sparkling trugrass lawn. No more rats scampering across her back yard. No noisy sea gulls circling overhead.

She felt sorry for Ralph. He would probably die in the dump. He'd end his days in some dirty shack, slurping up mulligan stew. He'd die alone, some dismal night, while the dump fires flickered and the filthy rats squealed and scuttled in the darkness.

After the first week she got to know some of her new neighbors. There were twenty-nine other units on her block, each with its own trugrass lawn. Some, like hers, boasted a simulated maple tree. Others were graced with one of the permajade juniper bushes. She was welcomed warmly. They were all very friendly, all very polite. She never mentioned the dump. They talked about the past as if it were life on another planet. They talked about their favorite programs on the entertaintime screen, about where they had gone on the monthly tronicar excursions sponsored by the State. They talked about their illnesses.

And yet, it seemed to Lucy Leeson, they did not actually talk very much. Perhaps it was too much effort. Mostly they just sat in front of their entertaintime screens and watched. Most of their meals they could swallow in capsule form without even moving from their foamease chairs.

The weeks came and went and finally a man appeared one morning and sprayed the trugrass lawn a uniform brown. A week or so later he came back, worked a mechanism at the base of the simulated maple tree and all the bright green leaves curled up tight and invisible against the limbs. It was autumn.

The man told her they had tried leaving everything green all year round, but in the long run the people didn't approve of it. They liked to look out, some fine spring morning, and see the trugrass lawn and the maple trees unexpectedly green again. The service men came just before dawn to spray the lawns and unfold the maple leaves.

It was a landscaping marvel. The grass never had to be cut and Lucy knew that the simulated maple tree would never be over eight feet tall. No pruning, no troublesome roots, no falling leaves to rake.

Her only criticism was that the birds seemed to avoid both lawn and tree. She looked out, rather wistfully, in hopes of seeing a bird. But she rarely saw one. She remembered with a pang of nostalgia the red-winged blackbirds which descended on the cattails bordering the dump every spring. They were such bright, frolicsome, saucy creatures! But they never flew over 

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