prisoners could help him, I couldn't see.

"Warden Walker," Coleman intoned in his magnificent voice, "I'm shocked. I am not personally monitoring your Dream. The Committee as a whole will decide whether you are capable of returning to the real world. Moreover, please don't get carried away. I'm not concerned with what you do to this sensory projection of myself, beyond how it helps to establish your moral capabilities."

"I suppose," I said heavily, "that I could best establish my high moral character by excusing you from this penal sentence?"

"Not at all," Councilman Coleman asserted. "According to the facts as you know them, I am 'guilty' and must be confined."

I was stymied for an instant. I had expected him to say that I must know that he was incapable of committing such an error and I must pardon him despite the misguided rulings of the courts. Then I thought of something else.

"You show symptoms of being a habitual criminal, Coleman. I think you deserve life."

Coleman cocked his head thoughtfully, concerned. "That seems rather extreme, Warden."

"You would suggest a shorter sentence?"

"If it were my place to choose, yes. A few years, perhaps. But life—no, I think not."

I threw up my hands. You don't often see somebody do that, but I did. I couldn't figure him. Coleman had wealth and power as a councilman in the real world, but I had thought somehow he wanted to escape to a Dream world. Yet he didn't want to be in for life, the way Paulson and Horbit did.

There seemed to be no point or profit in what he had told me that morning, nothing in it for him.

Unless—

Unless what he said was literally true.

I stood up. My knees wanted to quit halfway up, but I made it. "This," I said, "is a difficult decision for me, sir. Would you make yourself comfortable here for a time, Councilman?"

Coleman smiled benignly. "Certainly, Warden."

I walked out of my office, slowly and carefully.

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