right direction would slide it into my hand. Sit down, Bronson, and talk to me. Throw that gun into the corner."

Bronson threw the gun, then sat down stiffly, clenched his big hands together, feeling the sweat slippery between them.

"Tell me about it, Bronson. I'm a little curious. So curious I might do something rather unexpected myself."

Bronson felt numb and sick. And then he started talking and as he talked he forgot about Morrow, and the last few months on Earth were vivid during re-call.

He remembered mostly the long agonizing nights in his dark apartment alone in Central City, suffering the intense agony of increasing anxiety and fear.

He had thought from the start that it was only a matter of time until someone found out that he had gotten THE CALL.

Incredible that a Corpsman should get THE CALL. To the illiterate masses, sure. But that didn't matter. They didn't know what THE CALL was, nor what happened when they got it.

But Bronson knew, only too well, what happened. It wasn't what they thought. To them it was the culmination of an intensely religious experience, an ecstasy of realization. THE CALL entitled them to leave their routine, mindless work and play, and follow THE CALL to some Earthly paradise or other. None of them had seen it, or rather no one had ever returned to tell of it.

Bronson had seen it. A little white room. A chair in the middle. You sat there. You were strapped down. A little gas pellet dropped from the ceiling. You didn't know what hit you, but you never worried anymore. From there a conveyor belt carried you into an incinerator.

They didn't know what hit them, so it didn't matter. But Bronson knew! That made all the difference. He had been lucky to have gotten THE CALL alone in his apartment. When he had looked at Mars, that's when it had hit him. An indescribable experience bordering on dope dreaming, but not the same. An odd tingling, a feeling of marvelous detachment from anything Earthly, and after a while it seemed there were voices in his mind, and the touch of an alien thought pattern, perhaps. He didn't know.

The association of THE CALL with Mars grew until there was nothing else, except his fear of discovery. He didn't want to die. Living wasn't so bad for a Corpsman. One lived pretty high above the menial masses with their happy, 

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