Does the DUP dream of life after Blair, of sudden popularity for the party in a parliament which is hung, or where Labour has only the slightest majority? Can DUP people believe it to be a strategy to refuse to share power with Sinn Féin, abandon devolution, settle for indefinite direct rule and precarious relevance in a Westminster - a place the party has never liked - all but free of nationalist representation?
The questions may have crept into minds preoccupied with the static northern situation; for all that they invite dismissal.
Previous unionist fixations on favours from minority government fizzled out. David Trimble's predecessor Jim Molyneaux over-estimated his influence with Margaret Thatcher, and was duly humiliated when she signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement. He went on to put store in John Major.
As Major's government limped to a close, nationalists and republicans complained bitterly that he was stalling the peace process because he needed Molyneaux's nine votes.
The Major pace was glacial at times, but he had engaged. When Blair arrived, the preliminary contacts with the IRA had already been made, and an understanding was there to be developed. As Molyneaux famously lamented, the IRA ceasefire was "destabilising". His moment of relevance achieved little.
One school of thought has always held that for the DUP leader the real enemy is not Rome, republicanism or the perfidious Brits, but the once monolithic and superior UUs.
The demise of Stormont would leave a feeble Ulster Unionist party no sizeable stage. The next election might indeed sweep away the lonely Sylvia Hermon and squeeze the SDLP to a single MP, leaving an expanded DUP to speak for Ulster in London all but unchallenged. In idle moments, Paisley may toy with that scenario.
What is more probable is that others in his party console themselves with a rose-tinted picture of the alternative to Stormont, because they fear the dear leader will consign them to it in any case.
Would a beefed-up presence at Westminster replace growing party organisation at home?
The proposed new shape of local government would make the DUP dominant in one half of Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin in the other, with a seventh council balanced. Would that satisfy an appetite whetted by having 33 members of a Legislative Assembly, with more than £1.5 million to spend on office costs?
The Northern Ireland Office's publication this week of the sums at risk brought predictable Paisley contempt: "filthy blackmail", unionism not for sale, etc. Many in the DUP may have listened sadly, impotently.
Paisley alternately glowers and grins on top of the Stormont heap, while lesser mortals in his party cringe, or blink and cross their fingers.
Waiting for the putative First Minister was always going to be unpleasant. After decades of being condemned as a demagogue, knowing that he could destroy UU leaders but not supplant them, it is hardly surprising he relishes his late-won dominance. A lifelong exhibitionist, he is where he loves to be, the centre of attention. Tony Blair and Peter Hain have tried flattery, trinkets, appeals to his sense of leadership, and stern accountancy. They have praised his "courage," and totted up what his party will lose if the Assembly closes.
He took the first as his due - what previous unionist leader has had a brand-new Baroness at home to make his dinner? - and promised re the second that he would tell the prime minister where to get off when he arrived this week.
Whereas he was in welcoming-sovereign mode for Gordon Brown's recent visit; a "son of the Manse" from an Ulster Scots background, Brown would "go the second mile" to be sympathetic to unionism, Paisley declared.
He knows, of course, that Brown is unlikely to tear up the process that Blair has struggled for so long to preserve. But the spell when ill-health seemed to cloud the formidable Paisley mind and shake his command of language has passed, as though it never existed.
Those critical months when the leader looked and sounded his age may have given some DUP lieutenants the illusion of control - a sense, maybe, of a Blair-Brown type interregnum, where they should prepare for life after Paisley.
He is on top of his game again, on top of his universe. His party should know their place: the Paisley image is what matters. This is a man basking in the attention of the political world who believes his options are open.
He can go for devolution and the number one slot, or stay aloof from the compromises of government and coast towards retirement as the man who never sold out.
Given his often unpredictable patterns of activity, it is entirely possible he himself does not know which way he will jump in the end.
In the Paisley mindset, arguments for and against holding out for a hung parliament may be no more than noises off-stage.