Part 4

"Thanks, Lanny. But you can't save me, my son. I've lost too much blood; I have too many internal injuries."

"But you could do it for yourself, Father." Lanny shook his head. "I don't understand why--"

"You wouldn't, Lanny. You're the new breed."

"You say that so often."

"In my time that might have meant a new species--supermen we created by genetics in a biological laboratory. But we've done more than that. You aren't freaks; you're our children in every sense of the word. We have made you men; we've taught you how to think."

"You deliberately made us as we are?"

"Every man who lived before your time was an Almost-man, Lanny. He had your same potential, but he hadn't learned how to use it."

"How are we different?"

Pendillo was seized with a sudden spasm of coughing; blood trickled from his lips. Once again Lanny released a shock wave of energy into his father's body, and Pendillo's strength was partially restored.

"I will tell you as much as I can," Pendillo promised, but his voice was no longer as clear as it had been. "I don't have much time left. The idea for our new breed of men began at the time of the invasion. Lanny, there wasn't much to choose from between our people and the enemy. Our cities were like theirs; we were enslaved by machines--by the technological bric-a-brac of our culture--as they are. Only our science was different. We had exploited the energy of coal and oil and water-power; we were beginning to accumulate a good deal of data about the basic atomic structure of matter.

"But we would have ridiculed any serious consideration of degravitation, or the magnetic energy of a field of force. These were the trappings of our escapist fiction, not of genuine science. We had a more or less closed field allowed to legitimate scientific research; any data beyond it was vigorously ignored.

"Then, from nowhere, we were invaded and utterly defeated by an alien people who used the precise laws of science we had scorned. Furthermore, we saw them ridicule our principles as semi-religious rituals of a savage culture. In the invasion less than a tenth of mankind survived. We were herded into the treaty areas, with no government and no real leadership. Some of us had been teachers before the war; the survivors looked to us to preserve the spirit and the ideals of man.

"We had to make a selective choice, Lanny. We had no books, no written records, no way to preserve the whole of the past. The teachers in all the treaty areas quickly established contact by courier. The lesson of the invasion had taught us a great deal. Men had been imprisoned by one scientific dogma, which had produced a mechanized and neurotic world. The Almost-men were trapped by another that had produced the same end result.

"So we had our first objective: to teach our children the supreme dignity, the magnificent godliness, of the rational mind. We didn't tell you what to think--which had been our mistake in the past--but simply the vital necessity of rational thought. We taught you that the mind was the integrating factor in the universe; everything else was chaos, without objectivity or direction, until it was controlled by mind. After that, we jammed your brains with data from every field of knowledge that had ever been explored by man. That's why we interchanged couriers so frequently. In our world we had been specialists; we had to share the facts among ourselves so the new breed might have them all."

Far away they heard the dull thunder of an explosion. Lanny's head jerked up. Pendillo coughed up blood again, but there was a satisfied smile on his lips. "That will be Gill and the boys from the treaty area," he sighed. "Arriving right on schedule. We've forced them to attack the city without weapons; to survive, they'll have to make the same mental reintegration that you did, Lanny."

"How could you have been so sure, father, that we would be able to--to handle the matter-energy units the way we do?"

"We weren't, my son. We were sure of nothing. We only knew that you were the first generation whose minds had been set completely free. Nobody had done any of your thinking for you. If any man is equipped to solve problems, you are--you of the new breed."

"But why couldn't you learn the same techniques yourselves? Why can't you save yourself now, father?"

"Because we belong in the old world. Because the technique is only an application of the data you know, Lanny; that is something you have worked out for yourselves. We could give you the theory; we were incapable of following it through your minds."

Pendillo gasped painfully for breath. He closed his hand over his son's. "The old survivors are still imprisoned by beliefs carried over from the world we lost. We teach, Lanny, but we cannot believe as you do, even when we see our own children--our own sons--" His voice trailed away, and he slumped against Lanny's chest.

A series of explosions rocked the metal walls; Pendillo opened his eyes again. His dying whisper was so soft, so twisted by pain, the words were almost inaudible. "One more thing, son. We did more--more than we thought. Don't retreat to our world; make your own. Without the machines and the city walls and the uproar--"

Juan Pendillo grasped his son's hand. His fingers quivered for a moment of agony. And then he died.

* * * * *

Lanny stumbled away from the cell, his eyes dim with tears. The repetitive explosions continued outside in the domed city. Lanny discovered the origin of the sound when he made his way up the incline to the upper level. The parade of gigantic freight spheres was swinging in from the void of night, but the port machines, which handled the landings, were idle. The spheres were crashing, one upon the other, into the field just beyond the city. From disengaged, pliable tubes, jerking with the spasmodic torment of mechanical chaos, the raw materials plundered from the earth poured out upon the ruin. Fire licked at the wreckage, probing hungrily toward the city of the Almost-men.

Lanny ran through the deserted guard rooms. Beyond the walls he heard a babble of panic on the city streets. The first exit that he found led up to the second level, where no man had ever been.

He emerged on an ornate balcony, which overlooked the square where the trading booths stood. The force dome that had sheltered the city was gone. Lanny could look up and see the stars--and the endless parade of glowing freight spheres descending toward the earth. The air was clean, cold and wet with the sea mist.

In a sense the depressing, stifling city he had seen that afternoon was already gone--except for the bleak walls and the clatter of machine sounds. And, in the agony of its death, the city noise had become the scream of mechanized madness. A seething mass of vehicles choked every tier, fighting for space, grinding each other into rubble. Vehicles careened from the upper roads and plunged into the mass beneath.

At first it seemed a panic of machines. The people were trivial incidentals--bits of fluff which had been unfortunate enough to get in the way of the turning wheels. Then Lanny saw the walkaways, as crowded as the roads. A mass of humanity spewed through the doors of the luxury hotels, like run-off streams swelling the floodtide of a swollen river. Where were the Almost-men going? How could they escape? They had given their will and initiative to their machines; they could do nothing to help themselves.

Lanny saw an occasional opalescent bubble rise in the air. But inevitably, before it could move beyond the city, a force of blazing energy shot up from the lowest tier and brought the capsule down. Here and there in the darkness Lanny saw the furious blast of an energy gun, probing futilely into the chaos.

As the fire rose higher in the port wreckage, Lanny saw men fighting on the lower tier. They held the bridge and the trading square and they had taken the power center, which explained why the city was dark and why the force dome was gone. But they were still fighting to take the arsenal. A squad of guards held them off with energy guns; the men fought back from the darkness with weapons they had captured elsewhere.

Even now they hadn't discovered the truth; they still feared the enemy weapons. They still thought they must have guns of their own--machines of their own--in order to be free. Build your own world, Pendillo had said; don't go back to ours.

Lanny pushed through the throng on the walkway, trying to find an incline to the lower tier. Once or twice people in the mob saw him, in the shuddering light reflected by the energy guns, and recognized him as a man--a half-naked, black-bearded savage. They screamed in terror.

* * * * *

This was the hour of man's revenge, yet Lanny felt an inexpressible shame and sadness. Was this the way man's cities had died a generation ago, in a discord of mechanical sound, without courage and without dignity?

At last he found the incline to the lower level. It was jammed with a mass of Almost-men, fighting and clawing their way down so they might flee into the hunting preserve beyond the city. The tide swept Lanny with it. At the foot of the incline he circled the arsenal to join the men, still confined in the trading square.

Gill was directing the fire of his men as they inched forward. He clapped Lanny on the back, grinning broadly.

"I knew you'd get out, Lan. Is Juan all right?"

"He's dead, Gill. He was wounded and he didn't know how to heal himself."

"He had to know, Lanny; he taught us."

"They all taught us. They made us--" Lanny's voice choked a little as he used his father's familiar phrase. "--a new breed. Gill, we're acting like fools; we're fighting for something we don't want or need."

"We have to have weapons, Lan."

"We need nothing but what we've been taught. The mind interprets and commands the chaos of the universe. Matter and energy are identical."

Lanny turned and walked, erect and unafraid, toward the arsenal. The energy fire from the guards' guns struck him and exploded. He reorganized the pattern into harmless components and stood waiting for the charge to die away.

In a moment Gill was beside him, beaming with understanding as he met and transformed a second blast from the guns. "Of course matter and energy are the same!" he cried. "It should have been obvious to us. We have been prisoners twenty years for nothing."

"We needed those twenty years to discover our new world. We have only finished our education tonight."

As a third blast of energy came from the arsenal, other men slid out of the darkness and faced the guns. Lanny and Gill walked away, ignoring the screaming machines and the stabbing knives of fire.

"Yesterday," Gill said slowly, "if I had known that I could direct a flow of energy just as easily as I integrate with my hunting club, I would have stood here cheerfully and slaughtered the Almost-men, just to watch them die. Now, I'm sorry for them."

"There's no reason why they must all die in panic, Gill. Isn't there some way--"

Behind them they heard a burst of ragged cheering. The arsenal guards, having seen their weapons fail, had deserted their posts and fled. Men stormed into the building, shattering the metal doors by re-organizing the energy structure. Slowly they wheeled out the great machines--the symbols of enemy power.

"We fought for this," one of the men said. "And now we have no use for them."

* * * * *

Gill called a meeting of the resistance council in the deserted trading square, while the city around them throbbed in the chaos of disintegration. The men were entirely aware of the problem created by their liberation. The new breed was free, on the threshold of a new and unexplored world. They could carry the message to other treaty areas; they could show other men the final lesson in reorientation. That much was simple. But what became of the enemy?

"It would be absurd to kill them all," Gill said. He added with unconscious irony, "After all, they do know how to think on their own restricted level. They might be able, someday, to learn how to become civilized men."

"The worst of it," one of the others pointed out, "is that their home world is bound to know something's wrong. The delivery of resources has already been interrupted. They will try to reconquer us. It doesn't matter, particularly, but it might become a little tiresome after a while."

"Ever since I understood how this would end," Lanny said, "I've been wondering if we couldn't work out some way for them to keep the skyports just as they are. Let the Almost-men have our resources. They need them; we don't."

The council agreed to this with no debate. Lanny was delegated to find someone in authority in the skyport and offer him such a treaty. Lanny asked Gill to go with him. The others split into two groups, one to put out the fires and clear away the port wreckage; the second to herd the enemy refugees together in the game preserve and protect them from the animals.

Lanny and Gill pushed through the mob toward the upper levels of the city. The crowd had thinned considerably as more and more of the enemy fled into the forest. The brothers, barefoot giants, had an entirely unconscious arrogance in their stride. They passed the rows of luxury hotels and entered the government building. Here, apparently, there was an emergency source of power, for the corridor tubes glowed dimly with a sick, blue light. Room after room the brothers entered; they found no one--nothing but the disorderly debris of haste and panic.

Methodically they worked their way to the top floor of the building. In a wing beyond the courtroom were the private quarters of the planetary governor.

* * * * *

He sat waiting for them in his glass-paneled office overlooking the tiers of the city. He was a tall man, slightly stooped by age. He had put on the full, formal uniform of his office--a green plastic, ornamented with a scarlet filagree and a chest stripe of jeweled medals. He was behind his desk with the wall behind him open upon the sky.

"I expected a stampeding herd," he said.

"You knew we were coming?" Lanny asked.

"It was obvious you'd try to force us to sign a new treaty."

"Call it a working agreement," Gill suggested. "We intend to let you keep the--"

"You have panicked the city by taking advantage of our kindness. But you won't pull this stunt again; I've already requested a stronger occupation force from parliament."

The governor stood up; he held an energy gun in his hand. "This frightens you, doesn't it? You should have expected one of us to keep a level head. I've handled savages before. You're very clever in creating believable illusions, particularly when there seems to be some religious significance. I should have known it was a trick when you sent that addle-witted missionary back to us."

"Tak Laleen?"

"Of course none of my men tell me what's going on until it's too late. They took her to the Triangle first. She talked to the priests, and they filled the city with all sorts of weird rumors about men who could control the energy pattern of matter." The governor's lip curled; he nodded toward a side door. "She's here now, under house arrest. She'll be expelled from the territory on the first ship out after the port is reopened."

"She's wasn't lying," Lanny said. "She understood more than we did ourselves. Maybe Juan told her--"

The governor laughed and motioned with his gun. "Will you join her, or do you want to force me to spoil your pretty illusion?"

Gill walked unhurriedly toward the desk. "You must listen to us. Fire the gun, if you insist on that much proof. We want to save your world, not destroy it."

The governor backed toward the open wall panel. "Stand where you are, or I'll fire!"

"Just give us a chance to explain--"

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

"Why not, since men made the laws originally?"

The shell of dignity in the governor's manner began to crack away, revealing the naked hysteria that lay beneath. Gill moved again. The governor punched the firing stud of his energy gun. The fire lashed harmlessly at Gill's chest.

"It's a lie!" the governor screamed. He fired the gun again at Lanny; then at Gill. His mouth quivered with terror. He was an intelligent man; he looked upon the evidence of a fact that overturned everything he believed. In the clamor of a dying city, still throbbing far below his open wall panel, he heard the testimony of the same discord. He lost his rational world in the chaos, and he hadn't the ability to find another.

For a moment the governor stood looking at the half-naked giants he had been unable to kill. Then he flung the weapon away and leaped through the open panel into the mechanical clatter of the dying city.

"Once I wouldn't have cared," Gill told his brother. "Now I do. Lanny, must we destroy their world in spite of ourselves?"

They heard a faint voice behind them. "Not all of us, Gill." The brothers turned. They saw Tak Laleen, dressed again in the white uniform of the missionary. She came slowly through the metal panel of a door.

"You see, it is possible for us to learn," she said when she stood within the room. "I have."

"Then all your people--"

"Not all of them. A few, if they're fortunate."

"You did it, Tak Laleen; most of our older survivors haven't."

"They watched you grow up. The change was so gradual, they weren't aware of it. I fell into your hands at the moment when you were yourselves discovering your potential capabilities. I followed the three of you when you ran away from the sphere police in Santa Barbara. One of you had touched my force-field capsule and drained away its power. I had to know how you did it. By intuition I guessed something very close to the truth, but even so it could have unhinged my mind if it hadn't been for Juan Pendillo. He taught me what he had taught you--a new point of view, a new way of looking at the world. He was so gentle and so patient, so easy to understand."

"And after all that, you ran away from the skyport and betrayed him."

"It was a put up job." She smiled. "Juan and I worked it out together. He wanted to force the city guards to attack the treaty area; but, if my people refused to believe what I told them, at least Gill would try to rescue his father and Lanny. We had to make the conflict begin before you were armed. If you won by using a machine, you might put your faith in machines again instead of yourselves. It was a risk for Juan and myself, but more so for you. No one really knew what you might be able to do, or what your ultimate limitations were."

"There are none," Gill said.

"I know that now, because I've made the reorientation myself. I didn't then. The rational mind is the only integrating factor in the chaos of the universe--Juan told me that. It is literally true. Mind creates the universe by interpreting it." She put her hand in Lanny's and looked up at the stars patterning the void of night. "I wish I might say that to my people and have them understand; but the clatter of our machines closes us in. Our world will die in violence and madness, the way the skyport died tonight. We may be able to help the survivors afterward; we can do nothing now."

"But we must do it now," Lanny persisted stubbornly. "We don't want revenge, Tak Laleen; we've outgrown our reason for that."

"Can you teach my people any differently than you learned yourself? It took an invasion and twenty years of imprisonment before you were able to break free from your old patterns of thinking."

"But you did it in a day."

"In the beginning, your teachers didn't know what their goal was; they only knew they had a problem and it had to be solved. I came in at the end, when their job was nearly finished and they were pretty sure where they were headed. That's why it was so easy for me."

"And your world does that, too."

Gill fingered his lip. "The trouble is, Lanny, it isn't simply a matter of giving them the facts. To us they are obvious, but you saw what happened to the governor. How can we make a man believe a new truth, when it means giving up all the science he has always believed?"

"We failed with the governor because we threw the end result in his face without giving him a logical reason to accept it."

Tak Laleen shook her head. "And so we're back where we started. We have to let my world fall apart before we can save it." She moved impatiently toward the door. "This building is a tomb. I want to walk on the soil and smell the wind and taste the energy of the earth."

* * * * *

In an uncomfortable silence they left the government building. Gill integrated with the power in the lift, and they rode the elevator to the ground level. As the cage slid past the empty floors, Gill broke the silence abruptly.

"If all we want is to prevent chaos on your world, Tak Laleen, it won't be hard. We'll just go through with the treaty we intended to offer to the governor. We can put things back as they were and go on delivering resources to the Almost-men. The only people who know the truth will be our prisoners. We can keep them out of sight and ourselves play at being Almost-men to satisfy any tourists who come to the skyport."

"We'll have to do that for a while, until we work out something better; but it's only a stopgap. We have a problem," Lanny said doggedly. "We know it can be solved, because it has been for ourselves and for Tak Laleen. All we have to find is the method."

"Learning begins with a need," the missionary said. "For you, it was twenty years of despair: invasion, humiliation, surrender. Your old ideas didn't work. You either had to accept status as second-raters or work out a new way of thinking. As for me--" She shrugged her shoulders. "I suppose I couldn't help myself. I did try to run away, remember. I tried every possible answer in terms of our logic first. I even thought, for a while, that Lanny was a robot. Anything but the truth."

Gill asked, "When did you first begin to understand? What happened that made you willing to believe the truth?"

"It was an accumulation of many things, I suppose."

"That isn't specific enough. There must have been one instant when you were willing to give up what you believed and start learning something new."

"I don't know when it was."

They left the government building and walked through the lower courtyards of the city. Groups of Almost-men were being herded back into the city from the game preserve. They clung together, hushed and terrified. The city lights were in working order once more and the flashing colors turned their faces into gargoyle masks. Three guards, in torn and bloodstained uniforms, stood looking at the machines which men had hauled out of the arsenal. Suddenly one of the soldiers began to kick at an abandoned gun, screaming in fury while tears of rage welled from his eyes.

Lanny turned away. It was painfully embarrassing to watch the dissolution of a human personality, even on the relatively immature level which the machine culture of the Almost-men had achieved. But as Tak Laleen watched the spectacle of childish rage, sudden hope blazed in her eyes. She grasped Lan's arm.

"He's blaming the machine for our defeat," she said. "Now I remember what happened to me; now I know! When you were running away from Santa Maria, Lanny, you fired an energy gun at my sphere. It destroyed the force-field and I fell out of the port. I was terrified--not so much of you, but because my machine had failed. All night while I lay in the launch, I faced that awful nightmare. For the first time in my life, I began to doubt the system I had trusted. I lost faith in my own world. I felt a need for something else."

Lanny repeated slowly, "Loss of faith in the status quo--"