unable to leave the Morale Center. The manner of refusal was so gentle, so persuasive, so reasonable that not until he was alone that night did he think of his custody in the Center as a form of imprisonment. Even then, with his morning departure imminent, he was unable to relax or to analyze what was happening to him and what it meant.

Now, sitting by himself in the cabin of the copter, he tried to sort out his reflections. They refused to be channeled. Bits and pieces of the previous two days skittered into and out of his consciousness. From the disordered montage one face kept emerging: Ann's. He tried to capture it, to hold it before his mind's eye. It danced from light to shadow, changed, slipped elusively away from him. What was wrong? The brief hours with her under the open sky had made him feel more vividly alive than all the experience of his lifetime. Her disappearance could not change that. Her inexplicable behavior couldn't change it. He would find her again—he had to find her. But now he was unable even to recapture her image. It faded as he reached for it. The spirit of their adventure—its warm intimacy, its sense of escape, its essential newness—was already dimming. Why? Hendley couldn't accept the Investigator's view of her. He hadn't held Ann in his arms. He hadn't felt her tremble. He hadn't seen the mingled joy and pain in her eyes.

Pain, Hendley thought. Why pain?

"Mind if I sit here?"

The strange voice dissolved Hendley's confused reverie. He glanced at a beige uniform clothing a stout figure. His gaze rose to include a fleshy smile and small, bright, eager eyes.

"No, of course not," he said.

"I didn't know—never met a Freeman before. Not in uniform, I mean." The seat next to Hendley groaned and shifted to accommodate the balloon of flesh. "Mind you, I've known some who've become free. I'm a 1-Dayman myself, as you can see," he went on. "I'm not so far from freedom. Plenty of those in my line—I'm in Distribution, recreation equipment is my specialty—have paid off the tax debt and gone over."

Hendley merely nodded, awash in the high tide of words.

"You're young," the fat man said accusingly. "That's what gets me. You must have had it easy from the start."

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