Using her sting of light the blue woman drove the dancers robed in red and green light through their routine. Each girl stayed within her narrow frame of light—or rather, the cones of color nimbly followed the girls as if attached to them. Hendley tried to single out the girl tagged number 11. He kept losing her, searching, finding her again, afraid of what he would see, helpless to turn away.
For a brief instant she passed through the field of the materializer and was reproduced in the cylinder no more than twenty feet away. She turned her head, seeming to glance over her shoulder directly at Hendley. The slight gesture brought a stab of pain to his chest. She had tilted her head exactly that way toward him when he found her outside the Agricultural Research Center. No two women would have that precise balance of grace and reserve, that particular angle of the head in turning. He knew that dip of waist, that soft swell of breast, that slender column of neck—that hidden sadness.
ABC-331 looked into his eyes without seeing him, whirled and spun away.
Nik was talking. His voice seemed muffled, coming through a filter of numbness. "I suppose you're wondering why these women are brought here. You see, they found out long ago that there aren't enough women in the camps—there never are. Fewer make it here than men. The Organization knows why, I don't. Most of those who are here are Contracted. That doesn't always mean very much, but it adds to the shortage. Obviously Freemen couldn't be denied the singular pleasures women can give. So there's a fresh batch brought in every month to stock the PIB's, and there are the showgirls. They come once a week. There's something about showgirls, about having a woman a thousand other men have stared at and wanted...."
He paused. The pattern of the dance had changed. Under the lash of the blue woman's mysterious whip the green and red figures separated into matched pairs. The green, with their male face-masks, were bolder, more aggressive, threatening in attitude. The dancing red figures expressed in their movements a coquettish withdrawal, timidity, that peculiarly feminine blend of provocation and elusiveness.
And now the first flickering of light and motion showed on the giant thought-screen over the stage. The images became clearer, a sinuous mingling of red and green light, shaping to the forms of human bodies, writhing and twisting.
"Amazing thing, really," Nik said. "The thought-screen, I mean. I suppose the rest of it is pretty much what shows have always been, even in pre-Organization time. The female figure, dance, music, pantomime—they've always been basic ingredients of entertainment. The materializers aren't that special either. Just a more complex kind of viewscreen, bringing the stage closer to you. But the thought-screen, that's something else!"
"What does it do?" The meaning of the images on the giant screen was not yet clear. Hendley spoke painfully, almost against his will.
Nik seemed surprised. "You have peekies on the outside, don't you?"
"Yes. They let you create your own thought-pictures. But that's private. One, at most two people."