"But you have to play," the bald man said, unperturbed. "Rules of the game, you know. Have to play at least six holes through." He smiled again, his red face unmarked by concern. He said, "Obviously you're new here, and there are some things you obviously don't understand. But anyone who plays golf accepts the risks involved. And the rules." He hefted his plastic club with his hairy, muscular arms. "You'll play," he murmured. "Unless you'd rather fight it out here."
In an arrested moment of stillness in which no bird sang and the air itself ceased to stir, Hendley faced the murderer on the sun-washed green. It was happening, he thought stupidly. It could not possibly happen, but it was.
For some reason he looked up toward the sky, the great blue dome blazing with fire on the western horizon. Then, his brain numb, his steps wooden, he turned and walked back along the fairway toward his ball.
7
The first star of evening rested like a jewel against the night's dark throat. The moon had not yet risen. At surface level in the Freeman Camp, away from the gaudy main streets and the floodlit play areas, the shadows were deep. The clumps of woods and bushes in the parks, so fresh and cool and inviting during the day, were now black, forbidding caves.
At night the camp was different. Under the day's warm sun and dazzling sky, it was a vivid and colorful panorama of flowers and trees and green grass and gaily painted buildings, with a leisurely pace and a pervading atmosphere of carefree pleasure which could not be destroyed by the occasional bizarre incident. With the coming of darkness the tempo of activity became more frenetic, its spirit caught by the shrill cacophony of the music blaring from viewscreens and the computer bands in the better cocktail lounges and dance halls. There was a keener, more penetrating edge to the sudden peals of laughter, a more insistent note in the gay, sophisticated talk around the cafe tables and in the bars, an urgency to the hurrying steps of the crowds pushing along the streets, a sweaty impatience pervading the lines forming outside the red-painted PIB's. By day the Freemen were a family group enjoying lawn games and relaxing by the pool, and the family could hardly be blamed if a mad uncle brandished a golf club. At night the party started.
The main thoroughfares were thronged with Freemen. They clustered on street corners. They jammed the lavish restaurants and spilled out of the tiny bars. They swarmed through the glowing theater lobbies and filled the recreation halls with noisy confusion. Their merriment had a voice. It was high and artificially frightened, ringing through the tunnels of the electronically thrill-packed fun houses. It was hoarse and raw with savage excitement in the banked spectator rows of the miniature bird fight arena, where two leggy, long-beaked birds—rare mutations of an earlier species—controlled by slender string leashes secured to metal rings around their necks, goaded by electronic impulses from the whiplike metal rods held by their handler-trainers, pecked and slashed at each other with their curved sword-beaks. It was low and suggestive behind the drawn curtains of the private booths in the peekie-houses, where the latest erotic films were created by thought impulses on the individual screens.
Assaulted by the voices, jostled by the crowds, TRH-247 wandered through the camp. The driving tempo of its gaiety infected him, stealing into his blood stream, quickening all his senses into a kind of exaggerated awareness. Several drinks had blurred the residue of horror left from the scene he had witnessed on the golf green, and diluted the angry tension of the last two holes played out in the fading light. In the evening's party atmosphere he could almost forget—although, like someone holding a door closed against a ghost, he avoided the shadowed places and the dimly lighted side roads which separated the rows of residential buildings, seeking out the open, crowded centers and the bright lights.
On those final two holes of golf Hendley had required thirteen strokes. The number would not easily be forgotten, for each time he had addressed his ball, the stocky, bald-headed player had stood behind him, chuckling softly, tapping his weighted clubhead in his hand or casually lifting it. Hendley had had to fight down panic. His shots had been erratic and uncontrollable. To his lasting shame, on the last hole, as he placed himself behind his amused opponent in position to interfere with a drive, he had found himself thinking: If I struck now, I could get him first.
But nothing had happened. Hendley had not acted, and the man he called Curly had been content to smile at Hendley's nervousness and to mock his ill-concealed anger and revulsion. At the end of the sixth hole the stocky man had chuckled, saying, "Beat you by nineteen strokes. You're not much competition." And with that he had picked up his ball and walked away, leaving Hendley to stare after him bitterly, galled by the intense relief that left him quivering, unable to walk steadily, his hands shaking so he had trouble retrieving his ball.