"Yeah!" said Barlow, yanking his jacket back into shape.
"Aaah!" snarled the stranger, with more contempt and disgust than
ferocity. He added an obscenity current in Barlow's time, a standard
but physiologically impossible directive, and strutted off hulking his
shoulders and balling his fists.
* * * * *
Barlow walked on, trembling. Evidently he had handled it well enough.
He stopped at a red light while the long, low dreamboats roared before
him and pedestrians in the sidewalk flow with him threaded their ways
through the stream of cars. Brakes screamed, fenders clanged and
dented, hoarse cries flew back and forth between drivers and walkers.
He leaped backward frantically as one car swerved over an arc of
sidewalk to miss another.
The signal changed to green, the cars kept on coming for about thirty
seconds and then dwindled to an occasional light-runner. Barlow crossed
warily and leaned against a vending machine, blowing big breaths.
_Look natural_, he told himself. _Do something normal. Buy something
from the machine._
He fumbled out some change, got a newspaper for a dime, a handkerchief
for a quarter and a candy bar for another quarter.
The faint chocolate smell made him ravenous suddenly. He clawed at the
glassy wrapper printed "CRIGGLIES" quite futilely for a few seconds,
and then it divided neatly by itself. The bar made three good bites,
and he bought two more and gobbled them down.
Thirsty, he drew a carbonated orange drink in another one of the glassy
wrappers from the machine for another dime. When he fumbled with it, it
divided neatly and spilled all over his knees. Barlow decided he had
been there long enough and walked on.
The shop windows were--shop windows. People still wore and bought
clothes, still smoked and bought tobacco, still ate and bought food.
And they still went to the movies, he saw with pleased surprise as he
passed and then returned to a glittering place whose sign said it was
THE BIJOU.
The place seemed to be showing a quintuple feature, _Babies Are
Terrible_, _Don't Have Children_, and _The Canali Kid_.
It was irresistible; he paid a dollar and went in.
He caught the tail-end of _The Canali Kid_ in three-dimensional,
full-color, full-scent production. It appeared to be an interplanetary
saga winding up with a chase scene and a reconciliation between
estranged hero and heroine. _Babies Are Terrible_ and _Don't Have
Children_ were fantastic arguments against parenthood--the grotesquely
exaggerated dangers of painfully graphic childbirth, vicious children,
old parents beaten and starved by their sadistic offspring. The
audience, Barlow astoundedly noted, was placidly champing sweets and
showing no particular signs of revulsion.
The _Coming Attractions_ drove him into the lobby. The fanfares
were shattering, the blazing colors blinding, and the added scents
stomach-heaving.
* * * * *
When his eyes again became accustomed to the moderate lighting of the
lobby, he groped his way to a bench and opened the newspaper he had
bought. It turned out to be _The Racing Sheet_, which afflicted him
with a crushing sense of loss. The familiar boxed index in the lower
left hand corner of the front page showed almost unbearably that
Churchill Downs and Empire City were still in business--
Blinking back tears, he turned to the Past Performances at Churchill.
They weren't using abbreviations any more, and the pages because of
that were single-column instead of double. But it was all the same--or
was it?
He squinted at the first race, a three-quarter-mile maiden claimer for
thirteen hundred dollars. Incredibly, the track record was two minutes,
ten and three-fifths seconds. Any beetle in his time could have knocked
off the three-quarter in one-fifteen. It was the same for the other
distances, much worse for route events.
_What the hell had happened to everything?_
He studied the form of a five-year-old brown mare in the second and
couldn't make head or tail of it. She'd won and lost and placed and
showed and lost and placed without rhyme or reason. She looked like a
front-runner for a couple of races and then she looked like a no-good
pig and then she looked like a mudder but the next time it rained she
wasn't and then she was a stayer and then she was a pig again. In a
good five-thousand-dollar allowances event, too!
Barlow looked at the other entries and it slowly dawned on him that
they were all like the five-year-old brown mare. Not a single damned
horse running had the slightest trace of class.