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.

But she might not come.

He checked the time. It was after three o'clock. With a sense of urgency he rose and left the theater.

3

There was something unusual about the Historical Museum, oddly unsettling, and it was awhile before Hendley realized what it was. The place was almost empty. Here and there a few individuals or small groups of people shuffled slowly before the exhibits. A guide was pompously 

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