time."

"Of course, Eddie," I said.

I had banked on that, hadn't I, when I made my move?

Or did I?

Wasn't it perhaps a matter of knowing that all of it wasn't real and that the safety cutoffs in even a free-choice model of a Dream Machine couldn't let me come to any real harm? I had been suspiciously brave, disarming a dedicated maniac. With only an hour to spare for gym a day, I could barely press 350 pounds. I was hardly in shape for personal combat.

On the other hand, maybe I actually wanted something to go wrong so my sleep sentence would be extended. Or was it that, in some sane part of my mind, I wanted release from unreality badly enough to take any risk to prove that I was morally capable of returning to the real world?

It was a carrousel and I couldn't catch the brass ring no matter how many turns I went spinning through.

I hardly heard Horbit when he half-shouted at me as my men led him from the room. Glancing up sharply, I saw him straining purposefully against the bonds of muscle and narcotic that held him.

"You have to send me back now, Warden," he was shrilling. "You have to! I tried to coerce you with a gun. That's a crime, Warden—you know that's a crime! I have to be put to sleep!"

Keller flicked his mustache with a thick thumbnail. "How about that? You won't let a guy back into the sleepy-bye pads, so he pulls a gun on you to make you, and that makes him eligible. He couldn't lose, Warden. No, sir, he had it made."

My answer to Keller was forming, building up in my jaw muscles, but I took a pill and it went away.

"Hold him in the detention quarters," I said finally. "I'm going to make a study of this."

Keller winked knowingly and sauntered out of the office, his left hand swinging the blackjack the Committee had taken away from him a decade before.

The problem of what to do with Keller wasn't particularly atypical of the ones I had to solve daily and I wasn't going to let that worry me. Much.

I pressed my button to let Mrs. Engle know I was ready for the next interview.

They came. There were the hysterical relatives, the wives and mothers 

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