The morning after. In the underground streets and the wide arcades lined with shops, curling colored streamers rustle under the feet of night workers hurrying home to their rooms. Automatic street cleaners snuffle at plastic cups and empty bottles strewn outside of vending bars and recreation halls—snuffle like some curious animal, suck, devour and move on, their fat wheels whispering on the pavement. Marquees overhead still wink with last night's slogans:
ONE FOR ALL—ALL FOR ONE!
WORLD HAILS MERGER!
The Merger is complete. East is West, and black is white. Now the talk can cease. Now the viewscreens, the discussion forums, the recreation hours, the coffee debates, the public opinion polls, the conversations of lovers can turn to other things.
The Organization is One. Freedom is all.
Rebellion can be a bomb or a cry of pain, a shout of defiance or a mute, sullen face.
Or a man lying in bed, motionless.
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.