He finished his coffee. He had been sitting at the table by the vender for no more than ten minutes. When he glanced across the way at the Research Center, idly wondering what ABC-331 did there, he saw her. She was standing at the fringe of the entryway, peering up and down the street with an air unmistakably furtive. Hendley jumped to his feet and started toward her. She had not seen him. Before he could fight his way through the mass of pedestrians between them, the girl slipped into the crowd, walking rapidly.

Hendley reached the entry where she had stood a moment before. She was nowhere in sight.

For an hour Hendley wandered the area where the girl in red had vanished. A dozen times he thought that he glimpsed her face in a crowd inside a shop or across a street or on one of the overhead walks. Each time he was mistaken.

He tried to tell himself that her actions didn't mean that she had lied. Perhaps she'd been sent on an errand. For all he knew her job with the Research Center might be as a messenger, who would enter and leave the building a dozen times during the day. But he couldn't shake the impression that she had been looking for him when she emerged—looking anxiously, afraid that he might still be there.

His pleasure in the day's defiant freedom was gone. It seemed pointless to wander the streets. The time that had stretched before him like a blank sheet of paper now seemed merely empty, the sense of freedom a futile gesture. What had he hoped to gain? Surely he had known from the beginning of the day that, sooner or later, he would have to return to his room, to the only life he knew, to the inevitable reckoning that waited for him.

A flashing marquee caught his eye. SEE THE INTERIOR OF A FREEMAN CAMP! the sign shrilled. REVEALING! EXCITING! AUTHENTIC!

Hendley hesitated. It was a come-on, he knew. Very little that was revealing or exciting would be shown. But the possibility teased his mind. Even a brief glimpse was better than nothing. And he was tired of walking.

He presented his identity disc to the ticket machine. The show was expensive, costing 30D, or thirty minutes debit against his work time, but he felt reckless. He recognized the symptom as dangerous. Sometimes workers went completely berserk under the same impulse, going off on wild sprees that could run up many years debit, nullifying an equal period of work and prudent self-denial. Hendley had known one man in his own department at the Architectural Center who had 

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