"Why, it's the logical step forward in penal servitude. Man has been heading toward this since he first started civilizing himself. After all, some criminals can't be helped psychiatrically. We can't execute them or turn them free; we have to imprison them."

I waited for Coleman's reaction. He merely nodded.

"Of course, it's barbaric to think of a prison as a place of punishment," I continued. "A prison is a place to keep a criminal away from society for a specific time so he can't harm that society for that time. Punishment, rehabilitation, all of it is secondary to that. The purpose of confinement is confinement."

The councilman edged forward an inch. "And you really think Dreamland is the most humane confinement possible?"

"Well," I hedged, "it's the most humane we've found yet. I suppose living through a—uh—movie with full sensory participation for year after year can get boring."

"I should think so," Coleman said emphatically. "Warden, don't you sometimes feel the old system where the prisoners had the diversions of riots, solitary confinement, television, and jailbreaks may have made time easier to serve? Do these men ever think they are actually living these vicarious adventures?"

That was a question that made all of us in the Dreamland service uneasy. "No, Councilman, they don't. They know they aren't really Alexander of Macedonia, Tarzan, Casanova, or Buffalo Bill. They are conscious of all the time that is being spent out of their real lives; they know they have relatives and friends outside the dream. They know, unless—"

Coleman lifted a dark eyebrow above a black iris. "Unless?"

I cleared my throat. "Unless they go mad and really believe the dream they are living. But as you know, sir, the rate of madness among Dreamland inmates is only slightly above the norm for the population as a whole."

"How do prisoners like that adjust to reality?"

Was he deliberately trying to ask tough questions? "They don't. They think they are having some kind of delusion. Many of them become schizoid and pretend to go along with reality while secretly 'knowing' it to be a lie."

Coleman removed a pocket secretary and broke it open. "About these new free-choice models—do you think they genuinely are an improvement over the old fixed-image 

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