passed me. And when Mr. Dorchin offered me the
chance to live again as a beautiful girl, I jumped at the opportunity.
Believe me, I _jumped_, in spite of its disadvantages. My flesh body is
still alive--it is sleeping, while I am here. I could go back to it. But I
never do."

"And the rest of us?"

"Different, Mr. Burckhardt. I work here. I'm carrying out Mr.
Dorchin's orders, mapping the results of the advertising tests,
watching you and the others live as he makes you live. I do it by
choice, but you have no choice. Because, you see, you are dead."

"Dead?" cried Burckhardt; it was almost a scream.

The blue eyes looked at him unwinkingly and he knew that it was no
lie. He swallowed, marveling at the intricate mechanisms that let him
swallow, and sweat, and eat.

He said: "Oh. The explosion in my dream."

"It was no dream. You are right--the explosion. That was real and this
plant was the cause of it. The storage tanks let go and what the blast
didn't get, the fumes killed a little later. But almost everyone died
in the blast, twenty-one thousand persons. You died with them and that
was Dorchin's chance."

"The damned ghoul!" said Burckhardt.

* * * * *

The twisted shoulders shrugged with an odd grace. "Why? You were gone.
And you and all the others were what Dorchin wanted--a whole town, a
perfect slice of America. It's as easy to transfer a pattern from a
dead brain as a living one. Easier--the dead can't say no. Oh, it took
work and money--the town was a wreck--but it was possible to rebuild
it entirely, especially because it wasn't necessary to have all the
details exact.

"There were the homes where even the brains had been utterly
destroyed, and those are empty inside, and the cellars that needn't be
too perfect, and the streets that hardly matter. And anyway, it only
has to last for one day. The same day--June 15th--over and over
again; and if someone finds something a little wrong, somehow, the
discovery won't have time to snowball, wreck the validity of the
tests, because all errors are canceled out at midnight."

The face tried to smile. "That's the dream, Mr. Burckhardt, that day
of June 15th, because you never really lived it. It's a present from
Mr. Dorchin, a dream that he gives you and then takes back at the end
of the day, when he has all his figures on how many of you responded
to what variation of which appeal, and the maintenance crews go down
the tunn