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, idiot faces. There were many privileges, and though a Corpsman couldn't marry, one was allowed to develop interesting friendships with the women Corps members. That was another thing. Marie Thurston. What if, as a result of long intimacy, she should suspect? He paced in his apartment, perspiration streaming down his throat, his muscles tense. He didn't want the little white room. Sometime THE CALL would strike him out there where people were, and he'd act like any of the others. Raise his arms. Raise them to sky, walk blindly, oblivious to anything else, his head raised, his mouth gaping, his eyes closed, feet slogging, stumbling. Mumbling-- But it seemed that Bronson was wrong about that. The masses wanted it and they didn't know what THE CALL was, so no inhibitory factors. But Bronson knew, and as a result, he found he didn't get THE CALL unless he asked for it. He could look at Mars from his darkened quarters at night alone, and get THE CALL, and no one knew. And what surprised Bronson was that he _did_ ask for it. THE CALL became an obsession, with even the Pleasure Marts, and Marie, sliding into unimportance. He had to deal with an enigma. He had two choices. Assume he was insane, the most logical, perhaps. Or that he wasn't insane, in which case THE CALL was a phenomenon with some material basis in fact outside of himself.