Chapter IV: Part 4

The first star of evening rested like a jewel against the night's dark throat. The moon had not yet risen. At surface level in the Freeman Camp, away from the gaudy main streets and the floodlit play areas, the shadows were deep. The clumps of woods and bushes in the parks, so fresh and cool and inviting during the day, were now black, forbidding caves.

At night the camp was different. Under the day's warm sun and dazzling sky, it was a vivid and colorful panorama of flowers and trees and green grass and gaily painted buildings, with a leisurely pace and a pervading atmosphere of carefree pleasure which could not be destroyed by the occasional bizarre incident. With the coming of darkness the tempo of activity became more frenetic, its spirit caught by the shrill cacophony of the music blaring from viewscreens and the computer bands in the better cocktail lounges and dance halls. There was a keener, more penetrating edge to the sudden peals of laughter, a more insistent note in the gay, sophisticated talk around the cafe tables and in the bars, an urgency to the hurrying steps of the crowds pushing along the streets, a sweaty impatience pervading the lines forming outside the red-painted PIB's. By day the Freemen were a family group enjoying lawn games and relaxing by the pool, and the family could hardly be blamed if a mad uncle brandished a golf club. At night the party started.

The main thoroughfares were thronged with Freemen. They clustered on street corners. They jammed the lavish restaurants and spilled out of the tiny bars. They swarmed through the glowing theater lobbies and filled the recreation halls with noisy confusion. Their merriment had a voice. It was high and artificially frightened, ringing through the tunnels of the electronically thrill-packed fun houses. It was hoarse and raw with savage excitement in the banked spectator rows of the miniature bird fight arena, where two leggy, long-beaked birds--rare mutations of an earlier species--controlled by slender string leashes secured to metal rings around their necks, goaded by electronic impulses from the whiplike metal rods held by their handler-trainers, pecked and slashed at each other with their curved sword-beaks. It was low and suggestive behind the drawn curtains of the private booths in the peekie-houses, where the latest erotic films were created by thought impulses on the individual screens.

Assaulted by the voices, jostled by the crowds, TRH-247 wandered through the camp. The driving tempo of its gaiety infected him, stealing into his blood stream, quickening all his senses into a kind of exaggerated awareness. Several drinks had blurred the residue of horror left from the scene he had witnessed on the golf green, and diluted the angry tension of the last two holes played out in the fading light. In the evening's party atmosphere he could almost forget--although, like someone holding a door closed against a ghost, he avoided the shadowed places and the dimly lighted side roads which separated the rows of residential buildings, seeking out the open, crowded centers and the bright lights.

On those final two holes of golf Hendley had required thirteen strokes. The number would not easily be forgotten, for each time he had addressed his ball, the stocky, bald-headed player had stood behind him, chuckling softly, tapping his weighted clubhead in his hand or casually lifting it. Hendley had had to fight down panic. His shots had been erratic and uncontrollable. To his lasting shame, on the last hole, as he placed himself behind his amused opponent in position to interfere with a drive, he had found himself thinking: If I struck now, I could get him first.

But nothing had happened. Hendley had not acted, and the man he called Curly had been content to smile at Hendley's nervousness and to mock his ill-concealed anger and revulsion. At the end of the sixth hole the stocky man had chuckled, saying, "Beat you by nineteen strokes. You're not much competition." And with that he had picked up his ball and walked away, leaving Hendley to stare after him bitterly, galled by the intense relief that left him quivering, unable to walk steadily, his hands shaking so he had trouble retrieving his ball.

Time, the serene beauty of the camp, and two quick whiskeys at the nearest refreshment counter quieted Hendley's nerves and helped him to gain perspective. Obviously there must be some form of internal force for law and order among the Freemen. Outsiders presumably couldn't interfere with that internal rule. To do so would be to deny freedom. When Hendley found out how the system worked, he would have to report the dangerously mad golfer. Something would be done. Surely the risks of golf mentioned by Curly didn't include cold-blooded murder!

As reason asserted itself--and the drinks took effect--he began to feel better. He was able to sip his third drink slowly, enjoying it, savoring with it his first full view of twilight, painting a stark black filigree of leaf and branch against a luminous sky. The spectacle left him breathless. What overwhelming grandeur the world offered! And here in the Freeman Camp it was continuously on display. The sky itself seemed to thunder the joys of freedom. Against this awesome splendor the overzealous enthusiasm of a group of swimmers, the sexual whim of an impressionable girl, even the petty violence of a deranged mind shrank into insignificance.

There was so much to enchant the eye and ear. A man would never have his fill of it. If freedom meant no more than the opportunity--and the leisure--to enjoy all this to his heart's content: the beauty of a bird soaring, the sparkle of a sunlit pool, the intricate texture of a tree trunk, the cool sweep of a green lawn, the vaulting leap of sky from horizon to horizon--it would be enough. Endless pleasure. No need to devour it hungrily (except for him, Hendley thought, checking his rapture). For the others, the truly free, there would never be the necessity to hurry away to the appointed task, the appointed recreation hour, the appointed woman. (He hadn't thought of RED-498, his Assigned, with quite that cold objectivity before, but it was true.)

Darkness came. The insistent beat of the crowded pleasure centers caught first his ear and then his need to participate, to discover more of the lures of freedom. He was drawn along the crowded streets, looking, smiling as the groups grew more boisterous and here and there an early drunk reeled from a bar, absorbing the sights and sounds as he had savored his last whiskey. Only occasionally--passing near the dark, silent, empty places--did he shiver, as if he sensed there the lurking shadows of pain and insensate cruelty.

At last he was hungry. There were many restaurants to choose from, but he remembered the reception official's reference to the main Rec Hall on the hill. He had no trouble locating the hill or identifying the massive yellow building, whose walls were thrown into sharp relief by a battery of lights in its spacious gardens. As Hendley rode a moving walk up the steep incline he could feel the lifting pressure in his thighs. It had been a long day with far more physical activity than he was accustomed to.

Up close the Rec Hall was even more impressive than it had seemed at a distance. From a central spindle, itself as large as an ordinary recreation hall in the cities, curving escalators rose to the main theater or exhibition hall, whose domelike roof vaulted outward on concrete spines like a huge umbrella. Lesser wings on ground level contained varied game rooms. There was one section off to one side which was concealed behind a high wall. On a lower level, also reached from the central lobby by winding escalators, was the great casino. A floodlit pool was set into the lush green gardens surrounding the building complex.

Even the lobby was luxurious with an opulence Hendley had never seen before. Living trees bloomed next to the great concrete pillars. Ornate plastic and real wood furnishings, intricately worked, were placed in conversational groupings centered around colorful three-dimensional paintings and depth sculpture. One entire luminous wall shed a soft, flattering blue light over the whole room.

Inquiring at the main desk, Hendley learned that a wide selection of food and entertainment was available. A computer-clerk blinked out a descriptive layout of the Rec Hall on its message panel. There was a main dining room on a balcony, where a computer band played discreetly and a dance floor was jammed with couples doing the Sidewalk Hop. Hendley chose a quieter cafe in one of the wings on ground level.

The service was excellent. He ordered a martini, punched several buttons for his meal and sat at the designated table. Just as he finished his drink a tray carrying his hot dinner slid smoothly off the conveyor belt which ran past his table. The meat-sub was marvelously authentic, tender and juicy. Somewhat to his own surprise he devoured the meal greedily.

Relaxing over coffee and an after-dinner liqueur--which was excellent, without a trace of chemical taste or side effects--he glanced around the cafe with a feeling of well-being. Something--a delayed tug of recognition--brought his gaze back to a young man at an adjoining table. When their eyes met the young man smiled and nodded. Hendley returned the greeting. It was the same youth who had saved his life that afternoon by promptly pulling him from the pool.

With the careless slouch and bored manner of someone long used to freedom's luxuries, the young man picked up his drink and approached Hendley's table. "Join you?" he murmured. "You look as if you've been enjoying your first day in camp."

"It's been quite a day," Hendley admitted. "There's so much to see and do."

"That's the usual reaction," the other said, faintly patronizing.

Hendley flushed. With a self-conscious laugh he said, half-defensively, "I didn't say it was _all_ good."

The stranger was surprised. "Now that's unusual."

"Well, I've seen some peculiar things," said Hendley. "Even that water polo match where you fished me out--by the way, I didn't have a chance to thank you properly." The young man brushed aside his gratitude. Hendley went on talking. "They play kind of rough. One of those men came out with a broken arm. It's hardly what you'd call playing for fun."

The young man raised a quizzical eyebrow--one only in an exaggerated arch. The controlled boredom of his expression was deceptive. His face was in fact remarkably expressive, but each reaction seemed deliberately languid. He was, Hendley guessed, several years younger than Hendley's own thirty-three years, but he gave the impression of a sophisticated worldliness which Hendley could not approach.

"You call hurting people fun?" Hendley demanded.

The young man smiled lazily. "Some people do."

A sudden, vivid image of a golf club, glinting in the sun as it slashed down in a vicious arc toward a limp figure on the green, jolted Hendley. The defenses which he had built up with drink and reason to contain that demoralizing reality abruptly shattered. "There was something else," he said soberly. "Maybe you can help me--it's something that happened today in a game. It--it's hard to believe, but it _did_ happen!"

He recounted the incident as rationally as he could, trying to keep his voice steady. The young man's face failed to register the shock or disbelief Hendley had expected. As he listened the youth fingered his glass and pursed his lips. His expression was grave, but that might have been only in deference to Hendley's obvious emotion. When Hendley had finished, the young man's sole comment was to raise his glass to his lips and drink.

"Don't tell me that sort of thing happens every day!" Hendley protested, stung by the lack of response.

"Hardly," the other replied. "Though golf bugs are pretty unpredictable, and it's true about going into the game at your own risk. But murder is frowned upon, of course, even in golf."

"_Frowned_ upon!"

"Oh, yes. We're not all barbarians here." The young man smiled.

"Isn't there something that can be done? Aren't there any Investigators--any penalties?"

The young man's tone was cool. "We are the free," he said. When Hendley continued to stare at him, he explained, "Oh, your bald friend went too far. There's no denying that. And he won't get away with much of that conduct. The community will take care of him. We have our own ways. But you must see that what you're suggesting--Investigators, penalties, courts of order, that sort of thing--is quite out of place here."

"But there has to be some order! Violence, murder--such things are unheard of outside!"

His companion smiled again indulgently. "Isn't everything we have here unheard of outside?"

Hendley had no answer. The Freeman's casual acceptance of equally casual crime was another shock. Yet he could not argue with the simple assertion that freedom did not admit arbitrary external controls, even those guaranteeing order and safety. But perhaps--he grasped the young man's passing reference with a kind of desperation--such methods as group pressure, ostracism, some form of social coercion did work. They must. Otherwise....

"You have a lot to learn," the young man said.

"I guess I have," Hendley said, shaking his head.

"Tell me," the other said abruptly. "That red emblem on your sleeve--it means you're a visitor, doesn't it?"

"Yes. I was told no one would know."

"I guessed. I've seen that emblem before, always on strangers. And they've always disappeared quickly. It wasn't hard to figure out. How long are you here for?"

"Just till noon tomorrow."

"You need someone to show you around, give you the guided tour. Someone to help you keep things in perspective."

Hendley was not sure whether or not the diffident remark was an offer. "I'll admit I wasn't very well briefed," he said. "The Morale Investigator who got me this visiting privilege didn't tell me much."

"Of course not," the Freeman said. "They don't know."

"What do you mean?"

"Just that. Few outsiders are allowed in here. There aren't as many exceptions as you might think. Chances are your Investigator doesn't know anything more about freedom than you did before you came here. He only knows what it's supposed to be."

"But there are official personnel right here who aren't free--in the administration building, for instance."

"They're not allowed into the camp proper. They can't even see into it. And the underground service facilities are connected only to windowless buildings on the surface. But just to make sure, those people are all on life tenure here. They're 1-Daymen without much time to go, and they don't go back to the cities." The young man's lips curved in a reflective smile. "Funny, isn't it? The whole Organization is dedicated to getting into a Freeman Camp, but no one outside has any idea what it's really like." He laughed outright. "We did have a kind of official tour once--before the Merger. Bunch of Easterners being given the high level treatment. We all put on a good show for them. But they didn't see what it's _really_ like. You've got to know your way around for that."

"I guess you know your way around."

"I ought to. I've never been out."

"Never?" Hendley exclaimed, startled.

"I was born here."

The brief statement carried a world of significance. Born free! Never to have known work, worry, regimentation, routine, discipline. Never to have wanted anything. Never to have breathed the sterile, chemically purified air of the underground cities, never to have been contained in the blind-walled towers, never to have been deprived of the sun and the stars! Hendley thought of childhood with the parks and the trees and the sunlight--delightful prelude to a whole lifetime of leisure and play, with every whim or need indulged, catered to, satisfied. No wonder the young man wore his Freeman status with such nonchalance!

"It must have been a wonderful life," he said, awed by the prospect.

"I guess you'd say so. Sure," the Freeman said composedly. "But I never thought of it that way."

"Your parents were both here when you were born?"

"Uh-huh."

"Then you grew up with them." Hendley felt a different envy. "I was taken away from mine after the first few years. I hardly remember them. That's the way it's done outside. I didn't see much of them after I was six. From then on it was schools, work training--you never had that."

"Oh, I had schools," the young Freeman protested. "The best. Nothing's too good for a Freeman, you know." He laughed. "Those school computers--they tried to drill it into us. I guess I didn't learn as much as I should have, but I was exposed to it, anyway. As for my parents, I never saw much of them. They were always too busy getting their jolts. This was all new to them when I was a kid. Like with you."

"Jolts?"

"Laughies. Fun. Pleasure-pures. You know."

"Are they still here? I mean--alive?"

"They're around somewhere," the young man said indifferently. "I saw the old boy on a hunt about six or seven suns ago."

"A hunt! That's where that girl--" Hendley broke off. "I heard someone talking about a hunting party. What's that all about?"

"You don't know about the hunt?" The young man looked at Hendley oddly.

"No. How could I?"

"That's right." The Freeman hesitated. "We'll get to the hunt later. First you have to get the dimensional view--you, with depth. Behind the scenes. And I'm just the little Freeman who can push the right buttons. How about it?"

"I'm with you."

The Freeman grinned. "We ought to have names. What's yours?"

"TRH-247."

"Mine's a laughie. NIK-700. You can call me Nik," he said. "Everybody does. We don't run a very tight ship here," he added with humor. "That's an old saying. I heard it from a computer in one of those back-time courses in school."

Hendley was unfamiliar with the phrase, but he guessed its meaning. As he rose with his new friend he thought: The Organization is a tight ship. As tight as computer ingenuity can make it. Freedom is escape from that, too.

* * * * *

"You have casinos in the outside world, I suppose?" Nik asked.

"No," Hendley said. "The Organization outlawed them many years ago. Too many people would gamble away a life's work credit. Compulsives, they used to be called. The Organization acted to protect them from themselves."

"Gambling is a favorite pastime here," Nik said. "And the casino here in the Rec Hall is generally considered to be the best. It never closes, day or night. That's why it's below ground level--so you don't see the sun."

The main floor of the casino was a half-dozen steps below the entrance where Hendley and his companion stood. They looked out over a scene of feverish activity, distinguished as much by the low volume of sound as by the air of tension. The casino was divided into a series of diminishing circles. The first and widest circle was the most crowded, containing row upon row of small gambling machines--computers with illuminated screens across whose faces paraded a pattern of designs and figures. Every one of these machines was in use--the majority of the players being women, Hendley noticed. The gambler could halt the dancing pattern on the screen by pushing a button. Winning relationships of designs and figures paid off with a distinct buzzing and a cascade of round white chips into a cup at the base of the screen. Throughout this crowded circle the players fed their white chips into the machines with the automatic, somnambulent attitude of robots, never pausing, never looking up, seldom reacting to win or loss.

"We have our compulsives, too," Nik said. "Some of them never leave the casino. They fall asleep in the lounges, wake up, go back to the machines. Until they run out of chips."

It seemed incredible to Hendley that Freemen would voluntarily choose to shut themselves off from the sun and the open sky, once having gained them, but the hypnotized faces of the gamblers were convincing. Shaking his head, he looked beyond the first bank of machines toward the inner circles. At various kinds of green-topped tables hordes of Freemen gambled with cards, dice, electronic wheels, light-sticks. The circles shrank to an open aisle, wider than the others, near the center of the huge room. Here a single large table occupied the exact center. A robot sat immobile at the table. No one was playing. Hendley saw that robot dealers monitored all of the tables, their impassive metallic faces immediately recognizable by their light-reflecting quality.

Nik seemed to divine the direction of Hendley's interest. "We used to have human croupiers and dealers," he said. "But they couldn't be trusted. They'd hold out chips--fix games for their friends--things like that. Robots work much better. They can't cheat. And they can't be bribed or threatened."

Hendley was frowning. "What I don't understand," he said, "is what you gamble for. What do you get out of it? You have everything you want or need provided for you. How can all those people go on gambling, and feel like that about it"--he nodded toward the first circle of feverishly intent players--"when it's all so meaningless? What do they have to win or lose?"

Nik hesitated. "Maybe it's hard to understand, but ... do you see those white chips?"

"Yes."

"The casino issues only a limited number of them--each casino has its own chips. There are never quite enough to go around. And they're the only things you can use to gamble. Objectively they mean nothing--they have no value. But they've come to have a special value here. A compulsive gambler will do almost anything to get more chips, especially if he's a heavy loser. Without chips he can't gamble. That's why there are some things you can buy with chips that you can't get any other way."

"What could you possibly buy that isn't already free?"

"Oh, quite a few things." The young Freeman smiled tolerantly. "There's the weed, for instance."

"The weed?"

"A form of opiate. Habit-forming. Quite deadly in the long run, but some people get hooked on it and have to have it. No one knows how it's smuggled into the camp. Some say it's grown here, but no one has ever found out where. It can be bought--if you have white chips."

"But why?" Hendley exclaimed. "I've heard of addicts outside--but here there are no pressures, no worries, no frustrations. Why would anyone be driven to using drugs? It's incredible!"

"Well, there are other things you can get with chips that aren't so incredible." Nik was obviously amused by Hendley's naive astonishment. "For instance, do you see that blonde girl down there, the one standing beside the fat gambler at the wheel in the third section?"

Hendley peered toward the inner circle indicated. He had no trouble identifying the statuesque blonde Nik was referring to. Like a number of the women in the casino she wore her white coverall zipped open to the waist--a custom not permissible in the outside Organization. Her smooth white skin, surprisingly untanned as if she took care to avoid the sun, and the remarkable ripeness of her exposed figure, enabled her to stand out easily in the crowd. The face that went with her more arresting features was like a robot doll's--flawlessly beautiful, sweetly vacuous. Hendley could not help staring at her. His face began to feel warm.

"Beautiful, isn't she?" Nik said, laughing.

"Very!"

"She belongs to that gambler next to her. They're Contracted. He's a big gambler; what you call a compulsive." Nik's smile was worldly, amused at mankind's overfamiliar decadence. "You may already know that there's a lot of interchanging of partners in the camp, but not with her. She's available, but only at a price. She's one of the things you can buy with white chips."

For a long moment Hendley continued to stare at the tall, lush blonde, so obviously bored, and at the squat, heavy-set gambler, so evidently ignoring her, consumed by his gambling passion to the point where other desires had ceased to exist. Hendley thought of the years the man must have worked before he had at last paid off his tax debt and won his way to freedom. And this finally was all it meant to him. Hendley let his gaze roam over the casino, aware of its peculiar hush, sensing in the intense absorption of the gamblers a spreading, contagious sickness. Oppressed, he turned away.

"Let's go outside," he said. "I'd like to see the stars."

* * * * *

"We'll go back for the main show," Nik said. "It's worth seeing."

"What kind of show is it?"

"I'll let you find that out for yourself," the young man grinned. "But I saw the way you stared at the blonde. You'll like the show."

Hendley felt a trace of annoyance, but he let the remark pass. The girl had been stunning, and he had stared. All of a sudden he was remembering ABC-331, seeing her face lifted up toward his, and he was strangely uncomfortable with the memory.

They rode the slow sidewalk strip downhill from the Rec Hall to the concentration of entertainments in the camp's pleasure center. Hendley wondered what other special revelations his companion had in store for him. High above, the night sky soared in a breathtaking leap of black space, stabbed by stars. His gaze followed the great black arch over his shoulder until it vanished behind the Rec Hall on the hill.

"That big table at the center of the casino," he said suddenly. "What is it? No one was playing."

Nik was strangely silent. When he finally answered Hendley had the impression he was being evasive. "The stakes are too high at the big table," he said, "But someone will play there before the night is over. Someone usually does. The smaller the circle the higher the bet," he added quickly, not giving Hendley a chance to press him further. "That's why the outer circle gets the most play." He paused, then added reflectively, "I tried the big table once. Sooner or later you get the urge to give it one whirl. I won."

"What are these high stakes?" Hendley asked, curious.

But Nik failed to hear--or chose to ignore the question. "I know where there's a private party tonight," he said. "We'll have time to get there and back for the show. I think you'll enjoy it. Some interesting types. Very arty and all that."

From the bottom of the hill the moving walk sliced through a section of the central park. The way was brightly lighted, but beyond the ribbon of light the park was dark. At one point Nik stepped off the walk, motioning Hendley to follow suit. They faced a narrow path leading through the shadowed park. Nik stopped. He seemed to be listening for something. Puzzled, Hendley started to speak. A quick gesture silenced him. From somewhere along the twisting path there came a scuffling sound.

Nik grinned. "I thought so," he said. "We take the long way around."

Boarding the walk again, they rode through the park to the main street of the entertainment section. "What was that all about?" Hendley asked.

"You have to watch the park after dark," Nik said. "And be careful on any dimly lighted side streets, too, even in the residential area."

"You mean it's dangerous?" It took a moment for the implication to sink in. There was no place in the cities of the Organization where one could not ride or walk safely at any hour. If Hendley hadn't carried with him an all-too vivid memory of the violence that could occur in the Freeman Camp, he would have been sure his companion was joking.

"I keep forgetting," Nik said. "You don't have crime outside, do you?"

"There are rules infractions, of course," Hendley said, "but nothing like what you're suggesting." Hearing again in his imagination the soft scuffling sound floating from the dark path, he gave a shudder. What had caused the noise? Running footsteps? Fighting?

"There is some individual crime here," Nik said casually. "Robberies, mostly, or sexual attacks. But lately there's been more and more trouble with gangs. Unruly packs who roam the parks and back streets at night."

"Robbers?" Hendley asked in disbelief, finding the concept difficult to accept.

But the young Freeman slowly shook his head. His smile was sardonic. "They're called Pleasure Packs," he said. "Robbery is only a superficial motive, if at all. I guess you'd say they're just looking for something different." He searched for a way to make Hendley understand. "It's like sex. You wouldn't expect sex crimes here. There's plenty of entertainment available along that line. There are the PIB's and the showgirls--you'll see them later. But after a while the ordinary thing isn't enough. That's one of our major problems...." Nik's voice trailed off, as if he had suddenly become aware of what he was saying and regretted his frankness. "We change here," he said abruptly, executing a nimble jump to an intersecting walk that rode off at a tangent from the main street.

Following his new friend awkwardly, favoring his stiff knee, Hendley puzzled over his words. There had been too many revelations to absorb all at once. Surely the crimes NIK-700 had mentioned must be isolated instances. The whole life of the Organization, all human pursuit, rested on the base of freedom's desirability, its ultimate satisfactions. The suggestion that it could give rise to a kind of anarchy, that Freemen would seek to dispel boredom and ennui with barbarous acts of violence, left Hendley with an uneasy feeling, as if a firm surface had quite illogically, unaccountably, turned spongy and uncertain underfoot.

The moving walk wound along a street dividing the entertainment center from the rows of low-level housing. Hendley wondered if, with so little time left to him, he would spend much of it in the bright and airy room assigned to him. Along their way Nik pointed out places of special interest. "People tend to seek out their own kind, wherever they are," he said. "See that cafe? You'll find scientists there mostly. A strange lot. Stick to themselves, and most of them never go to the casinos or the shows. They've rigged up a regular laboratory--taken over one of the rec halls--and they dabble in experiments of one kind or another. Useless, of course, with the limited equipment they have, but it seems to keep some of them happy. That gray building is one of the old clubs. You'd probably find my father there. All the old-timers belong. Of course, in theory everything in the camp is open to everybody, but that isn't the way it works out. You're just not welcome in the club until you've been here years and years." Nik spoke with a trace of contempt. "They have their private parties and their ritualistic games. I'm a member really, by birthright, but I seldom go there. Last time I went my mother was playing one of their little games." He laughed mirthlessly. "She was trying to take off her uniform while riding in a rubber raft in the pool, without tipping the thing over. If you got dunked, that made you fair prey." He glanced at Hendley sharply, almost suspiciously, as if he were afraid of laughter. "She didn't remember me," he added curtly, "but I think she'd been on the Weed."

Hendley's head whirled. The complexities of Freeman behavior left him bewildered. He doubted that he could ever be restless here. There was too much to do and enjoy without needing to seek out artificial stimulants and bizarre pleasures. But could he be wrong? Did he know even himself that well? Everything seemed to change in the perspective of freedom....

"Here we are," Nik said, leaving the walk.

They stopped before a low, circular, relatively small building from which came a remarkable volume of sound. As they entered, the noise burst over them like the resounding coda of a symphony. The main orchestration was supplied by human voices erupting in every range of pitch and intensity. Behind these could be heard the whine and sigh of a computer band. And, bursting up through a center stairwell around which wound a circular escalator, to crash against Hendley's ears like a solid wave, came an instrumental thunder of party noises: the explosion of falling glass, the shudder of the overloaded stairway straining with its burden, the shifting of a hundred feet, shrieks and shouts and trills of laughter.

Nik grinned at him. "I'll get us a couple of drinks."

"I could use one!" Hendley said, raising his voice a couple of notches to be heard.

"You know how artists are," the Freeman shouted back. "They like to make themselves heard!"

Hendley didn't know. The only art fashioned in the Organization was created by efficient craftsmen applying known principles--acting under the direction of a computer. They worked as Hendley worked in the Architectural Center, by pushing buttons. Order, harmony, proportion, emphasis, representation, meaningful distortion, suspense, metaphor--the essential ingredients of the various arts were measurable quantities, reducible to mathematics. Or so Hendley had thought. What he saw now was a different art, created by another kind of artist. Free art, he thought with fresh excitement.

It was also a disturbing art. Directly before him, dominating the lobby, was a dimensional painting. If he had thought of Freeman painting before, he would have envisioned representational art of trees and flowers and blazing skies. Or a concern with light, so essential a part of the free life. What he saw, vibrating with peculiar inner tension, was a gray mass which seemed to deny both light and color. It was a shapeless blob, pulsating with--Hendley groped for the nature of his response to the painting, seeking to find the cause through the effect; it was--pain.

"Crass," someone said. "Vulgar." Another voice retorted, "Color isn't _everything_!" Words and phrases collided and ricocheted and split into fragments. "--isn't supposed to _mean_ anything. It's supposed to _be_." "Quite mad--that's the beauty of it...." "Genius...." "The inner planes are brilliantly suggested...." "Erotic, of course...." "Feeling!" "Essence...." "I don't _like_ it. That's the real criticism...." "--see how he used intersecting curves. Marvelous illusion, don't you think?" "Not _new_ at all...." "--so much life...." "... death!"

Unnerved, Hendley turned away from the painting. Nik was beside him again, shoving a drink into his hand. Hendley took a brief swallow, needing it. The rising crescendo of party noise seemed to diminish as the drink coursed through his body. Its taste was unfamiliar to him, but before he could question it Nik was steering him through the crowd toward the escalator.

"The main party is downstairs," Nik said. "You can see some of the exhibits along the way. The place is bigger than it looks, isn't it?"

"Yes, from outside--"

"It wasn't built as a gallery, but it's been converted. Used to be a service building of some kind. Say, I've got to smile at a few faces I know. See you downstairs on the bottom level. Take a look around as you go down."

He was gone. The stairway wound slowly past different exhibits of paintings and sculpture. Knots of Freemen clustered before each work, talking and arguing and laughing. Curiosity forced Hendley off the stairway at the first level below the lobby. He edged his way into a crowded room whose walls and ceiling were covered with paintings. Their effect, even at first glance, was vaguely alarming. It took him a while to make a full circuit of the room. By the time he reached the last painting, a bewildering exercise in spatial relationships in which ribbons of color entwined like mangled intestines, he was badly shaken. The art was strikingly personal, each portrait a private image. The paintings seemed without form or coherent meaning. They ranged from wildly vivid explosions of light and color to somber experiments in deliberate dullness. They lacked any common viewpoint. But in spite of their singularity, they had a sameness. What they shared, what gave the exhibition a cumulative impact, was the creation in paint and plastic and metal of a world disturbed, threatened, and threatening, a world of unimaginable chaos, devoid of tranquillity or joy, a sensual world which denied the evidence of the senses, an emotional world terrorized by its feelings.

Hendley wanted to escape. He plunged through the babble and confusion, fighting his way back to the central escalator, where he leaned over the railing into the open center well like a man gasping for air. He was still carrying his glass, forgotten after the first sip in his absorption with the Freeman art, but in the crush of the crowd half the drink had been spilled. He raised the glass.

A girl pressed close to him. Her face was daubed with streaks of bright paint. "Isn't this frantic?" she breathed.

Hendley nodded. "It's that," he agreed dryly.

The girl smiled. The pupils of her eyes were shrunk to small black pinpoints in a blue field. "You're cute," she said. With a deft movement she speared his glass. Tilting her head back, she drank deeply. Her throat worked as she drained the glass. Then she held it out very carefully beyond the railing of the stairway and dropped it down the center well. The polished glass winked with light as it tumbled through the air. The sound of its shattering was lost in the general noise below.

"I hate empty glasses," the girl said, laughing.

An arm dragged her away. The crowd closed around her like doors shutting. Then the escalator reached the bottom level and Hendley was carried through a wide archway into a much larger room. Here there was less heated discussion, less attention paid to the paintings lining the walls, more hilarity and shrill excitement. The computer band blared from the far end of the room. A group of Freemen milling around in the center turned out to be dancing couples--many pairing men. There were bars set up on either side of the entrance. Both were jammed. Most of the dancers and many of the others in the crowd wore strangely cut-out uniforms, their bare arms or chests or faces smeared, like the face of the girl on the stairway, with dabs and streaks of color.

Hendley eased past the naked, painted back of a girl locked in an embrace with a man whose encircling arms were striped with crimson paint. Suddenly Hendley wished that he were out in the cool evening air, away from the noise and heat and confusion. But his throat was painfully parched and his head was spinning. He needed another drink. He didn't want to think any more. He didn't want to hear the strident note in the merriment spilling around him. He didn't want to speculate on the meaning of the bizarrely painted bodies of free artists, whose lives seemed as desperate as their art.

He fought his way to the nearest bar, jabbed the first button within reach, and seized the drink that slid from a chute onto the counter. It was weaker than his previous drink, but it warmed his stomach. He ought really to be drunk by now, he reflected. Never in his life had he had so much alcohol in one day. And as a matter of fact he was dizzy. His eyes were not focusing well. Faces swam across his vision, jelly faces, without bones. One of them was....

Nik. The young Freeman was smiling his sardonic smile, but his eyes were speculative. He thinks I'm drunk, Hendley thought. It's all right for him to laugh. But he forgets that I have only one day. No. One night, what's left of it. Then I go back....

"--find it interesting?" Nik was talking to him.

"Very," Hendley said. His tongue struggled with the single simple word. "Don't understand," he muttered vaguely, not sure whether he meant the painted artists or their shapeless works or his clumsy tongue.

There was a commotion nearby. Briefly the crowd parted, falling back. A girl had crumpled to the floor. She tried to push up with her arms but didn't make it. Then she was rolling on her back, writhing in evident pain, her hands balled into fists that dug into her midriff. As helping hands reached down toward the girl, the crowd closed around her like a spider enveloping its prey, walling her off from Hendley's view once more.

"Know her," he said. "Funny...."

"What's that?" Nik's fingers tightened on his arm.

The gesture annoyed Hendley. He didn't like to be grabbed. He shook his arm free.

"What did you say?" Nik demanded.

"That girl. Met her on the stairway. She stole my drink," Hendley said sadly.

For a brief instant the lean, indifferent posture on his friend's face tightened with emotion. The expression was gone almost at once, but not before Hendley had recorded it. He was puzzled. Why should a stolen drink make Nik angry? There was more where it came from. All you could drink.

"I'll get you another," Nik said with a light laugh. "Can't have girls getting drunk on your liquor. I guess your drink was one too many for her."

"Wasn't that," Hendley said with a certainty that surprised him. He stared in the direction of the girl who had fallen. Something in his mind struggled toward shape and meaning. The thought resisted form, remaining as incoherent as a Freeman painting. But Hendley knew that he had to leave. Whatever the amorphous conviction was, it had something to do with the stolen drink, and it conveyed fear. "I'm going," he blurted.

"But--your drink!" Nik protested.

"No more." Hendley started away. Nik grabbed his arm. Hendley whirled on him in sudden anger. "I'm leaving!" he cried. He took refuge in the young Freeman's earlier words, not wanting to voice a nameless fear. "You said there was a show I shouldn't miss. I'm going back to the main Rec Hall!"

He lurched free of his friend's grasp and plunged through the yielding crowd toward the escalator. The center well was like a tunnel burrowing up toward the open sky, the sweet night air, the heavy garden scent of freedom.

8

Halfway back to the hotel, Nik caught up to him on the moving sidewalk. The fresh air had cleared Hendley's head a little and helped to relieve his feeling of oppression. But he turned at the young Freeman's call with a defensive resentment.

"You took off in a big hurry," Nik said.

"So what?" Hendley snapped.

Nik shrugged. "Thought you'd get a jolt or two out of our would-be artists," he said indifferently. "They can get on your nerves though. Say, do you feel all right?"

"Why shouldn't I?"

"I wondered if maybe you weren't used to our drinking habits. Takes awhile. You were looking a bit green back there."

Hendley relaxed a little. The Freeman's manner was typically at ease, his gaze turning away from Hendley to rest with amused tolerance on the befuddled struggles of a festive group trying to stage an "iggy" race on an enclosed track past which the sidewalk ran. The clumsy, thick-hided, tailless iguana mutants, oversized descendants of one of the few desert species to survive into the Organization world, reared and threw themselves from side to side, trying to unseat their intoxicated riders. Nik's casual attention to this drunkenly comic sport did more than anything else to divert Hendley's temper and lull his vague suspicion. He was forced to admit, after all, that he had been drinking heavily. It was hardly strange that he should have begun to feel the effects. Nik couldn't be blamed for that, any more than a girl's drunken collapse could be charged to a single drink.

Suddenly the darkly shadowed landscape of the Freeman Camp blurred. The whole star-bitten sky reeled, tilting on its edge, tipping....

Nik was at his side in time to save him from falling off the moving walk. They were riding the slow strip, but a tumble could have been nasty all the same, even dangerous. "I say, you're still rocky," the young Freeman said. "We'd better get you some place where you can rest."

Hendley shook his head. The spasm of dizziness was passing almost as quickly as it had come. He tried to breathe deeply, leaning against his friend's supporting arm. He was a good fellow, Hendley thought. Never should have run off and left him like that. Funny, the notions that could get into your head. Not even an idea, really, just a--a feeling.

"My quarters aren't far from here," Nik said. "We can go there. Give you a chance to recuperate."

"I'm all right," Hendley protested. "Just dizzy for a minute. I'm feeling better already."

"But you need--"

"No," Hendley said firmly. With an effort he pulled himself erect, disengaging his friend's arm. "This is my only night here. If I rest now I'll sleep, and if I sleep I won't wake up until it's time to leave. You said the show at the hotel was worth seeing. I'm going to see it."

Nik did not answer, but the exasperation on his face was so transparent, and so unexpected, that Hendley laughed. "Humor me," he said. "And stick close. You can catch me if I fall."

He grinned at the young Freeman, and after a moment Nik began to join his laughter. "I'll be imprisoned if I don't think we'll make a real pleasure-purist out of you yet!" he exclaimed.

Arm in arm, they leaned against each other, laughing uproariously, as the moving walk carried them through the central park toward the main Rec Hall on the hill, a brightly lighted yellow mushroom painted against the night's endless promise.

* * * * *

"Tell you what I'm going to do," Hendley said.

"All right, name it."

"I'm going to have another drink."

Nik chuckled. "Don't say I didn't warn you."

"To the desert with your warnings. Drink is pleasure, and pleasure is all." The familiar Organization slogan came easily to Hendley's lips. "Bring on the girls! Are you sure this is a good seat?"

"The best. There's a materializer right overhead. And you have a good view of the main screen over the stage."

Hendley stared at an opaque plastic cylinder suspended from the ceiling of the great circular auditorium. Less than twenty feet away, the cylinder was just big enough to contain a grown man. It might have been a decorative fixture, its smooth surface reflecting a multicolored flow of light from the auditorium's glowing panels. There were about two dozen of the cylindrical objects spaced throughout the theater, overhead for those seated in the balcony, along the sides for the audience on the main floor. It was difficult to get seats close to the stage, Nik had explained, unless you arrived very early, but with the materializers you didn't need front-row seats. The man-sized cylinders brought the stage to you. Moreover, from a middle distance, and especially from the balcony, you had a better view of the huge thought-screen, the giant father of the materializers in shape, mounted directly over the stage and almost at Hendley's eye level. This huge screen was also dark.

Drinks arrived on a conveyor belt just as the main lights in the auditorium began to dim. From his balcony perch Hendley stared down as the curtain of light obscuring the central stage slowly dissolved. The stage revealed was in semidarkness.

A spatter of applause broke into thunder as a cone of light slashed down to sculpture a living bronze--a nude woman standing motionless on a revolving dais. For an instant the striking figure was enveloped in brilliant white. Then the light began to change from pink through rose to a garish red, until at last the figure seemed to be bathed in blood, unrelieved except for a small white circle lying at the top of the valley between the woman's red breasts. From the balcony it was impossible to distinguish the white circle clearly, but on the materializer, so close to Hendley's seat, it was easy to discern a thin necklace, the clear outline of a white tag, and the number 1 printed on the tag, which had evidently been treated somehow to reject the red light. The crimson figure was reproduced slightly larger than life within the plastic cylinder, and with a breathtaking illusion of reality, as if she were physically imprisoned there. It was not like looking at a viewscreen, even a dimensional one. It was as if the living flesh in its garish costume of light had been transported from the stage into the plastic cocoon.

A second white cone stabbed down through the darkness, pinning a second nude figure upon the stage. Again the light changed by degrees to red. Almost imperceptibly a low, sensuous beat of music had begun to make itself heard. And with that the audience became more vociferous. As another and yet another red figure was revealed on the stage, a persistent murmuring grew. Audible gasps ignited fresh crackles of applause as each new model appeared. They were all young, shapely, beautiful. In the brief flash of white light as they were first seen, their bodies were visibly pale, like Hendley's own, the white sheen of skin unburned by the sun. When the light changed, they became, in their bizarre red envelopes, both more vivid and less human. Hendley could not tear his gaze away as the procession continued. His throat grew dry, and he drained his glass.

Twelve girls in all took their places in the red spotlights. Hendley missed seeing the eleventh one closely. He had glanced down at the stage just before she appeared in closeup on the nearby materializer. By the time he looked back from the general tableau below to the intimate revelation on the cylinder, the girl's image was already fading. And her back was toward him. He had only a glimpse of a slender, willowy body, narrow-waisted, of long slim legs, and of a nest of short curls above a graceful neck. She was a red vision from a dream, but something other than admiration stirred in his mind.

"I missed that one second from the last," he said to Nik.

"A pretty thing," Nik said appraisingly. "Quite well equipped, too." His hands shaped an imaginary bosom.

"She looked--I'm not sure--familiar."

Nik laughed. "That's not unusual. There's a blue girl--she'll be coming on shortly--who once reminded me of my mother. I suppose one of your Morale Investigators would say that was significant. But it's not, really. A beautiful girl seen in the distance, or not clearly, will always remind you of someone."

"Only if that someone matters," Hendley said with surprising clarity.

The young Freeman made a mock grimace of pain. "Hmmm," he murmured. "I should have thought of that."

"What's a blue girl?"

"Same as in your outside world. You see, the showgirls are all outsiders. Red means a 5-Daygirl. Green a four, blue a three. Obviously they don't wear their uniforms while they're performing."

Hendley smiled absently. He wished that he had had a clearer view of the eleventh girl. Even in the distance of the stage, and in the strangely erotic distortion of the colored spotlight, she seemed familiar. But whom could she remind him of? There was only....

"What's wrong?" Nik asked. "Feeling dizzy again?"

"No," Hendley said hoarsely. "It's not that."

As if to prove his statement he reached for his glass, only to find it empty. The resemblance was superficial, he assured himself. That was all it could be. Ann could not be here. But the nagging impression that the girl on the stage was enough like her to be a double unnerved him. He was chagrined to realize how seldom he had thought about her since his arrival in the Freeman Camp. Perhaps that was understandable enough--the clockless hours had been full--but this defense did not dispel a twinge of guilt. Forgetfulness argued a shallow emotion, undermining the importance he attached to his hours with ABC-331.

"Ah, here come the greens," Nik said. "And I've ordered us a couple refills on the drinks. Don't take it if you don't think you can handle it."

Hendley didn't answer. He wanted the drink, and he had a feeling that he would need it.

The pattern of presenting the showgirls was repeated, except that the second set were washed with a startling green light. And each girl wore an identical male face-mask. The slow but insistent beat of the background music quickened slightly, acquiring a harsher, more driving rhythm. A perceptible tension of excitement quivered in the air of the auditorium.

There were twelve girls in green. "They're the males," Nik said unnecessarily. "You'll be surprised how you get to think of them that way, the obvious physical evidence to the contrary."

Hendley started to ask what all this was leading up to, but before he could speak the tempo of the music changed. The twenty-four girls formed a wide circle near the apron of the stage. Their spotlights faded until they were only dimly visible. Attention shifted to the center of the stage. Light panels dropped into place, figuring suggestively the setting of a pre-Organization city. The technique and the scene were immediately familiar to Hendley. They were traditional in the presentation of a Freedom Play.