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.

"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?

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.

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.

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."

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."

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 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—"

"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.

"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."

"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.

"So you made the motor turn over?" This came from Dr. Pendillo, who was feeling his way through the door behind Lanny. "How, 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—"

"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.

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.

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."

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,

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!"

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.

"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."

"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.

"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—"

"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."

"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.

She sniffled. "If I could just feel warm again—if you would build a fire and give me a chance to rest—"

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,

"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?"

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.

One of the boys clapped Lanny on the back. "So you brought your woman with you; they must be snappy lookers down your way."

"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."

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."

"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—"

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?

"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.

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."

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."

Pendillo glanced sharply at his friend. Endhart nodded. "It is time," he said cryptically.

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?"

"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.

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."

"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.

"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."

"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.

From the adjoining cell his father answered placidly, "It depends on Tak Laleen's statement—and how much of it they believe."

"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."

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.

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—"

"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."

"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."

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.

"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 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.

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.

"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."

"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!"

"The whole business is drivel. Superstitious nonsense. No man can violate the established laws of science."

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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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?"

"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."

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."

"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.