Slowly she learned that her mind wasn't terrible to look at. Little by little she let down her defences, though she never learned to like this mind mingling.

Other lessons were more fun. The one she liked the best consisted in doing what she had always loved, being alone in the Dome, in her favourite niche from which she could look straight across to the eastern mountains. She watched the green turn slowly to red and gold, and the colours vanish as the snow fell and the world Outside turned to black and white and grey.

Some days she was sent up to the Dome with a sketch pad and told to draw whatever came into her mind. At times she could only sketch exactly what she saw from her perch. But at times it was almost as if another hand took hold of the pencil and scribbled quick sketches. A girl and boy bent over a fish trap. An open meadow planted with neat rows of vegetables. A great fire with people singing and dancing around it. A face, brown skinned, with a dimple at a corner of the mouth and long

red hair.

Sometimes one of the Custodian's blue uniformed Communicators would sit beside her, training her in the techniques of concentration, so that she might send her thought waves far over the snowy mountains, towards that great question mark that lay beyond. It was infuriating work, and she dreaded it, because there was no way of knowing if, out there, someone was receiving the messages she sent. Certainly she never got a reply.

Occasionally now, not only in her dreams, she had the strange feeling that, for just an instant, she was in someone else's mind. There was the image of a man dressed in red with a small camera strapped to the middle of his forehead. An older man, bowed down and hunch backed, but with keen eyes. A woman dressed in finely woven robes but with a head as bald and shiny as a peeled egg.

There were feelings, too, that suddenly Swept over Ruth, and yet which she knew were not hers. Feelings of being trapped. Fear of loneliness. Of the future, which seemed, in this other person's eyes, to stretch into the distance like a grey fog. Above all there was a hunger for beauty.

After a time Ruth began to associate this feeling with the red- haired girl, the girl with the dimple. The girl with the hoe.

The New Year

JANUARY THE FIRST, 2147 AD. Ruth woke long before the official rising time and lay excitedly longing for the lights to come on. One by one the others awoke, until they were all alert and the room hummed busily with their psychic activity. “Oh, this is ridiculous!” Angela's bed creaked and Ruth heard her feet pad across the floor. With a decisive snap the

light went on.