Nik waited until the crowd's uproar had begun to subside. "In the
drawing," he said then. "That's what those little white tags they
wear are for. There's a filter over the tags, by the way--that's what
screens out the colored rays. You have that ticket you got when we came
into the theater? Well, there'll be a drawing. Winning tickets are
matched to the girls. All of them. Red ones go first, then the green,
the blue last." He grinned reminiscently. "That's really the part of
the show that's special. Oh, the dancing and the rest are all right,
and the thought-screen is interesting--that'll be starting up soon--but
wait till the drawing!"
Hendley felt sick. His stomach stirred uneasily. He swallowed hard.
A sad, enigmatic statement kept running through his head: "That's
what I'm supposed to be." Beautiful, he thought. Selected because she
was beautiful. Trained to please with her beauty. Trained, too, to
simulate passion.
No, it was impossible! What he feared couldn't be true! He had drunk
too much, and his mind was as unsettled as his body. The resemblance
was superficial, deceptive, a trick of lighting.
But the sick fear could not be reasoned away.
A group dance number began. The woman painted in blue light was taller
than the others, more blatantly sexual, dominant. Now she raised one
arm, holding up a slender metal rod. Her wrist flicked. A string of
white light danced across the stage like the lash of a whip. Where it
snapped off a red dancer cringed, cowering, pantomiming fear. Or was
she acting? Was the whiplash real?
Using her sting of light the blue woman drove the dancers robed in red
and green light through their routine. Each girl stayed within her
narrow frame of light--or rather, the cones of color nimbly followed
the girls as if attached to them. Hendley tried to single out the girl
tagged number 11. He kept losing her, searching, finding her again,
afraid of what he would see, helpless to turn away.
For a brief instant she passed through the field of the materializer
and was reproduced in the cylinder no more than twenty feet away.
She turned her head, seeming to glance over her shoulder directly at
Hendley. The slight gesture brought a stab of pain to his chest. She
had tilted her head exactly that way toward him when he found her
outside the Agricultural Research Center. No two women would have that
precise balance of grace and reserve, that particular angle of the head
in turning. He knew that dip of waist, that soft swell of breast, that
slender column of neck--that hidden sadness.
ABC-331 looked into his eyes without seeing him, whirled and spun away.
Nik was talking. His voice seemed muffled, coming through a filter of
numbness. "I suppose you're wondering why these women are brought here.
You see, they found out long ago that there aren't enough women in the
camps--there never are. Fewer make it here than men. The Organization
knows why, I don't. Most of those who are here are Contracted. That
doesn't always mean very much, but it adds to the shortage. Obviously
Freemen couldn't be denied the singular pleasures women can give. So
there's a fresh batch brought in every month to stock the PIB's, and
there are the showgirls. They come once a week. There's something about
showgirls, about having a woman a thousand other men have stared at and
wanted...."
He paused. The pattern of the dance had changed. Under the lash of the
blue woman's mysterious whip the green and red figures separated into
matched pairs. The green, with their male face-masks, were bolder, more
aggressive, threatening in attitude. The dancing red figures expressed
in their movements a coquettish withdrawal, timidity, that peculiarly
feminine blend of provocation and elusiveness.
And now the first flickering of light and motion showed on the giant
thought-screen over the stage. The images became clearer, a sinuous
mingling of red and green light, shaping to the forms of human bodies,
writhing and twisting.
"Amazing thing, really," Nik said. "The thought-screen, I mean. I
suppose the rest of it is pretty much what shows have always been,
even in pre-Organization time. The female figure, dance, music,
pantomime--they've always been basic ingredients of entertainment. The
materializers aren't that special either. Just a more complex kind of
viewscreen, bringing the stage closer to you. But the thought-screen,
that's something else!"
"What does it do?" The meaning of the images on the giant screen was
not yet clear. Hendley spoke painfully, almost against his will.