Dinner is served, vaguely. The seven merry boatmen stagger up from the lower beach, smiling and content. The sense of exhilaration and victory lasts all through the night, waning only with the sunrise.

From Good News

IT MAY HAVE BEEN, as the man on the Tower would say, a failure of courage. Or to use his preferred cliché, a failure of nerve. It may never have happened at all. There was indeed, in those fading years of the doomed century, a sense of overwhelming illusion in the minds of men and women. The cities became unreal. Not so much unbearable as unreal. To the millions crowded within them—for it seemed they could not live elsewhere, in a landscape owned by corporations and dominated by gigantic machines—the ever-growing cities assumed the shape of nightmare. Not a nightmare of horror but a nightmare of dreariness, a routine and customary tedium. Reality became personal, individual, limited to the walls of a room in the center of an enormous hive. The blue eye that glowed from the center of the wall opened only into deeper realms of loneliness. Friends clung together, then were torn apart. Men and women feared one another and searched for safety in isolation. Families withered, scattered across a continent, attached by the thinnest strands of brief, tenuous, one-dimensional and unreliable communication. To leave the illusory safety of the room was only to find oneself in a corridor without windows leading out into the corridor of the streets, where the walls were of glass and steel, the floor of concrete and asphalt, and the ceiling a dense umber haze through which a pale sun, ever more feeble, shone rays without warmth and little light. At night the layer of smoke and fog and industrial gases cut off all view of the stars, reflecting the vast illuminations of the cities, which extended for hundreds of miles in all directions. The streets were jammed with clamorous machines, crowded with endless hordes of silent humans, most of them wearing air-filtering masks; one saw only the eyes of others, and all eyes were wary, alert with fear or blank, withdrawn into the inner space of abstraction. A terrible restlessness infected every movement, every gesture.