Nik seemed surprised. "You have peekies on the outside, don't you?" "Yes. They let you create your own thought-pictures. But that's private. One, at most two people." "Much the same concept, though. This is just vastly more sophisticated--and more effective. It doesn't mirror what's actually happening on the stage. It reflects the audience's reaction to it. I don't pretend to know how it's done, but the screen--or the computer complex directing it--records the impulses of all our thought waves, selects and synthesizes them. What comes out, though it's often a montage, is not one viewer's reaction, but the total reaction. Ah! You see? Those two dancers on the left--see them down on the stage? Now look at the screen!" Hendley saw. The tempo of the dance had quickened, the pantomime of the dancers had become more daring. But the stage performance remained essentially suggestive. The version of it which appeared on the thought-screen was a blunt and strangely hideous extension of that suggestion into the realm of the obscene. Hendley tore his gaze away from the screen. "Unbelievable, huh?" Nik murmured. "I've sometimes wondered if it might all be a hoax." When Hendley glanced at him sharply the young Freeman shrugged. With an urbane smile he said, "Why not? Whatever it is, it's a remarkable machine. But it could simply be showing what a very clever computer _says_ the audience reaction would be. That would be much the same as showing the actual thoughts, wouldn't it? Who could tell the difference?" Hendley closed his eyes. Any pleasure he might have found in the spectacle had long since vanished. But he could not shut his ears to the sensual rhythms of the music or erase the lurid images which danced in the darkness behind his eyelids. In the end he had to open his eyes--to seek out the willowy girl stained with crimson light, to torture himself with a glimpse of lips parted in a smile, a fleeting motion of long slim legs nimbly scissoring, a bobbing nest of short soft curls, now dyed from gold to red. He knew now why Ann had been evasive, and why she had run away. He had many answers now. What he did not know--and what continued to torment him--was whether or not everything that had happened between them, every sigh, every caress, had been no more than the dance on the stage--a pantomime of passion.