to pick it up again he heard it ringing, too, as loudly and realistically as when he'd made it ring himself, though this time she had to be the one who was sustaining the experience's reality. When she picked it up he suggested she leave it off the hook this time and come back to bed, go to sleep. As soon as she was asleep he told her that she wouldn't wake up again until the alarm went off in the morning and that she wouldn't remember having heard the phone ring when she did.

St. Jacques spent the rest of the dream-time practicing altering himself in front of the bathroom mirror. He added and subtracted tans and mustaches, changed his clothing, haircut, age, race, and features, made himself skinny, fat, and muscular, then tried on Russell Thomas's form, face, and way of moving. Finally, feeling greatly daring, he went back to the living room and picked up the Evenement du Jeudi he'd been looking at earlier, and using it as a guide turned himself into the woman in the picture. The change was wholly convincing; in the mirror he looked like the woman and yet as real as his real self had ever looked; he could feel the weight of her breasts on his chest, a strange confusion of sensations where his penis and testicles should have been, but weren't, problems with his equilibrium when he took an involuntary step back.

For some reason it was easier to make complex changes in himself than it was to change the things around him. But having a woman's body was disturbing; he changed himself back to normal just before the alarm woke him.

It was Veronica's turn to make breakfast. As usual, she sipped her tea, picked at her eggs, and left most of her toast untouched, finally offering what was left to him. He waited for her to mention Mother Isobel's accusations or what had happened the night before; when she did neither he finally asked, "Did the phone ring last night? I had this dream in which it kept ringing and ringing-"

She thought a moment, concentrating, then shook her head. "I don't think so. If it did I didn't wake up either."

So he could insert himself into people's dreams without fear of the consequences, either to himself or to them. He could even visit Mother Isobel in her sleep, take her baseball bat away from her and hit her over the head with it, then tell her to forget all about it. Though the information would still be there in her mind, buried on some unconscious level, and would just result in more trouble later. What he really should do was sneak into her dreams and convince her he was the most wonderful man who'd ever lived, a veritable saint who deserved a raise, then let the idea percolate up through her conscious thoughts until she took it for her own.

He drank four more cups of coffee before he left for school, but even so he was dead tired, irritable, and almost unable to function all day, though he kept stopping off in the faculty lounge and knocking down Dixie cup after pink Dixie cup of the horribly bitter coffee they kept simmering there. When lunch came he didn't go to the cafeteria, just curled up on the couch in the lounge and went to sleep. Dreaming, he relived his last hour of waking time-the correspondence between waking and dream time seemed exact-but was unable to in any way influence or change the backward flow of events. He was the only one asleep, all the others were awake and conscious: there was no way he could alter or escape from the collective reality they were maintaining.

But it was hard having to endure the gritty exhaustion of last hour's class all over again. Hard to endure his frustrated lust and fantasies yet another time without being able to do anything about them. Hard, finally, to have to watch himself doing such a ridiculous, insensitive, and insanely boring job of teaching books that, when he'd first started teaching, had fascinated and excited him. He was in the same position as his students now, a spectator rather than a participant, and the combination of boredom, frustration, and acute self-criticism was intolerable. He'd have to do something about it, use at least part of the time he spent reliving class periods in reverse to not only think about his subject, but to study the girls' reactions, think about what they needed, why they always learned so little, because if he couldn't speed things up and turn in a performance he felt better about as spectator/critic, he was going to be unhappier than he was making any of his students.

It was ironic in a way: the very transformation that was going to allow him to satisfy all his forbidden desires would at the same time force him to become a better teacher.

He slept through the period bell, was awakened a moment later by Jim Seabury, the new psychology teacher.

"You're going to be late if you don't hurry."

"Thanks, Jim. I didn't get much sleep last night and-" He realized what he was saying, broke off suddenly, then added with what he hoped was the appropriate sheepish grin, "But if you don't mind, I'd appreciate it if you didn't mention anything about it to anybody. Even Veronica."

"Sure. Hey, did you hear Mother Isobel refused to renew my contract? Said I was atheistic."

"I heard. I'm sorry."

"I'm not. I'll be glad to get out of here. But anyway, you should watch out, make sure you get enough sleep. Most people don't realize how dangerous not getting enough is. You can end up on the funny farm that way."

St. Jacques stared at Seabury, trying to decide if the other had meant anything personal, then remembered belatedly that the psychology teacher had served as a subject in some sort of sleep-deprivation experiments once.

"How come?"

"REM sleep. Dreaming. You've got to get a certain amount of dreaming in every night. Missing a few days won't really do you any harm, but after a while it creeps up on you."

"I haven't quite reached that point. Not yet, anyway. But I've got to get to class. See you later."

"Sure. Bye."

He spent the rest of the afternoon avoiding Mother Isobel while compiling for himself a new set of images and fantasies for the night to come, not sure whether or not his morning memories would be available, since he'd already slept on them once.

Marcia was back in class. She seemed to have reverted to her normal behavior-which is to say, she ignored him as completely as possible-though she was quieter than usual. He, in turn, neither called on her nor paid any overt attention when he saw her whispering and passing notes, but he watched her out of the corner of his eye.

Once, when he was staring unguardedly at June, he realized both she and Terri were staring quietly and intensely back at him. After he jerked his gaze away, though, he realized they had just been pretending to pay attention and that their thoughts had been totally elsewhere.

As he was leaving the school after his next class he glanced over at the swimming pool, saw the girls on the swim team all lined up watching Veronica demonstrate a back flip off the high board. They had a meet that evening; Veronica wouldn't be back till long after he was asleep.

He finished his work early and went to bed around seven. He didn't bother to switch pillows: the spices were once again stimulating his imagination and sharpening his senses-if anything, their effect was more aphrodisiac than tranquilizing-but he knew he was too tired to be kept awake by them.

As soon as he'd finished his plummeting dive through the back of his head he looked at the bedside clock: 7:15. If he let himself return to the beginning of his French I class he'd have five hours and fifteen minutes before his dream progression brought him back to the moment he'd fallen asleep. That would be about 5:45, and he had no idea what would happen then.

He let the backward flow carry him along, his exhaustion decreasing with every hour subtracted from the day. On his way back to school he realized he would never be able to return to a point where he felt refreshed if he took control at 2:00, and that anyway he was staying conscious through the whole sleep period, not really giving way to his dreams despite the fact that he was immersing himself in the collective unconscious and sharing the dreams of others. What if he needed that relaxation of conscious control and the release it brought to stay sane?

But perhaps it was just the contact, the shared wish-fulfillment, that was needed, and the abdication of control was merely a means toward that end. He tried to remember what Jung-who, after all, had been the one who'd concentrated on the collective unconscious-had said about dreams. All he could come up with was an anecdote he'd read somewhere.

Freud and Jung had been at a psychiatric conference where Freud had been lecturing about phallic symbols. He'd claimed that nothing in a dream was what it seemed, that every apparent meaning cloaked a hidden, latent meaning. He'd stated that things in dreams-such as trains going into tunnels, pencils, swords, umbrellas, or whatever-had no meaning or importance in themselves, but were there to simultaneously mask and reveal what they really stood for, which was in every case a phallus.

When question time arrived, however, Jung had demanded what the latent meaning of a phallus was when the phallus itself appeared in the dream, and Freud had been unable to answer him.

Which was all very well, and if St. Jacques's unconscious had presented him with the information it had to mean something, but he couldn't see what. Unless a phallus really did stand for itself alone, so that distortion was only a means of getting certain things into awareness. Which would mean that what was important was the fact of getting them there, not the subterfuges one normally used to do so.

Watching Veronica come soaring back up out of the pool onto the diving board, he found himself appreciating her grace and control. She and the rest of the swim team would still be awake, so the scene had to be rigidly exact and immutable, but when he looked at her from this distance she seemed almost as young and graceful as her dream-self of the night before. Perhaps it was because she didn't have to worry about the impression she was making on people, but poised on the diving board in her blue tank suit, completely lost in what she was doing, she seemed paradoxically less aggressively healthy, less solidly muscular, than she did away from her sports.

St. Jacques continued backing away from the swimming pool, lost it around the corner. Inside the main building he backed past the faculty lounge up the stairs to his last class. He was surprised and pleased to find the resolution he'd made during his lunchtime nap had already had some effect, though he'd made no conscious alteration in his teaching methods: he was obviously paying closer attention to his students and their needs, trying harder to get things across to them, being a little more sympathetic when they didn't understand him. What's more, some of the students seemed to have sensed the change and were reacting favorably.

Between classes he dashed backward down to the empty faculty lounge, spat two cups of coffee back into their pink Dixie cups and let the percolator suck them up its spout, then backed out of the lounge to his French I class, feeling more tired than ever. He endured the class in reverse until the moment came when he'd first entered the room and put his books on his desk, then took control of the dream and felt the time-flow flipflop back to normal around him.

None of you will notice anything's different unless I tell you to, he commanded silently. You will all see me here at my desk, giving the same lecture and asking the same questions you remember from before. Nothing will be any different from the way you remember it. Except, he decided to add, the class seems much more interesting, and when you wake up in the morning the only thing you'll remember is that it was a good class and you feel like you've really learned something.

He got up, walked to the door, then paused a moment before going out, watching them. They were all staring intently at the front of the room, more alert and interested-seeming than he could remember ever having seen them. Glancing at the front, he realized he could see himself sitting at his desk, shuffling notes. The product of their collective imagination.

The St. Jacques behind the desk looked up at the class, began talking animatedly. What he was saying was not only more interesting than anything St. Jacques remembered reexperiencing himself saying, it was also clearer and better organized. He was fascinated, almost tempted to stay and watch his improved self teach, but finally tore himself away, went down to the faculty lounge, and made sure it was as empty as he remembered. In the lounge bathroom he first became his younger self, then took on Russell Thomas's appearance, practiced moving around until he was sure he had everything down perfect, then went back upstairs.

No one noticed him enter. He had a hard time tearing himself free of the fascination his double exercised over him, but finally walked over to June and Terri and asked them to come to the faculty lounge with him. He hesitated, then asked Marcia as well.

The fantasy he'd worked out-that had elaborated itself in his head over the last two days-called for Marcia to know what was happening, and to have helped plan it with him (the him in question being, of course, Russell Thomas: the poet's identity an additional safeguard in case something went wrong, as well as a physical self it felt good to wear, and which was undoubtedly more pleasing than his own), then persuaded her two somewhat hesitant but interested friends to participate with her. So Marcia was the one who locked the door to the faculty lounge behind them and turned out the lights, plunging the room into a semiobscurity lit only by the faint reddish glow filtering in through the curtains. And it was Marcia also who took the lead and encouraged her friends, undressing both herself and the bogus poet, making quiet ecstatic love with him on the carpet and couch until the time came when June and Terri too shed their clothes and all three were rolling around in a passionate, sweating tangle of bodies, breasts, thighs, genitalia, and multiple orgasms, in ever more complicated and abandoned linkages, pairings, and daisy chains. St. Jacques was indefatigable, trying things he'd never before even allowed himself to imagine, no longer really sure when something had originated in his own fantasies and when it came from one or more of the girls. ... He found his physical form changing, so that for a while he was a boy of fourteen, at other times various older men he knew instinctively were the girls' fathers, at yet another time a man who could only be his own father, then, briefly, he was two men, one of them Russell Thomas while the other was his own adolescent self. Meanwhile the girls had been shifting and flowing between various identities, Marcia becoming first Liz and then St. Jacques's mother, while Terri and June had become his two younger sisters, then both of them were Veronica as she'd been when St. Jacques first met her. One of them even became Mother Isobel, and for an instant she stared fiercely and furiously around her, but their combined desires overcame the innate censoring mechanism that had called the nun into their midst, and she grew younger, became the Sister Isobel she'd been when St. Jacques first met her, then younger still, a shy adolescent girl, before she melted back into Veronica and the two Veronicas again began to flicker through the identities of various other girls in his classes before regaining their true forms as Terri and June. ... All of them, every identity, spasming and melting through orgasm after orgasm, each the ultimate possible release from the tensions of the one before until even that ultimate possible release showed itself in turn to be merely a state of intolerable tension by contrast with the release that followed it.

Finally-perhaps gradually, perhaps abruptly, St. Jacques wasn't sure-they'd disentangled themselves, were showering and soaping one another clean in the shower stall that had made a sudden appearance in the bathroom, then were toweling one another off and getting out. St. Jacques was himself again, no longer Russell Thomas, but a younger self, seventeen or eighteen years old, with the confidence and grace that Russell Thomas had pretended to and he himself had always lacked.

St. Jacques glanced at his watch as he was putting it back on: 7:15. His dream-time had caught up with the waking-time it was recapitulating. St. Jacques reminded all three girls that they'd have to forget everything as soon as they awakened. Marcia said she would make sure she did, then had to excuse herself and leave, as they'd all known she would.

St. Jacques felt an irresistible urge to return home, taking Terri and June with him. He finished dressing then waited for June and Terri to put their heavy pullovers on over their jeans-all three were dressed casually, for the street now-then put his arms around them and walked them to his car. He felt singingly happy, with a quiet excitement growing in him that he was content just to feel. The girls squeezed into the front seat with him and he drove them back to the house, all three waving to the gate guard as they left.

At the house St. Jacques opened a bottle of champagne-St. Jacques had always liked champagne and both girls had a weakness for it-then sat around the living room sipping it in silence and watching the fire that had sprung to life in the fireplace. When they finished the bottle, they went into the bedroom to make love some more.

They start slowly, romantically, this time, as though the three of them are fitting together, following something innate and inborn rather than dictating their private needs and wants to one another. The spicy smell from the pillow fills the room, fills them all with a floating lightness as it blends into the walls and furniture and turns everything into sunlit forest, soft and cool and green. Then a luminous mist with hints of green and gold in its depths is swirling languidly around them as they make love in the long green grass with the tiny red and yellow wildflowers all around ... as they rise up together in the glowing air on their long, golden-tipped, ivory-feathered wings, beating their way gently and without haste ever higher, until at last the world is lost entirely beneath them and they swoop and turn with ever greater rapidity and grace, falling and floating, all three intertwined now, through infinite golden clouds, St. Jacques's double phallus jade and ruby, twin coiling serpents of light, there deep in both girls simultaneously as they all three cling to one another, not moving, not needing to move anymore, spinning and turning through the cool foggy luminescence of infinite space, the skies beyond the sky, and St. Jacques knows that this is what the phallus in his dreams had always masked and revealed, this ultimate unmoving union, this joyous fusion of flesh and sky.

"I told you that it was just a venal sin, and he'd come to his senses soon," he hears Terri say to June in a voice that is as much his wife Veronica's as it is Terri's, as much Terri's as it is Veronica's.

"Angels always do. I owe both of you an apology," he hears June say in a voice choked with laughter, a voice as much Mother Isobel's as it is June's, as much June's as it is Mother Isobel's.

"On the contrary," St. Jacques says, "I'm the one who has to apologize. I'm delighted that Veronica brought you along and gave me the opportunity to make amends." They all burst out laughing and fall intertwined into the sky.

St. Jacques realizes suddenly that on awakening he will remember only the phallus, the multiple penetrations and spasming releases, that the unity and love and the way they're all five melting through one another into the infinite sky will be as beyond his own conscious mind's ability to accept as his earlier, purely sexual fantasies had been beyond Mother Isobel's comprehension.

The alarm clock goes off and he just has enough time to remind them all-June and Terri and Veronica and Mother Isobel and himself-to forget what's happened as soon as they awaken. They agree, and then all of them fall laughing out of the sky into their separate selves.

Veronica and St. Jacques wake up beside each other. They stare at each other, wide awake, more refreshed than either can remember having been in years. Neither remembers any of what passed between them in the early morning, when Veronica's symbiote had finally reached the critical point in its interaction with her nervous system and begun affecting her dreams in the same way her husband's had been affecting his-a change that had been delayed several days in her case, because she'd eaten so much less of the moldy toast than her husband had that the mold which had taken up residence in her had needed that much longer to multiply to a point where it could affect her.

They smile at each other, feeling a rare mutual sympathy and tenderness and rather surprised by it, unaware that anything has really changed. They then separate to live their separate days, St. Jacques to worry about improving his teaching methods and fantasize endless daisy chains and orgasms, though perhaps a little less obsessively than before; Veronica to work with her geology students and swim team while she daydreams about astral projection and the wonders of heaven.

It took them almost a year to realize and accept what they'd come to mean to each other, decades more to begin to fully integrate their sleeping and waking lives. Sometime during that first year they began making love to each other in the flesh again, and eventually two children were born to their union. And in those two children and their many, many descendants, the blue-green mold lived happily ever after.

My favorite short-story ideas often come to me as a sort of ironic counterpoint to something else I'm working on: usually the same general kind of idea, but skewed around so it's shooting off in an entirely different, and probably antithetical, direction. Some of "The Jamesburg Incubus" comes from ideas I was playing around with for my most recent novel, Webs, mixed in with reading I was doing at the time on dreams, demonology, and witchcraft, all of it finally linking up and crystalizing around St. Jacques-who, in turn, owes his existence partially to vague memories of an irritatingly pretentious French teacher I used to know, and partially to my own fears of what my life might be like if I ever end up having to teach for a living.

SCOTT BAKER.

MAN OF STEEL, WOMAN OF KLEENEX.

LARRY NIVEN.

Larry Niven lives in California with his wife, Marilyn. His novel Ringworld (1970) won the Hugo and the Nebula awards, as well as Australia's Ditmar Award and Japan's Seiun Award. He has also won the Hugo Award for his short fiction. He edited the Man-Kzin War series, and has written or coauthored more than fifty books. Visit www.larryniven.net for more information.

HE'S FASTER THAN A speeding bullet. He's more powerful than a locomotive. He's able to leap tall buildings at a single bound. Why can't he get a girl?

At the ripe old age of thirty-one,* Kal-El (alias Superman, alias Clark Kent) is still unmarried. Almost certainly he is still a virgin. This is a serious matter. The species itself is in danger!

An unwed Superman is a mobile Superman. Thus it has been alleged that those who chronicle the Man of Steel's adventures are responsible for his condition. But the cartoonists are not to blame.

Nor is Superman handicapped by psychological problems.

Granted that the poor oaf is not entirely sane. How could he be? He is an orphan, a refugee, and an alien. His homeland no longer exists in any form, save for gigatons upon gigatons of dangerous, prettily colored rocks.

As a child and young adult, Kal-El must have been hard put to find an adequate father-figure. What human could control his antisocial behavior? What human would dare try to punish him? His actual, highly social behavior during this period indicates an inhuman self-restraint.

What wonder if Superman drifted gradually into schizophrenia? Torn between his human and kryptonian identities, he chose to be both, keeping his split personalities rigidly separate. A psychotic desperation is evident in his defense of his "secret identity."

But Superman's sex problems are strictly physiological, and quite real.

The purpose of this article is to point out some medical drawbacks to being a kryptonian among human beings, and to suggest possible solutions. The kryptonian humanoid must not be allowed to go the way of the pterodactyl and the passenger pigeon.

* Superman first appeared in Action Comics, June 1938.

I.

What turns on a kryptonian?

Superman is an alien, an extraterrestrial. His humanoid frame is doubtless the result of parallel evolution, as the marsupials of Australia resemble their mammalian counterparts. A specific niche in the ecology calls for a certain shape, a certain size, certain capabilities, certain eating habits.

Be not deceived by appearances. Superman is no relative to homo sapiens.

What arouses Kal-El's mating urge? Did kryptonian women carry some subtle mating cue at appropriate times of the year? Whatever it is, Lois Lane probably doesn't have it. We may speculate that she smells wrong, less like a kryptonian woman than like a terrestrial monkey. A mating between Superman and Lois Lane would feel like sodomy-and would be, of course, by church and common law.