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.
