Hal's tennis-court dream (p. 68)
The umpire whispers Please Play. We sort of play. But it’s all hypothetical, somehow. Even the ‘we’ is theory: I never get quite to see the distant opponent, for all the apparatus of the game.
Context
The dream's close, and the nearest the anthology gets to solipsism stated as tennis: all the apparatus of a public match, and no verifiable other on the far side. It stages, as dread, the doctrine Schtitt will preach two scenes later as liberation — the true opponent being the player himself.