“Wait,” Lydia said. “I was a man in the dream, fairly young. Funny, how some of it comes back.”

Lawrence frowned suddenly. “Never question the dream messages of the gods,” he said dramatically. “You might find out what they mean.”

“Now don’t say things like that,” she cried. “It makes me nervous. And look at those leaves outside. How alive they seem, how … watchful. God, I wish the damned storm would stop.”

“The sound of rain on a trailer roof will be different,” Lawrence said.

She smiled over at him. He’d just closed his leather shop for good. He’d upholstered the whole camper-trailer, and half of her books had leather covers that he’d made for her. She almost gasped: how could they be so in love and so old? “In my dream, someone was taking an examination,” she said. “I was thinking of my books, and just remembered.”

“I was, dear Lydia. We both are!” Oversoul Seven was all ready to transmit the words to Lydia when Cyprus said gently, “No prompting, remember.”

The leaves were really tossing in all that wind. Oversoul Seven filled himself with the uniqueness of it, because Cyprus was saying: “All right, we have to leave now. The first part of the examination allows for a quick viewing only.”

And the scene changed….

TWENTY-THIRD CENTURY A.D.

Proteus secretly yearned to be a girl: they were so much freer to express themselves. Instead he was stuck at home in the living nodule with his father, and only innocuous hobbies to content him. He also yearned for the sight of something naturally green, growing, real. In fact, this desire had grown so strong that he determined to do something about it.

He said eagerly: “Surely we could take some small space and devote it to a natural miniature farm. Say the whole thing only took up one living nodule. It would be self-sufficient. Someone ought to be able to give us permission—”

Mithias, his father, frowned: “Life grows. That kind of life grows, anyhow. There’s no stopping it. It’s wild. We’ve spent two centuries developing an artificial environment that we could handle. If you gave that kind of life freedom, people would have children all the time. You’d be dead at sixty or seventy. Our way of life is balanced. But I can’t expect you to really understand that at sixteen.”

He paused and said with a grunt, “When we had our ‘natural’ environment, the women were kept busy having children. Men had the positions of power. Otherwise, I can’t think of anything good about those days. They were filled with sickness, wars, social diseases—”

“You’re right as usual,” Proteus said. But he was still sick of being cooped up inside with his father all day.