Free Dancers in the Afterglow by Jack L. Chalker Page A

snugly inside, and there were lights, bunks, desks, some communications gear, and even what appeared to be a shower and chemical toilet The guards, at least, were going to have things reasonably comfortable. Some large, heavy boxes marked with strange symbols were moved inside, but the prisoners didn't know what was in them.
    A few of the people refused to work at first. The guards allowed this, but when food time came again they were pointedly excluded, and they were also herded off, away from the river, and denied water as well. The message was clear soon enough: no work, no food or water. Within only a few hours, there were no more holdouts.
    A mild modesty crisis that seemed to amuse the soldiers arose that afternoon. Some people had taken advantage of the night to relieve themselves au naturel, but the situation was now different.
    Pleas to use the chemical toilet were ignored, and the prisoners were told that such provisions hadn't been completed as yet. One woman used that as an excuse to start running for the trees. Then they were forty-nine.
    A second building was more complex than the first. A barren little place at first, its floor was later lined with cushions in regular rows, and there seemed to be a platform at the front like a stage. They also moved a lot more heavy boxes inside, but the building's function remained a puzzle.
    Next came a tentlike structure. Wooden poles unfolded and interlocked to provide side supports, over which a heavy cloth cap was stretched and locked, providing a roof but no floor or walls. A network of slender poles was evenly spaced at about two-meter intervals beneath the cap. They fitted into locking supports in the slightly arched fabric top, and were then driven into the soft ground. When the poles were in as far as a mark etched into their surfaces the press of a stud sent out anchor supports beneath the ground. They were solid as a rock, and could support a good deal of weight despite their thinness.
    The next box provided them with a rude awakening. When it unfolded at the release of the last corner latch, someone said, "Oh, my God! Hammocks!" Yuri nodded numbly, looking back at the open structure. "That open thing—that's for us," he said. A detachment, meanwhile, had been working under a soldier's supervision digging a pit toilet and dumping lime in the bottom. It wasn't the pit toilet that upset the prisoners, but its location.
    The guard's quarters were to the left, the other enclosed building was perhaps a hundred meters to the right, and equidistant from the two, forming a triangle was the hammock-barracks. The pit toilet was in the center of the triangle. One thing the soldiers did themselves. Five of them unpacked a net woven of the lighted rope material and strung it, fencelike, from guard's quarters to a post a few meters behind the open building, then to the other structure, and back to the guard's quarters. The hammock-building and the mysterious structure were completely inside the perimeter, while the guard's shack was outside but for the little corner with the generator, to either side of which the ends of the rope barrier were attached and interlocked. An additional rope barrier sealed off that corner and the generator from the diamond.
    The rope fence was barely a meter high. It did not look intimidating, and the guards knew it.
    One of them nodded to another across the way, and the generator hummed into life, lighting the fence. It was far brighter than the temporary barrier of the night before; even in total darkness, the infield would be lit with an eerie yellow glow. Additional lights were affixed atop all three structures in the diamond. The prisoners had surprised themselves, even though there were a lot of them and the materials were obviously designed to be assembled by novices.
    The job appeared to be done before dark. The prisoners were all called together for dinner and given more of the loaves they were now used to.
    Then a hose was connected from