“We came from the same place, you said so yourself.”

“But your choice hasn't worked, has it? The computer and the information it contains has become the only meaning of life. Though I shouldn't talk. For us, the Web has become so important that we fall apart when it's not there. Back home the soldiers would never have caught us by surprise. A way from the Web we're useless.”

“Let's try to combine our uselessnesses and break out of prison together.''

“Do you mean it? Could we?”

“I think you've come at exactly the right moment. I've worked for a full year to shake people free of their fear of Outside through Dream Therapy. But it hasn't worked. I've seen workers and soldiers leave Dreamland full of ambitions that vanish into nothing. Until the next dream.”

“Why? Your freedom dreams certainly shook me loose, and the whole of Ark Three, come to that.” She laughed.

“The message the computer feeds into everyone's lifepak is so powerful that it overrides the strongest dream. It tells them that their job is the most satisfying in the world and doing it is the only thing that will make them happy. So the worker's job makes him secure, and the soldier knows that being a soldier is the finest thing in the world.”

“What does it tell the Lords?”

“That their accumulated knowledge will make the world a better place. But not yet. Only when there is enough know- ledge. But there will never be.”

“So the City's a trap for everyone except the slaves. What do they think?”

“That life is hell and that anything would be better.”

“Why don't they escape? More of them, I mean, than fifty out of a thousand.”

“Because there are two soldiers to every slave, plugged into the alarm systems, the video cameras, the microphones. The soldiers hear and see and know everything that happens in the Ark.”

“They don't know about me. Nor about your secret trips across the dam to take supplies to the villagers. Nor about what you have been doing to their dreams.”

“You're quite right. You can see how that fear infects even me. But against the computer and the soldiers I can't fight - not alone.”

“But with us to help! Tomi, why don't you just turn off the computer if it makes life so wretched for you all?”

“Do you think I haven't thought of that? Do you think I haven't challenged my father to find a way?”

“Your father ... what did he say?”

“That there is a mechanism built into the computer that stops our interference with its special program.”

“I wish I knew about computers. Are you sure that you can't find a way of reprogramming it so that the Lords and soldiers and workers start to think differently, so that they want to go Outside and begin a new life?”

“I've talked to my father about that ... “