Jame was awake: lifting his head from his bed, he noticed that all around him his fellows were rising, looks of vacant surprise on their faces. Jame knew he should not be awake, and the thought filled him with fear. With a lurching emptiness his mind yearned for the machine-instilled dreams he had been living an instant ago; a hundred years ago, it seemed to him. He was suffering the classic withdrawn symptoms of an addict, but this piece of knowledge would have been of little help to him. He experienced the ejection from the womb, without the shelter of infancy to protect him.

Gasping, he lifted himself painfully from his bed, trailing a morass of wiring and contacts. Divesting himself from his headress - an Electro-Neural Impulse Amplifier and Transciever - he sat down, with the grace of a falling brick, on a nearby bench. Slowly, he felt life return to his stinging, protesting limbs. When he had recuperated from the physical shook of awakening, he looked around him again. Throughout the dormitory, men were staggering, shambling in aimless paths around the beds. One of the older sleepers had never taken the shock. He lay half out of his bed, that was almost a coffin, dead. One elderly sleeper sat down besides Jame.

"Do you know what happened?" asked the old man.

"I'm not sure. For some reasons the machine don't work anymore."

"Doyou know know why we're in here?" The old man looked through Jame, it seemed, into the past. Jame shook his head. "obviously, you were taught it was the thing to do after the Attainment of Adulthood, but there is a reason beyond the mutterings of an abstract ritualism, you know. You see, it all happened a long time ago, when………."

"I know that, the end of the Time of Progress…………."

"Yes. Man had spent amillion years pulling himself from the mire. He reached the moon, the planets and stopped. It had been prophesied that man could not fly faster than the sun, and despite attempts to achieve the Condition of Hyperspace, man was finally caged. He had nothing left except life on Earth: and could have no more than outposts on the cold surfaces of the planets. People committed suicide, died, stalled, and man was sentenced to an existence of stagnation. There was one solution, the ENIAT, that which you have just left. The Earth became the land of the Lotus-Eaters. You dream of battles, conquests, travel, but never of the dreary monotony faced by mankind in the "Thousand Years of Grey". This is the duty of the machines, to prevent Man from the insanity of life on his own, only world."

The old man was tired. It seemed to Jame that he had aged rapidly in the last ten minutes.

"Now, the old man spoke again, "the machines will never work again. I know. "He stood up and returned to his own bed.

Jame thought. His only memories of the outside world were that of a child, where, patiently trained by his automatic Nurses, he was prepared for Adulthood, a period of mating, and then the dreams. Although he had been persuaded of the wisdom of the Bed, he had no dab memories of the world outside. He remembered his mate, a girl he had only known a few weeks. Decision hit him like the beam of a searchlight. With the fibre of an Ancient, he drew the attention of those still around the dormitory.

"You have a choice" he called, the steel in his voice an emotion as old as man himself, but unused for so many years. "You can stay here, or you can live again," he walked slowly, but with confidence this time, to the outer door. "You can live again out here."

Not looking to see the people who followed him, he stepped outside.

R. Keeley LVI