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."
"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.
