Last Call

The Call comes to everyone eventually - a mysterious summons pulling human beings toward Mars, toward something that promises purpose beyond the gray control of Earth's Disciplinary Corps. Bronson is one of the soldiers tasked with hunting down those who answer it, the deserters who abandon their posts and their conditioning to follow that strange signal into the void. But when the Call reaches him, Bronson finds himself trapped between the only identity he's ever known - enforcer of order, instrument of compliance - and a hunger he cannot name or deny. What is The Call really? Escape to something greater, or another form of mind control? And can a man who has spent his life enforcing tyranny ever trust his own impulse toward freedom? Written in 1952, at the height of Cold War paranoia about conformity and brainwashing, this is a terse, unsettling novella about the moment when a conditioned mind begins to remember it was once free.