"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."