Mithias was watching his son’s face. “Now don’t start brooding,” he said. “We’re due for a rain at noon. Why don’t you go outside and watch? It always lifts your spirits.”

“I might,” Proteus said. He was shy, diffident, but strangely arrogant too. The suggestion sounded too much like an order, so he just stood there.

“It’s almost noon now,” Mithias said, irritably.

So Proteus scowled and went through the door of their spacious nodule. He stood on the small plastic sidewalk, and looked up at the plastic trees. Down there, beneath him, where the real Earth was, who knew what was going on? Really? No one, he thought. Except for the scientific expeditions, no one went there any more. But then he stopped thinking as the rain began. Usually it excited him. Now he felt more depressed. It would rain politely for fifteen minutes. The water would run down the plastic drains and be saved and purified, and then fall tomorrow for fifteen minutes someplace else.

When he was small he had a schedule of all the rainfalls. He knew exactly where and when it would rain. His own nodule area held fifteen subites, with over a million people, and he’d run over the plastic sidewalks, frantic with excitement, keeping up with the rain.

He squinted up. Three clouds passed. They always did, at rain-time. If you didn’t know that the artificial sky stopped one-eighth of a mile up, or if you tried to forget it, like he used to, then you could imagine that the rain was real, and the clouds. They were real enough, he thought. Only they were man-made and regulated. He scowled, then grinned. Imagine seeing four clouds one day, or even two, how that would shake everyone up! But the rain fell from the sky of the floating city, and there would never be one cloud more or less. He almost wanted to cry but he didn’t, remembering his age.

What would a real flood be like, he wondered, or a windstorm? For a minute his eyes almost closed under the impact of sheer emotional excitement: he’d seen microfilms of ancient natural disasters in which the power of nature was unleashed, and now he imagined great brown curls of floodwater emerging from real rivers, torrents of rain that fell with great force, winds that whipped a world apart.

Yet Earth had survived. It was still down there. And down there great climatic changes still existed; heat and cold, as they were, despite their convenience or inconvenience to man. To be pitted against that—Proteus held his breath, almost whoosy with the thought of it—to exist in the context of nature! What excitement it must have generated. Just a real rainstorm, coming from nowhere—appearing out of … itself, out of nature, sinking down into real ground filled with dirt and bugs and roots!