protest against a system that knew you only as a number? How could you defy a vast network of computers that knew what you were going to do before you did it—knew, and saw your defiance merely as an equation to be speedily solved. How did you change directions on a one-way street?

In his own work, architecture, when perfection left a residue of discontent you introduced a flaw. You broke one of the rules. And maybe what you ended up with would be better than the perfect thing, in its flaw as flawless as an artist's distortion of the world to his own image of it. Hendley had done it himself, taking pure harmony and proportion of form and trying to make it individual. He had....

"No," he muttered aloud. "You only pushed a button."

For if one line could be altered, the master computer in the basement of the Architectural Center had already worked out the six hundred and sixty-eight ways in which that single change could be made without weakening the resulting structure. The Organization encouraged that kind of individuality. It wasn't originality at all.

Yet the principle was valid. You had to break one of the rules. You had to get out of step.

And there was a way. Work was the foundation of the Organization—the work day, the work hour, the work minute. This was the basic commodity, the medium of exchange, the measure of social status. Work to pay off your tax debt. Work to climb the rungs on the ladder that led to freedom.

Simply lying there, without lifting a hand, he could create a flaw.

2

About ten o'clock that morning TRH-247 stood on an underground pedestrian ramp watching the crowds flow past him—shoppers, tourists, workers, going and coming, stepping with the ease of long habit from the slow to the fast strips of the moving sidewalks. All the faces were different, Hendley thought. He was less than a five-minute rise from the Architectural Center, but it was quite probable that he had never once seen any of these faces before. These people might live in the same building, eat from the same venders, visit the same Rec halls, even work at the Center. But under the carefully staggered schedules in the structure of the Organization's work pattern, schedules which enabled 32,000,000 people in this particular City No. 9 to live in a circumscribed area without trampling one another underfoot, the chances were good that none of these people had ever crossed Hendley's path before. 

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