Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net Dreamtown U. S. A. BY LEO P. KELLEY _Here is another look at the America of tomorrow--by a Wilkes College sophomore, winner of the 3rd prize in IF's College Science Fiction Contest.... An America in which there is no more school, no more art, no more enterprise, no more intellectual pursuit--a nation of hedonists. And in such a land, how could there be malcontents?_ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, February 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The girl's body was small, slender, and perfectly proportioned. Her hair had been dyed platinum and was drawn back from her face by a mesh net which sparkled with red jewels. She stood in the middle of the room, head tilted back, eyes closed, moving in time to the music coming from an invisible transmitter. Her hands glided sinuously up and down either side of her body. She seemed oblivious to the people circling the room enjoying Gil Patton's party. It was only when she heard Brant's voice that she opened her eyes. "Lisa, you go for that stuff, I see," Brant called to her, referring to the music being piped into the room from one of Dreamtown's many Sensory Communications Centers. "It's really out of this world, Brant, way out, all out!" Lisa replied. She came over and sat on the arm of the chair in which Brant sprawled. "You can feel it way down here," she said, and placed her hand on the pit of her stomach. "Wonder how we ever got kicks out of that old stuff that you couldn't _feel_?" Brant asked as he placed his arm about Lisa's waist. "Just _hearing_ music doesn't give you any glow." Brant slid farther down in the chair and stretched his legs out before him. The bluish light in the room glinted from the highly polished surface of his knee length boots. He wore loose-fitting yellow trousers and a black suede shirt split open almost to the waist, revealing his chest. "Have you tried one of Gil's new pebbles?" he asked Lisa. "No, what's new about them?" she asked. She wriggled into Brant's lap and rubbed her cheek against his chest. "They're slaughter. Instead of just getting a deeper feeling from real experiences, you can sit back and imagine something--anything--and you can feel the sensations of your fantasy. You can feel all that way down here, too," he said, touching, in repetition of Lisa's gesture, the pit of her stomach. "Get me one, Brant. Let's see what goes."