It did not take Billy Neville long to make his transformation to the personality of a clothing drummer. Every special cop had to be an expert at the art of quick shifts of disguise and Neville was rather better than most. Nor did it take long for the little blue copter to whisk them halfway around the knobby little planetoid of Pallas. It eased itself through an airlock into a doomed town, and there the colonel left it with his orderly.
The town itself possessed little interest for Neville though his trained photographic eye missed few of its details. It was much like the smaller doomed settlements on the Moon. He was more interested in meeting the local magnate, whom they found in his office in the Carstairs Building. The colonel made the introductions, during which Neville sized up the man. He was of fair height, stockily built, and had remarkably frank and friendly eyes for a self-made man of the asteroids. Not that there was not a certain hardness about him and a considerable degree of shrewdness, but he lacked the cynical cunning so often displayed by the pioneers of the outer system. Neville noted other details as well—the beginning of a set of triple chins, a little brown mole with three hairs on it alongside his nose, and the way a stray lock of hair kept falling over his left eye.
"Let's go," said the colonel, as soon as the formalities were over.
Neville had to borrow a breathing helmet from Mr. Carstairs, for he had not one of his own and they had to walk from the far portal of the dome across the field to where the showboat lay parked. He thought wryly, as he put it on, that he went from one extreme to another—from Venus, where the air was over-moist, heavy and oppressive from its stagnation, to windy, blustery Mars, and then here, where there was no air at all.
As they approached the grounded ship they saw it was all lit up and throngs of people were approaching from all sides. Flood lamps threw great letters on the side of the silvery hull reading, "Greatest Show of the Void—Come One, Come All—Your Money Back if Not Absolutely Satisfied." They went ahead of the queue, thanks to the prestige of the colonel and the local tycoon, and were instantly admitted. It took but a moment to check their breathers at the helmet room and then the ushers had them in tow.
"See you after the show, Mr. Allington," said the colonel to Neville, "I will be in Mr. Carstairs box."
Neville sank into a seat and watched them go. Then he began to take stock of the playhouse. The seats were comfortable and commodious, evidently having been designed to hold patrons clad in heavy-dust space-suits. The auditorium was almost circular, one semi-circle being taken up by the stage, the other by the tiers of seats. Overhead ranged a row of boxes jutting out above the spectators below. Neville puzzled for a long time over the curtain that shut off the stage. It seemed very unreal, like the shimmer of the aurora, but it affected vision to the extent that the beholder could not say with any certainty what was behind it. It was like looking through a waterfall. Then there was eerie music, too, from an unseen source, flooding the air with queer melodies. People continued to pour in. The house gradually darkened and as it did the volume and wildness of the music rose. Then there was a deep bong, and lights went completely out for a full second. The show was on.
Neville sat back and enjoyed it. He could not have done otherwise, for the sign on the hull had not been an empty plug. It was the best show in the void—or anywhere else, for that matter. A spectral voice that seemed to come from everywhere in the house announced the first number—The Dance of the Wood-sprites of Venus. Instantly little flickers of light appeared throughout the house—a mass of vari-colored fireflies blinking off and on and swirling in dizzy spirals. They steadied and grew, coalesced into blobs of living fire—ruby, dazzling green, ethereal blue and yellow. They swelled and shrank, took on human forms only to abandon them; purple serpentine figures writhed among them, paling to silvery smoke and then expiring as a shower of violet sparks. And throughout was the steady, maddening rhythm of the dance tune, unutterably savage and haunting—a folk dance of the hill tribes of Venus. At last, when the sheer beauty of it began to lull the viewers into a hypnotic trance, there came the shrill blare of massed trumpets and the throb of mighty tom-toms culminating in an ear-shattering discord that broke the spell.
The lights were on. The stage was bare. Neville sat up straighter and looked, blinking. It was as if he were in an abandoned warehouse. And then the scenery began to grow. Yes, grow. Almost imperceptible it was, at first, then more distinct. Nebulous bodies appeared, wisps of smoke. They wavered, took on shape, took on color, took on the appearance of solidity. The scent began to have meaning. Part of the background was a gray cliff undercut with a yawning cave. It was a scene from the Moon, a hangout of the cliffdwellers, those refugees from civilization who chose to live the wild life of the undomed Moon rather than submit to the demands of a more ordered life.