uptly.

"The trouble is, I'm not sure you aren't right," his son continued. "You
say you find me--changed. When did you first notice a difference?"

"Last night, you were still my little boy. This morning--" Blake Hartley
was talking more to himself than to Allan. "I don't know. You were
unusually silent at breakfast. And come to think of it, there was
something ... something strange ... about you when I saw you in the
hall, upstairs.... Allan!" he burst out, vehemently. "What has happened
to you?"

Allan Hartley felt a twinge of pain. What his father was going through
was almost what he, himself, had endured, in the first few minutes after
waking.

"I wish I could be sure, myself, Dad," he said. "You see, when I woke,
this morning, I hadn't the least recollection of anything I'd done
yesterday. August 4, 1945, that is," he specified. "I was positively
convinced that I was a man of forty-three, and my last memory was of
lying on a stretcher, injured by a bomb explosion. And I was equally
convinced that this had happened in 1975."

"Huh?" His father straightened. "Did you say nineteen _seventy_-five?"
He thought for a moment. "That's right; in 1975, you will be
forty-three. A bomb, you say?"

Allan nodded. "During the siege of Buffalo, in the Third World War," he
said, "I was a captain in G5--Scientific Warfare, General Staff. There'd
been a transpolar air invasion of Canada, and I'd been sent to the front
to check on service failures of a new lubricating oil for combat
equipment. A week after I got there, Ottawa fell, and the retreat
started. We made a stand at Buffalo, and that was where I copped it. I
remember being picked up, and getting a narcotic injection. The next
thing I knew, I was in bed, upstairs, and it was 1945 again, and I was
back in my own little thirteen-year-old body."

"Oh, Allan, you just had a nightmare to end nightmares!" his father
assured him, laughing a trifle too heartily. "That's all!"

"That was one of the first things I thought of. I had to reject it; it
just wouldn't fit the facts. Look; a normal dream is part of the
dreamer's own physical brain, isn't it? Well, here is a part about two
thousand per cent greater than the whole from which it was taken. Which
is absurd."

"You mean all this Battle of Buffalo stuff? That's easy. All the radio
commentators have been harping on the horrors of World War III, and you
couldn't have avoided hearing some of it. You just have an undigested