Phil was looking at Kane's card, comparing it with his own and with some other cards. "Well, not bad," Phil was saying, "Is it, gang?" "Not bad at all!" they chorused. "What isn't bad?" Kane asked. "Our taste, man," Laura said. "You'll fit so good." The odd one, Lucille, raised an eyebrow, with some mockery in it still, at Kane. "You'll sure belong, Professor. Don't worry," Lucille said. She held up her card. "We liked it." "Of course it'll take a little time," Phil said as he threw his arm over Kane's shoulder. "A few sessions and you'll match up just right." "I really don't believe I understand," Kane said vaguely. "You will," Lucille said as she moved away from him. "You sure will, Professor." She was tall, and with long lithe legs. She was a handsome woman, Kane thought. As Phil explained casually on the way toward the Midtown Hotel, they had just had a music session. Everything was done in sessions, in groups that is. Everyone had his group, and his group did everything together. Anyway, they had had a music session. The machine in the middle was a Reacto. The cards were Reacto Cards. It was really a kind of taste tester, and the point was that the Reacto tested everyone's reaction to the music. The cards enabled everyone to check their reactions, check them against the reactions of all the others. It involved conformity ratings, and tendencies to stray from the group norm. The important thing about the taste rate cards was that they enabled you to find out just how much group spirit you had. The closer your card resembled that of all the others in your group, the more GS you had. "My GS rating's gone up," Laura kept burbling all the way to the Midtown Hotel. "It's gone up!" The same process applied to reading, movies, television, eating, anything involving the elements of reacting. The important thing was not how you yourself felt, but how you felt in relation to the feelings of the group. The problem seemed to be that of reducing deviation tendencies to a minimum. On the way to the Midtown Hotel, Jenny asked Phil how he liked the new best-seller, _Love Is Forever_, and Phil took a small card out of his wallet and they all compared Reacto Cards in order to determine relative reactions to _Love Is Forever_. Good God! _You had to look at a card to find out how you liked something!_ It was frightening as hell. Kane wondered how wide-spread, how universal, it really was, this incredible conformity, this collective thinking. This appalling sacrifice of individuality. Kane was too tired to give much thought to it right then. He was anxious to get to the Hotel, and he was beginning to fantasize a bed, cool sheets, his body stretching and sinking down into blissful slumber. But as appalling as the situation seemed at the time, Kane soon found that he had only circled on the fringes of it. This was only the beginning. * * * * *