Three more men in similar dress came running out from behind the schoolhouse as Eric stared, dumbfounded.

“All right,” Travis barked. “Get him inside with the others. Something has gone wrong. We’ve got to get down to the river bridge and stop a massacre.”

“You’re one of them!” Eric cried hoarsely, the understanding hitting him like a runaway hay wagon.

Travis smiled sadly. “How do you think they knew where the village was?”

Eric had risen to the balls of his feet, his fingers extended like the talons of a hawk. With a cry of rage, he launched himself at Travis, but as swift as he was, the nearest man was quicker. The barrel of the weapon swung a fraction of an inch. There was no sound, but Eric was caught in midair, as though hit by an invisible sweeping steel boom that instantly stopped his forward flight and hurled him backward. He bounced once hard against a hitching post, then slumped forward, face down in the street.

CHAPTER 4

Considering how important it was to the total function of Central Control, and indeed to the total function of Shalev and the entire Alliance of Four Cities, the Monitoring Room was really quite unremarkable. About thirty feet long and twenty feet wide, it was painted in pale blue and orange, as was much of the rest of Central Control. As one entered from the main hallway, the wall to the right was bare except for a door marked “Authorized Personnel Only.” Behind that door stood a dozen large CPUs—the central processing units for the entire computer system, the heart of Shalev and the Alliance of Four Cities.

But it was the wall to the left that made the Monitoring Room what it was. Along the entire length of the wall was a built-in cabinet system containing four computer consoles with keyboards. These monitoring consoles were overshadowed by the two large tracking screens filling the whole wall above them. If the CPUs held the heart of the system, these screens were the eyes. On them, the computers could pinpoint any one of the seventy thousand citizens of Shalev in a few seconds, a flashing light showing the person’s location on a grid map of the city.

Travis Oakes stopped outside the door to the Monitoring Room and rechecked his orange and blue dress uniform, tugging the jacket downward. Four weeks of farm work had tightened his waist muscles, he noted, not without some satisfaction. His fingers briefly straightened the Guardian emblem on his lapel; then, satisfied, he took a deep breath, opened the door, and slipped inside.

After the simple rooms and furnishings of the village, the gleaming glass and steel computer consoles and digital readout panels of the Monitoring Room stood in sharp contrast. He stopped and looked around, letting the room’s familiarity soak back into him.