TRH-247 clicked off the sound. He turned impatiently from the screen to stare at the blankness of the ceiling. Always the same fadeout, he thought. The same idyllic setting, the same sensuous appeal, the same bronzed hero and heroine finding joy unconfined and forever after in a Freeman Camp. Why not? It was society's dream. It had always been his own. What was wrong with it now? Or with him? He shook his head angrily, as if the gesture would help him shrug off his restlessness. "Thomas Robert Hendley," he said aloud, "you should get up." The habit was recent--not talking to himself, a practice so old he found it perfectly natural, but the indulgence of thinking of himself in the old-fashioned names instead of his official designation. For some reason he found it strangely pleasing to think of himself as Thomas Robert Hendley. It didn't matter that there had been, in the history of the Organization, two hundred and forty-six other Thomas Robert Hendleys. None of them had his particular set of brown eyes, his hard-to-comb black hair, his six feet of angular frame, his aches, his memories, his four inches of childhood scar on his right forearm, his restless dreams, his hopes, his mind. They weren't _him_. Frowning, Hendley continued to stare at the ceiling. He knew that he barely had time to bathe, wipe off his beard, dress, eat, and still get to work on time, even though his office was less than five minutes away and he was not due until seven. He moved slowly in the mornings. He couldn't gulp down his breakfast, and he liked to linger over his coffee and his first cigarette. Still he did not move. Unwanted, a trickle of memories sifted into his mind. Fragments of the previous day's celebration. People shouting, drinking, dancing. The whole city a bobbing, swirling sea of color, noise, confusion. Joy, joy--and one unsmiling mouth, one pair of sober eyes, one arm unraised in salute. His. Well, he had taken care of the sober eyes. He had got drunk with the rest of them. And he had still felt alone, apart. All along he had felt out of it--through all the weeks of endless news coverage on the home and public viewscreens, the interminable debates at work, the hotly argued discussion forums. No one had talked of anything else. And there had been a strange intensity in the endless great debate, which often erupted into angry words and shaking fists and red faces, as if everyone sensed a significance in this last Merger, a special importance that was neither voiced nor even consciously realized.