Willie Destrin had never bought a dream before and he freely admitted it to the sharply dressed, well-fed friendly fellow who took his Personal Information Digest card. Willie sighed. There wasn't much he would have to tell the dream agent once the PID card disappeared inside the terminal. Its embedded microdisc gave the smiling young stranger instantaneous access to the records of nearly every transaction Willie had made since 2016-more than half his lifetime. of purchases, medical records, legal files, and so forth, were available at the click of a rat's tail. Not that everyone who needed his credits could see his personal information. Most of it was blocked under ordinary circumstances, but when you wanted to buy a dream-well, the dream agent could lay Willie's life wide open.

Willie no longer cared about the loss of his privacy. He could scarcely remember the days when a citizen could use the anonymity of cold cash to purchase a temporary escape from reality. That was before the addiction abolitionists had managed to do away with every vice and pleasure which might interfere with profits, and unless you caused trouble, no one knew or cared what drove you to drown yourself in whiskey, numb your mind with psycho-tropics, or smoke or eat yourself into an early grave. But addictions caused lost working days, inefficiency on the job, and they inflated health insurance premiums, all of which had a detrimental effect on the bottom line. When the Megacorps became powerful enough to do something about the problem, they did so.

Simply establishing their factories in less prosperous countries was no longer profitable. Most of them no longer needed Euramerican business interests to shore up their economies; Asia had its own Megacorps and the workers there were now competing with Euramerica, nor slaving away for its corporate giants. The Megacorps had decided to redesign the western worker by bombarding him with new laws and a huge anti-addiction campaign. Those who couldn't shape up found themselves jobless and unemployable while the giant corporations produced more and more goods and services with fewer and fewer workers.

"You've been self-employed for the last ten years?" the polite young man noted. Willie grunted and nodded. There was no hint of disapproval in the agent's voice, not even condescension, but Willie cringed inwardly all the same. Unemployed was what he really meant-unemployed and living on a stipend which kept him barely existing on the fringes of society. At fifty-two Willie knew for a certainty that he would never again be numbered among the gainfully employed.

He had been a carpenter, a good one, until the two Megacorps, which now controlled all construction on three continents, had made freelancing illegal. They had slid over the industry like giant amoebas, absorbing smaller companies and spewing out redundant workers like so much excrement. Willie had tried for a while to subsist on small private jobs, but soon he found that fewer and fewer customers who could or would pay him cash for anything. When cash disappeared altogether he couldn't build so much as build a doghouse for a neighbor without incurring a heavy fine; the penalty for underground barter was a stiff prison sentence. So Willie finally gave up, put away his hammer and applied for the stipend and the small apartment offered in exchange for his battered pride. It didn't make Willie feel any better to know that the same thing was happening in nearly every trade and profession. as eager young workers moved from their specialized training programs into the work force.

The little motivational poster stuck to the wall of the agent's cubicle didn't help much either; it was there for the young man's benefit, after all, not Willie's. REDUNDANCY LOOMS, it read.

"Have you made a selection from our catalog?"

The young dream agent asked if Willie had decided from among the hundreds of dreams listed in the catalog. Willie resisted the urge to answer sarcastically. What else had he had to do for the last ten years but select a dream? He'd become just like his grandmother with her lottery His own dreams had been taken away; he couldn't even indulge, as his grandmother had for so many years, in the purchase of a lottery ticket.

Lately, Willie had been thinking a lot about his grandmother and her "dream-of-the-week". Every Monday morning the old lady would shuffle out the door and make her way to the corner Mini-Shop around the corner. There where she would put down two dollars from her meager pension check for a slip of paper that always had the same six lucky numbers dimly printed on it. And every Monday evening when the family was gathered around the supper table she'd start spinning the dream.

It always started with the obvious. She would pay off all the family's bills first; then she'd buy some relative a new car. The next day she'd talk about buying the building they were living in, fixing it up very nice and inviting all her relatives to move in with her. By Wednesday she'd have thought of more ways to spend her millions. She'd like a little house in the country, maybe, like the one she'd seen in some slick magazine, with flowers everywhere. Willie always smiled when he thought of the way she used to press the worn ticket to her nose and declare that she could already smell the roses in her dooryard.

In winter, when she was bundled up to keep the chill out of her old bones, she'd spend an hour or two each evening planning a luxury cruise to tropical islands untouched by excessive tourism. In the sweltering summer, she'd have her cottage on a cool lake in northern Michigan to look forward to. Willie could almost hear the sea gulls and smell the oily smoked chub as she spoke.

After gambling of all sorts was outlawed, Willie had persuaded the old guy at the store to just give his grandmother a little piece of paper and tell her it was her ticket for the week. Luckily, she was so old by then that she didn't seem to notice that the Saturday night ritual of watching the little balls pop up with the winning numbers had been replaced by educational shorts on insect life. By the time the Mini-Shop was taken over by a Megacorp and the sympathetic old timer replaced with a straight-up, anti-addictionist college student Grandma was too feeble to make the trip for her ticket; but that didn't stop her from dreaming.

One day, after his grandmother had begun with alarming regularity to leave the gas on after making her afternoon pot of tea, the family decided it was time she went where she could be looked after full-time. Once in residence at Peaceful Valley, a division of Healthcare Megacorp she actually believed her numbers had come up. During Willie's first visit his grandmother told him that the sterile nursing and terminal care facility was really a beautiful antebellum mansion she had recently renovated to suit the needs of herself and her many new friends who lived there with her. The nurses were servants who brought tea and cakes to them on grandma's sets of fine bone china and sterling flatware; the place was crammed with valuable oil paintings and antiques.

On his way out Willie chatted briefly with the home's activities director who informed him that his grandmother had to be brought inside when the gardening crew made its weekly rounds because she simply would not stop trying to direct their work. The young horticultural technicians were especially annoyed at her insistence that they begin work immediately on the rose beds she had planned for the sunny lawn behind the building.

But Willie's Grandma was not a bother at Peaceful Valley for long. Under the influence of drugs, close supervision, and lack of an audience, she quickly declined from being alert and ambulatory to a near vegetative bedridden state. Aphasia obliterated the symptoms of dementia until Willie's last visits consisted of sitting by the bedside of a comatose stranger with a tube in her nose. Soon after, she had died.

"And here's Country Cottage #32. Do you wish to personalize the dream?" the agent wanted to know.

Willie handed over a battered file folder and the young man began mechanically checking over the pictures and data forms before feeding them into a scanner. He seemed only ever so slightly annoyed that the picture and plans for Willie's cottage were non-standard. Willie had spent all his allotment of terminal time for the last few months in carefully searching all the dreamscapes he could find on the freenet, but the professional dreamscapers and dreamscripters did almost everything in virtual reality and Willie had little access to that level of technology. His dream cottage was reduced to a simple hand-drawn watercolor accompanied by a disk of blueprints.

"These will do nicely," the agent said pleasantly, "but you will have to fill in the details yourself."

Willie's month research told him that this should not be a problem for anyone of average imagination. It was, in fact, one reason why the price of a dream had fallen so dramatically in the last year or so.

He'd read the whole story on the freenet. When the dream technology was first developed the psychologists had thought that to be effective the dreams would have to be scripted and orchestrated right down to the minutest detail, much like the old entertainment movies. For the purposes of therapy that was probably the case, Willie reasoned. After all, you couldn't cure a rapist of paedophile if his imagination could take over at a critical moment and reinforce rather than extinguish his antisocial behavior. The subject could never have an inkling that what he experienced was not waking reality, and he must never believe that he was in control of the situation, even sub-consciously.

Willie had read all the accounts of the early experiments with dream therapy in the scientific journals. Criminals and the mentally ill lived in carefully designed dream worlds for days, months even, until their influence permanently changed the dreamer's personality. The dreams were so closely patterned on the dreamer's real life that the switch from dreaming to waking became impossible to determine.

Willie was particularly impressed by the story of a guy who had been apprehended for habitually beating his wives and girlfriends. Psychiatrists had scripted a dream for him that put him in a typical confrontation with his current companion. His anger and need to control welled up and exploded as usual. But as soon as he raised a hand to her bad things began to happen to him. Three or four burly men appeared at his door, barged their way in and proceeded to beat the hell out of him for a while.

And the experience was real in every way, according to the article. The taste of blood in his mouth, the gasping for breath when they punched him in the stomach, the sound of his own nose breaking and ribs cracking-oh yeah, it was all there. And the dream went on. The wife beater was in a dream hospital for what seemed like weeks, roughly tended by nurses and physicians who evinced no sympathy at all for his predicament, refusing to give him as much as an aspirin tablet for the lingering and often intense pain he suffered.

. As soon as he left the dream hospital, he was taken into custody by dream cops who had slammed him around some more for good measure. Then came his time in the dream jail. Willie didn't like reading that part. The weird thing was that when the subject finally woke up he was decidedly unsure as to the nature of the episode, so seamlessly had the dream been woven for him. Three hours in the dream lab had passed like three excruciating months of real time. His next therapy session was more of the same. He'd find himself back in the confrontational situation, where he would generally think twice about assaulting his dream spouse again.

This continued until from the subject's reports of the dream and his feelings about it the therapist could make a decision as to whether or not the patient should be allowed back into reality for good. In conjunction with traditional therapies, the dreams had worked well in this and similar cases, Willie had concluded. Over the intervening years the prisons and mental hospitals had gradually emptied, leaving only a relatively small number of hopeless sociopaths and psychotics behind.

Willie had continued to follow the chronicles of the scripted dreams through their use as therapy for minor problems, Phobics, neurotics, hypochondriacs, and addicts of all sorts were cured in short order by these artificial dreams; people started behaving in their waking lives as they had been were forced to behave in the dreams.

Soon, the dreams had been were approved for use as entertainment for the normal. The recreational aspects had first been researched in universities with the physically impaired as subjects. For these people the long, uninterrupted dreams of being able to walk, or to see, or to travel to exotic places boosted their morale and speeded rehabilitation. Then the Megacorps began using the dreams as rewards, mini-vacations for their most productive employees. Upper-level management had, at great expense, dreams designed uniquely for them, while those at lower levels had to be content with the standard cruise, golfing trip, or world tour.

A breakthrough occurred with the advent of these cheap, mass-produced dreams. Their essence was stamped on microdiscs and almost none of the dreamer's personality was incorporated, and yet they became individualized as soon as they had nudged themselves into the dreamer's subconscious. Early subjects were always injected with carefully measured amounts of the substance that induced the dreaming state, but now the recreational users were given a plate and a bottle. The drugs and the electrically charged microdiscs embedded in the plates were important to the process, but Lately, the researchers were in every researcher seemed to agree that the dreamer himself was the most important part of the package.

The agent clicked in the final details of Willie's dream and informed him that he had a confirmed appointment at the Dream Theater the next day. He handed Willie a printed appointment slip, returned his PID card and file folder, and wished him sweet dreams. Willie took his things and made his way out past the long line of the obviously self-employed who were standing patiently behind him. They were all over forty, dressed in formerly fashionable cast-off clothing from the Megacorp Recyclab, and too idle to have any more important way to spend the day than waiting for their dreams to come true.

Willie had no credits left to buy the luxury of a tube ride home. He wove his way through the crowds of busy people, the employed. There were others like him in the streets, of course, but even they were at least trying to look busy. There were no homeless, no bag ladies, nor beggars to be seen. The Megacorps had seen to it that the underclass, whose presence and pitiful condition had been so evident when Willie was a young man, were at least marginally taken care of. They all lived in the shabby but decent Megahome units, and they were expected to stay there; the sight of the loitering self-employed was bad for tourism. A monthly stipend was deposited regularly into their accounts, and since there were no frivolities, vices around anymore to waste credits on, the amount was adequate. Their purchases were closely monitored. If Willie had wanted a new pair of expensive shoes, for instance, he would be lucky even to get inside one of the exclusive boutiques which sold them, and if he made it so far as to present his PID card in payment the agent would politely refuse to conclude the sale even if Willie had enough credits at his disposal to do so. Similarly, he couldn't order himself a steak on the grocery net. "Make another choice, please," the terminal would say, and a list of substitutes such as beans, eggs, and canned tuna would roll up. But Willie couldn't feel too bad about any of it. Even the employed were not allowed to spend too freely on luxuries, and no one was allowed to go into debt.

Willie's hand print buzzed him into his building, an old-fashioned precaution seeing as how there were no criminals around anymore, -not that anyone living in the building had anything even the lowliest burglar would want to steal. The foyer smelled of strong disinfectant. The residents took turns cleaning the common areas, and in Willie's opinion most of them took a peculiar delight in overusing the sanitation products simply because they were supplied free.

In the elevator Willie realized that after his hours of walking in the hot streets he could use some disinfecting himself, but he knew his card would tell the showers that it was no go for him tonight-he'd used the last of his three showers already this week. He had taken care to bathe this morning so he wouldn't risk being sent home because some fastidious employed person objected to his personal odor.

Not that he had anyone to please but himself tonight, or any night for that matter. He had no girlfriend, and certainly no wife.

The only girl he had ever really wanted had rejected him long before he had become self-employed. She could tell even then what was ahead for him, and although she was a compassionate and caring person whose feelings for him were tender, she had chosen not to become too deeply involved for fear her own career path as an artist would be derailed as a result of their association. with him.

He couldn't blame her, of course. She had gone on to become a very successful artist, thanks to the bottled dreams, as they were now called. Her fantasy dreamscapes were immensely popular with children and adults alike. Willie had not chosen one of her scopes from the catalog, but he had given her holographic image a hole of her to the agent.

His footsteps echoed down the empty corridor leading to his flat. Only singles and childless middle-aged couples were assigned to this building, but even so the place had been unusually quiet lately. Since the dreams had become available to the self-employed at bargain prices, many of his neighbors had already taken advantage of them, and since the price reduction, everyone he knew was flocking to the dream agents. For only a few credits you could have a dream every other week, and stipends had just been raised by nearly the amount needed. Most people came home with boxes containing the dream components and instructions; Willie wasn't sure if anyone else in his building had been asked to go to the Dream Theater. Perhaps it was only a precaution for first-timers like him, in case there were of unforeseen problems.

A few unfortunate incidents had occurred. Willie had read of the rash of cases At one time there had been a problem with kids who in their waking lives thought they were still in the horror dreams that had been were so popular for the short time they were available. Children always had a hard time distinguishing between dreaming and waking, but even adults had trouble admitting that the Bottled Dreams were only fantasy.

Ted from down the hall, for instance, was a balding forty-five-year-old who thought his girlfriend, Sammie, was no longer enough of a catch for him. He had chosen a wild beach excursion dream in which he had the body of a twenty-year-old hunk. In the dream he had been irresistible to women and he continued weeks afterwards to labor under this singular delusion. "Hey, Bubba, if that's a dream then let me dream my life away!" he'd told Willie afterwards.

Willie let himself into his tiny flat and touched the wall pad to turn on his lights and TV. He pivoted to the kitchenette and took his last tea bag out of a dented canister. He glanced at the TV screen to be sure it was set on a news or educational channel. Those he could watch all night if he chose, but he had only two entertainment class hours left for the week and he hated for the screen to go blank during the last twenty minutes of a film. Not only did he really like those sappy old movies, but they were the only thing that looked good on his antiquated set since most everything was broadcast in three-dimensional hologram form these days.

Willie plopped down into is ratty old recliner. The plastic panel covering the remote in the arm had been lost long before Willie acquired the chair. He covered the keypad with a piece of cardboard to keep from tuning into an entertainment channel by accident. On the tiny twenty-four inch screen what looked to Willie like a swarm of fuzzy termites was dismantling a large pile of logs. He rummaged around for his old pair of conversion spectacles and squinted at the picture through them. Not termites, he realized, but a crew of crack young construction workers was tearing down a building just like the dilapidated old wreck he was living in. The announcer was saying explaining that a smaller and much nicer group dwelling for young couples would soon replace the edifice. Experts in domestic horticultural design had already laid the plans for the flower, vegetable, and meditation gardens that would surround this Ultra-Novo dream home. An architect's elevation zoomed from invisible to screen size, but all Willie's little set could take in was the top half of the front door. The announcer invited holo viewers to click on for a guided tour of the new housing; he encouraged virtual reality users to explore it on their own. Then the screen went still and silent. Willie changed the channel since he knew the elegant door would certainly remain closed to him in virtual or any other kind of reality. As usual, he fell asleep during the late-night university physics course.

Next morning Willie laid out the newest, cleanest clothes he could find in his little wardrobe before checking the floor's terminal for his credits. He was pleased to find that because he was scheduled for an outside appointment he had been credited with an extra shower for the week, as well as a tube ride to his destination.

He arrived at the Dream Theater in plenty of time and waited for nearly an hour before a flawlessly groomed young woman came to take him down a long, narrow corridor flanked on either side by closely spaced, windowless doors. Willie thought with distaste that the place it looked much more like a laboratory than a theater. The place seemed deserted except for the two of them. Dreamers came here, the woman explained, because there were fewer distractions, and because difficulties could be dealt with swiftly and properly. Although, she assured him, no real problems had arisen since the unfortunate horror series had been withdrawn.

She stopped before one of the doors, gestured for Willie to go inside, and told him to simply press the panel on the wall if he needed assistance. She smiled and wished him sweet dreams.

The room was somewhat smaller than Willie's apartment, and completely bare except for an imitation oriental carpet and a comfortable sofa. The early dream experimenters had needed a roomful of equipment and meters of wiring to accomplish their illusions, and the subject was required to submit to some minor surgical procedures. But the box Willie found waiting for him on the sofa was less than half the size of his old TV.

There were only three items inside: a large plastic drinking bottle filled with clear, brown liquid, a porcelain disk that resembled a decorated, ten-inch dinner plate, and a three-by-five card which read:

"This dream will occupy approximately three hours of real-time and two weeks of dream time.

Drink one quarter of the contents of the bottle.

Set your fingers into the depressions provided on either side of the plate.

Breathe slowly and deeply while looking steadily at the plate.

To continue the dream when you feel conscious of your waking surroundings, repeat the above steps until the bottle is empty.

SWEET DREAMS!"

Willie opened the bottle. The thin liquid inside tasted faintly of raspberries. As he settled his fingertips into the gelatinous substance which filled the depressions a warm tingling sensation worked its way slowly through his hands and up his arms. He stared at the plate's bas-relief of the little cottage he had designed. For a whole minute nothing at all happened, but when the tingling had progressed to his neck and finally to his head, he began to float slowly towards the cottage, and the landscape of the plate took on a sensual life of its own.

He was bouncing down the gravel drive towards his home. His bicycle took the bumps with practiced ease and he put just enough pressure on the brakes to come to a smooth stop when he reached the front garden. Birds sang and sported in the air around him, the delicate perfume of the cared-for flowers enveloped him. It was late afternoon, but the summer sun still shone brightly when the masses of thick, white clouds sailed past it.

He dismounted, set his bike in the rack and looked towards the vegetable garden. Margie was there, of course. Where else would she be in such fine weather? As soon as he caught her eye she smiled and began tugging at her dirt-encrusted gloves. She ran into his arms and he embraced her scent of earth and sweat, pressed her soft, damp body close to him and kissed her.

"I'll bring the tea to the gazebo," said. "You must be thirsty after your ride. And then you can tell me all about your day."

Inside the vine-covered sanctuary he stretched his legs and breathed the cool, earthy-smelling air as he sucked down two big glasses of iced tea and told Margie about his latest project at the shop.

He had been the first and the best to get in on a new craze: designer birdhouses. The one project he had been working on for the last month and a half was an exact reproduction in miniature of the wealthy homeowner's elegant dwelling. Soon it would be home to a flock of purple martins. The idea had come to him when large, detailed dollhouses came back into fashion. More a toy for adults than for children, many wealthy people had been fascinated by the hobby, some even dedicated large rooms in their houses to these marvels of miniaturization and the artificial grounds which set them off. The most elaborate displays had gardens with real plants and lawns, even tiny sprinkler systems, all under special lighting. The artisans who created them had built whole careers around their design, construction and maintenance.

Similarly, Margie's husband made a good living by taking the mini-estates outdoors in the guise of birdhouses and feeders. Anyone with a yard larger than a postage stamp wanted to attract birds, and anyone wealthy enough to live comfortably outside of the metropolitan areas wanted one or more of his of these bird havens.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of tiny pink bricks that he dropped into Margie's lap.

"Those are real bricks, made exactly to scale," he told her. "The guy's own house is made of artificial ones. And this," he said proudly, drawing a piece of fancy gingerbread from his shirt pocket, "is real wood. Tomorrow we're dipping all the trim in twenty-year paint. When the client's plastic house is disintegrating form UV rays the birdhouse will still look like new!"

Margie made approving noises as she turned the tiny pieces with her long, slender fingers.

"Well, they're lovely," she said. And I'm doing pretty well myself. Come to the studio and see."

Margie's studio was a small building attached to the south side of their cottage. She tapped out a few commands on her computer's keyboard and a huge panel on the back wall came alive with light and movement, sound and odors.

"Oh, wow!" he breathed. "It's working now! It's just like having the ocean right outside your window."

"Well, that's what it's supposed to look like, only better. See where the sun is? I've timed it to coincide with the position of the sun where Mr. Rockwell lives. And the tide will come in and go out in phase with the moon. When I'm all done the seasons will change, migratory birds will come and go, and a few surprises will show up at irregular intervals."

"What kind of surprises?"

"Oh, you know. Dolphins playing close to the shore, whales breaching in the distance, sailboats coming in, storms at sea. Simple things." She smiled at him and snuggled against him. Another six weeks and rich old Rockwell will have a seaside home in the middle of the city!"

He put his arm around her. "Something new every day," he said. "Wonderful and perfect, just like us," he sighed. "How did I ever manage before I met you?"

"You were a lonely single guy, a frustrated architect suffering for art in the cramped polluted city. And I came along and liberated you," she said with mock seriousness. "Let's go make dinner. I have some nice fresh veggies for you to feast on, and a juicy steak."

He held her tighter as she tried to wiggle out of his arms. "Oh, yeah! Was I ever a lonely guy? And we've just begun. Only twenty-five years old and we're both making names for our selves doing the thing we love best."

"Living in the place we love best with the person we love best," Margie added, pressing her warm cheek against his neck.

The snow was deep, the temperature around -20 and the sun was dropping form sight by the minute, but he was cozy in the thermal suit he had donned at the tube station near the shop. The light from the snow-laden cottage sparkled over the thick white of the lawn and as he strained to look inside he could just make out a small face pressed up against the frosty window. He opened the door and knocked the snow off his boots in the mudroom. The inner door opened to cries of "Daddy, daddy!" His little son grabbed him around the legs while a deliriously happy puppy danced and barked around them.

He wriggled out of the thermal suit and gave the boy a small packet of tiny colored windows.

"Here you go, Brad. The final touch. You need help, just shout."

The boy's eyes widened. "Real glass! And a ROSE window!" he squealed. "Thank you, Daddy!" He went racing to the basement with his treasures to install them in the miniature Gothic cathedral he and his dad were making as a winter project.

In the kitchen, Margie had just set the steaming teapot on the little antique dining table.

"I allowed five minutes for you to get through the snow," she told him, "and one minute for a snuggle." He opened his arms and scooped her up. "We could have a tunnel built on the drive, you know," she chided. "You wouldn't have to bother with a thermal suit, and it would make deliveries a lot easier. Lord knows we can afford it now."

"What good is living in the country if you can't rough it once in a while," he laughed. "Here, I've picked up the groceries. We're hardly snowbound."

"Dad I got the assignment!" Brad's smiling face was all that was visible on the screen, but his father couldn't help marveling at how mature the boy looked for twenty-two. "And it's a great project, Dad. Space for twenty families in a city dwelling as comfortable as your place. Gardens, everything. All of the conveniences, none of the ins! It's going to be on VR as soon as the design is finished. You can walk right in, open the cupboards, program the robotics, have a cup of tea."

His father grinned into the mini-cam. "I'm so proud of you son. Will you come for a visit when you're done? Your Mom and I would really like to see you."

Brad signed off, leaving his dad chuckling to himself. He couldn't wait to tell Margie that Brad had finally found someone he was serious about.

"How did we let him talk us into this?" Margie asked as they unpacked the last of their things before settling down to their first cup of tea in their new home.

"Because we're getting old, that's how. And how would it look if the great and famous architect's own parents refused to live in one of his Ultra-Novo homes?"

"Well," Margie admitted, "it is comfortable, and all the gadgets are out of sight. You only have to use them if you want to."

"Yeah, we can even scrub the floor on our hands and knees if we feel like it!"

"Not much danger of that, I think," Margie laughed. "But I can't wait to get into the music room."

"And the art room," he added.

The latest model of the Thinking Auto-Vac roamed silently from room to room, checking the invisible bar codes on all the objects in them. It picked up the things it determined were out of place and tossed them into its various compartments; in due course the robot would deposit the errant articles in the bedrooms, the laundry, and (the place where the majority would end up) the toy box. The machine had been working steadily for nearly half an hour and it still had the vacuuming, floor washing, and dusting to do.

Margie and her husband were staying well out of the way by having a long teatime in the central dining room.

"That little girl is a human tornado!" he said. "Was Brad ever such a handful?"

"We were a lot younger then," Margie said, brushing a lock of steely-gray hair off her brow. "He was just as active, but we were better equipped for it!"

He took her soft hand in his and looked into her merry eyes. "Have I ever told you that my life with you has been unutterably happy?"

The smile lines around Margie's eyes deepened. "Only about ten times a day since you proposed to me," she said. "But I'm not tired of hearing it. It's been a perfect life."

"A dream life," he agreed. "But I'd like to go back to the cottage soon, just for a visit."

"Sure," she said. "Brad and Angelica are always happy to have us, even if we do complain a bit about how they've changed the place."

They walked up the drive hand-in-hand. The snow tunnel was discreetly camouflaged with hedges, he noted, and one of his own sculptures had the place of honor in the front garden. The façade of the cottage still looked the same. His son and daughter-in-law had not even changed the color.

Margie squeezed his hand tightly, then patted it. Then she pinched his arm painfully.

"Hey there, Bubbah!" she shouted at him, her voice strange and deep. "Come on now, let go!"

Someone, but certainly not Margie, was trying to take him away from his home, he realized. Or rather, to take his home away from him. In his confusion he gripped as tightly as he could, but his hands were too weak. The intruder's last determined jerk sent the plate flying across the room and against the wall where it shattered into a tinkling pile on the floor.

"Wow, I thought we were going to lose you there, Ted. I was afraid I'd have to call the bag brigade for you."

Ted rubbed his eyes and looked through the fog of his lingering dream into the intruder's anxious face. He tried to focus, to recall who the man might be, and who he himself might be for that matter. After a few dazed seconds his consciousness composed itself and pulled him back into full waking reality.

"Oh, a good ten hours. You've even had a little accident there," he said, glancing at the dark stain spreading over Ted's fashionable and expensive trousers. "So, how was it? I'll record your first debriefing now, while the experience is fresh."

Ted mumbled something about how the experience would probably remain fresh for the rest of his life.

"First of all, how real was it? Did you believe you were Willie?"

"Oh, yes," Ted replied quickly. "I had no recollection that I had ever been anyone but Willie, the poor sod, and during his dream I couldn't remember ever having been Willie!"

"Great! So, first impression, off the record, so to speak. Now that we've run the experiment almost to the end, can we assure them at the head office that the Sweet Dreams project is humane? I mean, there are hundreds of thousands of them out there, more every day, and what else can we do for them? The Megacorps can't continue to provide the little they have now for much longer. But you were one of them for a while. Were you happy, relatively speaking?"

Ted smiled. In fact, he had experienced a pure and untroubled happiness that even his own privileged life as a dream researcher had never provided.

"Yes, I think the typical subject would find it humane to be allowed to dream his life away."

Ted got stiffly to his feet and bent to gather the pieces of the plate. He made a mental note to edit the records of "Willie's" dream. Maybe he could insert a little more excitement, more challenge. As he reached under his desk to retrieve the empty bottle, his eyes rested for a second on the little poster stuck to the wall of his cubicle. REDUNDANCY LOOMS, it read-as if he needed reminding.