the trugrass lawns.

After a while, Lucy stopped visiting her neighbors. For some reason which she could not specifically name, they depressed her. They were old and listless and often ill, but it was more than that.

At length she knew the reason. They were dead; they were corpses waiting for interment. They would be transferred from the plastic prefabs to State permaplastic coffins with scarcely a groan of protest. They were just waiting for death, day after day. Consciously, they swallowed their capsules, read their daily newstapes and sat with their eyes riveted on the screens. But subconsciously they had stopped living. Subconsciously they longed for death to release them from the bondage of State security, State brainwashing, the bland and eternal aura of State assurance and reassurance.

She began to feel that she was being smothered to death in the plastic prefab. She grew to loathe the food capsules. The endless entertaintime programs finally filled her with boredom. The newstapes were some diversion but she resented them because she sensed that all the news had been too carefully sifted and predigested beforehand.

She stared out at the meek leafless tree and hated it. Sometimes she sat on the floor because she was so tired of the foamease chair. Once she pressed the "Dispensary" button just to see what would happen, but she never tried it again because she was subjected to a tedious two-hour examination which left her exhausted and taut with irritation. The examination was thorough but so impersonal she was left feeling like an inanimate object.

She no longer had nightmares about the dump rats but now a new and even more terrifying dream haunted her sleep. She dreamed that the State, unable to supply prefabs fast enough to meet the thousands of new applicants, secretly filled some of the food capsules with sleeping powders. The sleeping victims, chosen at random, were then carried out of their quarters, slipped into State permaplastic coffins and quietly buried. In her dream the plastic prefab became a permaplastic coffin. Doped with sleeping powder, she was buried alive. She would wake up, night after night, screaming, throwing her arms in the air to claw her way out.

At length she began to sit up most of the night; during the day she would sleep at frequent intervals in the foamease chair. This routine effectively ended the dream of being buried alive, but she still dreaded the nights.

She would sit for 

 Prev. P 37/63 next