Around nine-thirty I went to bed, yielding to an almost embarrassingly strong desire to see Lea again, if only in a dream. As I lay there waiting for sleep to come, I amused myself by reviewing the' strange details my dream computer had given me on the structure of the Macro society and its strange metric. time system:*

*See C.I. Data Excerpts.

The more I thought, the more I wondered if maybe Karl was right. I had read about people making up their own world when they could no longer cope with their existing reality. Maybe I should take a vacation.

No matter what position I tried, sleep simply would not come.

About midnight Karl and Cindy slipped quietly in. I faced the wall and feigned sleep so as not to intrude.

Soon I drifted toward sleep and was awakened by Cindy's muffled giggles. "Damn it!" I thought and moved my pillow over my head as Karl, said, "Quiet, Honey," in a hushed voice.

The sound of their rustling about on his bed across the room was hard to ignore, but I did, and once more slipped into the edge of sleep. I sat up startled in my bed. Cindy had let out a shrill squeal.

There they were, stark naked. Karl was nibbling on her ticklish inner thigh-right there with me in the room.

"Damn it, Karl!" I cursed angrily. "Don't you have any respect for the act?"

Karl looked up, as startled as I had been, and, as Cindy gathered the blanket about her, his expression changed from surprise to amusement.

He grabbed Cindy, blanket and all, and said playfully, "Hell no, Jon! We're ballin', we're not in church!"

Cindy's apology was drowned by the voice of my own inner conflict. "Karl's right, you know," my evolved self was saying. "There's joy and laughter to be shared making love with someone you care for. It's wholesome. It's healthy. It's good."