But if it was a test to see if I was ready for reality, did I want to pass it? My life was nerve-racking and mind-wrecking, but I liked the challenge--it was the only life I knew or could believe in. What was I going to do? The only thing I knew was that I couldn't tune in tomorrow and find out. The time was _now_. Horbit motioned the gun to my desk set. "Sign that paper." I reached out and took hold of his wrist. I squeezed. Horbit's screams brought in the guards. I picked up the gun from where he had dropped it and handed it to Captain Keller, my head guard, a tough old bird who wore his uniform like armor. "Trying to force his way back to the sleep tanks," I told Keller. He nodded. "Happened before. Back when old man Preston lost his grip." Preston had been my predecessor. He had lost his hold on reality like all the others before him who had served long as warden of Dreamland. A few had quit while they were still ahead and spent the rest of their lives recuperating. Our society didn't produce individuals tough enough to stand the strain of putting their fellow human beings to sleep for long. One of Keller's men had stabbed Horbit's arm with a hypospray to blanket the pain from his broken wrist, and the man was quieter. "I couldn't have done it, Warden," Horbit mumbled drowsily. "I couldn't kill anybody. Unless it was like that other time." "Of course, Eddie," I said. I had banked on that, hadn't I, when I made my move? Or did I? Wasn't it perhaps a matter of knowing that all of it wasn't real and that the safety cutoffs in even a free-choice model of a Dream Machine couldn't let me come to any real harm? I had been suspiciously brave, disarming a dedicated maniac. With only an hour to spare for gym a day, I could barely press 350 pounds. I was hardly in shape for personal combat. On the other hand, maybe I actually wanted something to go wrong so my sleep sentence would be extended. Or was it that, in some sane part of my mind, I wanted release from unreality badly enough to take any risk to prove that I was morally capable of returning to the real world? It was a carrousel and I couldn't catch the brass ring no matter how many turns I went spinning through. I hardly heard Horbit when he half-shouted at me as my men led him from the room. Glancing up sharply, I saw him straining purposefully against the bonds of muscle and narcotic that held him. "You have to send me back now, Warden," he was shrilling. "You have to! I tried to coerce you with a gun. That's a crime, Warden--you _know_ that's a crime! I have to be put to sleep!" Keller flicked his mustache with a thick thumbnail. "How about that? You won't let a guy back into the sleepy-bye pads, so he pulls a gun on you to make you, and _that_ makes him eligible. He couldn't lose, Warden. No, sir, he had it made." My answer to Keller was forming, building up in my jaw muscles, but I took a pill and it went away.