"All right, name it."
"I'm going to have another drink."
Nik chuckled. "Don't say I didn't warn you."
"To the desert with your warnings. Drink is pleasure, and pleasure is all." The familiar Organization slogan came easily to Hendley's lips. "Bring on the girls! Are you sure this is a good seat?"
"The best. There's a materializer right overhead. And you have a good view of the main screen over the stage."
Hendley stared at an opaque plastic cylinder suspended from the ceiling of the great circular auditorium. Less than twenty feet away, the cylinder was just big enough to contain a grown man. It might have been a decorative fixture, its smooth surface reflecting a multicolored flow of light from the auditorium's glowing panels. There were about two dozen of the cylindrical objects spaced throughout the theater, overhead for those seated in the balcony, along the sides for the audience on the main floor. It was difficult to get seats close to the stage, Nik had explained, unless you arrived very early, but with the materializers you didn't need front-row seats. The man-sized cylinders brought the stage to you. Moreover, from a middle distance, and especially from the balcony, you had a better view of the huge thought-screen, the giant father of the materializers in shape, mounted directly over the stage and almost at Hendley's eye level. This huge screen was also dark.
Drinks arrived on a conveyor belt just as the main lights in the auditorium began to dim. From his balcony perch Hendley stared down as the curtain of light obscuring the central stage slowly dissolved. The stage revealed was in semidarkness.
A spatter of applause broke into thunder as a cone of light slashed down to sculpture a living bronze—a nude woman standing motionless on a revolving dais. For an instant the striking figure was enveloped in brilliant white. Then the light began to change from pink through rose to a garish red, until at last the figure seemed to be bathed in blood, unrelieved except for a small white circle lying at the top of the valley between the woman's red breasts. From the balcony it was impossible to distinguish the white circle clearly, but on the materializer, so close to Hendley's seat, it was easy to discern a thin necklace, the clear outline of a white tag, and the number 1 printed on the tag, which had evidently been treated somehow to reject the red light. The crimson figure was reproduced slightly larger than life within the plastic cylinder, and with a breathtaking illusion of reality, as if she were physically imprisoned there. It was not like looking at a viewscreen, even a dimensional one. It was as if the living flesh in its garish costume of light had been transported from the stage into the plastic cocoon.
A second white cone stabbed down through the darkness, pinning a second nude figure upon the stage. Again the light changed by degrees to red. Almost imperceptibly a low, sensuous beat of music had begun to make itself heard. And with that the audience became more vociferous. As another and yet another red figure was revealed on the stage, a persistent murmuring grew. Audible gasps ignited fresh crackles of applause as each new model appeared. They were all young, shapely, beautiful. In the brief flash of white light as they were first seen, their bodies were visibly pale, like Hendley's own, the white sheen of skin unburned by the sun. When the light changed, they became, in their bizarre red envelopes, both more vivid and less human. Hendley could not tear his gaze away as the procession continued. His throat grew dry, and he drained his glass.
Twelve girls in all took their places in the red spotlights. Hendley missed seeing the eleventh one closely. He had glanced down at the stage just before she appeared in closeup on the nearby materializer. By the time he looked back from the general tableau below to the intimate revelation on the cylinder, the girl's image was already fading. And her back was toward him. He had only a glimpse of a slender, willowy body, narrow-waisted, of long slim legs, and of a nest of short curls above a graceful neck. She was a red vision from a dream, but something other than admiration stirred in his mind.