th the patrol. Like him, they
were wakers--people who had never known the electronic dreams which
were fed to all but a few of Earth's peoples. People who had never
lain asleep in nutrient baths from their seventeenth birthday living
an unreal world built to their own standards. Of the billions on
earth, only a few hundred were wakers. Most of those were patrol, of
course, but a few were rebels.

That was he, and also the girl he had seen yesterday. And it had been
Edna and Sammy and Jeanne and Gardner; and maybe a dozen other people
he had known since he had escaped from the Commune, when he had been
just a kid--but when he had seen the danger.

For the past two and a half centuries or so, almost everyone raised on
Earth had been raised in a commune, never knowing his or her parents.
They had been raised, they had been indoctrinated and they had mated
in the communes--and then gone into Sleep. More than likely, Nelson's
parents were there still, dreaming in their trance, having long ago
forgotten each other and their son, for those were things of a harsher
world over which one could have no control. In Sleep one dreamed of a
world that suited the dreamer. It was artificial. Oh, yes, it was a
highly personalized utopia--one that ironed out the conflicts by
simply not allowing them. But it was artificial. And Nelson knew that
as long as the universe itself was not artificial nothing artificial
could long stand against it. That was why he had escaped the commune
without letting them get him into the nutrient bath in which the
dreamers lived out their useless lives. His existence gave the lie to
the pseudo-utopia he was dedicated to overthrowing. The called it
individualism, but Nelson called it spineless.

* * * * *

Above him was sky stretching light blue to the horizons--and beyond
the blueness of stars. He felt a pang of longing as he looked up
trying to see stars in the day sky. That was where he should be, out
there with the pioneers, the men who were carving out the universe to
make room for a dynamic mankind that had long ago forgotten the
Sleepers of the home world. But no, he decided. Out there he would not
be giving so much to mankind as he was here and now. However decadent
these people were, he knew that they were men. Nelson knew that
somehow he had to overthrow the Sleepers.

Before something happened while they lay helpless in their coffins,
dreaming dreams that would go