Sentinels relocatedHEADmain

1 files changed, 2068 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/59356-0.txt b/59356-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..dac6bb0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/59356-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,2068 @@
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 59356 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                            THE ALMOST-MEN
+
+                         BY IRVING E. COX, JR.
+
+               _All learning must begin with a need. And
+               when the tried old ideas won't work for a
+              people--won't conquer defeat and despair--a
+                new way of thinking must be found...._
+
+           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
+              Worlds of If Science Fiction, October 1955.
+         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
+         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
+
+
+Hands shook at his shoulder, dragging him awake. Lanny's foster father
+was bent over him, whispering urgently, "Get up, boy. We have to leave."
+
+Groggily Lanny pushed himself into a sitting position. He had been
+sleeping in his earth burrow beside Gill, outside Juan's cottage.
+Hazily Lanny remembered being carried home from the canyon after the
+explosion, but he could recall nothing else.
+
+It was an hour before dawn. Gill was dressing; his shoulder was wrapped
+in a homespun bandage. Lanny got up, staggering a little, and helped
+his brother put on his leather jacket and his weapon belt.
+
+"Thanks, Lan," his brother said.
+
+Lanny touched the bandage. "Shouldn't you heal the cells, Gill?"
+
+"I have to expose it to the sun first. I didn't catch it soon enough
+last night, and too many germs infested the wound." To their foster
+father, Gill added, "I still think you should leave me here. I may
+not--"
+
+"You're both my responsibility," Juan Pendillo answered. "We'll survive
+together, Gill, or die together."
+
+"What happened?" Lanny asked as he pulled on his breeches and pushed
+his stone knife and his wooden club through the loops of his weapon
+belt.
+
+Silently Juan pointed toward the dawn sky. High above them Lanny heard
+the whine of a score of enemy police spheres. "They insist on the
+surrender of all eight hunters who went out last night."
+
+Gill said, "But Tak Laleen killed Barlow with her energy gun. Why are
+they blaming us?"
+
+"Barlow was working for them as a spy," Lanny put in. It was a
+convenient explanation, but vaguely he knew he was lying. He felt a
+pang of guilt, but he couldn't understand why. What had he done that he
+should be ashamed of?
+
+What had happened last night? Lanny wracked his brain, trying to
+remember.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Eight hunters had been sent out to bring in a cache of rifles which
+Lanny's brother, Gill, had found in the rubble of Santa Barbara. It
+was risky business, because under the terms of the surrender treaty
+men were prohibited the use of all metals in the prison compounds.
+But the younger generation--boys like Lanny and Gill, born since the
+invasion--were more fiercely determined to resist the Almost-men than
+their elders. Armed with fifty rifles, they thought they would be
+strong enough to attack the Chapel of the Triangle.
+
+The Almost-men: the children had coined the word, subtly asserting
+the pride of man. Yet they knew it was a semantic trick they played
+upon themselves. It changed nothing. The conquerors were physically
+identical to men; their enormous superiority was entirely technological.
+
+As the eight hunters crept toward the ruins of Santa Barbara, through a
+narrow canyon, old man Barlow suddenly emerged from the brush and stood
+grinning at them. It was his privilege to join the hunters; any citizen
+of the settlement could have done so. But the younger generation hated
+Barlow. He was the practical man; he called himself a realist. He never
+allowed them to forget they were defeated, imprisoned and without
+weapons; he took savage delight in poking holes in their plans for
+resistance.
+
+"What are you doing here?" Lanny's brother demanded.
+
+"I came to watch the fun, Gill."
+
+"We're going to bring back fifty rifles; that's all--"
+
+"Right under the noses of our masters? Don't be naive."
+
+"There's only one way the Almost-men would find out--"
+
+Barlow snorted. "Don't think I ran to the Chapel of the Triangle and
+told Tak Laleen what you were up to. They don't need that sort of help
+from us. When are you going to get it through that thick skull of
+yours? We're outclassed; we're second-raters; we'll never defeat them."
+
+From the night sky they heard the low hum of a force-field car. An
+opalescent sphere soared above the canyon. Gill's fist smashed into
+Barlow's jaw.
+
+"So you did tell her!"
+
+Barlow fell back against the canyon wall, his mouth bleeding.
+
+The sphere came to a graceful stop thirty feet above the hunters and
+the de-grav platform lowered a woman toward the canyon. Surrounded by
+the faintly opaque capsule of her protective force-field, she moved
+toward them, a beautiful, dark-haired woman clothed in white.
+
+This was Tak Laleen, the alien missionary assigned to the Santa Barbara
+area. She lived in the Chapel of the Triangle. Under the terms of the
+surrender treaty, the missionaries of the Almost-men were guaranteed
+immunity to preach and work in the treaty areas. They were selfless,
+generous and kind, yet men abhorred them, for they represented the
+tangible power of the conqueror.
+
+Tak Laleen glided toward the hunters, forming the alien's triangular
+sign of peace with her small, white fingers. "I come in peace, in the
+name of the All of the Universe."
+
+"We haven't violated any regulation," Gill snapped stiffly.
+
+Barlow sidled toward her. "Take me back to the Triangle," he begged.
+"I'll tell you--"
+
+Gill's fist lashed out again; Barlow reeled under the blow. "We're a
+legally elected punishment squad," Gill lied. "This man has broken a
+community law."
+
+"You don't understand!" Barlow cried desperately. "They came to get--"
+
+The other hunters fell on him, pummeling him into silence. The violence
+sickened Lanny, yet what alternative did they have? Lanny raised his
+club. At the same time the missionary came closer to the mob, and his
+club touched her forced-field capsule. Normally the energy would have
+paralyzed him with pain. But his mind refused to accept the normal, and
+Lanny felt the same sort of integrated unity with the energy field that
+he had with his hunting club. Command over the matter structure of the
+field. The energy flowed into his body and was absorbed, stored in an
+explosive concentration of power.
+
+For a moment the opaque capsule dimmed. Tak Laleen clenched her hand
+over her mouth and fled into her sphere. The car soared up above the
+canyon.
+
+Lanny swung his club again. Since Barlow must die, let him die quickly,
+without pain. Murder!--the accusation was a pang of agony in Lanny's
+mind. This violated everything Juan had taught him. He was aware that
+he wanted Barlow's death not because the old man had tried to betray
+the hunters, but because Lanny could not answer Barlow's poisonous
+despair in any other way. Lanny was ashamed. But who would know his
+real motive if he killed Barlow now? Who--but himself?
+
+Lanny's club touched Barlow's chest. He felt a drain of energy, a
+disintegration of structure. The energy Lanny had absorbed from the
+missionary's force-field exploded in a fierce, white heat. Barlow
+crumbled into dust.
+
+Lanny's awareness of what he had done survived for a fraction of a
+second. He stood facing the exploding light and waves of concussion
+lashed at his body. A dark chaos, whipped into fury by a floodtide of
+guilt, rocked his mind. He willed himself into unconsciousness, a bleak
+forgetfulness that sponged the guilt--and the truth--from his mind.
+
+And now he remembered nothing but the explosion and the queasy shadow
+of self-accusation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"The settlement," Juan Pendillo said to his sons, "is required to
+surrender the hunters at dawn. That gives us forty-five minutes.
+We're all heading for different treaty areas. We are to go to the San
+Francisco colony."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The three men slid along the street, clinging to the shadows. Twice
+they passed other hunters in flight, but no one spoke, for the enemy
+sound detectors on the Chapel of the Triangle were sensitive enough
+to pick up a whisper at a distance of half a mile. Lanny and Gill
+discarded their moccasins, in order to be more sure of their footing.
+The moccasins were useless except as symbols of status. Juan Pendillo
+qualified to give the extra skins to his sons, since before the
+invasion he had been a Doctor of Philosophy, and the teachers had
+become the governing force in every treaty area.
+
+For two hours Pendillo and his foster sons walked north. Occasionally
+they saw enemy spheres overhead, but the ships never came closer. After
+they reached the coast, the pounding surf formed a protective sound
+barrier when they talked.
+
+"How far is the San Francisco treaty area?" Gill asked.
+
+"Three hundred miles, more or less," Pendillo replied.
+
+"How many days?" Lanny inquired. His father, like all the older
+survivors in the settlement, always spoke of distance in terms of
+miles--a word that was meaningless to the new generation.
+
+Pendillo laughed, with gentle bitterness. "Once, Lanny, we might
+have made it by car in eight hours. Now?--I don't know. The couriers
+sometimes do it in a week, when the weather is good. It will take us
+longer. I won't be able--" He cut himself short. "It's funny, isn't it?
+In the old days I used to gripe about the traffic; right now I'd give
+ten years of my life to see a Model-T again."
+
+Gill ground his naked heel into the sand. "The Almost-men took
+everything from us. But we're not licked. One of these days we'll be
+strong enough--"
+
+"As strong as their machines?" Lanny asked.
+
+Gill swung toward his brother angrily. "That's Barlow's kind of talk,
+Lan."
+
+"The weapons and the machines of the Almost-men," Pendillo said, "are
+more powerful than anything we ever had. Yet we must defeat them; we
+must make ourselves free again. And we shall; I have no doubt of it.
+Granted, we have no weapons like theirs, and no chance of building any.
+We still don't resign ourselves to defeat. The techniques we used in
+the past failed; then we must find new ones. How? I don't know. That's
+the problem our generation leaves to yours. Men live by their dreams;
+without them we are nothing."
+
+The three men continued to move north along the beach until they came
+to the barrier that marked the northern boundary of the Santa Barbara
+treaty area. The barrier was a series of widely separated pylons
+marching across the land. Each pylon served as a pedestal for one of
+the enemy's highly sensitive sound receptors and an automatic energy
+gun. Any sound detected within seventy feet of the border became
+instantly the focal point for a stabbing beam of disintegration. Yet
+men crossed the barriers at will. Couriers traveled freely from one
+treaty area to another, and hunters crossed the border because the
+animal life in enemy territory was more prolific.
+
+They had two methods for passing the pylon guns. Sometimes they swam to
+sea, circling the barrier beyond the range of the sea-coast receptors.
+The second technique, used by the inland hunters, was to confuse the
+listening machines. The hunters would hurl half a dozen stones into the
+barrier area. While the energy guns obediently disposed of the rolling
+rocks, the hunters sprinted across the forbidden ground before the guns
+could concentrate upon the second target.
+
+Both Lanny and Gill preferred to run the guns. They enjoyed the risk of
+defying the enemy machines. But Dr. Pendillo shook his head. It meant
+sprinting a distance of a hundred yards in less than nine seconds--the
+time it took the guns to reorient their target.
+
+"Before the invasion," Pendillo explained, "the fastest man on Earth
+ran a hundred meters in a little over ten seconds. You boys are a new
+breed. You've been forced to adapt; I'm too old." Pendillo's eyes were
+suddenly serious. "Adaptation," he repeated. "The possibilities are
+infinite for a man who is free from convention, free from the inherited
+ideas of his past. That is the way we shall defeat the Almost-men. The
+human mind has an unmeasured capacity for solving problems--for pulling
+itself up by its bootstraps--so long as hope for a solution remains
+alive."
+
+They passed the barrier by swimming a quarter of a mile to sea. They
+rested briefly when they returned to the beach. Then they resumed their
+march north again, through territory ceded to the enemy. They stayed
+close to the beach, until their passage was barred by an increasingly
+rocky coastline. Since they had seen no enemy police spheres since they
+left the treaty area, Pendillo thought it was safe for them to use the
+highway which paralleled the beach.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After nearly twenty years, the ribbon of asphalt was still in good
+repair. Occasional cracks had broken the paving. Grass and weeds choked
+the crevices and some culverts had been washed out by spring rains.
+
+The primary change was environmental, but only Juan Pendillo was
+aware of that, for his sons took for granted the young forests that
+crowded every hillside and the abundant wild game. With no more than
+a ten minute interruption in their march northward, Lanny and Gill
+ran down a rabbit and a pheasant, killing them with skillfully hurled
+stones--the traditional weapons of the hunters. They cleaned the kill
+and strapped it to their weapon belts.
+
+Late in the afternoon they entered Santa Maria. The town had not been
+large, but it was the first relic of their defeated culture that Lanny
+and Gill had ever seen. Sometimes, when their hunting took them south,
+they saw the site of Los Angeles, but that told them nothing about the
+past, for it was a flat desert scrubbed clean of rubble to make room
+for an enemy skyport. Santa Maria had survived the invasion, since it
+was too isolated from the major centers of population to have been a
+target of the enemy guns.
+
+Lanny and Gill stood in the empty main street and looked with awe at
+the deserted stores. Some of the buildings were made of brick; some
+were actually two and three floors high. This must, surely, have been
+a great city of the old world. They had no point of reference but the
+monotonously identical houses of the subdivision which had become their
+treaty colony. Here the buildings were all different and by that fact
+alone they seemed beautiful.
+
+Lanny and Gill stopped at each store window, to stare in wonder at
+the goods still on the shelves. In an automobile agency, a solitary
+sedan still stood, on deflated and frayed tires, in the center of the
+showroom floor. Here at last was visible proof that men had once built
+a machine technology. The automobile was as big and as shiny, beneath
+its generation of dust, as any of the spheres of the Almost-men.
+
+"Were they all like that?" Lanny asked in an awed whisper.
+
+"Fundamentally, yes," Pendillo said.
+
+"And they moved over the roads faster than a deer!" Gill's eyes
+glistened. "But where are the weapons, father?"
+
+"Our cars weren't armed, Gill; we used them for pleasure. But don't get
+me wrong. We had guns--vicious and terrible things; we were no more
+civilized than the Almost-men. Our weapons just weren't the equal of
+theirs, so our civilization was destroyed."
+
+"You're saying the Almost-men are better--"
+
+"No, Gill. The Almost-men are mirror images of ourselves--man at his
+worst. That's why we understand each other so thoroughly," Pendillo
+paused before he added, "And that's why we can't destroy them on their
+terms; we must make our own."
+
+They pushed open the door of the agency and went into the showroom.
+Hesitantly, like children with new Christmas toys, they ran their
+fingers over the dusty hood of the sedan. Lanny felt a strange,
+electric empathy as he touched the cold metal, as if it were a familiar
+part of himself. For a moment he saw in his mind the geometric
+structure of the alloy atoms, just as he could visualize the more
+complex cell make-up of his own body. Judging from the expression
+on Gill's face, he guessed that his brother had perceived the same
+relationship.
+
+"And the Almost-men took all this from us," Gill said in a choked
+voice. "Why, Juan?"
+
+"In our wars among ourselves, we always had the same motivation.
+They came here for resources. Every skyport they have built on Earth
+continuously ships out tons of metal and chemicals--oil, coal, ores.
+On their home world the Almost-men have exhausted their own resources;
+they must have ours to keep their mechanistic civilization going."
+
+Juan opened a door at the rear of the showroom into a large,
+cement-floored garage. Except for three automobiles, abandoned twenty
+years before in various stages of repair, the room was empty. "We can
+spend the night here," Pendillo decided.
+
+Lanny and Gill pried open the door at the back of the garage. Behind
+the building tangled shrubs and live oaks choked the half-mile shelf
+of land that separated Santa Maria from the coast. They found a ready
+supply of dry firewood under the trees.
+
+It was dusk. The setting sun was veiled in a mist. Fingers of fog
+reached hungrily for the warm earth, driven inland by the wind. Lanny
+and Gill would have been more comfortable outside. They were accustomed
+to the chilly night air. They could have burrowed sleeping troughs in
+the soil and restored their strength with earth energy.
+
+It had always puzzled them that the older survivors, like Juan, could
+not do the same. Pendillo's generation made very poor hunters, too,
+often dying of a wheezing sickness if they spent many nights on the
+trail.
+
+Pendillo's sons carried wood into the garage, where Juan sat shivering
+on a wooden bench with his rabbit-skin jacket hunched around his
+shoulders. Lanny and Gill stripped off their jerkins and gave them to
+their father.
+
+Pendillo's sons were naked, then, except for their short, crudely cut
+breeches and their leather weapon belts. And only the belts, which
+held their stone knives and their clubs, would either of them have
+considered essential. The rest was superficial, a mark of status. In
+a general way Lanny and Gill were physically alike--sturdy, bronzed
+giants, like all the children who had survived in the treaty areas.
+They were both nineteen, or perhaps a little older. Dr. Pendillo had
+found them abandoned as he fled the final enemy attack. Gill's hair
+was yellow and a pale beard was beginning to grow on his chin. Lanny's
+black hair curled in a tight, matted mane; his beard was heavy,
+already covering much of his face and giving him a sinister, derelict
+appearance. Since metal was forbidden in the prison compounds, no man
+was clean-shaven. After a fashion they did occasionally trim their
+hair, with treasured slivers of glass which foraging hunters brought
+back from the ruined cities.
+
+Lanny and Gill made fire in a rusted waste can. Pendillo watched them
+with admiration. That was another shortcoming in the older survivors
+that puzzled Lanny: they were very clumsy about producing fire, and
+almost none of them could hurl a stone accurately enough to kill an
+animal. Yet both skills, so essential to the hunters, had been taught
+the children by their elders.
+
+On an improvised wooden spit Pendillo's sons roasted the pheasant and
+the rabbit which they had killed that afternoon. The three men ate
+hungrily, Pendillo with a fastidiousness that secretly amused the
+bronzed giants who sat cross-legged beside him. Dr. Pendillo tore the
+meat daintily from the bones with his fingers; at intervals he wiped
+the grease from his lip with a corner of his jacket.
+
+Pendillo built a bed for himself from a pile of dry, rotting rags close
+to the fire. Lanny restoked the can with fresh wood so his father might
+be warm during the night. Then Pendillo's sons spread their skins close
+to the open door, where they felt more at ease.
+
+Almost at once Lanny was asleep. It was an instinctive process of will.
+He ordered his body to rest, and it responded; just as he could be
+instantly awake and alert at any energy change that indicated danger.
+He had never examined the process consciously, and he considered it
+in no way unusual; but he might have recalled, if he had pressed his
+memory back into his earliest childhood, that it was part of a pattern
+Pendillo had taught his sons.
+
+There was a sputter of sound. Lanny leaped to his feet, his hand
+closing on his stone knife. He heard a roar of clanging metal in the
+automobile showroom. Then silence.
+
+Lanny sprang through the open door. Dimly he saw Gill sitting in the
+sedan, his hands gripping the wheel.
+
+"What happened?"
+
+"It started, Lanny. I just came in to look at it, to touch it again,
+and--"
+
+"So you made the motor turn over?" This came from Dr. Pendillo, who was
+feeling his way through the door behind Lanny. "How, Gill?"
+
+Gill slid out of the car, backing away from it. "I don't know. I don't
+know!"
+
+"You must, Gill."
+
+"I got in. I was--I was pretending it was before the invasion and I was
+driving the machine down the road. I could see the matter structure
+of the motor in my mind, and how the parts fit together. I must have
+touched the starter."
+
+"After twenty years, the battery would be dead and the fuel would have
+evaporated. Tell me what you really did, Gill."
+
+Gill clenched his fist against his mouth. "It seemed as if it were
+a part of me, like my hand. And then the machinery began to move,
+because--because I wanted it to. Maybe there was some fuel left,
+father, and maybe--"
+
+"Why are you afraid of the truth, Gill?"
+
+"People don't run machines by wanting them to go!"
+
+"The thinking mind, my son, is capable of--" Pendillo's voice trailed
+off, for they all heard the sound outside--the high whine made by the
+force-field of an enemy sphere.
+
+Lanny darted to the showroom window. At the end of the street an
+opalescent sphere was riding in the fog, three feet above the ground.
+Enemy police guards in protective capsules spilled through the open
+port, carrying energy guns slung over their shoulders.
+
+"The Almost-men picked up the sound of the motor," Pendillo gasped.
+
+Then he saw the woman in the white uniform of the Triangle. She stood
+at the port, spotlighted by the glow of blue light that came from
+within the ship.
+
+It was the missionary, Tak Laleen.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the street the tracer light began to dart back and forth over the
+empty buildings, responding to the commands of the sound receptors.
+Lanny and Gill seized their father and plunged into the choking
+darkness of the forest. Dead brush snapped. The tracer light swung
+toward the trees, concentrating with smug, mechanical self-assurance
+upon the place where the three men had been. Lying flat against the
+cold earth, they wormed their way foot by foot toward the coast.
+
+Behind them they saw the force-field capsules of six enemy guards
+floating above the trees. Strong tracer lights danced over the upper
+branches, but the foliage was too dense for the light to penetrate to
+the ground. In their glowing bubbles the enemy police swung back and
+forth, trying to find a clearing in the brush. Two of them attempted to
+force their way into the trees but their body capsules were too bulky;
+the force-field generated by the individual envelopes was not powerful
+enough to push through the gnarled branches.
+
+The three fugitives inched steadily forward. The glow of tracer lights
+faded behind them. They could hear the wind above the trees and, far
+away, the sound of surf breaking on the rocks.
+
+Juan Pendillo was shivering in the cold. His teeth began to chatter.
+Hastily his sons pressed his body between theirs, shielding him from
+the cold and sharing their body energy until his trembling finally
+stopped.
+
+They heard a snapping sound in the brush. An enemy guard appeared
+suddenly. He had dissolved his force-field and he was walking warily
+on the wet earth. He held an energy gun cradled in his arms. The enemy
+walked with cat-like caution--but, in spite of himself, it was the
+amateur caution of a man who relied on the protective devices of a
+machine.
+
+Slowly Lanny's lips twisted in a sneer. This was the enemy, heavily
+armed and invulnerable--but helpless without his mechanical gadgets.
+Lanny's hand moved soundlessly over the ground. He grasped a stone. The
+enemy was less than twenty feet away; it was a target a child couldn't
+miss.
+
+Lanny swung into a sitting position and simultaneously threw his stone.
+The guard dropped, a wound torn in his skull. Pendillo and his sons
+slid forward again. As they passed the dead Almost-man, Lanny worked
+the energy gun out of of the guard's hands.
+
+It took them an hour to reach the cliffs overlooking the sea. They
+turned north again, seeking shelter among the rocks. And they came
+abruptly upon a wide, bowl-shaped cavity in the earth. Through the fog
+they saw the narrow passage between the cavity and the sea. In the
+center of the sheltered, artificial pool a metal dome rose some fifty
+feet above the quiet water. The dome, protected by a force-field, was
+joined to the land by a catwalk. From its waterline a ridged, white
+tube snaked upward and disappeared among the trees on the north bank of
+the pool. A repair barge swung at anchor under the catwalk. A towering
+pylon raised a sound receptor and an automatic energy gun high above
+the roof of the dome.
+
+Pendillo whispered, "This must be one of their automatic mining
+operations. I've never seen one before."
+
+Gill replied, "Lanny and I have come upon lots of them in the hills.
+The domes run themselves. Sometimes the Almost-men come and check over
+the machines; that's what the barge is here for, I think."
+
+"The domes dig out minerals or pump oil," Lanny added, "and send it to
+the skyports through the white pipes. But you can never get close to
+them. The whole operation is protected by the energy guns."
+
+"They have us pinned down here," Gill said, "unless we can use that
+barge."
+
+Lanny fingered the energy gun he had taken from the dead guard. "All
+we have to do is knock out the pylon." He raised the weapon and aimed
+it at the nest of delicate instruments at the base of the pillar. He
+turned the firing dial. The flame knifed through the fog. The tower
+disintegrated in a blaze of dust.
+
+The three men slid down the rock and plunged through the cold water
+toward the barge. In the night sky they heard the whine of an
+approaching force-field car.
+
+They leaped aboard the barge, hauling Dr. Pendillo in after them. Gill
+knelt in front of the motor in the stern. Lanny watched the sky, with
+the energy gun clutched in his hand. He knew the charge in the chamber
+was nearly spent. There might be enough left to hold off the enemy for
+a moment, but certainly no longer.
+
+Frantically Gill turned the wheels until the motor stirred into life.
+As it did the glowing sphere swung down upon them. Lanny raised his
+gun and fired. Fear projected something of himself into the leaping
+charge of energy--a confusing sensation of screaming joy and chaotic
+horror that left his mind limp and numb. It seemed that he had actually
+touched the force-field of the sphere; he was physically tearing apart
+the tense, strait-jacket of solidified energy.
+
+The sphere lurched upward and away into the night. As it did, the port
+broke open and a figure dropped toward the water. It was Tak Laleen.
+She reached for the tiny box fastened to her breast, trying to activate
+her protective force-field capsule. Lanny knew he had to stop her, or
+she might still be able to prevent their escape.
+
+He sprang into the water, clawing for her feet as she fell toward
+him. She screamed and her screams died as he dragged her beneath the
+surface. He tore the box from her hands and let it fall.
+
+When they broke the surface, his hands were on her throat and all his
+lifelong hatred of the Almost-men was in his finger tips as he pressed
+his thumbs down upon her windpipe. Pendillo cried out,
+
+"Don't kill her, Lanny! No man has ever taken one of the enemy alive."
+
+Reluctantly Lanny relaxed his grip. Tak Laleen screamed again and
+slapped her hands at his face. Abruptly she paused and stared into his
+eyes.
+
+"You!" she gasped. "The black savage. No wonder my sphere--In the name
+of the All of the Universe, kill me quickly! Kill me now, as civilized
+beings have a right to die--not your way. Not your way!"
+
+Then, for no reason Lanny could fathom, Tak Laleen fainted.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sheltered by the mist and the darkness, the stolen barge moved rapidly
+north along the coast. Tak Laleen lay unconscious in the bottom of the
+boat, wrapped in her white uniform; Pendillo sat shivering beside her.
+Lanny and Gill stood in the stern. Although the motor was controlled by
+an automatic navigator, Gill tore out the flimsy destination tape and
+guided the wheel manually.
+
+"Even this the Almost-men can't do for themselves," he remarked to his
+brother.
+
+"Do you suppose they really can't read direction from the sun or the
+stars?"
+
+"All their brains are in their machines."
+
+"And machines are nothing."
+
+"Juan has always said that," Gill said slowly. "It sounds logical and
+reasonable. But I don't know what it means, Lanny!"
+
+For a long time they stood watching the heaving shadow of the sea, each
+of them trying in his own way to make sense of the riddle. Suddenly the
+motor sputtered. Gill tinkered with the machine until it was purring
+smoothly again.
+
+"The power cells are nearly empty," he said. "We'll have to run the
+barge aground sometime tomorrow and start walking again."
+
+"Yes, I know." Lanny clenched his fist over his brother's arm. "But how
+do we know it, Gill? How can we run this machine, when we have never
+seen it before?"
+
+Gill laughed uneasily. "Don't forget, before the invasion our people
+were pretty good at building machines, too."
+
+"That doesn't answer the question, Gill. When I fired the energy gun, I
+felt as if it were a part of myself--as if I knew all the cells in the
+metal just as I know my own."
+
+"That happened to me when I sat in the automobile in the showroom."
+
+"It scares me, Gill. I keep thinking I should remember something but--"
+
+"I was scared last night, too, because I thought I'd made the motor go
+by forcing it to move with my mind. And that's absurd. If we had that
+much control over machines, as we do over our hunting clubs, how could
+the enemy ever have defeated us?"
+
+Tak Laleen opened her eyes, then, and sat up stiffly. The wind struck
+her face and swept her hair back. Shivering, she pulled her uniform
+tight around her throat.
+
+"Where are you taking me?" she demanded.
+
+"You're our prisoner," Lanny answered.
+
+"The Sacred Triangle will not pay ransom. We volunteered to serve here
+on the earth; we knew the risks."
+
+Lanny moved toward her. Fearfully she slid away from him until her back
+was against the gunwale. "Don't touch me!" she begged.
+
+He shrugged and dropped on the deck close to her feet. "When you came
+out of the Triangle to take care of our sick, you never were repulsed
+by--"
+
+"Not the normal ones, no."
+
+"Your aversion applies only to me?"
+
+"Don't pretend." She twisted her hands together. "What kind of a--a
+thing are you?"
+
+Juan Pendillo intervened, "We dragged you aboard rather
+unceremoniously, Tak Laleen. Let me introduce my sons, Lanny and Gill."
+
+"You're lying. Where did you get the metals to make him?"
+
+Lanny stared at his father. "Is she--has her mind been affected--"
+
+"All this beating around the bush is so foolish." Suddenly she seized
+Lanny's arm and dug her nails, like claws, into his skin. "But--but it
+is real! You're not a machine." Her eyes glazed and she fainted again.
+
+By dawn the motor of the barge was missing continuously and the speed
+had been reduced to a relatively slow forty knots. The sun rose,
+dispelling the fog, and the wind on the sea became a little warmer.
+Juan Pendillo tried to pace the tiny deck, flaying his arms to restore
+the circulation. Tak Laleen, having recovered from her second faint,
+sat brooding with her uniform clutched tightly over her throat.
+
+Periodically the missionary talked to Pendillo. She asked again and
+again what they were going to do with her. Either ransom or murder were
+the only possibilities that occurred to her. That point of view was a
+fair index to the attitude the Almost-men held toward the survivors
+on the planet they had conquered. Mankind they considered filthy,
+illiterate barbarians; the primitive squalor of the prison compounds
+was their proof.
+
+Lanny understood enough of the religion of the Triangle--that noble
+abstract of God which the enemy called the All of the Universe--to
+know why the conquerors had to use a semantic device to define their
+superiority. The Almost-men were a liberty-loving society. Their
+government decrees and their religious poetry abounded with vivid words
+of freedom. They could not have maintained an integrated social soul
+and enslaved a culture of their peers; therefore, they had to invent a
+verbal technique for reducing man to the status of a savage.
+
+"As we have always done ourselves," Pendillo told Lanny when he first
+became aware of the inconsistency as a child. "But don't condemn
+the enemy for it, my son. Words have the peculiar habit of becoming
+anything we want them to be. If we set our minds to it, we can make
+anything true. The Almost-men are not merely alien invaders; they are
+like man himself--the most tragic distortion of our worst traits.
+Someday we shall make war on them, yes, but before we do we must learn
+how to conquer ourselves."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Early in the afternoon the power cells in the barge were exhausted.
+Gill drove the ship up on a desolate beach, at the place where Monterey
+had once stood. Nothing survived but an occasional piece of debris,
+buried in the drifted sand, for Monterey, close to a military camp, had
+been heavily bombed by the invaders.
+
+"We must find a place to camp," Pendillo advised. "I don't believe
+either Tak Laleen or I have the strength to go any farther today."
+
+They found it necessary to hike eight miles north of Monterey before
+they were beyond the area of total destruction. The ruins, scattered
+among the encroaching trees, became recognizable as skeletal relics of
+things that might once have been homes. They found one frame cottage
+still whole because it had been built close to a hillside. The battered
+walls would provide shelter for Pendillo and the missionary. Further,
+the house had a stone fireplace where they could cook their food, and
+close by a shallow spring bubbled from the dark earth.
+
+Gill and Lanny trapped a deer and carried the carcass back to the
+cottage. Both Tak Laleen and Pendillo were struggling to make a fire.
+Lanny took over the chore and in seconds flames leaped through the dead
+brush heaped on the hearth. It had always puzzled him that Pendillo
+could have taught him the techniques, and still not be able to make the
+fire himself. Tak Laleen was just as helpless. Without their machines
+the Almost-men were nothing: again and again that became apparent.
+
+Gill stripped off the deer hide carefully so it could be made into
+a second jacket for Pendillo. While he stretched the skin in the
+afternoon sun, Lanny turned the meat over the fire. When they began
+to eat, both Lanny and Gill were amused that Tak Laleen had manners
+as fastidious as Pendillo's. The missionary nibbled delicately at her
+food, as if she thought the grease would soil her lips. Afterward
+she and Pendillo washed in water which they heated over the fire.
+Pendillo's sons stripped and swam in the ocean, as a man properly
+should to make himself clean.
+
+They made beds for their father and the missionary in front of the
+fire. Lanny and his brother would have been willing to continue the
+march north until nightfall; the food had restored their balance of
+energy, as it always did. But they knew the other two had to rest.
+
+Lanny and Gill dug burrows in the warm sand outside the cottage, where
+they felt more comfortable. They were consciously an integrated part
+of their world, nurtured by the earth and the sun. To them it seemed
+absurd to build walls of wood or stone to separate themselves from
+a part of their own being. None of the younger generation had ever
+understood the need of their elders for artificial shelter. That
+feeling, too, was a product of of their education, though neither they
+nor their teachers grasped what it implied. The children of the prison
+camps lived in a new universe, not yet defined.
+
+Lanny and Gill were immediately asleep. It did not occur to them that
+Tak Laleen might try to escape. They assumed she had read the signs of
+the plentiful game in the forest: they were a long way from any enemy
+installation.
+
+Yet four hours later they were jerked awake by the sound of her
+screams, faint and terrified in the night shadows of the forest. They
+found her a thousand yards from the cottage. Her back was against a
+wall of boulders and with her frail, white hands she was trying to beat
+off a snarling cougar which had already clawed her uniform to shreds.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Lanny drew his knife and leaped at the animal. Gill threw a stone which
+might have broken the skull with bullet force, but at that moment the
+cougar whirled toward them. Its claw slashed at Lanny. He bent low,
+driving his knife upward. Momentum carried the big cat forward. As the
+tearing fury struck his chest, Lanny plunged his knife again into the
+thick hide.
+
+The cougar fell, writhing and howling. Gill smashed a broken tree limb
+into the yawning jaws, and the big cat died. Tak Laleen stumbled
+toward them. She tried to speak. The words of gratitude choked in her
+throat and she fainted.
+
+Again! Lanny thought, with disgust. The Almost-men--or at least their
+missionary women--had a limited gamut of emotional reactions. It seemed
+an inadequate way to solve a problem.
+
+They left Tak Laleen where she lay. Gill expertly stripped off the skin
+of the animal they had killed, another hide they could fashion into a
+jacket for Juan Pendillo. Lanny had been superficially wounded--a long,
+shallow scratch across his chest. He examined it carefully, feeling
+through the severed body cells with his mind and directing the blood
+purifiers to seal off the few germ colonies which were present. When
+the skin seemed to require no healing exposure to the sun, he allowed
+the scratch to heal at once.
+
+Gill shouldered the cougar hide, still warm and dripping blood. Lanny
+picked up the missionary and they returned to the cottage. Tak Laleen's
+uniform was torn and useless, but the material was a tough plastic
+which had protected her from any serious wound. Her chest and arms were
+criss-crossed with scores of tiny abrasions. It puzzled Lanny that
+she had made no effort to repair her body. It occured to him, with
+something of a shock, that the Almost-men might use machines to do
+that, too.
+
+Tak Laleen regained consciousness when Lanny put her on the bed in
+front of the fire. Pendillo tore off her battered uniform and bathed
+the scratches with hot water.
+
+"You saved me; you risked your own life!" She said it with a peculiar
+fervor. Lanny couldn't understand why she thought an element of risk
+had been involved. A hunter with half his skill and experience could
+have done as much.
+
+"I won't try to run away again," she promised. Not much of a
+concession, Lanny thought, suppressing a grin.
+
+Pendillo said they would have to spend the next day in the cottage, to
+give the missionary a chance to rest. She was suffering, he said, from
+something he called shock. Precisely what that was neither of his sons
+knew, but they supposed it was an obscure ailment that beset the enemy.
+The more they learned about Tak Laleen, the stranger it seemed that
+such a weak people could have conquered the earth.
+
+During the interval of waiting, Lanny and Gill dried the two hides they
+had taken. They cut breeches and a jacket for Tak Laleen, to replace
+the uniform she could no longer wear.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After they resumed their trek north, it took them four days more to
+reach the pylon barrier south of the San Francisco treaty area. Tak
+Laleen became more and more exhausted. She shivered constantly in
+the cold air. Her nose began to run--a phenomenon Pendillo called a
+cold--and the wounds in her chest stubbornly refused to heal. When she
+saw the towered guns on the barrier, she dropped to the ground and wept
+hysterically.
+
+"We can't pass that," she whispered.
+
+"If you're afraid to run the guns," Lanny told her, "we can swim around
+them."
+
+"I don't know how."
+
+"There's no other way into the treaty area," Gill said brutally.
+
+She sniffled. "If I could just feel warm again--if you would build a
+fire and give me a chance to rest--"
+
+"Not until we're inside the barrier. The police would spot a fire out
+here."
+
+Gill picked her up and began to carry her toward the beach. She
+screamed in terror and beat her fists against his naked back. When he
+did not stop, she cried out,
+
+"I can tell you how to break the circuit on the pylons!"
+
+Gill paused. "Yes?"
+
+"If we could knock out just one of the guns, we could walk through the
+barrier, couldn't we?"
+
+Gill set her on her feet. She ran back to Lanny, stumbling over the
+rough ground and wiping her nose with the back of her hand. "Lanny, you
+and your brother can hit anything with a stone. Couldn't you knock out
+the power unit in a pylon?"
+
+"Sure, if we knew where it was. We've tried for years to find that out,
+but we can't get close enough to examine the towers."
+
+She pointed eagerly. "It's the criss-crossed framework, just under the
+sound receptor at the top."
+
+He measured the distance critically. "It will take careful marksmanship
+to hit anything so small. Think we could do it, Gill?"
+
+"We'll have to try; the lady's afraid to get her feet wet."
+
+Gill threw the first stone. It fell short of the target. The automatic
+energy guns swung on the stone, efficiently disintegrating it before it
+touched the ground. Lanny tried; and his brother threw again. It was
+Lanny's fourth missile that struck the tiny mechanism. A puff of smoke
+filled the air and the top of the pylon became a mass of twisted, metal
+girders.
+
+Lanny grinned at the missionary. She was a fool, he thought; for the
+sake of her own comfort, she had given away one of the most valuable
+secrets in the arsenal of enemy weapons. When the treaty areas knew
+it, the barriers would go down; men would be free when they chose. And
+Tak Laleen was so grateful to have escaped a cold swim in the sea, she
+seemed unaware of the extent of her betrayal.
+
+They walked across the barren ground. The missionary clung with
+feverish hands to Lanny's arm. Half a mile beyond the barrier, they
+ascended a steep hill. From the crest they looked down upon the
+peninsula and the sprawling arms of the bay in the background.
+
+Except for the jumbled ruins of downtown San Francisco, at the point
+of the peninsula, the land from the ocean to the bay was crowded with
+closely packed rows of dwellings. Some were flat-roofed, whitewalled
+houses similar to the subdivision settlement where Lanny and Gill grew
+up. Others, built since the surrender, were ugly hovels made from clay
+and grass.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The San Francisco treaty area was the largest on Earth, perhaps because
+it was the city where the invasion had begun. Lanny had always known
+it was big, but he was awed to see so many men, so many of his own
+kind, assembled in one place.
+
+Across the bay, on a flat, white plain where Oakland had once stood,
+was the crowded, multi-tiered skyport of the enemy. From all the
+surrounding hills the pliable, white tubes poured an endless stream
+of resources into the port. Automatic machines, working ceaselessly
+day and night, loaded the plunder into machine-navigated, pilotless
+spheres; at five minute intervals an endless parade of spheres lifted
+from the field beyond the skyport and headed toward the stars, while a
+second parade of empties came in for a landing.
+
+From a distance the skyport, under its opalescent dome of a
+force-field, looked like an enormous spider with its sprawling, white
+tentacles clutching the green earth. The San Francisco skyport was the
+largest the enemy had built, and the seat of the territorial government
+they had set up to rule the captive planet.
+
+Grotesque relics of man's bridges still spanned the bay and the Golden
+Gate; columns of rusted steel held up the graceful loops of a single,
+rusted cable. An enemy bridge, like a fairy highway supported by nearly
+invisible balloons of de-grav spheres, joined the skyport and the
+treaty area.
+
+As the three men and their captive descended the hillside, they were
+stopped by four nearly naked youths who mounted guard on the southern
+fringe of the settlement. Though still boys in their teens, they were
+physical giants like Lanny and Gill. Pendillo told the boys why they
+had fled from the Santa Barbara settlement; he asked to be taken to the
+home of Dr. Endhart.
+
+"Our chief teacher?"
+
+"Dr. Endhart and I are old friends. We knew each other before the
+invasion."
+
+One of the boys clapped Lanny on the back. "So you brought your woman
+with you; they must be snappy lookers down your way."
+
+Tak Laleen shrank against Lanny's side, holding his hand in terror.
+
+"Not much for size, though," the boy added critically. "How much do you
+weigh, girl?"
+
+The boy put his arm around the missionary's shoulder. She gave a squeal
+of fear and, in her eagerness to shrink still closer to Lanny, she
+forgot to hold her crudely cut jacket closed across her breast. The
+hide fell free. The boy saw her white, scratched shoulder and her thin,
+frail arm.
+
+He whistled. "So you caught one of the Almost-men. A missionary? I
+never saw one without the uniform. Let's see the rest of it."
+
+He snatched the jacket from Tak Laleen. She gave another wail and
+fainted. Lanny sighed and picked her up.
+
+"She has a habit of doing this," he explained wearily. "She hasn't
+pulled one for nearly four days; I guess this was overdue."
+
+The boy inspected her with a sneer. "Scrawny, aren't they?"
+
+"Take away their machines," Lanny replied, "and this is all you have
+left."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Lanny and his brother made an easy adjustment to the new community.
+The social stratification was an uncomplicated division of men into
+three types: the teachers, the old ones who had survived the invasion,
+and the children who had grown up since the war--by far the largest
+group. The classification was logical and unobtrusive; it produced no
+frustrating social pressures. Since the children had known no other
+form of society, they assumed that men had always organized their
+culture with such understandable simplicity.
+
+The chief occupation of the community was always the education of the
+young. That, too, Lanny and Gill assumed to be the normal activity
+of man. The teachers were the real government of every treaty area.
+Their control was subtle, engineered through an unofficial--and
+illegal--representative body, usually called the resistance council.
+
+Since Pendillo had been a teacher in his home settlement, he took up
+residence with Dr. Endhart. They kept Tak Laleen with them, a prisoner
+confined to the house. For nearly a week she lay on a pallet suffering
+the miseries of a cold. Lanny knew that older survivors in every
+settlement sometimes had the same malady. Pendillo had taught his sons
+that sickness happened because some of the survivors of the invasion
+had been so demoralized by defeat they had lost the mental ability to
+control their own physical processes. But Tak Laleen was one of the
+conquerors; nothing had demoralized the Almost-men. There was only one
+possible conclusion Lanny could reach: the invaders had never learned
+to control the energy units in their body cells.
+
+A hunter's assignment, Lanny found, was easier than it had been in the
+smaller Santa Barbara settlement. The Almost-men had set up a vast
+hunting preserve north and east of the bay; it was kept well-stocked
+with game. There was no need for the hunting parties to break through
+the pylon barrier and raid territory ceded to the invaders. The hunters
+simply crossed the skyport bridge, circled the opalescent dome, and
+entered the forest, where broad trails had been conveniently laid out
+under the trees.
+
+This generous provision came about because the enemy considered the
+San Francisco compound something of a showplace, an experimental
+laboratory for improving relations with the conquered. A steady stream
+of tourists, sociologists, politicians and religious leaders poured
+into the San Francisco skyport from the mechanized home world of the
+Almost-men. They came to satisfy their curiosity, to purchase tourist
+relics, to examine and sometimes criticize the occupation policy.
+
+Frequently, when Lanny was hunting in the forest, he saw Almost-men who
+were recent arrivals in the skyport. Usually they floated above the
+trees in their individual, degravitized, force-field capsules, watching
+the hunt and eagerly recording the activity with their expensive
+cameras. Sometimes they whipped up enough courage to descend to the
+forest trails and talk to their captives.
+
+Several times Lanny was interviewed by the enemy, and slowly he began
+to flesh out a more realistic definition of the Almost-men. They were
+no longer a clear-cut symbol for something he hated, but suddenly more
+human and more understandable. They were physically weak, just like the
+older survivors in the treaty settlements. They were timid and unsure
+of themselves. They were hopelessly caught in a mire of pretty words,
+which they seemed to believe themselves. And without their machines
+they were helpless.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Lanny and his brother had been in the San Francisco area for
+nearly two weeks, they were invited to a formal session of the local
+resistance council, where they were accepted as new citizens of the
+community. The delegates met at night in the rubble of the old city. A
+narrow passage tunneled through the ruins to an underground room which
+had once been the vault of a bank and had, therefore, survived the
+bombing and the slashing fire of the energy guns.
+
+Gill did not stay with his brother in the rear of the vault. Instead
+he joined the young hotheads who formed the war party in the local
+council. At home Gill had dominated the same element.
+
+The men in every treaty area were split between two points of view. One
+group wanted to organize an immediate attack upon the invader, in spite
+of the inequality in arms. The others counciled caution, until they had
+the strength to strike a real blow to free the Earth.
+
+Since men had no weapons and no metals from which to make them, the
+obvious basis for any successful attack had to be a scheme for seizing
+arms from the enemy. "We can only destroy the Almost-men if we use
+their own machines." Again and again the San Francisco war party
+repeated that fact; it seemed an argument so self-evident that it was
+beyond any rational challenge. "The machines have no intelligence, no
+sense of values; they will obey us just as readily as they obey the
+enemy."
+
+"More so." Gill spoke clear and loud, in crisp self-confidence. "I do
+not believe the enemy knows how to feel the structure of matter."
+
+This statement created a minor sensation. The heads of the delegates
+turned slowly toward Gill. Gill was smiling, his mane of blond hair
+shimmering like gold in the flickering light. Lanny felt, as always, a
+tremendous admiration for his brother. Gill was so sure of himself, so
+certain that he was right. Gill's mind would never have been plagued by
+shadowy fears he couldn't understand.
+
+"I have seen an enemy bleed," Gill went on. "They do not know how to
+heal a wound."
+
+"That might be true of some," one of delegates answered. "Some of
+our old ones have forgotten, too. But you spoke as if the individual
+community of cells could be extended to include integration with all
+external matter."
+
+"By touch; I have done it myself."
+
+"You mean the extension into the energy units of your hunting club."
+The delegate smiled depreciatingly. "We all understand that. But a
+wooden club was once a living thing. Community control over other forms
+of matter is entirely different."
+
+"No, the machines respond the same way. I made a motor turn over, when
+it had been idle and without fuel for twenty years. It frightened me
+when it happened. The energy in the metal was something new, and I
+couldn't understand the structure at first. But I've thought about it
+since, and I'm sure--"
+
+"We'll look into the possibilities--after we capture the enemy
+machines. Our problems at the moment is to get the machines."
+
+The delegates returned to their discussion. They had agreed, long ago,
+that the only way to attack the skyport was from inside the protective,
+force-field dome. For years the Almost-men had tried to encourage trade
+between the skyport and the treaty area, and the resistance council had
+turned that to their advantage.
+
+Gradually they had increased the number of young men who went to the
+city with necklaces of animal teeth and meaningless gee-gaws for the
+tourist trade. The Almost-men had grown used to seeing a mob of men
+milling on the bridge and in the lower tiers of the city. The council
+had regularly altered the trading parties, so that every man in the San
+Francisco colony had been under the dome half a dozen times. They knew
+their way around in the skyport; they knew the location of the power
+station and the city arsenal. When the attack came, fifty men in the
+city would seize the power plant and the rest would attempt to take the
+arsenal.
+
+One of the hotheads arose from his place beside Gill. "We have
+discussed this and argued it for almost as long as I can remember," he
+said. "There is nothing more to be said, for it or against it. Hasn't
+the time come to take a vote?"
+
+A moderate protested mildly, "But have we weighed all the risks? If we
+make a mistake now--"
+
+"Can you suggest a better way to get weapons?"
+
+And the moderate admitted, "True, we can't defeat the enemy unless we
+have weapons comparable to theirs."
+
+It was the last gasp of an old argument. Everything that could be said
+had already been said; every delegate knew both sides to the debate,
+and every delegate was driven by the same instinct to make a fight
+to reclaim his lost world. When the vote was counted, a majority of
+the council favored war. A committee was appointed to make the final
+disposition of forces and to set the time for the attack. Lanny was not
+surprised when Gill was named a member of the committee.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the afternoon following the meeting, Lanny was assigned to a group
+of traders so he might learn the geography of the skyport before the
+attack. As the enemy capital on Earth and a tourist attraction, the
+San Francisco skyport was a miniature replica of an enemy city. Under
+the dome were tiers of streets and walkways, interwoven in complex
+patterns, and the battlement spires of luxury hotels, theatres,
+cabarets, public buildings. The streets overflowed with a flood of
+jangling traffic, and the air was filled with the well-to-do riding
+their de-grav cars in the enviable security of their private capsules.
+
+Lanny's overall impression was a place of intolerable noise and
+glitter. The Almost-men seemed to make a fetish of their machines. They
+found it necessary to use their clattering vehicles even though their
+destination might be a building only one tier away. The air under the
+dome was fetid with the stench of vehicle fuels.
+
+The trading area was confined to a small, metal-surfaced square on the
+lowest level of the city, close to the narrow, neutralized vent through
+the force-field dome. Tall buildings swarmed above the trading booths,
+blotting out the sun. Lanny felt boxed in, imprisoned by the high
+walls, choked by the artificial, filtered air.
+
+He sold a satisfactory quota of trade goods to the tourists who had
+adventured down to the booths. And he dutifully noted the location of
+the walkway to the power center and the arsenal. But he gave a sigh
+of relief when his duty was done and he was free to go back across
+the bridge to the treaty area. He filled his lungs with the crisp,
+damp air, unsterilized by the fans of the enemy city. How could the
+Almost-men survive, he wondered, how were they capable of clear-headed
+thinking, in such seething confusion?
+
+In the treaty areas, where men could put their naked feet upon the
+soil and feel the life-energy of the earth, where men breathed the
+fresh wind and held sovereignty over their environment--only there were
+men really free. Would he trade that for the city walls that blotted
+out the sun, and the monotonous throbbing of machines? The victor was
+the slave; the conquered had found the road to liberty. For the first
+time in his life Lanny understood the paradox. Stated in those terms,
+what did men actually have to fight for?
+
+As he always did when he had a problem, Lanny went to Juan Pendillo. It
+was late in the afternoon. Already the cooking fires were being lighted
+on the small rectangles of earth in front of the houses where the
+older survivors lived. But Pendillo and Dr. Endhart were still inside,
+packing away the models which Endhart had used to teach his last class
+for the day. They usually waited for Lanny or Gill to make their night
+fire, since Pendillo's sons did the work so effortlessly. Tak Laleen
+was with the teachers. She sat on the only chair in the room, playing
+abstractly with one of Endhart's teaching tools--a crude mock-up of the
+structure of a living energy unit. It was the same sort of learning-toy
+Lanny himself had been given when he was a child.
+
+Lanny burst in on them excitedly. He began to talk at once, trying to
+put in words the conviction that had come to him as he stood on the
+bridge. Suddenly the words were gone. In his own mind it was clear
+enough, but how was he to explain it? How could he tell them it would
+be self-destruction to capture the city of the Almost-men?
+
+"You wanted to talk to us?" Pendillo prompted him.
+
+"It--it's this vote we've taken for war, father." Lanny glanced at Tak
+Laleen. His father and Endhart smiled disarmingly.
+
+"You can talk quite freely," Endhart said. "Tak Laleen knows the vote
+has been counted. She knows what it means."
+
+"Unarmed men are going to attack the city," the missionary said without
+expression. "You are very courageous people. But you are certain you
+will win--against our machines and our energy guns." With a frown, she
+put aside the model she had been holding. Her face was drawn and tense;
+there was doubt and fear in her eyes.
+
+"Of course we'll take the skyport," Lanny assured her. "That doesn't
+worry me. It's what happens afterward--what we do when we have your
+guns and your machines."
+
+Endhart and Pendillo exchanged glances, in subtle understanding. "The
+city will belong to us," his father said.
+
+"Why do we want it? The city is a prison!"
+
+The eyes of the elders met again. "We need guns to protect ourselves.
+Haven't you always said that, Lanny? You've heard all the discussions
+in the council meetings."
+
+"But do we, father? Answer me honestly."
+
+"You can answer that better than I, my son."
+
+Tak Laleen stood up, wringing her hands. "You will face the
+force-field and our guns--but you wonder if you need weapons." With
+an effort she checked the hysterical laughter bubbling in her throat.
+"My people would say you had gone mad; but who knows the meaning of
+madness?"
+
+Pendillo took the missionary's hand firmly in his. "She's tired, Lanny.
+Our ways are still new to her."
+
+"And we've had her cooped up in the house too long," Endhart added.
+
+Pendillo glanced sharply at his friend. Endhart nodded. "It is time,"
+he said cryptically.
+
+Pendillo turned toward his son. "A walk outside would do her good,
+Lanny."
+
+"Is it safe?"
+
+"She won't try to escape; you and I will go with her."
+
+Pendillo led her toward the door. Her face glowed with hope. She
+glanced eagerly down the long street, lit by the evening fires. Lanny
+was sure she was looking for the nearest Chapel of the Triangle,
+calculating her chances of escape. She was the enemy. What reason did
+his father or Endhart have to trust her so blindly?
+
+At the door Pendillo turned for a moment toward Endhart. "You'll make
+sure Gill knows?"
+
+"At the proper time; leave it to me."
+
+"Knows what?" Lanny demanded.
+
+"That we may be a little late for dinner," his father answered blandly.
+He nodded toward Tak Laleen and Lanny understood.
+
+Lanny walked on one side of Tak Laleen and slid his arm firmly under
+hers. She kept running her fingers nervously over his arm. She tripped
+once, when her foot caught in a shallow hole; her nails tore a deep
+gash in Lanny's flesh as he reached out to keep her from falling. He
+healed the wound at once, except for a small area where the germ colony
+needed exposure to the life-energy of the sun. She looked at his arm.
+Her lips were trembling; her face was white.
+
+"So you can do it, Lanny."
+
+For a moment he had forgotten her remarkable inability. "You mean the
+healing? All men do that; we always have. A rational mind controls the
+structure and energy of organized matter."
+
+"I've listened to Dr. Endhart teaching that to the small children," she
+replied. "It--it is difficult to believe." She began to laugh again;
+waves of hysteria swept her body. "I'm sorry, Lanny. I've thought,
+sometimes, that I'm losing my mind. We're never really certain of
+ourselves, are we? Two plus two doesn't have to make four, I suppose;
+it's just more convenient when it does."
+
+"I could show you how to heal yourself, Tak Laleen."
+
+"Ever since I came here I've been learning, Lanny. But it does no good
+unless I'm willing to learn first. My mind is tied down by everything I
+already know. I can put my two and two together as often as I like, and
+I still come up with four. Any other answer is insanity."
+
+Twice, as they walked through the streets, Pendillo took a turn
+which led toward one of the enemy chapels. Lanny swiftly guided the
+missionary in another direction. The third time they came upon the
+Chapel of the Triangle suddenly, and before he could pull Tak Laleen
+back she broke free and fled toward the glowing Triangle, crying for
+help in her native tongue.
+
+Lanny sprinted after her. Tak Laleen beat with her fists on the metal
+door. From the air above them came the high whine of a materializing
+force-field. Capsules swung down upon them. The missionary was
+swallowed within the church. Lanny and his father were enveloped in a
+single bubble.
+
+It rose on an automatic beam and arched toward the skyport. In panic
+Lanny glanced down through the opalescent field at the settlement
+rolling by beneath them, and the choppy water of the bay, turned
+scarlet by the setting sun. Pendillo leaned calmly against the curved
+wall of their prison.
+
+"She betrayed us!" Lanny cried.
+
+"I expected her to, my son."
+
+"You--you knew this would happen?"
+
+"A teacher must sometimes contrive a unique--and possibly
+painful--learning situation. It's one of the risks of our profession."
+
+"Why, father? She'll tell the Almost-men about the attack on the
+skyport; she'll tell them--"
+
+Pendillo tapped the curved wall of force. "We're in a tight spot,
+Lanny. It's up to you to get us out--without a gun and without any of
+the enemy machines. All you have to work with are your brains and what
+we've taught you for the past twenty years. I think you can count on
+some help from Gill later on. He'll have to attack the skyport tonight,
+without working out all his fine plans for seizing the arsenal. And
+Gill won't have any guns, either."
+
+"So you and Endhart planned this."
+
+"That's why I insisted on keeping Tak Laleen alive. I thought we
+might need her as--as a catalyst. The vote of the resistance council
+rushed things a little, but on the whole I think it worked out quite
+satisfactorily. Your education is finished, Lanny--for all of you who
+are the new breed. Now start applying what we think you know."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For a brief time the prison sphere that held Lanny and Juan Pendillo
+was suspended above the teeming tiers of skyport streets. Enough time,
+Lanny guessed, for the enemy to question Tak Laleen and to reach some
+decision based upon what she had to tell them. Abruptly the capsule was
+hauled down. Lanny and his father were dumped into barred cells buried
+somewhere in the bowels of the city.
+
+"What will they do with us?" Lanny asked.
+
+From the adjoining cell his father answered placidly, "It depends on
+Tak Laleen's statement--and how much of it they believe."
+
+"Will they condemn us to readjustment?"
+
+"Undoubtedly, unless you solve our problem first--and these bars seem
+thoroughly solid to me."
+
+Lanny drew in his breath sharply, suddenly afraid. "What's it like,
+father--the readjustment?"
+
+"No one knows, really. A machine tears your mind apart and puts it
+together again--differently."
+
+Lanny shivered as he remembered the half-dozen readjustment cases he
+had seen in the Santa Barbara treaty area--living shells, with all
+initiative and individuality drained from their souls. He moved to
+the barred door of his cell. For a split-second of panic he seized
+the bars and futilely tried to pry them apart. Slowly edging into his
+consciousness came a vague awareness of the structural pattern of the
+energy units in the metal. It was the same extension of his integrated
+community of cells which he had with his hunting club. His panic
+vanished; he felt a little ashamed because he had been afraid. It would
+be no problem to escape.
+
+He held the bars and allowed his mind to feel through the pattern of
+energy organization. The metal was very different from any of the
+familiar substances Lanny knew, but far less complex because the
+arrangement was so rigidly disciplined. There were two things that
+Lanny might do. He could fit the energy units of his own body past
+the space intervals of the metal--in effect, passing through the metal
+barrier. But that would be slow and exacting work. It would require a
+considerable concentration to move the specialized cells of his body
+across the metal maze. The second method was easier. As he extended his
+cerebral integration into the metal, he could rearrange the energy unit
+pattern. The bars should fragment and fall apart.
+
+Lanny was amazed how rapidly the change took place. Before he could
+adjust the pattern of more than half a dozen energy units, a chain
+reaction began. Lanny found he had to absorb an enormous flow of
+superfluous energy to prevent an explosion.
+
+As soon as he crossed into the corridor, watching photo-electric cells
+sent an alarm pulsing into the guard room on the tier above. The
+metal-walled corridor throbbed with the deafening cry of a siren.
+
+Lanny darted toward his father's cell. "Hold the metal and make it over
+with your mind--just as we integrate with our clubs. It's the same
+principal, father."
+
+Pendillo shrugged. "I can't, Lanny. I don't know how."
+
+Lanny had no time to weigh the significance of what his father said
+for the scream of the siren stopped and a guard appeared at the head
+of the corridor. The guard wrapped himself hastily in the shell
+of a force-field capsule. He fired his energy gun. The knife of
+flame arched through the corridor and struck Lanny's face. His body
+reacted instinctively, absorbing and storing part of the charge and
+re-constructing the rest so that it became a harmless combination of
+inert gasses.
+
+But as the blinding flame splashed bright in Lanny's eyes--the way it
+had once before, when he murdered old Barlow--Lanny's mind faced the
+traumatic shock of remembering. Lanny had murdered Barlow--he knew
+that, now--murdered him with a blaze of energy which he had stored when
+he brushed against the force-field capsule surrounding Tak Laleen.
+
+It was not the fact of murder that had clamped the strait-jacket of
+forgetfulness on Lanny's mind and allowed him to think Tak Laleen had
+killed Barlow. He had known, for one split-second, the full maturity of
+the education Pendillo had given his sons. Known it too soon, with too
+little preparation. Now he understood why he had felt ashamed, why he'd
+retreated deliberately from the truth: because he had killed Barlow
+to resolve an old argument, not to be rid of a traitor. The method of
+murder had, ironically, given him the answer to Barlow's poison of
+despair; but because the two had happened simultaneously, the emotional
+shock of one had affected the other.
+
+The bursting charge of energy washed away his absurdly exaggerated
+sense of guilt. He achieved the mature integration he had lost before;
+his mind was whole again. The integration was nothing new--merely
+a restatement of what Pendillo had taught him, what all the treaty
+area teachers taught the new children. The mind of man could control
+the energy structure of matter. Pendillo called that rationality.
+But matter and energy were synonymous. The teachers had implied that
+without teaching it directly. A mind that could heal a body wound was
+also able to control the energy blast from an enemy gun.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From his father's cell Lanny heard a stifled groan. He looked back.
+The bars of the cell had been twisted by the blast; Pendillo was badly
+hurt. His wounds seemed to be extensive, but Lanny was sure his father
+would heal himself quickly.
+
+Lanny sprang at the guard. The Almost-man had enough courage to hold
+his ground, still sure of his impregnable machines. He was aiming his
+energy gun again when Lanny touched the opalescent capsule. That, too,
+was nothing now; Lanny had found his way into the new world. The field
+of force was simply energy in another form. Lanny could have reshaped
+the field, intensified it, or dissolved it as he chose.
+
+He shattered the capsule, like a bubble of glass. He smashed the gun
+aside. The guard stood before him, stripped of his mechanical armor--a
+man, facing his enemy as a man.
+
+As the guard turned to run, Lanny reached out for him leisurely. Weakly
+the guard swung his fist at Lanny's face. Lanny laughed and slapped at
+the ineffectual, white hand. The guard howled and clutched the broken
+fingers against his mouth. Desperately he kicked at Lanny with his
+metal-soled boots. Lanny dodged. The unexpected momentum sent the
+guard reeling and he had no efficient capsule to hold him up.
+
+He sprawled on the metal floor close to his energy gun. He grasped
+for the weapon as Lanny leaped toward him. For one brief moment Lanny
+saw madness film his enemy's eyes. Then the guard began to scream. He
+thrust the muzzle of the energy gun against his own chest and pressed
+the firing stud.
+
+Lanny turned away from the smoldering heap of charred flesh and went
+back to his father's cell. He disorganized the energy units of the
+tormented knot of metal bars and knelt beside Pendillo. Lanny was
+amazed that his father had made no effort to heal his wounds. Juan
+was bleeding profusely; his eyes were glazed with pain. Lanny lifted
+Pendillo tenderly in his arms.
+
+"Father! You must begin the healing--"
+
+"I do not know how, Lanny."
+
+"All men control their own body cells!"
+
+"So you were taught, and what a man believes is true--for him."
+
+Cautiously Lanny extended his energy integration into his father's
+body. It was something he had never done before with a living man. The
+weak disorganization of cells frightened him. Clearly Pendillo was
+telling the truth; he was incapable of ordering his own healing. Then
+how had he taught his sons so well, if he could not use the technique
+himself?
+
+Hesitantly Lanny released into his father's body some of the energy he
+had stored. He wasn't sure what the effect would be, but it seemed to
+help. Pendillo tried to smile; his eyes became clearer.
+
+"Thanks, Lanny. But you can't save me, my son. I've lost too much
+blood; I have too many internal injuries."
+
+"But you could do it for yourself, Father." Lanny shook his head. "I
+don't understand why--"
+
+"You wouldn't, Lanny. You're the new breed."
+
+"You say that so often."
+
+"In my time that might have meant a new species--supermen we created by
+genetics in a biological laboratory. But we've done more than that. You
+aren't freaks; you're our children in every sense of the word. We have
+made you men; we've taught you how to think."
+
+"You deliberately made us as we are?"
+
+"Every man who lived before your time was an Almost-man, Lanny. He had
+your same potential, but he hadn't learned how to use it."
+
+"How are we different?"
+
+Pendillo was seized with a sudden spasm of coughing; blood trickled
+from his lips. Once again Lanny released a shock wave of energy into
+his father's body, and Pendillo's strength was partially restored.
+
+"I will tell you as much as I can," Pendillo promised, but his voice
+was no longer as clear as it had been. "I don't have much time left.
+The idea for our new breed of men began at the time of the invasion.
+Lanny, there wasn't much to choose from between our people and the
+enemy. Our cities were like theirs; we were enslaved by machines--by
+the technological bric-a-brac of our culture--as they are. Only our
+science was different. We had exploited the energy of coal and oil and
+water-power; we were beginning to accumulate a good deal of data about
+the basic atomic structure of matter.
+
+"But we would have ridiculed any serious consideration of
+degravitation, or the magnetic energy of a field of force. These were
+the trappings of our escapist fiction, not of genuine science. We had
+a more or less closed field allowed to legitimate scientific research;
+any data beyond it was vigorously ignored.
+
+"Then, from nowhere, we were invaded and utterly defeated by an
+alien people who used the precise laws of science we had scorned.
+Furthermore, we saw them ridicule our principles as semi-religious
+rituals of a savage culture. In the invasion less than a tenth of
+mankind survived. We were herded into the treaty areas, with no
+government and no real leadership. Some of us had been teachers before
+the war; the survivors looked to us to preserve the spirit and the
+ideals of man.
+
+"We had to make a selective choice, Lanny. We had no books, no written
+records, no way to preserve the whole of the past. The teachers in all
+the treaty areas quickly established contact by courier. The lesson of
+the invasion had taught us a great deal. Men had been imprisoned by one
+scientific dogma, which had produced a mechanized and neurotic world.
+The Almost-men were trapped by another that had produced the same end
+result.
+
+"So we had our first objective: to teach our children the supreme
+dignity, the magnificent godliness, of the rational mind. We didn't
+tell you what to think--which had been our mistake in the past--but
+simply the vital necessity of rational thought. We taught you that
+the mind was the integrating factor in the universe; everything else
+was chaos, without objectivity or direction, until it was controlled
+by mind. After that, we jammed your brains with data from every
+field of knowledge that had ever been explored by man. That's why
+we interchanged couriers so frequently. In our world we had been
+specialists; we had to share the facts among ourselves so the new breed
+might have them all."
+
+Far away they heard the dull thunder of an explosion. Lanny's head
+jerked up. Pendillo coughed up blood again, but there was a satisfied
+smile on his lips. "That will be Gill and the boys from the treaty
+area," he sighed. "Arriving right on schedule. We've forced them to
+attack the city without weapons; to survive, they'll have to make the
+same mental reintegration that you did, Lanny."
+
+"How could you have been so sure, father, that we would be able to--to
+handle the matter-energy units the way we do?"
+
+"We weren't, my son. We were sure of nothing. We only knew that you
+were the first generation whose minds had been set completely free.
+Nobody had done any of your thinking for you. If any man is equipped
+to solve problems, you are--you of the new breed."
+
+"But why couldn't you learn the same techniques yourselves? Why can't
+you save yourself now, father?"
+
+"Because we belong in the old world. Because the technique is only
+an application of the data you know, Lanny; that is something you
+have worked out for yourselves. We could give you the theory; we were
+incapable of following it through your minds."
+
+Pendillo gasped painfully for breath. He closed his hand over his
+son's. "The old survivors are still imprisoned by beliefs carried over
+from the world we lost. We teach, Lanny, but we cannot believe as
+you do, even when we see our own children--our own sons--" His voice
+trailed away, and he slumped against Lanny's chest.
+
+A series of explosions rocked the metal walls; Pendillo opened his eyes
+again. His dying whisper was so soft, so twisted by pain, the words
+were almost inaudible. "One more thing, son. We did more--more than
+we thought. Don't retreat to our world; make your own. Without the
+machines and the city walls and the uproar--"
+
+Juan Pendillo grasped his son's hand. His fingers quivered for a moment
+of agony. And then he died.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Lanny stumbled away from the cell, his eyes dim with tears. The
+repetitive explosions continued outside in the domed city. Lanny
+discovered the origin of the sound when he made his way up the
+incline to the upper level. The parade of gigantic freight spheres
+was swinging in from the void of night, but the port machines, which
+handled the landings, were idle. The spheres were crashing, one upon
+the other, into the field just beyond the city. From disengaged,
+pliable tubes, jerking with the spasmodic torment of mechanical chaos,
+the raw materials plundered from the earth poured out upon the ruin.
+Fire licked at the wreckage, probing hungrily toward the city of the
+Almost-men.
+
+Lanny ran through the deserted guard rooms. Beyond the walls he heard a
+babble of panic on the city streets. The first exit that he found led
+up to the second level, where no man had ever been.
+
+He emerged on an ornate balcony, which overlooked the square where the
+trading booths stood. The force dome that had sheltered the city was
+gone. Lanny could look up and see the stars--and the endless parade of
+glowing freight spheres descending toward the earth. The air was clean,
+cold and wet with the sea mist.
+
+In a sense the depressing, stifling city he had seen that afternoon was
+already gone--except for the bleak walls and the clatter of machine
+sounds. And, in the agony of its death, the city noise had become the
+scream of mechanized madness. A seething mass of vehicles choked every
+tier, fighting for space, grinding each other into rubble. Vehicles
+careened from the upper roads and plunged into the mass beneath.
+
+At first it seemed a panic of machines. The people were trivial
+incidentals--bits of fluff which had been unfortunate enough to get in
+the way of the turning wheels. Then Lanny saw the walkaways, as crowded
+as the roads. A mass of humanity spewed through the doors of the luxury
+hotels, like run-off streams swelling the floodtide of a swollen river.
+Where were the Almost-men going? How could they escape? They had given
+their will and initiative to their machines; they could do nothing to
+help themselves.
+
+Lanny saw an occasional opalescent bubble rise in the air. But
+inevitably, before it could move beyond the city, a force of blazing
+energy shot up from the lowest tier and brought the capsule down. Here
+and there in the darkness Lanny saw the furious blast of an energy gun,
+probing futilely into the chaos.
+
+As the fire rose higher in the port wreckage, Lanny saw men fighting
+on the lower tier. They held the bridge and the trading square and
+they had taken the power center, which explained why the city was dark
+and why the force dome was gone. But they were still fighting to take
+the arsenal. A squad of guards held them off with energy guns; the men
+fought back from the darkness with weapons they had captured elsewhere.
+
+Even now they hadn't discovered the truth; they still feared the enemy
+weapons. They still thought they must have guns of their own--machines
+of their own--in order to be free. Build your own world, Pendillo had
+said; don't go back to ours.
+
+Lanny pushed through the throng on the walkway, trying to find an
+incline to the lower tier. Once or twice people in the mob saw him, in
+the shuddering light reflected by the energy guns, and recognized him
+as a man--a half-naked, black-bearded savage. They screamed in terror.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This was the hour of man's revenge, yet Lanny felt an inexpressible
+shame and sadness. Was this the way man's cities had died a generation
+ago, in a discord of mechanical sound, without courage and without
+dignity?
+
+At last he found the incline to the lower level. It was jammed with a
+mass of Almost-men, fighting and clawing their way down so they might
+flee into the hunting preserve beyond the city. The tide swept Lanny
+with it. At the foot of the incline he circled the arsenal to join the
+men, still confined in the trading square.
+
+Gill was directing the fire of his men as they inched forward. He
+clapped Lanny on the back, grinning broadly.
+
+"I knew you'd get out, Lan. Is Juan all right?"
+
+"He's dead, Gill. He was wounded and he didn't know how to heal
+himself."
+
+"He had to know, Lanny; he taught us."
+
+"They all taught us. They made us--" Lanny's voice choked a little
+as he used his father's familiar phrase. "--a new breed. Gill, we're
+acting like fools; we're fighting for something we don't want or need."
+
+"We have to have weapons, Lan."
+
+"We need nothing but what we've been taught. The mind interprets and
+commands the chaos of the universe. Matter and energy are identical."
+
+Lanny turned and walked, erect and unafraid, toward the arsenal.
+The energy fire from the guards' guns struck him and exploded. He
+reorganized the pattern into harmless components and stood waiting for
+the charge to die away.
+
+In a moment Gill was beside him, beaming with understanding as he met
+and transformed a second blast from the guns. "Of course matter and
+energy are the same!" he cried. "It should have been obvious to us. We
+have been prisoners twenty years for nothing."
+
+"We needed those twenty years to discover our new world. We have only
+finished our education tonight."
+
+As a third blast of energy came from the arsenal, other men slid out of
+the darkness and faced the guns. Lanny and Gill walked away, ignoring
+the screaming machines and the stabbing knives of fire.
+
+"Yesterday," Gill said slowly, "if I had known that I could direct a
+flow of energy just as easily as I integrate with my hunting club, I
+would have stood here cheerfully and slaughtered the Almost-men, just
+to watch them die. Now, I'm sorry for them."
+
+"There's no reason why they must all die in panic, Gill. Isn't there
+some way--"
+
+Behind them they heard a burst of ragged cheering. The arsenal guards,
+having seen their weapons fail, had deserted their posts and fled. Men
+stormed into the building, shattering the metal doors by re-organizing
+the energy structure. Slowly they wheeled out the great machines--the
+symbols of enemy power.
+
+"We fought for this," one of the men said. "And now we have no use for
+them."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gill called a meeting of the resistance council in the deserted
+trading square, while the city around them throbbed in the chaos of
+disintegration. The men were entirely aware of the problem created by
+their liberation. The new breed was free, on the threshold of a new and
+unexplored world. They could carry the message to other treaty areas;
+they could show other men the final lesson in reorientation. That much
+was simple. But what became of the enemy?
+
+"It would be absurd to kill them all," Gill said. He added with
+unconscious irony, "After all, they do know how to think on their own
+restricted level. They might be able, someday, to learn how to become
+civilized men."
+
+"The worst of it," one of the others pointed out, "is that their home
+world is bound to know something's wrong. The delivery of resources has
+already been interrupted. They will try to reconquer us. It doesn't
+matter, particularly, but it might become a little tiresome after a
+while."
+
+"Ever since I understood how this would end," Lanny said, "I've
+been wondering if we couldn't work out some way for them to keep the
+skyports just as they are. Let the Almost-men have our resources. They
+need them; we don't."
+
+The council agreed to this with no debate. Lanny was delegated to find
+someone in authority in the skyport and offer him such a treaty. Lanny
+asked Gill to go with him. The others split into two groups, one to put
+out the fires and clear away the port wreckage; the second to herd the
+enemy refugees together in the game preserve and protect them from the
+animals.
+
+Lanny and Gill pushed through the mob toward the upper levels of the
+city. The crowd had thinned considerably as more and more of the enemy
+fled into the forest. The brothers, barefoot giants, had an entirely
+unconscious arrogance in their stride. They passed the rows of luxury
+hotels and entered the government building. Here, apparently, there was
+an emergency source of power, for the corridor tubes glowed dimly with
+a sick, blue light. Room after room the brothers entered; they found no
+one--nothing but the disorderly debris of haste and panic.
+
+Methodically they worked their way to the top floor of the building. In
+a wing beyond the courtroom were the private quarters of the planetary
+governor.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He sat waiting for them in his glass-paneled office overlooking the
+tiers of the city. He was a tall man, slightly stooped by age. He
+had put on the full, formal uniform of his office--a green plastic,
+ornamented with a scarlet filagree and a chest stripe of jeweled
+medals. He was behind his desk with the wall behind him open upon the
+sky.
+
+"I expected a stampeding herd," he said.
+
+"You knew we were coming?" Lanny asked.
+
+"It was obvious you'd try to force us to sign a new treaty."
+
+"Call it a working agreement," Gill suggested. "We intend to let you
+keep the--"
+
+"You have panicked the city by taking advantage of our kindness. But
+you won't pull this stunt again; I've already requested a stronger
+occupation force from parliament."
+
+The governor stood up; he held an energy gun in his hand. "This
+frightens you, doesn't it? You should have expected one of us to keep
+a level head. I've handled savages before. You're very clever in
+creating believable illusions, particularly when there seems to be some
+religious significance. I should have known it was a trick when you
+sent that addle-witted missionary back to us."
+
+"Tak Laleen?"
+
+"Of course none of my men tell me what's going on until it's too late.
+They took her to the Triangle first. She talked to the priests, and
+they filled the city with all sorts of weird rumors about men who could
+control the energy pattern of matter." The governor's lip curled; he
+nodded toward a side door. "She's here now, under house arrest. She'll
+be expelled from the territory on the first ship out after the port is
+reopened."
+
+"She's wasn't lying," Lanny said. "She understood more than we did
+ourselves. Maybe Juan told her--"
+
+The governor laughed and motioned with his gun. "Will you join her, or
+do you want to force me to spoil your pretty illusion?"
+
+Gill walked unhurriedly toward the desk. "You must listen to us. Fire
+the gun, if you insist on that much proof. We want to save your world,
+not destroy it."
+
+The governor backed toward the open wall panel. "Stand where you are,
+or I'll fire!"
+
+"Just give us a chance to explain--"
+
+"The whole business is drivel. Superstitious nonsense. No man can
+violate the established laws of science."
+
+"Why not, since men made the laws originally?"
+
+The shell of dignity in the governor's manner began to crack away,
+revealing the naked hysteria that lay beneath. Gill moved again. The
+governor punched the firing stud of his energy gun. The fire lashed
+harmlessly at Gill's chest.
+
+"It's a lie!" the governor screamed. He fired the gun again at Lanny;
+then at Gill. His mouth quivered with terror. He was an intelligent
+man; he looked upon the evidence of a fact that overturned everything
+he believed. In the clamor of a dying city, still throbbing far below
+his open wall panel, he heard the testimony of the same discord. He
+lost his rational world in the chaos, and he hadn't the ability to find
+another.
+
+For a moment the governor stood looking at the half-naked giants he had
+been unable to kill. Then he flung the weapon away and leaped through
+the open panel into the mechanical clatter of the dying city.
+
+"Once I wouldn't have cared," Gill told his brother. "Now I do. Lanny,
+must we destroy their world in spite of ourselves?"
+
+They heard a faint voice behind them. "Not all of us, Gill." The
+brothers turned. They saw Tak Laleen, dressed again in the white
+uniform of the missionary. She came slowly through the metal panel of a
+door.
+
+"You see, it is possible for us to learn," she said when she stood
+within the room. "I have."
+
+"Then all your people--"
+
+"Not all of them. A few, if they're fortunate."
+
+"You did it, Tak Laleen; most of our older survivors haven't."
+
+"They watched you grow up. The change was so gradual, they weren't
+aware of it. I fell into your hands at the moment when you were
+yourselves discovering your potential capabilities. I followed the
+three of you when you ran away from the sphere police in Santa Barbara.
+One of you had touched my force-field capsule and drained away its
+power. I had to know how you did it. By intuition I guessed something
+very close to the truth, but even so it could have unhinged my mind
+if it hadn't been for Juan Pendillo. He taught me what he had taught
+you--a new point of view, a new way of looking at the world. He was so
+gentle and so patient, so easy to understand."
+
+"And after all that, you ran away from the skyport and betrayed him."
+
+"It was a put up job." She smiled. "Juan and I worked it out together.
+He wanted to force the city guards to attack the treaty area; but, if
+my people refused to believe what I told them, at least Gill would
+try to rescue his father and Lanny. We had to make the conflict begin
+before you were armed. If you won by using a machine, you might put
+your faith in machines again instead of yourselves. It was a risk for
+Juan and myself, but more so for you. No one really knew what you might
+be able to do, or what your ultimate limitations were."
+
+"There are none," Gill said.
+
+"I know that now, because I've made the reorientation myself. I didn't
+then. The rational mind is the only integrating factor in the chaos of
+the universe--Juan told me that. It is literally true. Mind creates the
+universe by interpreting it." She put her hand in Lanny's and looked
+up at the stars patterning the void of night. "I wish I might say that
+to my people and have them understand; but the clatter of our machines
+closes us in. Our world will die in violence and madness, the way the
+skyport died tonight. We may be able to help the survivors afterward;
+we can do nothing now."
+
+"But we must do it now," Lanny persisted stubbornly. "We don't want
+revenge, Tak Laleen; we've outgrown our reason for that."
+
+"Can you teach my people any differently than you learned yourself? It
+took an invasion and twenty years of imprisonment before you were able
+to break free from your old patterns of thinking."
+
+"But you did it in a day."
+
+"In the beginning, your teachers didn't know what their goal was; they
+only knew they had a problem and it had to be solved. I came in at the
+end, when their job was nearly finished and they were pretty sure where
+they were headed. That's why it was so easy for me."
+
+"And your world does that, too."
+
+Gill fingered his lip. "The trouble is, Lanny, it isn't simply a matter
+of giving them the facts. To us they are obvious, but you saw what
+happened to the governor. How can we make a man believe a new truth,
+when it means giving up all the science he has always believed?"
+
+"We failed with the governor because we threw the end result in his
+face without giving him a logical reason to accept it."
+
+Tak Laleen shook her head. "And so we're back where we started. We
+have to let my world fall apart before we can save it." She moved
+impatiently toward the door. "This building is a tomb. I want to walk
+on the soil and smell the wind and taste the energy of the earth."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In an uncomfortable silence they left the government building. Gill
+integrated with the power in the lift, and they rode the elevator to
+the ground level. As the cage slid past the empty floors, Gill broke
+the silence abruptly.
+
+"If all we want is to prevent chaos on your world, Tak Laleen, it won't
+be hard. We'll just go through with the treaty we intended to offer to
+the governor. We can put things back as they were and go on delivering
+resources to the Almost-men. The only people who know the truth will
+be our prisoners. We can keep them out of sight and ourselves play at
+being Almost-men to satisfy any tourists who come to the skyport."
+
+"We'll have to do that for a while, until we work out something better;
+but it's only a stopgap. We have a problem," Lanny said doggedly. "We
+know it can be solved, because it has been for ourselves and for Tak
+Laleen. All we have to find is the method."
+
+"Learning begins with a need," the missionary said. "For you, it was
+twenty years of despair: invasion, humiliation, surrender. Your old
+ideas didn't work. You either had to accept status as second-raters
+or work out a new way of thinking. As for me--" She shrugged her
+shoulders. "I suppose I couldn't help myself. I did try to run away,
+remember. I tried every possible answer in terms of our logic first.
+I even thought, for a while, that Lanny was a robot. Anything but the
+truth."
+
+Gill asked, "When did you first begin to understand? What happened that
+made you willing to believe the truth?"
+
+"It was an accumulation of many things, I suppose."
+
+"That isn't specific enough. There must have been one instant when you
+were willing to give up what you believed and start learning something
+new."
+
+"I don't know when it was."
+
+They left the government building and walked through the lower
+courtyards of the city. Groups of Almost-men were being herded back
+into the city from the game preserve. They clung together, hushed and
+terrified. The city lights were in working order once more and the
+flashing colors turned their faces into gargoyle masks. Three guards,
+in torn and bloodstained uniforms, stood looking at the machines which
+men had hauled out of the arsenal. Suddenly one of the soldiers began
+to kick at an abandoned gun, screaming in fury while tears of rage
+welled from his eyes.
+
+Lanny turned away. It was painfully embarrassing to watch the
+dissolution of a human personality, even on the relatively immature
+level which the machine culture of the Almost-men had achieved. But as
+Tak Laleen watched the spectacle of childish rage, sudden hope blazed
+in her eyes. She grasped Lan's arm.
+
+"He's blaming the machine for our defeat," she said. "Now I remember
+what happened to me; now I know! When you were running away from Santa
+Maria, Lanny, you fired an energy gun at my sphere. It destroyed the
+force-field and I fell out of the port. I was terrified--not so much of
+you, but because my machine had failed. All night while I lay in the
+launch, I faced that awful nightmare. For the first time in my life, I
+began to doubt the system I had trusted. I lost faith in my own world.
+I felt a need for something else."
+
+Lanny repeated slowly, "Loss of faith in the status quo--"
+
+"Could we duplicate that for all your people, Tak Laleen?" Gill asked
+doubtfully.
+
+"Yes, I'm sure we could, Gill. We have a clue; we know what has to be
+done. And we have an experimental laboratory." The missionary nodded
+toward the mob of cringing Almost-men coming in from the preserve. "We
+have a city of people, disorganized by panic, with their faith in the
+machine already shattered. While we teach these people how to make the
+reorientation, we'll learn the methods that will work most effectively
+with my world."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They left the city and began to cross the bridge toward the treaty
+area. Tak Laleen passed her arms through theirs. She said, with sorrow
+in her voice, "No matter what we do, no matter how carefully we try
+to cushion the panic, we still have no way of being entirely sure of
+the results. Something that works with our prisoners or with us might
+destroy my world; it could send a planet into mass paranoia."
+
+"That risk is implied in all learning, Tak Laleen," Lanny answered.
+"We can never escape it. I'm not sure we ought to try. The individual
+who lives in a closed world of absolutes--shut in by prison walls of
+his own mind--is already insane. The sudden development of a new idea
+simply makes the condition apparent."
+
+"In a sense," Gill added, "there is no such thing as a teacher. There
+are people who expose us to data and try to demonstrate some techniques
+we can use, but any learning that goes on must come from within
+ourselves."
+
+"We will develop the most effective method we can," Lanny said. "Then
+we will apply it to your world, Tak Laleen. The rest is up to them.
+That's as it should be--as it must be."
+
+Arm in arm they crossed the bridge--two men and a missionary from
+an alien world. They had been enemies, but during a night of chaos
+and death they had learned to become men--the first men to catch the
+vision of the new world of the mind. Each of them was soberly aware
+that the discovery was not an end, but a beginning. And they faced
+that beginning with neither fear nor regret, because they had the
+confidence that comes of maturity. The unknown was not a god-power or a
+devil-power, but a problem to be solved by the skill of a rational mind.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Almost-Men, by Irving E. Cox
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 59356 ***