Part 7

Participation was a compulsive act. Less than an hour after Hendley left the swimming pool in the central park, once more clad in his visitor's white uniform, he found himself lingering beside a fence enclosing a series of tennis courts. A shower, a rest, another whiskey and soda had refreshed him. Walking had loosened bruised, stiff muscles, although he still limped, favoring his right knee. Except for the knee and a swollen lip, he felt almost normal. Ready for action, in fact. Tennis, however, seemed a little too strenuous, even such indifferent tennis as that being played here. The players lobbed the ball back and forth listlessly, hardly trying when a shot went out of reach. Odd. A number of the activities Hendley had watched were carried on with the same indifference: lawn games, a bowling match, boating. In the parks and on the streets many Freemen stood around with vacant expressions. Yet the water polo players had thrown themselves into their game with a vengeance Hendley could attest to. Some participants in a football game he'd paused to watch for a while had piled into each other with an audible crunching impact. Even a group of cyclists racing around a circular track had competed with real fervor. They weren't very good riders, for Hendley had witnessed two collisions on a far turn in the brief time he watched. But they were enthusiastic.

Contact sports, he thought....

He walked on. The afternoon was waning, though the sun remained well above the horizon. How little the Freemen seemed to notice the sun! He never saw any of them staring up at the sky, while Hendley frequently paused to survey that awesome immensity. They brushed heedlessly past vivid flowers in bloom, trampled upon bushes, failed to turn their heads when a bird sang from a tree, while Hendley found these things fascinating. Perhaps in time you became used to them. They might come to seem ordinary. Even the vaulting sky might fail to make you feel small.

He came to an area of carefully tended lawns broken here and there by patches of white sand, defined by rough stretches of taller grass and shrubbery. Small groups of players strolled in the distance, pulling carts or carrying bags containing slender sticks. Something tugged at Hendley's memory. He had seen such a place in a miniature display in the Sports Museum. In the underground cities there was not enough space for such a layout, but it made a pretty picture in the late afternoon in the spacious Freeman Camp.

Near one of the familiar beige service buildings a player was setting a small white ball on the ground and preparing to strike it with the weighted end of one of the slender poles. He was a stocky, vigorous man twice Hendley's age, his skin reddened rather than tanned by the sun, his thick arms choked with dense gray hair, his head completely bald. Behind him another player hovered, watching, a tall angular man of much the same age, with a prominent Adam's apple, knife-edge nose, remarkably long arms, and an angry scowl. Calling on an old habit, Hendley attached the nickname Curly to the bald man with the hairy arms, and Happy to his scowling companion. Nicknames were easier to remember than numbers.

Curly glanced up from the white ball as Hendley came near. "Join us?" he called cheerfully. "It's better with three."

"Humph!" the other grunted.

"I'd like to," Hendley said. The exercise, which seemed mild, would help to limber abused muscles a little more, easing the soreness in his arms and neck. He was issued a bag of clubs and three white balls at the service building. When he joined the other players, Curly was waiting, prepared to hit his ball.

"If you don't know how to play, you can just watch us," Curly said.

Hendley nodded. As Curly faced his ball, Hendley hefted the slender plastic club with its flat-faced head and tentatively swung it.

"Not until I start my swing!" Curly snapped sharply.

Hendley desisted, not sure what he had done wrong. The stocky man flexed his hairy arms and drew his club high over his head. He remained frozen in that position for several seconds. Then he swung, the clubhead lashing down in a swift arc. At that moment the dour-faced player suddenly stabbed out with his club toward the ball. He missed by inches. Curly's club smacked the ball solidly and, following through, banged into his opponent's stick before it could be withdrawn. The club shot from Happy's hands. He grabbed his fingers, grimacing with pain. Curly laughed gleefully. "Caught you that time!" he cried.

The ball had flown almost out of sight down the playing field. The three men watched it until it came to rest. "That's the fairway," Curly explained. "Try to hit it there. Over there, that's called the rough. And those sandy patches are traps. Object is to get to the green--see it way off there?"

Hendley peered into the distance, wondering how he was ever going to hit the ball that far. Then the angular player stepped over to place his ball on the ground, scowling more savagely than before. Curly took up a position behind the taller man. He winked at Hendley.

A pattern of play emerged. One player was allowed to stand behind the one driving his ball. He could attempt to dislodge the ball, but only after the driver had begun his swing. Happy's first maneuver turned out to be a feint. He began his swing, checked it suddenly and brought his club into position for a direct overhand smash. But Curly had anticipated him. His stab at the ball was also a feint. Happy was left holding his club aloft with no chance to hit his opponent's stick. Curly laughed until his eyes were moist. "Cost you a stroke!" he chortled.

Happy managed to make his drive, but he used a short, vicious stroke. The ball sped out in a low trajectory, hooked sharply, and disappeared into the tall grass of the rough. Happy muttered angrily to himself.

Hendley, innocent in the tricks of the game, became an object of amusement to his fellow players. They took turns interfering with him. Three times they managed to knock his ball away just before Hendley's clubhead could strike it. On the fourth try Hendley not only hit the ball but had the satisfaction of catching Curly's club as well. He could feel the shivering impact.

His drive, with his three misses, he was informed, cost him a total of four strokes.

Hendley was not sure that he cared much for the game, but he was now determined to stick it out. At least his companions played in earnest. Curly took a keen delight in every phase of the game, but his cheerfulness did not disguise the intensity with which he played. Happy's long face grew longer and darker as the game progressed, his hawk nose seemed to sharpen, his mouth tightened into a thinner, grimmer line. His derision over Hendley's atrocious play seemed to be the only pleasure he found in the game. Hendley wondered why, with so many other sports and entertainments in the camp to choose from, the tall man should persist in one which merely made him angry.

At the beginning of the fourth hole, as each successive step in the game was called, Curly bristled when Happy's club, trying to stab the ball, struck the stocky man's shin. They exchanged heated words. Happy raised his club threateningly, but Curly brandished his own and faced the other down. They played on in sullen silence.

Hendley, the last to hit his ball successfully as usual, knocked it once more into the rough. This time the other two players contemptuously left him to hit out by himself without interference. They played on ahead. By the time Hendley managed to knock ball onto the close-cropped grass of the fairway, his companions were both on the green, a circle of very fine grass visible in the distance. Hendley paused a moment to watch them. He would quit after this hole, he reflected. With daylight almost gone--the sun now rested at the tops of the trees ringing the camp--he had no time to waste on pointless pleasure. He lacked the fiercely competitive approach of the other two men, perhaps because he was so inexpert.

On the distant green something had happened. Curly was shaking a fist at the taller man. They stood so close their chests bumped. Hendley could not hear them, but he watched the silent tableau of their anger with a feeling of apprehension. Suddenly Happy's thin, sharp-angled figure bent, lashing out like a whip. He snatched the other man's club from him, dropping his own. He brought the slender plastic rod down viciously across his bony thigh. To Hendley's surprise the plastic rod bent. At a second blow it snapped in two. With malice evident in the gesture Happy threw the two broken pieces onto the green.

Hendley had started toward them. For a moment nothing happened, the two men seeming to glare at each other in impotent rage. Hendley's pace quickened to a trot. It was a lucky thing that Curly had such a cheerful disposition....

Hendley started running. The stocky man had suddenly scooped up Happy's club from the ground. The tall man lunged for it. Curly eluded him. "Stop it!" Hendley shouted, but he knew he could not be heard. Curly dodged away from the surly player, whirled, raising the club, lashing down....

Hendley pulled up short. He seemed unable to breathe. The two figures on the green were motionless in the bright sunlight. Slowly the dour-faced man's tall body began to collapse, sliding toward the ground as if it were strung together in loosely attached sections. The silent impact of the lean figure hitting the ground prodded Hendley into action. His mind was still stunned, but his legs moved without his volition, automatically propelling him toward the green. Far off to the right another group of players had paused to stare. Hendley waved at them urgently, but they did not move.

What happened next no longer had the power to shock or terrify him. As he raced closer to the green, the stocky, good-humored Curly raised the plastic club in his hands and with careful, deliberate aim brought the weighted head down to crush the fallen man's skull.

Near the sand trap at the edge of the green Hendley paused to be sick. When he was able to stagger onto the smoothly clipped carpet of grass Curly was thoughtfully wiping the clubhead on the grass. Not far away a small, beige-painted vehicle was speeding toward them. The stocky man hardly glanced at Hendley or his victim. He made no attempt to escape.

He's mad, Hendley thought, facing him across the green. But at any rate he wouldn't get away now. The beige vehicle was approaching swiftly. Hendley stared at the dead man, whose face no longer scowled. Happy, he thought. Sickened again, he turned away.

The beige car, a motor-powered van carrying two beige-uniformed attendants, drove directly to the edge of the green. As the men hopped out Hendley expected Curly to run--or to prepare to resist. To his astonishment the two attendants paid no more attention to the stocky man than to Hendley. With silent efficiency they scooped the dead body onto a stretcher, carried it to the rear of the van, and slid it inside. Without a word they retreated around the car and began to climb back onto their seats.

"Wait!" Hendley shouted, running toward them. "Aren't you going to do anything about _him_?" He pointed accusingly at Curly, who was making practice swings with his borrowed club. The stocky man looked up.

One of the attendants was already in his seat, but the driver paused. His head swiveled toward Hendley--stiffly. "He was murdered!" Hendley shouted. "I saw it! You can't let him get away with it!"

The driver's face completed its turn. It was blank, shining, impersonal, and, in spite of its perfection of feature, inhuman. Hendley stared in stunned incredulity. Robots! Cleaning up the human debris on the golf course as they rescued drowning swimmers from the pools. No wonder Curly had remained indifferent!

The vehicle drove off while Hendley stared after it. Swinging around, he tried to find the distant group of players who had paused in their game to watch what was happening. He saw them far off on another fairway. Their interest had turned back to their game.

Hendley swung back to confront Curly. Revulsion shook him. The whole affair was impossible--it couldn't happen! "What kind of a man are you?" he shouted, hardly knowing what he was saying.

To his horror the stocky man smiled with his usual cheerfulness. "These things happen," he said. "He never liked the game really. I told him he shouldn't play it, but...." Curly made another idle swing with his club, the head whistling in the air. "Don't think about it. You'll soon feel better. Shall we get on?"

Hendley gaped at him. "Get on with what?"

"The game," Curly said blandly. "I'll wait for you while you hit up to the green."

Hendley's disbelief burst like a seed pod, spilling out angry words. "You're insane!" he cried. "You've just murdered a man! If you think we're going on with this farce--"

"But you have to play," the bald man said, unperturbed. "Rules of the game, you know. Have to play at least six holes through." He smiled again, his red face unmarked by concern. He said, "Obviously you're new here, and there are some things you obviously don't understand. But anyone who plays golf accepts the risks involved. And the rules." He hefted his plastic club with his hairy, muscular arms. "You'll play," he murmured. "Unless you'd rather fight it out here."

In an arrested moment of stillness in which no bird sang and the air itself ceased to stir, Hendley faced the murderer on the sun-washed green. It _was_ happening, he thought stupidly. It could not possibly happen, but it was.

For some reason he looked up toward the sky, the great blue dome blazing with fire on the western horizon. Then, his brain numb, his steps wooden, he turned and walked back along the fairway toward his ball.

7

The first star of evening rested like a jewel against the night's dark throat. The moon had not yet risen. At surface level in the Freeman Camp, away from the gaudy main streets and the floodlit play areas, the shadows were deep. The clumps of woods and bushes in the parks, so fresh and cool and inviting during the day, were now black, forbidding caves.

At night the camp was different. Under the day's warm sun and dazzling sky, it was a vivid and colorful panorama of flowers and trees and green grass and gaily painted buildings, with a leisurely pace and a pervading atmosphere of carefree pleasure which could not be destroyed by the occasional bizarre incident. With the coming of darkness the tempo of activity became more frenetic, its spirit caught by the shrill cacophony of the music blaring from viewscreens and the computer bands in the better cocktail lounges and dance halls. There was a keener, more penetrating edge to the sudden peals of laughter, a more insistent note in the gay, sophisticated talk around the cafe tables and in the bars, an urgency to the hurrying steps of the crowds pushing along the streets, a sweaty impatience pervading the lines forming outside the red-painted PIB's. By day the Freemen were a family group enjoying lawn games and relaxing by the pool, and the family could hardly be blamed if a mad uncle brandished a golf club. At night the party started.

The main thoroughfares were thronged with Freemen. They clustered on street corners. They jammed the lavish restaurants and spilled out of the tiny bars. They swarmed through the glowing theater lobbies and filled the recreation halls with noisy confusion. Their merriment had a voice. It was high and artificially frightened, ringing through the tunnels of the electronically thrill-packed fun houses. It was hoarse and raw with savage excitement in the banked spectator rows of the miniature bird fight arena, where two leggy, long-beaked birds--rare mutations of an earlier species--controlled by slender string leashes secured to metal rings around their necks, goaded by electronic impulses from the whiplike metal rods held by their handler-trainers, pecked and slashed at each other with their curved sword-beaks. It was low and suggestive behind the drawn curtains of the private booths in the peekie-houses, where the latest erotic films were created by thought impulses on the individual screens.

Assaulted by the voices, jostled by the crowds, TRH-247 wandered through the camp. The driving tempo of its gaiety infected him, stealing into his blood stream, quickening all his senses into a kind of exaggerated awareness. Several drinks had blurred the residue of horror left from the scene he had witnessed on the golf green, and diluted the angry tension of the last two holes played out in the fading light. In the evening's party atmosphere he could almost forget--although, like someone holding a door closed against a ghost, he avoided the shadowed places and the dimly lighted side roads which separated the rows of residential buildings, seeking out the open, crowded centers and the bright lights.

On those final two holes of golf Hendley had required thirteen strokes. The number would not easily be forgotten, for each time he had addressed his ball, the stocky, bald-headed player had stood behind him, chuckling softly, tapping his weighted clubhead in his hand or casually lifting it. Hendley had had to fight down panic. His shots had been erratic and uncontrollable. To his lasting shame, on the last hole, as he placed himself behind his amused opponent in position to interfere with a drive, he had found himself thinking: If I struck now, I could get him first.

But nothing had happened. Hendley had not acted, and the man he called Curly had been content to smile at Hendley's nervousness and to mock his ill-concealed anger and revulsion. At the end of the sixth hole the stocky man had chuckled, saying, "Beat you by nineteen strokes. You're not much competition." And with that he had picked up his ball and walked away, leaving Hendley to stare after him bitterly, galled by the intense relief that left him quivering, unable to walk steadily, his hands shaking so he had trouble retrieving his ball.

Time, the serene beauty of the camp, and two quick whiskeys at the nearest refreshment counter quieted Hendley's nerves and helped him to gain perspective. Obviously there must be some form of internal force for law and order among the Freemen. Outsiders presumably couldn't interfere with that internal rule. To do so would be to deny freedom. When Hendley found out how the system worked, he would have to report the dangerously mad golfer. Something would be done. Surely the risks of golf mentioned by Curly didn't include cold-blooded murder!

As reason asserted itself--and the drinks took effect--he began to feel better. He was able to sip his third drink slowly, enjoying it, savoring with it his first full view of twilight, painting a stark black filigree of leaf and branch against a luminous sky. The spectacle left him breathless. What overwhelming grandeur the world offered! And here in the Freeman Camp it was continuously on display. The sky itself seemed to thunder the joys of freedom. Against this awesome splendor the overzealous enthusiasm of a group of swimmers, the sexual whim of an impressionable girl, even the petty violence of a deranged mind shrank into insignificance.

There was so much to enchant the eye and ear. A man would never have his fill of it. If freedom meant no more than the opportunity--and the leisure--to enjoy all this to his heart's content: the beauty of a bird soaring, the sparkle of a sunlit pool, the intricate texture of a tree trunk, the cool sweep of a green lawn, the vaulting leap of sky from horizon to horizon--it would be enough. Endless pleasure. No need to devour it hungrily (except for him, Hendley thought, checking his rapture). For the others, the truly free, there would never be the necessity to hurry away to the appointed task, the appointed recreation hour, the appointed woman. (He hadn't thought of RED-498, his Assigned, with quite that cold objectivity before, but it was true.)

Darkness came. The insistent beat of the crowded pleasure centers caught first his ear and then his need to participate, to discover more of the lures of freedom. He was drawn along the crowded streets, looking, smiling as the groups grew more boisterous and here and there an early drunk reeled from a bar, absorbing the sights and sounds as he had savored his last whiskey. Only occasionally--passing near the dark, silent, empty places--did he shiver, as if he sensed there the lurking shadows of pain and insensate cruelty.

At last he was hungry. There were many restaurants to choose from, but he remembered the reception official's reference to the main Rec Hall on the hill. He had no trouble locating the hill or identifying the massive yellow building, whose walls were thrown into sharp relief by a battery of lights in its spacious gardens. As Hendley rode a moving walk up the steep incline he could feel the lifting pressure in his thighs. It had been a long day with far more physical activity than he was accustomed to.

Up close the Rec Hall was even more impressive than it had seemed at a distance. From a central spindle, itself as large as an ordinary recreation hall in the cities, curving escalators rose to the main theater or exhibition hall, whose domelike roof vaulted outward on concrete spines like a huge umbrella. Lesser wings on ground level contained varied game rooms. There was one section off to one side which was concealed behind a high wall. On a lower level, also reached from the central lobby by winding escalators, was the great casino. A floodlit pool was set into the lush green gardens surrounding the building complex.

Even the lobby was luxurious with an opulence Hendley had never seen before. Living trees bloomed next to the great concrete pillars. Ornate plastic and real wood furnishings, intricately worked, were placed in conversational groupings centered around colorful three-dimensional paintings and depth sculpture. One entire luminous wall shed a soft, flattering blue light over the whole room.

Inquiring at the main desk, Hendley learned that a wide selection of food and entertainment was available. A computer-clerk blinked out a descriptive layout of the Rec Hall on its message panel. There was a main dining room on a balcony, where a computer band played discreetly and a dance floor was jammed with couples doing the Sidewalk Hop. Hendley chose a quieter cafe in one of the wings on ground level.

The service was excellent. He ordered a martini, punched several buttons for his meal and sat at the designated table. Just as he finished his drink a tray carrying his hot dinner slid smoothly off the conveyor belt which ran past his table. The meat-sub was marvelously authentic, tender and juicy. Somewhat to his own surprise he devoured the meal greedily.

Relaxing over coffee and an after-dinner liqueur--which was excellent, without a trace of chemical taste or side effects--he glanced around the cafe with a feeling of well-being. Something--a delayed tug of recognition--brought his gaze back to a young man at an adjoining table. When their eyes met the young man smiled and nodded. Hendley returned the greeting. It was the same youth who had saved his life that afternoon by promptly pulling him from the pool.

With the careless slouch and bored manner of someone long used to freedom's luxuries, the young man picked up his drink and approached Hendley's table. "Join you?" he murmured. "You look as if you've been enjoying your first day in camp."

"It's been quite a day," Hendley admitted. "There's so much to see and do."

"That's the usual reaction," the other said, faintly patronizing.

Hendley flushed. With a self-conscious laugh he said, half-defensively, "I didn't say it was _all_ good."

The stranger was surprised. "Now that's unusual."