Part 2

Slowly Lanny's lips twisted in a sneer. This was the enemy, heavily armed and invulnerable--but helpless without his mechanical gadgets. Lanny's hand moved soundlessly over the ground. He grasped a stone. The enemy was less than twenty feet away; it was a target a child couldn't miss.

Lanny swung into a sitting position and simultaneously threw his stone. The guard dropped, a wound torn in his skull. Pendillo and his sons slid forward again. As they passed the dead Almost-man, Lanny worked the energy gun out of of the guard's hands.

It took them an hour to reach the cliffs overlooking the sea. They turned north again, seeking shelter among the rocks. And they came abruptly upon a wide, bowl-shaped cavity in the earth. Through the fog they saw the narrow passage between the cavity and the sea. In the center of the sheltered, artificial pool a metal dome rose some fifty feet above the quiet water. The dome, protected by a force-field, was joined to the land by a catwalk. From its waterline a ridged, white tube snaked upward and disappeared among the trees on the north bank of the pool. A repair barge swung at anchor under the catwalk. A towering pylon raised a sound receptor and an automatic energy gun high above the roof of the dome.

Pendillo whispered, "This must be one of their automatic mining operations. I've never seen one before."

Gill replied, "Lanny and I have come upon lots of them in the hills. The domes run themselves. Sometimes the Almost-men come and check over the machines; that's what the barge is here for, I think."

"The domes dig out minerals or pump oil," Lanny added, "and send it to the skyports through the white pipes. But you can never get close to them. The whole operation is protected by the energy guns."

"They have us pinned down here," Gill said, "unless we can use that barge."

Lanny fingered the energy gun he had taken from the dead guard. "All we have to do is knock out the pylon." He raised the weapon and aimed it at the nest of delicate instruments at the base of the pillar. He turned the firing dial. The flame knifed through the fog. The tower disintegrated in a blaze of dust.

The three men slid down the rock and plunged through the cold water toward the barge. In the night sky they heard the whine of an approaching force-field car.

They leaped aboard the barge, hauling Dr. Pendillo in after them. Gill knelt in front of the motor in the stern. Lanny watched the sky, with the energy gun clutched in his hand. He knew the charge in the chamber was nearly spent. There might be enough left to hold off the enemy for a moment, but certainly no longer.

Frantically Gill turned the wheels until the motor stirred into life. As it did the glowing sphere swung down upon them. Lanny raised his gun and fired. Fear projected something of himself into the leaping charge of energy--a confusing sensation of screaming joy and chaotic horror that left his mind limp and numb. It seemed that he had actually touched the force-field of the sphere; he was physically tearing apart the tense, strait-jacket of solidified energy.

The sphere lurched upward and away into the night. As it did, the port broke open and a figure dropped toward the water. It was Tak Laleen. She reached for the tiny box fastened to her breast, trying to activate her protective force-field capsule. Lanny knew he had to stop her, or she might still be able to prevent their escape.

He sprang into the water, clawing for her feet as she fell toward him. She screamed and her screams died as he dragged her beneath the surface. He tore the box from her hands and let it fall.

When they broke the surface, his hands were on her throat and all his lifelong hatred of the Almost-men was in his finger tips as he pressed his thumbs down upon her windpipe. Pendillo cried out,

"Don't kill her, Lanny! No man has ever taken one of the enemy alive."

Reluctantly Lanny relaxed his grip. Tak Laleen screamed again and slapped her hands at his face. Abruptly she paused and stared into his eyes.

"You!" she gasped. "The black savage. No wonder my sphere--In the name of the All of the Universe, kill me quickly! Kill me now, as civilized beings have a right to die--not your way. Not your way!"

Then, for no reason Lanny could fathom, Tak Laleen fainted.

* * * * *

Sheltered by the mist and the darkness, the stolen barge moved rapidly north along the coast. Tak Laleen lay unconscious in the bottom of the boat, wrapped in her white uniform; Pendillo sat shivering beside her. Lanny and Gill stood in the stern. Although the motor was controlled by an automatic navigator, Gill tore out the flimsy destination tape and guided the wheel manually.

"Even this the Almost-men can't do for themselves," he remarked to his brother.

"Do you suppose they really can't read direction from the sun or the stars?"

"All their brains are in their machines."

"And machines are nothing."

"Juan has always said that," Gill said slowly. "It sounds logical and reasonable. But I don't know what it means, Lanny!"

For a long time they stood watching the heaving shadow of the sea, each of them trying in his own way to make sense of the riddle. Suddenly the motor sputtered. Gill tinkered with the machine until it was purring smoothly again.

"The power cells are nearly empty," he said. "We'll have to run the barge aground sometime tomorrow and start walking again."

"Yes, I know." Lanny clenched his fist over his brother's arm. "But how do we know it, Gill? How can we run this machine, when we have never seen it before?"

Gill laughed uneasily. "Don't forget, before the invasion our people were pretty good at building machines, too."

"That doesn't answer the question, Gill. When I fired the energy gun, I felt as if it were a part of myself--as if I knew all the cells in the metal just as I know my own."

"That happened to me when I sat in the automobile in the showroom."

"It scares me, Gill. I keep thinking I should remember something but--"

"I was scared last night, too, because I thought I'd made the motor go by forcing it to move with my mind. And that's absurd. If we had that much control over machines, as we do over our hunting clubs, how could the enemy ever have defeated us?"

Tak Laleen opened her eyes, then, and sat up stiffly. The wind struck her face and swept her hair back. Shivering, she pulled her uniform tight around her throat.

"Where are you taking me?" she demanded.

"You're our prisoner," Lanny answered.

"The Sacred Triangle will not pay ransom. We volunteered to serve here on the earth; we knew the risks."

Lanny moved toward her. Fearfully she slid away from him until her back was against the gunwale. "Don't touch me!" she begged.

He shrugged and dropped on the deck close to her feet. "When you came out of the Triangle to take care of our sick, you never were repulsed by--"

"Not the normal ones, no."

"Your aversion applies only to me?"

"Don't pretend." She twisted her hands together. "What kind of a--a thing are you?"

Juan Pendillo intervened, "We dragged you aboard rather unceremoniously, Tak Laleen. Let me introduce my sons, Lanny and Gill."

"You're lying. Where did you get the metals to make him?"

Lanny stared at his father. "Is she--has her mind been affected--"

"All this beating around the bush is so foolish." Suddenly she seized Lanny's arm and dug her nails, like claws, into his skin. "But--but it is real! You're not a machine." Her eyes glazed and she fainted again.

By dawn the motor of the barge was missing continuously and the speed had been reduced to a relatively slow forty knots. The sun rose, dispelling the fog, and the wind on the sea became a little warmer. Juan Pendillo tried to pace the tiny deck, flaying his arms to restore the circulation. Tak Laleen, having recovered from her second faint, sat brooding with her uniform clutched tightly over her throat.

Periodically the missionary talked to Pendillo. She asked again and again what they were going to do with her. Either ransom or murder were the only possibilities that occurred to her. That point of view was a fair index to the attitude the Almost-men held toward the survivors on the planet they had conquered. Mankind they considered filthy, illiterate barbarians; the primitive squalor of the prison compounds was their proof.

Lanny understood enough of the religion of the Triangle--that noble abstract of God which the enemy called the All of the Universe--to know why the conquerors had to use a semantic device to define their superiority. The Almost-men were a liberty-loving society. Their government decrees and their religious poetry abounded with vivid words of freedom. They could not have maintained an integrated social soul and enslaved a culture of their peers; therefore, they had to invent a verbal technique for reducing man to the status of a savage.

"As we have always done ourselves," Pendillo told Lanny when he first became aware of the inconsistency as a child. "But don't condemn the enemy for it, my son. Words have the peculiar habit of becoming anything we want them to be. If we set our minds to it, we can make anything true. The Almost-men are not merely alien invaders; they are like man himself--the most tragic distortion of our worst traits. Someday we shall make war on them, yes, but before we do we must learn how to conquer ourselves."

* * * * *

Early in the afternoon the power cells in the barge were exhausted. Gill drove the ship up on a desolate beach, at the place where Monterey had once stood. Nothing survived but an occasional piece of debris, buried in the drifted sand, for Monterey, close to a military camp, had been heavily bombed by the invaders.

"We must find a place to camp," Pendillo advised. "I don't believe either Tak Laleen or I have the strength to go any farther today."

They found it necessary to hike eight miles north of Monterey before they were beyond the area of total destruction. The ruins, scattered among the encroaching trees, became recognizable as skeletal relics of things that might once have been homes. They found one frame cottage still whole because it had been built close to a hillside. The battered walls would provide shelter for Pendillo and the missionary. Further, the house had a stone fireplace where they could cook their food, and close by a shallow spring bubbled from the dark earth.

Gill and Lanny trapped a deer and carried the carcass back to the cottage. Both Tak Laleen and Pendillo were struggling to make a fire. Lanny took over the chore and in seconds flames leaped through the dead brush heaped on the hearth. It had always puzzled him that Pendillo could have taught him the techniques, and still not be able to make the fire himself. Tak Laleen was just as helpless. Without their machines the Almost-men were nothing: again and again that became apparent.

Gill stripped off the deer hide carefully so it could be made into a second jacket for Pendillo. While he stretched the skin in the afternoon sun, Lanny turned the meat over the fire. When they began to eat, both Lanny and Gill were amused that Tak Laleen had manners as fastidious as Pendillo's. The missionary nibbled delicately at her food, as if she thought the grease would soil her lips. Afterward she and Pendillo washed in water which they heated over the fire. Pendillo's sons stripped and swam in the ocean, as a man properly should to make himself clean.

They made beds for their father and the missionary in front of the fire. Lanny and his brother would have been willing to continue the march north until nightfall; the food had restored their balance of energy, as it always did. But they knew the other two had to rest.

Lanny and Gill dug burrows in the warm sand outside the cottage, where they felt more comfortable. They were consciously an integrated part of their world, nurtured by the earth and the sun. To them it seemed absurd to build walls of wood or stone to separate themselves from a part of their own being. None of the younger generation had ever understood the need of their elders for artificial shelter. That feeling, too, was a product of of their education, though neither they nor their teachers grasped what it implied. The children of the prison camps lived in a new universe, not yet defined.

Lanny and Gill were immediately asleep. It did not occur to them that Tak Laleen might try to escape. They assumed she had read the signs of the plentiful game in the forest: they were a long way from any enemy installation.

Yet four hours later they were jerked awake by the sound of her screams, faint and terrified in the night shadows of the forest. They found her a thousand yards from the cottage. Her back was against a wall of boulders and with her frail, white hands she was trying to beat off a snarling cougar which had already clawed her uniform to shreds.

* * * * *

Lanny drew his knife and leaped at the animal. Gill threw a stone which might have broken the skull with bullet force, but at that moment the cougar whirled toward them. Its claw slashed at Lanny. He bent low, driving his knife upward. Momentum carried the big cat forward. As the tearing fury struck his chest, Lanny plunged his knife again into the thick hide.

The cougar fell, writhing and howling. Gill smashed a broken tree limb into the yawning jaws, and the big cat died. Tak Laleen stumbled toward them. She tried to speak. The words of gratitude choked in her throat and she fainted.

Again! Lanny thought, with disgust. The Almost-men--or at least their missionary women--had a limited gamut of emotional reactions. It seemed an inadequate way to solve a problem.

They left Tak Laleen where she lay. Gill expertly stripped off the skin of the animal they had killed, another hide they could fashion into a jacket for Juan Pendillo. Lanny had been superficially wounded--a long, shallow scratch across his chest. He examined it carefully, feeling through the severed body cells with his mind and directing the blood purifiers to seal off the few germ colonies which were present. When the skin seemed to require no healing exposure to the sun, he allowed the scratch to heal at once.

Gill shouldered the cougar hide, still warm and dripping blood. Lanny picked up the missionary and they returned to the cottage. Tak Laleen's uniform was torn and useless, but the material was a tough plastic which had protected her from any serious wound. Her chest and arms were criss-crossed with scores of tiny abrasions. It puzzled Lanny that she had made no effort to repair her body. It occured to him, with something of a shock, that the Almost-men might use machines to do that, too.

Tak Laleen regained consciousness when Lanny put her on the bed in front of the fire. Pendillo tore off her battered uniform and bathed the scratches with hot water.

"You saved me; you risked your own life!" She said it with a peculiar fervor. Lanny couldn't understand why she thought an element of risk had been involved. A hunter with half his skill and experience could have done as much.

"I won't try to run away again," she promised. Not much of a concession, Lanny thought, suppressing a grin.

Pendillo said they would have to spend the next day in the cottage, to give the missionary a chance to rest. She was suffering, he said, from something he called shock. Precisely what that was neither of his sons knew, but they supposed it was an obscure ailment that beset the enemy. The more they learned about Tak Laleen, the stranger it seemed that such a weak people could have conquered the earth.

During the interval of waiting, Lanny and Gill dried the two hides they had taken. They cut breeches and a jacket for Tak Laleen, to replace the uniform she could no longer wear.

* * * * *

After they resumed their trek north, it took them four days more to reach the pylon barrier south of the San Francisco treaty area. Tak Laleen became more and more exhausted. She shivered constantly in the cold air. Her nose began to run--a phenomenon Pendillo called a cold--and the wounds in her chest stubbornly refused to heal. When she saw the towered guns on the barrier, she dropped to the ground and wept hysterically.

"We can't pass that," she whispered.

"If you're afraid to run the guns," Lanny told her, "we can swim around them."

"I don't know how."

"There's no other way into the treaty area," Gill said brutally.

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

"Not until we're inside the barrier. The police would spot a fire out here."

Gill picked her up and began to carry her toward the beach. She screamed in terror and beat her fists against his naked back. When he did not stop, she cried out,

"I can tell you how to break the circuit on the pylons!"

Gill paused. "Yes?"

"If we could knock out just one of the guns, we could walk through the barrier, couldn't we?"

Gill set her on her feet. She ran back to Lanny, stumbling over the rough ground and wiping her nose with the back of her hand. "Lanny, you and your brother can hit anything with a stone. Couldn't you knock out the power unit in a pylon?"

"Sure, if we knew where it was. We've tried for years to find that out, but we can't get close enough to examine the towers."

She pointed eagerly. "It's the criss-crossed framework, just under the sound receptor at the top."

He measured the distance critically. "It will take careful marksmanship to hit anything so small. Think we could do it, Gill?"

"We'll have to try; the lady's afraid to get her feet wet."

Gill threw the first stone. It fell short of the target. The automatic energy guns swung on the stone, efficiently disintegrating it before it touched the ground. Lanny tried; and his brother threw again. It was Lanny's fourth missile that struck the tiny mechanism. A puff of smoke filled the air and the top of the pylon became a mass of twisted, metal girders.

Lanny grinned at the missionary. She was a fool, he thought; for the sake of her own comfort, she had given away one of the most valuable secrets in the arsenal of enemy weapons. When the treaty areas knew it, the barriers would go down; men would be free when they chose. And Tak Laleen was so grateful to have escaped a cold swim in the sea, she seemed unaware of the extent of her betrayal.

They walked across the barren ground. The missionary clung with feverish hands to Lanny's arm. Half a mile beyond the barrier, they ascended a steep hill. From the crest they looked down upon the peninsula and the sprawling arms of the bay in the background.

Except for the jumbled ruins of downtown San Francisco, at the point of the peninsula, the land from the ocean to the bay was crowded with closely packed rows of dwellings. Some were flat-roofed, whitewalled houses similar to the subdivision settlement where Lanny and Gill grew up. Others, built since the surrender, were ugly hovels made from clay and grass.

* * * * *

The San Francisco treaty area was the largest on Earth, perhaps because it was the city where the invasion had begun. Lanny had always known it was big, but he was awed to see so many men, so many of his own kind, assembled in one place.

Across the bay, on a flat, white plain where Oakland had once stood, was the crowded, multi-tiered skyport of the enemy. From all the surrounding hills the pliable, white tubes poured an endless stream of resources into the port. Automatic machines, working ceaselessly day and night, loaded the plunder into machine-navigated, pilotless spheres; at five minute intervals an endless parade of spheres lifted from the field beyond the skyport and headed toward the stars, while a second parade of empties came in for a landing.

From a distance the skyport, under its opalescent dome of a force-field, looked like an enormous spider with its sprawling, white tentacles clutching the green earth. The San Francisco skyport was the largest the enemy had built, and the seat of the territorial government they had set up to rule the captive planet.

Grotesque relics of man's bridges still spanned the bay and the Golden Gate; columns of rusted steel held up the graceful loops of a single, rusted cable. An enemy bridge, like a fairy highway supported by nearly invisible balloons of de-grav spheres, joined the skyport and the treaty area.

As the three men and their captive descended the hillside, they were stopped by four nearly naked youths who mounted guard on the southern fringe of the settlement. Though still boys in their teens, they were physical giants like Lanny and Gill. Pendillo told the boys why they had fled from the Santa Barbara settlement; he asked to be taken to the home of Dr. Endhart.

"Our chief teacher?"

"Dr. Endhart and I are old friends. We knew each other before the invasion."

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

Tak Laleen shrank against Lanny's side, holding his hand in terror.

"Not much for size, though," the boy added critically. "How much do you weigh, girl?"

The boy put his arm around the missionary's shoulder. She gave a squeal of fear and, in her eagerness to shrink still closer to Lanny, she forgot to hold her crudely cut jacket closed across her breast. The hide fell free. The boy saw her white, scratched shoulder and her thin, frail arm.

He whistled. "So you caught one of the Almost-men. A missionary? I never saw one without the uniform. Let's see the rest of it."

He snatched the jacket from Tak Laleen. She gave another wail and fainted. Lanny sighed and picked her up.

"She has a habit of doing this," he explained wearily. "She hasn't pulled one for nearly four days; I guess this was overdue."

The boy inspected her with a sneer. "Scrawny, aren't they?"

"Take away their machines," Lanny replied, "and this is all you have left."

* * * * *

Lanny and his brother made an easy adjustment to the new community. The social stratification was an uncomplicated division of men into three types: the teachers, the old ones who had survived the invasion, and the children who had grown up since the war--by far the largest group. The classification was logical and unobtrusive; it produced no frustrating social pressures. Since the children had known no other form of society, they assumed that men had always organized their culture with such understandable simplicity.

The chief occupation of the community was always the education of the young. That, too, Lanny and Gill assumed to be the normal activity of man. The teachers were the real government of every treaty area. Their control was subtle, engineered through an unofficial--and illegal--representative body, usually called the resistance council.

Since Pendillo had been a teacher in his home settlement, he took up residence with Dr. Endhart. They kept Tak Laleen with them, a prisoner confined to the house. For nearly a week she lay on a pallet suffering the miseries of a cold. Lanny knew that older survivors in every settlement sometimes had the same malady. Pendillo had taught his sons that sickness happened because some of the survivors of the invasion had been so demoralized by defeat they had lost the mental ability to control their own physical processes. But Tak Laleen was one of the conquerors; nothing had demoralized the Almost-men. There was only one possible conclusion Lanny could reach: the invaders had never learned to control the energy units in their body cells.