“The only way we know about this, of course, is from sorry experience. The first humans who entered those booths got caught up in the induced fantasies. They couldn’t be roused from the dream–state. They had to be fed intravenously for a while, but they still died. That was probably what happened to the Letheans, too—they’d go into the booths, get hooked into a Dream, and slowly die. Literally dreaming their lives away.”
“Didn’t they know the booths would kill them?” Bred asked.
“They must have. I don’t see how they could miss the fact that there were no repeat customers. But maybe they wanted to die. Or maybe they just didn’t care. Maybe they made their world a little too perfect and needed diversion at any cost.
“We have our human analogues, you know. Back in the nineteenth, twentieth
