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."