The moving walk wound along a street dividing the entertainment center from the rows of low-level housing. Hendley wondered if, with so little time left to him, he would spend much of it in the bright and airy room assigned to him. Along their way Nik pointed out places of special interest. "People tend to seek out their own kind, wherever they are," he said. "See that cafe? You'll find scientists there mostly. A strange lot. Stick to themselves, and most of them never go to the casinos or the shows. They've rigged up a regular laboratory--taken over one of the rec halls--and they dabble in experiments of one kind or another. Useless, of course, with the limited equipment they have, but it seems to keep some of them happy. That gray building is one of the old clubs. You'd probably find my father there. All the old-timers belong. Of course, in theory everything in the camp is open to everybody, but that isn't the way it works out. You're just not welcome in the club until you've been here years and years." Nik spoke with a trace of contempt. "They have their private parties and their ritualistic games. I'm a member really, by birthright, but I seldom go there. Last time I went my mother was playing one of their little games." He laughed mirthlessly. "She was trying to take off her uniform while riding in a rubber raft in the pool, without tipping the thing over. If you got dunked, that made you fair prey." He glanced at Hendley sharply, almost suspiciously, as if he were afraid of laughter. "She didn't remember me," he added curtly, "but I think she'd been on the Weed." Hendley's head whirled. The complexities of Freeman behavior left him bewildered. He doubted that he could ever be restless here. There was too much to do and enjoy without needing to seek out artificial stimulants and bizarre pleasures. But could he be wrong? Did he know even himself that well? Everything seemed to change in the perspective of freedom.... "Here we are," Nik said, leaving the walk. They stopped before a low, circular, relatively small building from which came a remarkable volume of sound. As they entered, the noise burst over them like the resounding coda of a symphony. The main orchestration was supplied by human voices erupting in every range of pitch and intensity. Behind these could be heard the whine and sigh of a computer band. And, bursting up through a center stairwell around which wound a circular escalator, to crash against Hendley's ears like a solid wave, came an instrumental thunder of party noises: the explosion of falling glass, the shudder of the overloaded stairway straining with its burden, the shifting of a hundred feet, shrieks and shouts and trills of laughter. Nik grinned at him. "I'll get us a couple of drinks." "I could use one!" Hendley said, raising his voice a couple of notches to be heard. "You know how artists are," the Freeman shouted back. "They like to make themselves heard!"