"You'll find all these things out in time, Chuck," Keir said. "I'll be back very shortly. Just wait a little, eh?"

Chuck twisted his mouth in a disgruntled pout. "I don't like having to wait all the time."

"You need to learn to share," Keir said. "It's good for you."

"I share all the time at home," Chuck grumbled. "That's not what I worked so hard to get here for."

Keir ignored his interruption.

"And, when I'm not here with you, you will have the mental space to contemplate and formulate questions to ask me when I come back to you. If you have a burning need to know something, I will be here, but you would be amazed at the long gaps in between moments of inspiration, if you only stopped to observe."

The answer didn't satisfy Chuck, but Keir was again out of reach, putting out a gently reassuring hand to the large-eyed entreaty of the blond woman in white. From there he sat down beside the withdrawn man in tweeds. Chuck frowned. This wasn't at all what he had in mind for such an important and sacred journey. The others must not realize that they were having to sacrifice part of their personal quests for the sake of strangers, or they might be upset, too. He would bring that unfairness up just as soon as Keir came back to talk with him.

"Master Chuck," Mrs. Flannel said, holding her pet up next to her face. Spot was now a handsome ocicat with leopardlike markings. "Do tell the story about the answering machine again. I want Spot to hear it!" The cat blinked large, green eyes at him.

Oh, well, someone was paying attention to him. Chuck sat back, took a deep breath and launched into one of his favorite jokes.

"Tickets, please. Tickets!" The authoritative voice of the conductor rang through the car. Chuck glanced up from the lively conversation he was enjoying with Mrs. Flannel and Mr. Bolster. What a mixed cultural experience this train trip was turning out to be. The conductor sounded English, like Bergold, but the train was passing through flat, swampy terrain that looked like part of the Netherlands. Those were windmills dotting the flat, green land. But if this was a vision of Holland, what was that lacquered pagoda doing there? And the black cutout billboard of a bull-where was that from? It was all a jumble. He didn't see how anomalies like this would aid him in his journey to find enlightenment. You never could tell where you were.

"Tickets, madam? Sir? Sir?" The voice was very loud, and right next to him. Chuck looked up. The conductor, a burly, red-faced man in a neat black uniform trimmed with red, looked sternly down at him. "May I see your ticket, sir?"

"Why, sure," Chuck said. He began to feel in his pockets. The sweatshirt he was wearing didn't have one, and the pockets in the jeans were empty. Funny, he didn't remember being given a ticket. He looked over at Keir who sat perched on the arm of a seat in the aisle, but the wizened little man was watching him with detachment. Chuck plowed through his hazy memory. The spirit guide had told him something about identification before he'd left home. He had been told to hold fast to it, because it was the only thing he needed to get where he was going. He knew he possessed identity cards, a wallet full of them-although not here. He searched harder. He must have had a ticket to get this far. Maybe he'd missed it in his haste. He stood up and began to go through his pockets again.

"Come, come, sir," the conductor said. "People are waiting."

"But I don't have anything," Chuck said, frustratedly. "Wait . . . here it is!" He felt the outline of a card in the double pocket on his right hip. He pulled out a square of white cardboard and handed it over. The conductor turned it and looked at both sides.

"I'm sorry, sir, this is blank."

"What?" Chuck asked in disbelief.

"There's nothing on this at all."

The conductor displayed the card. Chuck stared.

"There's some kind of mistake," he said. "That's all I've got on me. Really."

"We don't wish to cause any kind of a fuss, sir," the conductor said, pulling a full-sized clipboard out of his waistcoat pocket. "Maybe we can do it in another way. Name?"

"Chuck. Chuck Meadows." Anxiously he watched the frowning conductor study his list.

"Hmmm . . ." The official peered up at him out of the corner of his eye. "Are you sure, sir? The image we have doesn't match your description, sir. Are you sure you know who you are?"

"Why, yes, I . . . no, not really," Chuck said, now feeling desperate. The train began to vibrate more vigorously under his feet. He looked to Keir for help. "I've been having trouble remembering things ever since I got here."

The conductor was professionally brisk. "I'm sorry, sir. Without proof, you could be anybody.

Passage was booked for a Mr. Chuck Meadows. If you're the wrong person, we shall have to put you off the train."

By then, the landscape was hurtling by outside at a furious rate. They must have been going 200 miles an hour. If they tossed him off now, he'd be killed. Chuck gulped, and patted down his pockets once again. His right-hand pants pocket disgorged a red-painted wooden yo-yo that hadn't been there before. How could he have missed something bulky like that? Or the pocket knife with a dozen blades in his breast pocket? A moment ago he hadn't had a breast pocket. Suddenly there were dozens of pockets, attached to pants legs, sleeves, and the front and back of the sweatshirt, which was growing down his body and arms like jungle vines. He pushed the heavy sleeves up over his hands and dipped into every one. Most were empty, but some of them had things in them. He dropped the contents on his seat one after another: magazine, umbrella, cheese sandwich with one bite taken out of it, bag of transparent blue dice in weird shapes, five corks, an indignant, small pig in a sequined tutu, and a potato. No wallet. Chuck looked helplessly at the conductor and shook his head.

"You see, this is what you should look like, if you are really Mr. Meadows," the conductor said. He turned the clipboard toward him. The picture of a man's face shrunk rapidly from the size of a book down to that of a lollipop. Chuck peered at the tiny image, which continued to shrink obstinately until all he could see was a roundish, blobby, over-exposed dot with shadows for eyes and curves for nose and mouth. It didn't look much like the visage he had seen reflected back at him in the make-believe jet. He felt pressure in his cheeks. His hands flew to his face. His cheekbones swelled and receded, moving up and down under his skin like burrowing animals. His nose flattened out, grew thin, turned up, turned down, grew broad, then narrow as a knife blade. A bump bulged at the bridge, then subsided, appearing again at the tip. His chin sawed in and out like a slide trombone, and his skin bubbled and boiled in a wild variety of color, texture and hairiness. His whole face was changing! He looked wildly around for Keir. His fellow travelers were staring at him in horror. Was he becoming a monster?

"Now, now, sir, no need for all that!" The conductor seemed suddenly much shorter than he had a - moment ago. No, he wasn't; Chuck had grown a foot taller. His body was now long enough to fit the oversized sweatshirt, adding acres of arms and legs that were awkward to manage. His limbs wobbled dangerously, and Chuck looked down in panic. The next moment the whole mass of him collapsed, until he contained the same mass as before, but all compressed into a short, fat body with short, fat legs and arms which were too short to reach any of his pockets. His midsection flattened out until he was no more than an inch thick but two yards wide. His arms stuck straight out like a scarecrow's.

"Sir, there's no need to become ugly about this," the conductor said.

Ugly? Was he ugly? Chuck wished he could see a mirror. Oh, he knew he was turning into a - monster! He watched with horror as hair sprouted out of the backs of his distorted, sprung-knuckled hands. His nails, now claws, lengthened and curled around until they were talons. Even his skin turned a deathly shade of green. Oh, heck, was he growing scales? Chuck's panic took him around the throat like a rope, cutting off his air. He fell on his back, gasping, holding out his taloned paws for help.

Someone had to make him human again.

Suddenly, Keir was on his knees beside him, the round, dark eyes looking deeply into his, the bushy beard close enough to tickle his nose. Keir's calm, thin voice soothed his terror-stricken nerves.

"You are calling yourself Chuck," Keir said, as peacefully as if he was reading a bedtime story.

"Chuck Meadows. Whether or not that is your name when you walk in the Waking World, it is your nom de reve here. Now, calm down and pull yourself together."

He couldn't. He didn't know where or what he was! He was used to his skin holding him all together, but it was failing him. He was a formless blob, and his vision stretched more than 180 degrees around his body. Everyone in the car was staring at him, humiliating him to the last degree. He felt himself pulled like taffy, out to infinity, encompassing his whole being within the form that suddenly had no boundaries, stretching everything along with him.

The others in the car broke into protests, as they began to widen out like pictures on a rubber sheet.

Poor Mrs. Flannel looked like wash on a line, and Kenner billowed like a ship in full sail.

"Steady on, man," Bolster protested, reeling in yards of arms and beating his bowler hat back into shape with floppy hands. "Contain yourself! Find one thing and stick with it!"

Oh, no, Chuck thought, caught up in the power of suggestion. He was no longer a person, but a thing. He was ashamed of himself for causing everybody distress. His hands became petals as he turned into a shy flower. The petals spread out into a banner that said "Welcome," plastered across his now flattened chest. People always said he was a doormat, and now he had become one! He felt like such a heel to be wasting everyone's time. His arms were limp shoelaces getting in the way of his vision because they were laced through his eyelets. He tried to apologize to everyone but his tongue was tied tightly underneath the shoelaces. Keir grabbed the aiglets and held them tight until they fleshed out into hands once again.

"Stop this! Now, who are you? Come on! Who? No, don't try to answer all the things that you are.

Just concentrate on one."

Chuck screwed his eyeholes shut, and concentrated. "I'm a man," he said indistinctly, his tongue flapping against his uppers.

"You're a man, you said," said Keir urgently. His tone of voice made Chuck listen intently. "Just a man. Not a shoe, or a doormat, or a shrinking violet. I know it's not easy, but you have to try. Be a man."

Chuck focused hard, trying to pay no attention to the eyes he knew were on him, to the ache of his twisted and sewn body. He'd never known how uncomfortable it was to be a shoe! Keir's voice droned softly in his ears, giving him an anchor to cling to. He began to feel a kind of detachment as he relaxed. His arms unlaced themselves from his tongue and unthreaded from his eye sockets. His legs unfolded out of nowhere. Twisted thread became sleeves that receded from his fingertips and slid back until they ended at his wristbone. His legs, decently slim, were clad in comfortable, familiar-seeming twill pants. The running shoes on his feet weren't what he remembered having, but he never did pay much attention to shoes. He would, now, knowing the suffering of their existence. He stared at them for a whole minute, and they stayed the same, indifferent to his sympathy.

"There, are you feeling better?" Keir asked. Chuck realized the guide had been sitting beside him for a while without talking. Chuck glanced at himself in the window glass. He looked different than he had on the plane, fine-boned and dark-skinned with black hair cropped close to his skull. "You're a human being again. Self-actualized for almost certainly the first time in your life, I imagine."

"I don't think this is how I look when I'm awake, either," Chuck said. "But I'm not sure."

"Probably not," Keir said. "But that isn't important right now. You'll find it is very difficult to hang on to one face in the Dreamland. In fact, no one tries."

"Do people in this plane go through this all the time?"

"Oh, yes," his mentor said. "Many of them have it under control. Many don't. Those fall under others' influence all the time, and are forced to live a different reality from the one they would otherwise choose."

"I won't do that again," Chuck said, with resolve.

"But you will. You have no choice. You already are," Keir pointed out, with a smile. "Didn't you just say this is not how you are at home? And how are you at home, exactly how you want to be?"

"I didn't think of it that way," Chuck said. "But I will stick to my own reality from now on, once I decide what that is." Chuck kept glancing at himself in the glass. The strange face met him eye to eye again. There was really no doubt that was him. He checked behind to make certain nobody else who looked like that was there. "I suppose I can get used to it."

"Good! In the meantime," Keir said, giving him a hearty slap on the knee, "decide what it is you are here, what you want here, and stick to it. That way you won't go off in all directions like that again."

Chuck scowled at him. "If you'd been here to guide me, I might have been able to stop before the changing got all out of hand. You were over talking to him." Chuck tilted his head impatiently toward Sean Draper.

"Listen here," the guide said earnestly, pulling Chuck's ear down close to his mouth. "I wasn't - going to say anything, but I have to. You're a good-hearted man, you said. You don't have anything against anyone else, you said." He pointed with a sharp forefinger, stabbing the air. "That man over there was not originally part of this group. He came to us very suddenly. He's got a terrible crisis to work through, not an easy life like yours where you feel a little out of sorts. A real problem!"

Chuck exploded. "I am not a little 'out of sorts'! I'm miserable! I hate being me!"

"But you have more choices than he has," Keir said.

Sensing he was being discussed, Draper turned his gray-blue eyes toward Chuck. In them he could read real pain. He felt ashamed of himself. It was self-indulgent for him to fuss about not being given everything he wanted, when he was probably better off than so many others.

Chuck reddened until the glow of his face was reflected in the warm homespun cloth of Keir's - tunic. "I'm so sorry. I didn't know . . . I thought . . . You know, sometimes I'm my own worst enemy."

Keir grinned, his narrow chin sharpening to a point as his cheeks pulled upward. He slapped Chuck on the shoulder. "Aren't we all? All right, things are more or less calm for the moment. What do you want to do first?"

Chuck's mind raced down the list of all the profound questions he had about life and existence that he had worked out over all the months he'd been studying meditation, but the first one that came out of his mouth was, "What just happened to me?"

"A good question! Live in the here and now." Keir sat down on his chair arm, which widened out and thickened with padding into a comfortable seat. "You lost control of your shape, Chuck. In order to keep it the way you want it, within certain parameters, of course, you have to learn how to manage influence."

Chuck raised his eyebrows. "What's that?"

"Influence! It's the power you have to change things. A lot like it is in the Waking World, but here much more directly responsive. You exert your influence at home, and things change subtly, but maybe not physically. Here, it affects everything, right up to the weather, and right down to every molecule in your body. Lesson one: Remember the three F's."

"Don't you mean the three R's?"

Keir shrugged. "You can spell it that way if you insist, but it stands for 'Form Follows Function.'

You want the shape of what you're doing to be a variant of the material you're working from, or else you'll spend all your energy justifying the alteration, not making use of the manifestation.""Huh?"

"I'll put it this way," Keir said, patiently. "Food is food. Shelter is shelter. Your perception is what makes the difference in appearance, but its use is the same. That's all. You exert energy to change the shape of something within the range of its function as you perceive it. If you can change your concept of its use, you can open up the same object to another entire string of variations. Got that? Try it!" Keir held out a candy bar. "See what you can do with this."

Panicking, Chuck felt his mind stretching again, but he slapped his hands over his ears and pulled inward. He concentrated hard on having a normal head. He felt a distinct snap as his cranium resumed its proper shape. No more out-of-control changing. He wasn't going to let that happen again. Having gotten his head back together, he put out a very tentative hand and accepted the candy bar.

It looked like a normal bar of chocolate: a narrow rectangle about twice as wide as it was long, and an eighth as thick as it was wide. The orange and red label was unfamiliar, but the delicious smell was unmistakable.

"What does this mean to you?" Keir asked.

"What does it mean to me?" Chuck echoed, puzzled. "It's a snack."

"Good, good, but let's go into free association." Keir tapped it with a sharp forefinger. "What are other things that this object could mean to you?"

"Uh," Chuck brought his forehead down to his balled fists, thinking hard. "Trick or treat, something my grandfather used to buy me when I was five, bribe my friend's sister gave us for not telling her parents on her. Um, food, object of desire, boost, pick-me-up, happiness . . . ?"

"That's good to begin with," Keir interrupted him. "Food's too easy. Let's take bribe. That's an interesting association, and it'll give you a lot of contrast to compare with. Concentrate on the candy bar and remember the sister offering it to you. That'll fix the function in your mind. What other kinds of things do you consider bribes?"

Chuck focused on the candy bar, but he couldn't imagine it being anything but what he saw before him. It was a bar of chocolate with almonds. Keir was studying him. This was the first pitfall in his study of his inner self. He mustn't fail on the earliest challenge put to him. Chuck blurted out the first thing that came into his mind.

"Well, money," he said, uncertainly. "Tickets to the ball game. Uh, doughnuts?" To his amazement, the shape of the package shifted, flattening out and turning from red and orange to a green-gray wad of bills, then dividing and flattening out completely into two rectangles of white cardboard printed in rainbow colors. Just as swiftly, the pair of tickets metamorphosed into two frosted rings of pastry sprinkled with multicolored jimmies. Chuck felt the weight of the doughnuts, faintly warm and just a trifle greasy on his palm. They smelled as good as the chocolate bar, but sweeter and heady with yeast.

Chuck watched the transformation wondering if he hadn't fallen asleep and was dreaming. The whole thing was impossible, like something out of a movie. Chocolate didn't turn into money or doughnuts!

He gawked at Keir. But then, old men didn't turn into dolphins or angels, either. His perception had to change.

The doughnuts were real. He broke off a piece of one, and yellow crumbs dribbled out between his fingers. He tasted it. The cake squashed pleasantly between his tongue and palate, and sugar melted in his mouth. It was real.

"And we're back again to snacks," the guide said, with a nod. "That's very interesting, isn't it? It says something deeper about you, but we won't go into that right now. You're a good pupil. Your mental images are very clear. Try it on your own now."

"How?" was all Chuck could croak out in a throat tight with amazement.

"You exerted influence," Keir said. "Unconsciously, because you didn't believe it would work. But you ought to now. If you can't believe your own eyes, you wouldn't be believing in this reality, now would you?"

"I suppose so." Chuck thought hard. If he could make money into doughnuts, maybe he could make something more difficult, change his perception, as Keir had said. He frowned at the broken pastry.

What in the world was exactly opposite to doughnuts? How about . . . a tree stump? He picked up the undamaged doughnut and put it on the floor, which was rocking with the movement of the train.

Concentrate. His meditation studies helped him to focus intently. All he could see was the doughnut.

Turn to wood, he thought at it.

Nothing happened. The doughnut just sat there looking delicious. Chuck frowned. Working influence must not be just like telepathy, then. Was there a more personal, physical connection? Maybe he had to be the doughnut. How would it feel to be a snack pastry? He'd done plenty of exercises in the past few months where books asked him to imagine himself in situations that would be embarrassing if he had not been alone. Doughnutism, er, doughnutity? doughnutness?-was far less humiliating than . . . well, better to forget about those times and concentrate on the task at hand.

He tried to picture a personal connection. The cushiony cake part was simple. He'd always considered himself to be an easygoing guy. The hardest part was wondering what in him corresponded to the hole in the middle. Then, it struck him: a hole was the perfect symbol for the inner emptiness that had driven him here. Who'd ever think that a doughnut would have cosmic significance? They did have a lot in common. That made it a lot easier for him to reach out for it. Now, he could feel something, as though the air was spongy and tangible, and the round shape caused a bulge out toward Chuck that he could sense with his outstretched fingertips. Now, if Keir was right, he could make it change by pushing on it somehow. Be a tree root, he thought at the doughnut. Be . . . cosmically strong, the underpinning of a great tree. Yeah, that sounded good.

To his surprise, the doughnut seemed to shudder. Its sandy surface pleated and became craggy as the toroid figure stretched and unrolled into an irregular tube. Its matter shifted, trying to contract back into a round shape. Chuck felt sweat start on his forehead as he felt his mind force the tube to keep stretching. When he relaxed for a moment, it snapped into a wooden ring, exactly like a doughnut but with bark frosting.

Tree root, darn it! Chuck thought. It shuddered visibly and took the form of a knobby tree root, except that it was made of puff pastry. As Chuck stared, the root became a cupcake with a tree painted in icing on the crown. Then it transformed into a perfect Buche de Noel, complete with meringue mushrooms. Chuck reached out to touch it, and the whole thing collapsed in a heap of crumbs.

"What am I doing wrong?" he asked Keir.

"You're fighting against the nature of dreamstuff," Keir said. "Didn't you hear? Form follows function, I said. Stay with the type of thing you're restructuring, and you'll succeed much better."

"I am!" Chuck said. "It's . . . it's a metaphor for me." He felt his face burn as Persemid snickered.

Keir clucked his tongue. "That's a lot to ask of a little doughnut. This is just your first time working with influence. Try a change more tied to a plausible physical reality."

"All right," Chuck said, focusing in again. Think snack, he told himself. The pile of golden crumbs responded at once, gathering themselves together as if drawn up by a vacuum, first into a crumb cake, then a neat, shiny-topped pound cake loaf. Chuck sat back on his heels, pleased. He looked up at Keir.

"Very good," Keir said. His eyebrows waggled encouragingly. He picked the cake up from the floor. "Try something else."

Inspired, Chuck stood up and felt in his many pockets. He had an idea. Wasn't there a piece of paper or two that he had fished out while looking for his ticket? He came up with a picture postcard of the Eiffel Tower. He grinned. That would work even better than a plain page. He tore it into a dozen odd-shaped pieces and put them on the arm of his chair, which widened out into a table. As he rearranged the pieces into the right order, he thought, Jigsaw puzzle. He actually felt something in the air shifting as the torn borders advanced and receded, forming the knobs and bays of a classic puzzle.

But the pieces were still thin as paper. He must be able to thicken them. Taking one between his fingers, he plucked at the edges, pulling outward, picturing many layers of cardboard laminated to one another, like all the puzzles he had played with as a child. Gratifyingly, he felt the piece grow thicker and more solid. He picked up the next one, and made it twice as deep as the first before he realized that he would have to control the shape, not count on it to stop when it was the right size. Now the acid test: would they all fit together? Chuck pushed the pieces around until the Eiffel Tower was arranged the right way. It looked good. He pushed down on the last piece, which settled satisfyingly into place with a brief hiss of cardboard. His seatmates murmured approvingly.

"Go on," Keir said. "Let's play some jazz on this theme. Take the next step."