"No," he said, "I won't tell you...."
The woman gasped and hid her face. The Superfather, scowling, made a motion.
The two dark men took hold of Twenty-three. They lifted him into the tube.
The Superfather dropped the second pack of cards into the panel and pressed the button. The top closed silently, like a mouth.
Twenty-three's eyes closed; his body waited.
For an instant—blackness, and silence, like a moment after death, or a moment before birth. Then twilight, or dusk, over an ocean. A sky of pale blue. A shine on the gently surging waters. A scent of clean air. Sea spray. The cool sound of wind.
Then a man's voice, deep and flowing: "You know that there is no entrance or exit to this city. It is sealed off and will always be so. But the dream machine in which you lie has been changed by our agents inside the city. The last card you dropped into it is different from the others. These changes have been made so your dream will become a reality. Your mind will be transmitted to us here among the hills and under the trees and by the ocean. And a new body, that we have grown, artificially, from all the elements, a body like the one you will leave behind, will be waiting for you. You need not be afraid."
Twenty-three felt himself moving forward. Sight and hearing and sensation, without a body. Time dropping away, like a forgetting of yesterday and tomorrow. There was only this moment. And then he felt the great humming surging power of the machine, like an ocean rushing him toward some unseen shore. He was caught in a gigantic tingling shock wave, and felt like a tremendously outsized torch, lit and flaming, and carried, still burning, in the green tide of sizzling electricity. The machine screamed. The machine chanted. The machine raved. Dimly, he heard his wife cry, and above him felt the Superfather scrabbling at the machine, the guards shouting. The machine shrieked and the great tidal wave of power jolted and flung him, white-hot kindling, through air, through sky, up and down! Down upon a white shore, upon creaming sands, leaving him to quiet, to silence, to a pulling away of the tide....