As the car sped off, she turned for a last sight of the dump. A huge
pall of thick smoke hung over the area. Tireless sea gulls flapped
above the refuse heaps, screeching raucously. Sighing with relief, she
looked away, concentrating on the tronicar's gleaming interior. Within
seconds the dump was far behind her. Her new life was like a dream. She had two private rooms in a plastic
prefab, complete with entertaintime screen, newstape projector and
remote music disc. Food, mostly in capsule form, was delivered daily. The trugrass lawn, freshly sprayed, boasted a simulated maple tree over
eight feet high. If she felt ill, all she needed to do was press the button marked
"Dispensary." A State doctor would arrive in three minutes. Sitting in her foamease chair, in front of the entertaintime screen,
she reveled in her new luxury. No dump smoke seeped into these rooms. No soot drifted past the windows. When she looked out, instead of
dingy cattails she saw the bright green simulated maple tree and the
sparkling trugrass lawn. No more rats scampering across her back yard. No noisy sea gulls circling overhead. She felt sorry for Ralph. He would probably die in the dump. He'd end
his days in some dirty shack, slurping up mulligan stew. He'd die
alone, some dismal night, while the dump fires flickered and the filthy
rats squealed and scuttled in the darkness. After the first week she got to know some of her new neighbors. There
were twenty-nine other units on her block, each with its own trugrass
lawn. Some, like hers, boasted a simulated maple tree. Others were
graced with one of the permajade juniper bushes. She was welcomed
warmly. They were all very friendly, all very polite. She never
mentioned the dump. They talked about the past as if it were life
on another planet. They talked about their favorite programs on the
entertaintime screen, about where they had gone on the monthly tronicar
excursions sponsored by the State. They talked about their illnesses. And yet, it seemed to Lucy Leeson, they did not actually talk very
much. Perhaps it was too much effort. Mostly they just sat in front of
their entertaintime screens and watched. Most of their meals they could
swallow in capsule form without even moving from their foamease chairs. The weeks came and went and finally a man appeared one morning and
sprayed the trugrass lawn a uniform brown. A week or so later he came
back, worked a mechanism at the base of the simulated maple tree and
all the bright green leaves curled up tight and invisible against the
limbs. It was autumn. The man told her they had tried leaving everything green all year
round, but in the long run the people didn't approve of it. They liked
to look out, some fine spring morning, and see the trugrass lawn and
the maple trees unexpectedly green again. The service men came just
before dawn to spray the lawns and unfold the maple leaves. It was a landscaping marvel. The grass never had to be cut and Lucy
knew that the simulated maple tree would never be over eight feet tall. No pruning, no troublesome roots, no falling leaves to rake. Her only criticism was that the birds seemed to avoid both lawn and
tree. She looked out, rather wistfully, in hopes of seeing a bird. But she rarely saw one. She remembered with a pang of nostalgia the
red-winged blackbirds which descended on the cattails bordering the
dump every spring. They were such bright, frolicsome, saucy creatures! But they never flew over the trugrass lawns. After a while, Lucy stopped visiting her neighbors. For some reason
which she could not specifically name, they depressed her. They were
old and listless and often ill, but it was more than that. At length she knew the reason. They were dead; they were corpses
waiting for interment. They would be transferred from the plastic
prefabs to State permaplastic coffins with scarcely a groan of protest. They were just waiting for death, day after day. Consciously, they
swallowed their capsules, read their daily newstapes and sat with
their eyes riveted on the screens. But subconsciously they had stopped
living. Subconsciously they longed for death to release them from the
bondage of State security, State brainwashing, the bland and eternal
aura of State assurance and reassurance. She began to feel that she was being smothered to death in the plastic
prefab. She grew to loathe the food capsules. The endless entertaintime
programs finally filled her with boredom. The newstapes were some
diversion but she resented them because she sensed that all the news
had been too carefully sifted and predigested beforehand. She stared out at the meek leafless tree and hated it. Sometimes she
sat on the floor because she was so tired of the foamease chair. Once
she pressed the "Dispensary" button just to see what would happen,
but she never tried it again because she was subjected to a tedious
two-hour examination which left her exhausted and taut with irritation. The examination was thorough but so impersonal she was left feeling
like an inanimate object. She no longer had nightmares about the dump rats but now a new and
even more terrifying dream haunted her sleep. She dreamed that the
State, unable to supply prefabs fast enough to meet the thousands of
new applicants, secretly filled some of the food capsules with sleeping
powders. The sleeping victims, chosen at random, were then carried out
of their quarters, slipped into State permaplastic coffins and quietly
buried. In her dream the plastic prefab became a permaplastic coffin. Doped with sleeping powder, she was buried alive. She would wake up,
night after night, screaming, throwing her arms in the air to claw her
way out. At length she began to sit up most of the night; during the day she
would sleep at frequent intervals in the foamease chair. This routine
effectively ended the dream of being buried alive, but she still
dreaded the nights. She would sit for hours thinking about the dump--the sea gulls
squealing, the trash fires flaring, soot flying past the windows and
finally Ralph tramping in with his crazy stories about the rats or the
mulligan stew or the fortune someone had found in a discarded fruit jar. She had hated it all before but now she wasn't sure she hated it very
much. Maybe she no longer hated it at all. What was it Ralph had said? How did it go? Oh yes: "We ain't got much here, _but at least we're
alive_." The words echoed in her mind. She thought of them a hundred times a day. It was a small thing that decided her. One morning she was standing
at the window, looking out across the trugrass lawn, when a State
dispensary ambucar drove up. Two hospital men entered the prefab across
the road. In a few minutes they came out carrying old Miss Quinsonby in
a plastic bag. Lucy Leeson felt sick. Although she was perfectly aware that Miss
Quinsonby had been ailing for months, the memory of her nightmare
came back to torment her.