“You are not dead, my son.”

“Please don’t tell me all I’m having is a drunken dream. Kitty warned me to take it easy, and I did. Is that it, Joseph? Am I dreaming all this?”

Joseph’s throaty laugh echoed off the high ceiling. “One from your own profession would have enjoyed answering that question for you.”

“One from my own …? Who?”

“Samuel L. Clemens. Mark Twain, as he preferred to call himself. He once wrote that life is only a vision, a dream.”

Bless my encyclopedic memory. “The Mysterious Stranger! Read it a long time ago. Didn’t Twain write that everything is a dream—God, man, the world, the sun—and that nothing exists except some empty space; that all of us are but thoughts?”

“Exactly.”

“Please, let’s forget Twain’s problems and concentrate on mine. You tell me I haven’t been kidnapped and I’m not dead and this is not a dream. So where am I and what am I doing here? Is someone—one of my friends—playing an expensive joke on me? That’s it! Lemmon is behind this, and this time he’s really outdone himself. Am I in Caesar’s Palace?”

Joseph frowned. “On Capri? No, no, no.”

“Not Capri,” I replied sarcastically, “Vegas.”

Once more Joseph laughed until his eyes watered, but he cut it short when he saw I was serious. “No, Matthias,” he said softly, “this is not Las Vegas.”

“Then tell me, man, where am I and what am I doing here?”

Joseph heaved a loud sigh and lowered himself to a stone bench near the couch, staring intently at his open hands as if he were trying to read his own palms. His voice was so low that I had to lean forward in order to hear his words. “My son, it is all very complicated and yet very simple. A short time ago you made some very strong pronouncements on a television program that is seen and heard by countless millions.”

Sudden chill! Ice cubes down my back. Warily I asked, “You mean my statements about Jesus and the resurrection being nothing more than a hoax?”

His warm brown eyes suddenly became slits of undisguised hostility. “The world has been exposed to ideas such as yours for twenty centuries. Scoffers since the time of Nero have done everything in their power to destroy the faith of those who choose to believe in Jesus. But you, Matthias, because of the age in which you live, are more important than a hundred Neroes. And because of man’s amazing progress in the science of communication, it is not unreasonable to conclude that when someone with your widespread reputation and importance speaks out, as you did, his words have an almost instantaneous impact on the entire world.”

“How can the truth hurt humanity, Joseph? Shakespeare once wrote, ‘While you live, tell the truth and shame the devil.’ ”