FOR FIVE months Ruth had been free of the nightmare. At the full moon of the vernal equinox it began again. She felt that she was struggling through the dark with some incredibly heavy load on her shoulder. She could feel it cut her muscles as she climbed up a steep place - was it a staircase? Then the real horror began. She was crawling across a narrow bridge, dragging the heavy object after her. It was night and there were no lights anywhere. There was a continuous roaring sound, like peal after peal of thunder, but no rain. She was swallowed up in fear. Fear of falling, fear of heights, fear of being found out. But by whom, or for doing what she did not know.

She awoke, screaming, to find Faith holding her and shaking her. Doors slammed. Glass broke.

“I'm sorry.” Ruth shivered at the memory. “I didn't mean to ... ' '

Angela groaned and put her pillow over her head, but Faith whispered, “It's all right. Don't worry,” and held her hand until she fell asleep again.

Next day the dream was taken apart. After a morning of answering questions and drawing pictures Ruth was exhausted and discouraged. The only thing they had found out for certain was that the object she had dreamed of carrying was an agricultural instrument known as a hand plough, probably used for the cultivation of grain.

“Grain? I don't remember that. I've dreamed of them growing vegetables Outside, but for the most part they seem to rely on berries and nuts and roots and ... and meat.”

“Meat? Are you sure?”

Ruth remembered the hunting dream. It must have occur- red in early winter, because there was a scatter of snow on the leaves that lay brown and gold on the ground. Among the shadows of the trees she had seen the shadow of hunters, silent, waiting. Then, among the branches a movement of great beasts, three of them, looking as if they had branches on their heads.

“But perhaps that was just the dream.”

“No, they would be elk,” a teacher biologist had said, when she had drawn them.

In the quietness of her dream had suddenly come a sound barely louder than the silence, a high faint singing that pierced the ear. Two of the three animals fell with a great crash into the underbrush. The third bounded into the shadows and was gone.

The next part of the dream wasn't nice, and Ruth hated having to remember it. There were people with knives, slicing and tearing at the brown hairy skin; blood spurting, oozing, dark and sticky against the snow and the leaves. Grey guts spilling steaming onto the cold ground. And laughter. Song and laughter.

WHAT WERE the people of Ark One really like? They seemed to be a mass of contradictions, living in a domed city, and yet in wooden houses in the forest, culturing yeast proteins and yet killing for food.