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.