His throat went dry. A cluster of white-clad figures materialized from the green mass of the woods, moving into the cleared area. One of the figures ran ahead of the others, who set off in pursuit. These were Freemen, evidently playing some kind of a game. A ripple of excitement ran through the theater. The pursuing men in white caught up with the leading figure, and they all converged in a writhing, tumbling mass, arms and legs flying. The spectacle was so violent it resembled a battle. One of the men broke free--the same one? Hendley wondered. Perhaps he was "it" in the game. His white coverall was torn, flapping as he ran. One of the other men dove after him, catching him by the ankles and tripping him up. The pursuers closed in.... The screen blurred, out of focus. An audible groan filled the theater. Hendley's heart was thumping. When the picture cleared, one of the Freemen was lying casually on the grass alone, apparently staring up at the sky. It was the one with the torn coverall. The others were racing off into the distance. They disappeared under the cover of the trees. That was all. For a little while after the Freemen vanished, the camera continued to probe the line of trees hopefully. Hendley kept wishing it would return to the man lying in the clearing, but it did not. Another sequence began in the film, but it merely showed some of the camp facilities. No Freemen were visible. Hendley's thoughts kept going back to the men he had seen. What carefree game had they been playing? What must it be like to engage in such openly abandoned sport? To lie endlessly on cool grass, watching the sun? To follow any impulse at will, with no thought of the cost? Perhaps all the years of work and waiting were worth while, if in the end you could be truly free, your tax debt paid off and limitless recreation yours to enjoy. Was he willing to throw that away--to exchange it for a brief affair with a girl he didn't know, whose brown-green eyes probably held only what he wanted to read into them? The remainder of the picture was short and unrevealing. When the screen went dark Hendley felt a sudden surge of anger. They teased you with freedom, he thought, just as the theater's marquee promised untold delights and offered instead a spoonful of stolen pleasure. And in the meanwhile they housed you in a blind room in a blind building, kept you busy pushing buttons in work that made you no more than a mechanical extension of a much more clever machine, and regimented your days and hours so that you wouldn't have time to think that there might be more to life than this--more even than the dream of ultimate ease and endless games. No, he thought. It was more than the lure of hope in a girl's eyes that attracted him. To seek her out, to meet her again, was simply to give specific direction to the day's gesture of defiance. What he hoped to accomplish by it, he didn't know. Where it would all end didn't matter. It was something he had to do.