“Who asked you to butt in?” The boy examined Peace from head to foot, and his expression changed to one of crafty appraisal. “How’d you like to make fifty monits?”
“Don’t be impertinent,” Peace said, affronted.
“It would buy you a pair of shoes—and all you have to do is go into the show with me.”
“You’re a nasty little whelp, and I wouldn’t be…” Peace’s tongue went numb as he glanced further down the street and saw a police car cruising slowly and watchfully near the curb.
“Let’s go inside, sonny.” He walked into the cinema foyer and jiggled nervously while he and the boy bought tickets and were handed steribags containing what looked like outsize sunglasses, a grey pair for him and a yellow pair for the boy. The nose of the police car was coming into sight as he pushed open the inner door, anxious to reach the anonymous dimness beyond. Finding his way to a seat was easier than he had expected because the screen was so brilliantly lit that it cast a strong glow over the entire auditorium.
As he was walking down the central aisle Peace was puzzled to note that the too-bright screen displayed nothing but a meaningless confusion of images and that there was absolutely no sound track. Undeterred by what, to him, were serious flaws in the presentation, a hundred or more patrons were sitting in attitudes suggestive of rapt enjoyment. Peace began to get an inkling of what was happening when he realized that everybody, young or old, was wearing the same kind of peculiar sunglasses. Intrigued in spite of himself, he sat down beside his small companion and began to open the steribag given to him at the box office. The boy plucked it from his grasp and replaced it with the bag containing his yellow glasses.
“What’s the idea?” Peace whispered.
“That’s the deal.” The boy dropped a ten-monit bill into Peace’s hand. “I’ll pay you ten an hour to a maximum of five hours.”
“But I don’t…”
“Shut up and watch the pictures,” the boy said. He put on the gray glasses and settled back into his seat with a look of fierce concentration.
Peace stared at him resentfully for a second, then donned the yellow glasses. The screen instantly assumed a normal degree of brightness, showing a cartoon image of a fluffy kitten chasing a butterfly, and an appropriate sound-track was fed into his ears via the side frames of the glasses. He watched the antics of the kitten for perhaps a minute, by which time intense boredom had set in, then he touched a miniature switch he had discovered on the bridge of the glasses. The cartoon film immediately changed with accompanying sound, to one in which an orange-coloured hound was unsuccessfully trying to scale a greased pole. Peace clicked the switch back and forth, and found that his choice was limited to the two equally depressing films he had already sampled. When he thought about it for a moment he realized that the lenses of his glasses were serving as stroboscopes, alternately becoming opaque and transparent at a frequency of perhaps a hundred cycles a second. Moving the switch altered the strobe timing, re-phasing it and allowing the wearer to see a different film of the several which were being projected onto the screen at once.
He nodded in appreciation of the gadgetry involved—in an old-style cinema the audience was actually in darkness fifty percent of the time, in between frames, and it was logical to use that time to project a different film. This explained the intense brightness of the screen when he had viewed it directly, without the filtering effect of the strobe glasses. Or did it? The screen had been very bright, with maybe four times the normal brilliance, and where were the violent virgins promised by the signs outside? At that moment cherub-face, seated beside Peace, gave a low moan of pleasure.
Peace regarded the boy suspiciously, then snatched the gray glasses away from him and crammed them on to his own nose. He was assailed by an orgiastic panorama of heaving flesh, plus sound effects which made it clear that if any of the participants really were virgins their departure from that blessed state was imminent. A feeling of warmth spread over Peace’s face.
The boy tugged at his arm. “Give me back my glasses.”
“I will not.” Peace took the glasses off and folded them up.
“But I paid you for them.”
“I don’t care,” Peace said firmly. “There ought to be a law against showing that sort of thing to minors.”
“There is, poop-head. Why do you think I’m paying you? Come on—hand them over.”
“Nothing doing.” Peace offered the boy the yellow glasses. “You’ll have better fun watching Fluffo.”
“Balls to Fluffo,” the boy retorted. “Look, mister, hand over the glasses or I’ll make trouble for you.”
Peace sneered at him. “After what I’ve been through, you think you can make trouble for me!”
“Leave me alone,” the boy screamed. “Stop touching me! Go away!”
“Just a minute,” Peace said, alarmed, “perhaps we can…”
“No, I don’t want to look in your grown-up glasses—they show awful things happening.
Please don’t make me look.” The boy’s voice grew even louder, convincingly hysterical. “I just want to see Brown Houn’ and Fluffo. Take your hand away! What are you doing to me?”
“If you don’t keep quiet,” Peace whispered, brandishing his fist. “I’m going to smash your evil little face.”
“Is that a fact?” a gruff voice said close behind him. Powerful hands lifted Peace right out of his seat and suddenly he was being propelled up the aisle with his arms twisted behind his back. Women in the end seats he passed hissed abuse at him and made painfully accurate swings with their handbags. Peace tried to break free, but his captor was too strong for him and seemed to have had training in physical combat, Ie. opened the heavy swing doors by the simple expedient of bouncing Peace against them, and the both men were out in the foyer. A managerial-looking woman with silver-blue hair and a pince-nez came out of a side office, drawn by the sounds of commotion.
“Got one, Miz Harley,” Peace’s captor announced. “Child molester. Caught him in the act.
Now can I have a bonus?”
Peace wagged his head earnestly. “This is ridiculous. I never touched the boy. I was only…”
“Shut up, you.” The big man shook Peace reprovingly, giving him a mild case of whiplash. “I saw him, Miz Harley. Caught him in the act. About my bonus, Miz Harley, do you think…?”
“Perhaps we ought to hear what the gentleman has to say about it,” Miz Harley said in reasonable tones which were music to Peace’s ears. She came nearer, adjusting her pince-nez.
Her eyes focused on Peace’s face and the colour abruptly fled from her cheeks.
“It’s you,” she said in a scandalized voice, taking a step backwards. “Up to your old tricks! Is no child safe from you?”
“What is this?” Peace protested, too shocked to feel any satisfaction at apparently having found a link with his past. “I wouldn’t dream of…”
Miz Harley pointed an accusing finger into his face. “You’ve tried to disguise yourself! The beard makes you look different, but not different enough. You’ve been here before, interfering with children. You’re a monster!”
Not again, Peace thought, as the familiar words echoed in his mind. He put on what he hoped was a smile, and said, “Look, can’t we talk this over quietly in your office?”
Miz Harley shook her head. “It’s people like you who give simultaneous cinemas a bad name.” She transferred her gaze to the big man behind Peace. “Blow your whistle, Simpkins.”
A large hand carrying a subetheric whistle appeared at the edge of Peace’s field of view, and a moment later there came a piercing warble which he sensed to be loaded with all kinds of ultrasonic frequencies. People on their way into the cinema paused to whisper to each other and to examine Peace with obvious distaste. His shoulders drooped as he realized that his spell of freedom was drawing to a close. The police were on their way, and in a matter of minutes he would be handed back to the Legion, having learned no more about himself than that, apparently, he had a history of molesting children. Perhaps he was a monster, after all—in which case he deserved everything that was coming to him.