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.
Once it had been voiced: Hendley remembered one discussion forum for his group a week before. He had been sitting between RED-498, his Assigned, the woman he was soon to contract with, and a short, fat man in the yellow coverall of a 2-Dayman. The round man had constantly been rising to demand the floor, grabbing his seat mike and shouting so loudly that his words over the loudspeaker were distorted and often incomprehensible. His round, full face had a squinty look, the triangle of eyes and nose being squeezed close together like a cluster of dots in the center of a circle. Even his eyebrows added to the effect—blond tufts of hair thick next to the bridge of his nose but disappearing as they fanned out. Below this concentration, a small red mouth pursed angrily.
"They just don't remember," he complained to Hendley. "They don't remember!"
He jumped up as another speaker finished. "Now listen!" he cried. "Think a minute. Just think! What is it that has made this Organization great? It's growth, that's what it is. Being big enough to do more things for more people, and do them better! What did we have before? I'll tell you what we had! A lot of little organizations, all squabbling among themselves, and the worker caught in the middle. There weren't any Freeman Camps then. There wasn't any chance for a man to get his tax debt paid off, not a chance in the world. Now we all have that chance, every one of us. That's what's important!"
The fat man sat down, breathing hard as if he had been running. He nodded with emphatic triumph at Hendley and RED-498. "This Merger is the greatest thing that could happen," he declared. "You'll see if it isn't!"
Others spoke. A tall, broad-shouldered man in the respected beige coverall of a 1-Dayman, adorned with the stitched emblem of an athlete, rose to deliver a speech which was quickly diverted from the Merger to the virtues of competitive sports as one of the Organization's finest forms of recreation. A plaintive voice wondered if maybe the Organization wasn't just getting so big that it oughtn't to get bigger. A woman with the calm, crisp voice of an intellectual pointed out that the Eastern and Western Organizations had for many years been moving steadily toward the Merger—had actually been merged in innumerable ways, not the least of which was the Executive Exchange Program, of which she could speak personally as one who had been proud to work for a year in the Eastern society. And there was one voice from the back of the hall, from someone who remained seated so that Hendley could not see him, whose words made Hendley stiffen and listen attentively.
"What we're trying to do," the unknown man said, "is to pretend that history never was. We're saying it doesn't mean anything to be born a Westerner. Maybe it's right that we should forget that our ancestors fought against the East, and a lot of them died to make sure we wouldn't all be swallowed up. But that doesn't mean we should let ourselves get swallowed up now...."