"I don't know what you're talking about," Hendley said.
The visitor smiled. "That's the wrong answer," he said.
Without warning he charged. Only the fact that Hendley was already poised on the verge of flight enabled him to elude the big man's rush. A thick arm caught at his waist, but he was already spinning clear. The fabric of his uniform tore as he broke loose.
Then he was running along the path toward the moving walk and safety, not looking back, not daring to waste even the fraction of a second it would have taken to glance over his shoulder.
For the second time in three weeks, ABC-331 was absent from the spectacle on the stage of the auditorium. Hendley stared down at the spotlighted dancers. Each movement, each graceful pose, each tantalizing glimpse in the nearest materializer brought achingly to memory Ann's willowy beauty. He could hear the audience breathing and muttering and shifting about in quickening excitement, like some huge invisible animal in the darkness of the theater. He felt relief that she was not there, exposing her beauty to the audience like an offering, but at the same time he felt cut off from her.
If only he could communicate with her in some way, let her know that he was alive and safe in the camp, even though he was a prisoner. At least the knowledge would give her some hope.
Hope for what?
The clear, cold question jarred him. Ann saw things with a more candid eye than his. She would know what confinement in the camp meant. She would not blind herself to the impossibility of escape. She would be relieved to know that he was safe, glad, even happy—but she would know that his assumption of a Freeman's role erected a wall far more solid and impregnable than any previous barrier of social status.
Shadowy images flickered on the great thought-screen above the stage. Lurid shapes of desire, created by the minds of Freemen who had exhausted every normal area of pleasure, writhed and twisted on the screen like fugitives from the deepest caverns of the imagination. Dreading what was coming, loathing it because Ann had been involved in that same monstrous pantomime, Hendley turned away from the screen. And in that moment, when his attention shifted, he felt again the pressure of eyes on the back of his neck.