The building in which TRH-247 lay was a circle of apartments bounding the Architectural Center, where he worked, like the ring around Saturn. Its outer façade was windowless, a curving face of concrete thirty stories high. The windowed inner circle looked across a broad courtyard toward the concentration of offices in the Center. Moving walks joined the residential ring to its activity core like spokes in a wheel. Because of the blind outer wall, common to all buildings in the Organization, the sun was visible to those living and working in the Center for only a brief period at midday. The sunrise belonged to the Free. Yet, through the unease of his hangover, TRH-247 was aware of the coming of day. Without opening his eyes he had been conscious of the gradual dilution of the room's darkness into gray, of the pink glow creeping from the corners of the room to spread up the walls, and at last of the splendid aurora of brightness climbing the east wall. Had he been asleep, he would have been gently conditioned to wakefulness by the artificial dawn. Feeling the weight of light and warmth harsh upon his lids, he waited for the bird call which came every morning at precisely six o'clock. In spite of the fact that he was anticipating it, the tuneful whistle made him start. His eyes flew open. He felt a slow draining away of tension. The psychology of it was wrong, he thought. Anything as naturally unpleasant as an alarm to wake you should be simply and directly jarring. The bird song, monotonously cheerful every morning, was actually a depressant. He wondered if a real bird singing would have the same effect. The question was idle, and he wasn't sure why it had occurred to him. But a great many such speculations, equally idle, had been disturbing him lately. All, he supposed, because of the Merger. The Merger. His mind rejected the word like an assembly machine spitting out a defective part. In a deliberate effort to detour that line of thought he nudged the button which turned on the viewscreen set into the south wall. It brought into focus a picture of a parklike setting in the early morning, a green glade drenched in sunlight. The camera's eye moved close to a cluster of flowers and focused sharply on a single red rose glistening with dew. Beyond the trembling rose, blurred but distinguishable, two naked figures appeared, running. A man and a woman. His hands caught her from behind and the pair tumbled together onto the wet grass. A shrill peal of woman's laughter rang. The background music soared to a joyous crescendo, and the camera turned discreetly away to embrace the sky, vaulting in a breathless leap from horizon to horizon. The final chord of music crashed. The picture faded out abruptly. An announcer appeared, smiling cheerfully. "Good morning, you late and early viewers! You have just seen 'Tender Shoots,' a Freedom Play written by...."