In the story, the title refers to the telephone number that one dials to schedule an assisted suicide with the Federal Bureau of Termination.

The setting is a society in which aging has been cured, individuals have indefinite lifespans, and population control is used to limit the population of the United States to forty million, a number which is maintained through a combination of infanticide and government-assisted suicide. In short, for someone to be born, someone else must first volunteer to die. As a result, births are few and far between, and deaths occur primarily by accident. The scene is a waiting room at the Chicago Lying-In Hospital, where Edward K. Wehling Jr. is faced with the situation that his wife is about to give birth to triplets, but he has found only one person, his maternal grandfather, who will volunteer to die