The Dark Symphony

when sex was not enough—and there were many times, many cases where Musicians needed something more than an orgasm—the theaters were a welcome diversion.
    Slowly, the music began to fade.
    It was time for the feature.
    Guil tensed as the soundtrack of the film replaced the intermission music, and his palms grew sweaty. He knew what he had come to see. Today's film was the latest results of the researchers who poked through Popular ruins looking for new mutations. He wondered, briefly, if the Stygian phantom would be in the feature…
    Then the vast cinerama screen lit up, and figures came on in colors brighter than they should have been, colors so bright that they stung at his eyes so that be was forced to squint to see at all. The sound rushed by him like a great flock of birds, an endless, flapping parade of them stirring the air and making his eardrums reverberate. Although he knew that he did not move from his seat, and that his seat did not remove from its place on the shimmer-stone floor, it felt very much as if he were rising, drifting across the other seats and toward the screen itself. The colors and sounds grew more real.
    He noticed, for the first time, that there was a cut-out spot on the screen, a white blank in the film in the shape of a man. The other researchers addressed it, explaining to it what they were hoping to discover by the dissection of the creature on the operating table. Then he was moving through the screen, passing through the thin molecular compression of the screen, farther back into the reality of the film itself. He swept in toward the nothingness spot, the white man-shape, and filled it. Toto-experience now. He was in the film as well as watching it.
    There were also smells. Antiseptics, mostly. But something else, too. He sniffed, caught it good this time. It was the odor of the first stages of tissue decay. For the first time, he looked at the thing on the table; the Popular the doctors were dissecting, and his stomach did somersaults.
    It was one of the hideous slugforms that had devolved from Man. There were not too many of this species, and each individual worm differed slightly from others of its sort. This one was a cherry red and pulsated with postmortem muscle spasms, so that it looked almost like the primary stages of a clot forming in the bloodstream. Only, this clot was four feet long and weighed in at a hundred pounds. Its body was bristled with sharp spines that jutted out on both sides and from its segmented back. Halfway up each of these spines was a bulbous projection, light blue in color and apparently only thinly shelled with a rubbery, wet, glistening membrane.
    Though the slugform was dead, one of the doctors informed Guil (who now understood that he was taking the part of a visiting Congressman inspecting the facilities of the researchers), it was still possible to display, for the Congressman, what the purpose of the blue tennis ball-sized spheres was. The doctor turned back to the slugform and used a scalpel to slice away putrid slug meat from the base of a spine. When he found what he wanted, he beckoned Guil—or the Congressman, whichever way one looked at it—to him.
    "This is a nerve trigger that receives impulses both from the brain and from the point of this spine. If something attacks the slugform, the points pick up the sensation, relay it to the nerve. The nerve trigger breaks the internal shell of the poison sac (the blue bulb) and sends the toxic liquid up through the interior of the spine to leak out the pin-point holes in the end. Or, if the enemy has not yet attacked, but the slug sees that he will shortly, the slug can send impulses from the brain to trigger the nerves and be ready for its assailant."
    "Fascinating," Guil said.
    "We think so."
    Then he was retching. He could not help himself. He was gagging, trying to stifle the vomit and trying to scream at the same time.
    The next instant, he was dissociated with the film and was sitting in his seat. The monitoring computers had sensed his great revulsion and had kicked his circuits open. Tired now, his entire frame shaking, he un-tightened the mesh cap and dropped it onto the seat, stood up, swaying. The sound needles withdrew from his nerves, stopped tapping his sensitive centers. He stumbled up the aisle and into the corridor of the immense shopping tower. In the light and the fresher air, he felt somewhat better. He shoved his hands in the slit pockets of the short cloak he wore