Part 1

Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

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.