Now, he was one of them, borne through the sky to an alien land that he had never seen, never wanted to see. It had happened to him. He watched the unfamiliar landscape through the windows of the plane. A couple of Watch Police were his companions, but they were busy over a game and paid no attention to him. His thoughts remained with the world he was leaving behind. There was something wrong with it. He had never been able to put his finger on it, but he had always been the odd one, the strange one who didn’t fit. He wanted things of his own--in a world where each man could say that all the Earth was his, if he remembered his neighbor could say it too. He didn’t believe that the great Machine, which they told him did the thinking for mankind, could think out his own problems as well as he could. Somehow this wrongness in the world had destroyed Barie. That was the sign by which he knew it was the world and not he who was in error. It could make her stand and say it was right for someone else to take her place in his arms. Barie--Barie-- It had taken from him every reason for living. He had no idea what was ahead of him, but in his mind there burned a single decision that would cover anything that came up. He would do everything in his power to obstruct the goals and purposes to which the Machine assigned him. He would break, and destroy, and disobey until they either crushed him or let him go back. And he had never heard of any who went back. With this decision clearly made, his mind was free to speculate on what he might find. He knew the traditional stories that circulated among the Agros regarding the Mech cities and their vast production centers. He’d heard tales of the monstrous, unthinkable mechanical brain that had finally brought order out of the chaos of human civilization. The thinking machine, as the Agros called it, had direct control over the life of every human being on the face of the Earth. At birth, a tape of data based on brain and chromosome mapping was filed with the central library which fed the machine. Here it was instantly available for optimum meshing with similar data from all other men and women currently alive. In as much detail as the machine considered necessary then, the subsequent lives of the people were planned. Their station, occupation, matings, permission to reproduce--all of these activities and thousands more, at the machine’s option, were precisely dictated and controlled. Rick was vaguely aware of the history of the changeover from chaos and war to order and peace. It had come about as a natural byproduct of the Second Industrial Revolution. Men had been searching for the answer for all the ages of history, and then suddenly they had it without even looking for it.