It can’t be the case that everything is in fact nothing, or that it’s all a dream, that we’re all made of nothing but dream-stuff. So the screenwriter thinks, who’s trying to discern the difference between dreams and nothingness, although he prefers the idea of a bubble, or something similar, floating around in space, in which we all dream our own individual dreams — some sad, some happy, others hellish, and just a few like paradise — but all of them together constituting a single collective dream, which is that same bubble floating around in space. And when we dream within the dream, our souls enter a region outside time and space where we find — perhaps a better word is “visit”—where we visit an event that happened either before or after the moment we fell asleep. Hence the ability to dream of something that hasn’t happened yet, and who knows, maybe this would even allow for a man to dream he’s shaking hands with his own departed ghost. The screenwriter returns to the previous scene, in which the girl’s still waiting in her father’s hotel room. Her luggage is all packed and waiting beside the front door. On the table, a few half-crumpled pages suggest a writer’s unsuccessful attempts at self-resuscitation. The last thing she wrote was a kind of variation on the theme of the previous chapter. Nothing new, in other words. She thinks her inspiration has dried up, so she resorts to repetition, which gives her the illusion that she’s making progress, because at least she’s writing something. She counts the number of days she’s been writing. She feels being hypnotized was like someone’s putting a time bomb in her brain; that far from being responsible for her creativity, it ended up compromising it. She can’t stomach the image of herself writing under the eyes of people who know she’s been hypnotized. It’s horrible. Her father has spoken to her several times about the need for both inspiration and perspiration, that it’s no good having the strength to achieve something if one hasn’t the will. Before leaving, she decides to give it another shot. She turns on the laptop. If she can manage even a couple of lines, she thinks, all her problems will go away. Most people are happy to do their dreaming at night, when they’re asleep. They say it keeps them sane. Well, it’s writing that keeps the girl sane. It’s something like a drug that helps her dream by day. “5.153 In itself, a No World is neither probable nor improbable. Either a No World occurs or it does not: there is no middle way. The old professor is reading the philosopher W in one of the many dim and dank derelict buildings in the City in Outer Space. Little does he know that all his suffering, this terrible life he leads, is down to his being a hunter of aliens who doesn’t know he’s an alien himself.” The girl then consults some notes she wrote previously, but finds nothing that galvanizes her. A couple of pages, at least! she implores, as if supplicating a deity to let some crumbs of inspiration fall from his table — or perhaps an alien from another galaxy, the same one who constantly sends her messages about Ka; either way, a being who could answer her prayer. She’s read of the possibility of becoming a God oneself. It is achieved in stages — perhaps they’re degrees of enlightenment — the last being the stage at which one can finally create a world of one’s own. When she thinks about it, it’s not much different from wanting to become a writer. The girl places the old professor in a modest room where he’ll spend his days waiting for the female student to visit him. He’s not sure she’ll ever come, but he clings to the hope she will. The girl wonders if the professor carries any false documents. No, he’s not like her father, she thinks, despite the fact that he’s an alien hunter who doesn’t have a license. In reality, he wouldn’t even know where to get a license. Before finding a job, he’d probably take some time out to think about the future. The girl tries to decide how much time he’d have before the police came to arrest him. She wonders if it will be his wife, the director of the Academy, or one of the female student’s parents who’ll get the police involved. He’d probably feel safe in the City in Outer Space, since it’s out of the terrestrial police’s jurisdiction. They wouldn’t bother chasing him into space anyway, not on the paltry charge of sleeping with one of his students. At least, that’s what the girl thinks. She chronicles the arrival of the old philosophy professor at his new home, his first tentative steps of acclimation to his new environment — getting used to the false gravity, to the simulated days and nights, to the way the space colony’s regulated, to the shapes of the buildings, the streets. . She begins with the line: An alien hunter with minimal experience stands with his luggage in front of his new home, wishing he could know, or at least have a good idea, how the adventure he’s begun is going to end. The girl gets up, nervously lights a cigarette, and ambles onto the balcony to smoke it. The screenwriter lights a cigarette and opens the window to aerate the room, then lifts his feet onto the sill, and leans back in his chair. More so than a writer, he feels like a detective following a variety of leads, any of which could either help or hinder his investigation. That is, trying to find ways of developing an already impossible plotline. He needs to link a series of set pieces, each belonging to a different scene, because he thinks it will help move his story along. He thinks about the screenplays that were written in the golden age, that long-since vanished epoch. What great films they became, he thinks. Nowadays, the devices he uses are considered hackneyed, perhaps even obsolete. When he’s done writing, he doesn’t know if he’ll have the energy to finish up the dialogue with another screenwriter; and he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to put in all the changes the director, the producer, and the secretary who sleeps with them will want him to make. The girl’s having a hard time concentrating. Even so, he thinks, at least she knows where she is, where the old professor in her story is — waiting in his modest room for a female student who may never show up. And that’s all he