He began to think about what it _really_ was, and that helped a
little. It helped him get through the worst part, which was the
downtown traffic and letting Frazer off and listening to Frazer urge
him to see a doctor.
Then he got to the building parking area and let them take his car
away and bury it down in the droning darkness where the horns hooted
and the headlights glared.
Harry climbed the ramp and mingled with the ten-thirty shift on its
way up to the elevators. Eighteen elevators in his building, to serve
eighty floors. Nine of the elevators were express to the fiftieth
floor, three were express to sixty-five. He wanted one of the latter,
and so did the mob. The crushing, clinging mob. They pressed and
panted the way mobs always do; mobs that lynch and torture and dance
around bonfires and guillotines and try to drag you down to trample
you to death because they can't stand you if your name is Harry and
you want to be different.
They hate you because you don't like powdered eggs and the telescreen
and a beautiful day in Chicagee. And they stare at you because your
forehead hurts and the muscle in your jaw twitches and they know you
want to scream as you go up, up, up, and try to think why you get a
headache from jerking your head to the left.
Then Harry was at the office door and they said good morning when he
came in, all eighty of the typists in the outer office working their
electronic machines and offering him their electronic smiles,
including the girl he had made electronic love to last Saturday night
and who wanted him to move into a two-room marriage and have children,
lots of children who could enjoy peace and progress and prosperity.
* * * * *
Harry snapped out of it, going down the corridor. Only a few steps
more and he'd be safe in his office, his own private office, almost as
big as his apartment. And there would be liquor, and the yellowjackets
in the drawer. That would help. Then he could get to work.
What was today's assignment? He tried to remember. It was
Wilmer-Klibby, wasn't it? Telescreenads for Wilmer-Klibby, makers of
window-glass.
_Window-glass._
He opened his office door and then slammed it shut behind him. For a
minute everything blurred, and then he could remember.
Now he knew what caused him to jerk his head, what gave him the
headaches when he did so. Of course. That was it.
When he sat down at the table for breakfast in the morning he turned
his head to the left because he'd always done so, ever since he was a
little boy. A little boy, in what was then Wheaton, sitting at the
breakfast table and looking out of the window. Looking out at summer
sunshine, spring rain, autumn haze, the white wonder of newfallen
snow.
He'd never broken himself of the habit. He still looked to the left
every morning, just as he had today. But there was no window any more.
There was only a blank wall. And beyond it, the smog and the clamor
and the crowds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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