"What now?" Hendley asked.
"You'll see," Nik said with a grin. And he added, shoving a glass toward Hendley, "Here's that refill."
The murmur from the audience grew louder. A computer band, simulating the sounds of old-fashioned man-played instruments, raised a triumphant peal. Abruptly a single spotlight speared the center of the stage. A section of the floor slowly folded back, and into the spotlight rose a naked woman, aggressively feminine, her legs spread wide, her magnificent bosom high, her head thrown back to let long hair stream down over her shoulders. The light turned swiftly to blue, and the spontaneous audience applause turned into a roar.
Above the noise Nik cried, "Remarkable woman! I won her once! Tremendous!"
Startled, Hendley stared at him. "You won her?"
Nik waited until the crowd's uproar had begun to subside. "In the drawing," he said then. "That's what those little white tags they wear are for. There's a filter over the tags, by the way—that's what screens out the colored rays. You have that ticket you got when we came into the theater? Well, there'll be a drawing. Winning tickets are matched to the girls. All of them. Red ones go first, then the green, the blue last." He grinned reminiscently. "That's really the part of the show that's special. Oh, the dancing and the rest are all right, and the thought-screen is interesting—that'll be starting up soon—but wait till the drawing!"
Hendley felt sick. His stomach stirred uneasily. He swallowed hard. A sad, enigmatic statement kept running through his head: "That's what I'm supposed to be." Beautiful, he thought. Selected because she was beautiful. Trained to please with her beauty. Trained, too, to simulate passion.
No, it was impossible! What he feared couldn't be true! He had drunk too much, and his mind was as unsettled as his body. The resemblance was superficial, deceptive, a trick of lighting.
But the sick fear could not be reasoned away.
A group dance number began. The woman painted in blue light was taller than the others, more blatantly sexual, dominant. Now she raised one arm, holding up a slender metal rod. Her wrist flicked. A string of white light danced across the stage like the lash of a whip. Where it snapped off a red dancer cringed, cowering, pantomiming fear. Or was she acting? Was the whiplash real?