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...."

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 

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