THROW ROCKS AT GLAMOR GIRLS!
FLUORESCENT TATTOOS!
Those were a few of the signs that flared and blared at Phil as he was marched across the springy, rubberized, plasti-bottle strewn grounds of All Pleasures Amusement Park.
The government crack-down on Fun Incorporated had produced a few tangible changes in Double AP, as far as Phil could judge from his last visit. The burlesque juke boxes were padlocked, the rubberoid figures that would shimmy orgiastically for a quarter were shrouded from view. Dresses were perhaps an inch higher than usual on the bosoms of the girls working in concessions. There didn't seem to be any shifty-eyed gents recruiting special parties to meet a gambling robot or enjoy some other form of illegal entertainment. In front of the side show someone was painting out the sign that read, "See the Woman With Four Mammary Glands!" Phil noticed Dion looking up at this defacement rather wistfully.
Yet there was an uneasiness in the park, and it wasn't just that the crowd was light. Barkers called out too suddenly and stopped too soon. Customers hesitated uncomfortably in front of concessions, then shuffled morosely on. Over-age glamor girls ready to dodge rubber rocks, or have their bedclothes or skirts jerked off when a spaceball hit its planet-simulating target, were a trifle hysterical in the challenges they shrilled at passing patrons. The cries coming faintly from the top of the 1,000 foot drop in the Spaceship Ride weren't the usual terrified but delighted squeals; they sounded more like wails.
Perhaps the fall of Fun Incorporated had caused people who pathetically treasured their thrills, or the money to be made from them, to wonder, "What next?" Perhaps President Barnes' rambling apocalyptic speeches had finally taken effect, making people ask themselves what they were getting from the so-called pleasures of life, especially the more highly advertised ones. Perhaps the government directive just now being barked from the public news-speakers for the destruction of all cats had given people a "We'd be safer at home" feeling.
Or it may have been that the uneasiness at Double AP was part of a general feeling gripping America, a feeling that had been gathering power in the unconscious and just now burst into thought, a feeling that something that even the government couldn't handle was stalking invisibly, whether for good or ill, behind each man.
Of course, for Phil the menacing stalkers were two very definite figures: Carstairs and Buck, who at the moment were shepherding their unwilling assistants through the pupil of one of several surrealistic eyes that served as the entrances to the Bug-Eyed Bar.
Tonight the gaudy tavern was emptier than the Park outside. Its famous Ten-G Highballs and Stun-Gun Cocktails were going begging. Its notoriously drink-hungry hostesses were conspicuous by their absence. The only two customers were being served soda pop by the smaller of the two bartenders, making it very simple for Juno, Phil, Mary and Dion to climb onto pneumo-barstools in front of the other bartender. Carstairs and Buck stood close behind them.
Phil found it difficult to believe that the man in front of them was Moe Brimstine. For one thing, his hair was red, even to the stubble on his cheeks and chin. For another, the eyes that Moe had always kept behind dark glasses were as small and squinting as a pig's. And although the fugitive from the FBL must recognize several of them, he didn't show it in any way that Phil could discern. He looked them all over stolidly, polishing the speckless bar with the immemorial soiled towel. For that matter, the whole bar looked much as a bar might have looked fifty or a hundred years before; robots could not supervise B-girls, nor had they ever been legalized as bouncers.