In sleep I have another dream about life before ship-time. It is as if on some level the blocks are going down, were never meant to hold for years, and in small bits and pieces my past needles through a curtain, trying to overtake me. I remember cities, metal, machines, the sound of this machinery as it filled the nests of the city and in the dream I seem to be controlling it. I am the controller of the machinery. Carefully I adjust tensors, lights, threads, make connections, and the machinery moves under my touch, trembles with power and begins to move. I sense that it is doing something, that I am commanding a technology which is chang­ing the face of the city and for an instant I can see myself; can sense myself poised before gauges, leaning forward, squinting into the darkness, taking readings while others gather around me and watch my efforts but as I am on the very precipice of insight—as it seems that just one more instant will flood the scene with light and I will be able to see what I have done—it all moves away from me and I awaken shaking and confused; no more aware of what has been happening than I was at the beginning. The image tan­talizes me, myself as a controller of machinery; I try to burrow myself back into the dream and find the image again but I cannot, it is evasive and I find that sleep at last leaves me entirely.

I get up from the bed, close the door which Nala had left open behind her, and return to these notes, trying to get things up to date. In the middle of transcription I suddenly see the plan for the escape; it is delivered to me wholly and without equivocation, all of it bursting like a flower within my mind and I sit in stunned awe, staggered by its profundity. I consider all of the facets of the plan which my subconscious has delivered unto me and it is surely workable, surely felicitous. It cannot fail if well executed. I wish that Nala were there so that I could share it with her but she is gone and I am not sure of her cubicle or dormitory. So I sit in the coming light for a while, thinking of the plan to myself and occasionally writing another line for these notes so that the past will not slip hopelessly behind me; no record ever to be made of what I have done and the timeless justification of my lot.