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.
A hunter's assignment, Lanny found, was easier than it had been in the smaller Santa Barbara settlement. The Almost-men had set up a vast hunting preserve north and east of the bay; it was kept well-stocked with game. There was no need for the hunting parties to break through the pylon barrier and raid territory ceded to the invaders. The hunters simply crossed the skyport bridge, circled the opalescent dome, and entered the forest, where broad trails had been conveniently laid out under the trees.
This generous provision came about because the enemy considered the San Francisco compound something of a showplace, an experimental laboratory for improving relations with the conquered. A steady stream of tourists, sociologists, politicians and religious leaders poured into the San Francisco skyport from the mechanized home world of the Almost-men. They came to satisfy their curiosity, to purchase tourist relics, to examine and sometimes criticize the occupation policy.
Frequently, when Lanny was hunting in the forest, he saw Almost-men who were recent arrivals in the skyport. Usually they floated above the trees in their individual, degravitized, force-field capsules, watching the hunt and eagerly recording the activity with their expensive cameras. Sometimes they whipped up enough courage to descend to the forest trails and talk to their captives.
Several times Lanny was interviewed by the enemy, and slowly he began to flesh out a more realistic definition of the Almost-men. They were no longer a clear-cut symbol for something he hated, but suddenly more human and more understandable. They were physically weak, just like the older survivors in the treaty settlements. They were timid and unsure of themselves. They were hopelessly caught in a mire of pretty words, which they seemed to believe themselves. And without their machines they were helpless.
After Lanny and his brother had been in the San Francisco area for nearly two weeks, they were invited to a formal session of the local resistance council, where they were accepted as new citizens of the community. The delegates met at night in the rubble of the old city. A narrow passage tunneled through the ruins to an underground room which had once been the vault of a bank and had, therefore, survived the bombing and the slashing fire of the energy guns.
Gill did not stay with his brother in the rear of the vault. Instead he joined the young hotheads who formed the war party in the local council. At home Gill had dominated the same element.
The men in every treaty area were split between two points of view. One group wanted to organize an immediate attack upon the invader, in spite of the inequality in arms. The others counciled caution, until they had the strength to strike a real blow to free the Earth.
Since men had no weapons and no metals from which to make them, the obvious basis for any successful attack had to be a scheme for seizing arms from the enemy. "We can only destroy the Almost-men if we use their own machines." Again and again the San Francisco war party repeated that fact; it seemed an argument so self-evident that it was beyond any rational challenge. "The machines have no intelligence, no sense of values; they will obey us just as readily as they obey the enemy."
"More so." Gill spoke clear and loud, in crisp self-confidence. "I do not believe the enemy knows how to feel the structure of matter."
This statement created a minor sensation. The heads of the delegates turned slowly toward Gill. Gill was smiling, his mane of blond hair shimmering like gold in the flickering light. Lanny felt, as always, a tremendous admiration for his brother. Gill was so sure of himself, so certain that he was right. Gill's mind would never have been plagued by shadowy fears he couldn't understand.
"I have seen an enemy bleed," Gill went on. "They do not know how to heal a wound."
"That might be true of some," one of delegates answered. "Some of our old ones have forgotten, too. But you spoke as if the individual community of cells could be extended to include integration with all external matter."
"By touch; I have done it myself."
"You mean the extension into the energy units of your hunting club." The delegate smiled depreciatingly. "We all understand that. But a wooden club was once a living thing. Community control over other forms of matter is entirely different."
"No, the machines respond the same way. I made a motor turn over, when it had been idle and without fuel for twenty years. It frightened me when it happened. The energy in the metal was something new, and I couldn't understand the structure at first. But I've thought about it since, and I'm sure—"
"We'll look into the possibilities—after we capture the enemy machines. Our problems at the moment is to get the machines."
The delegates returned to their discussion. They had agreed, long ago, that the only way to attack the skyport was from inside the protective, force-field dome. For years the Almost-men had tried to encourage trade between the skyport and the treaty area, and the resistance council had turned that to their advantage.
Gradually they had increased the number of young men who went to the city with necklaces of animal teeth and meaningless gee-gaws for the tourist trade. The Almost-men had grown used to seeing a mob of men milling on the bridge and in the lower tiers of the city. The council had regularly altered the trading parties, so that every man in the San Francisco colony had been under the dome half a dozen times. They knew their way around in the skyport; they knew the location of the power station and the city arsenal. When the attack came, fifty men in the city would seize the power plant and the rest would attempt to take the arsenal.
One of the hotheads arose from his place beside Gill. "We have discussed this and argued it for almost as long as I can remember," he said. "There is nothing more to be said, for it or against it. Hasn't the time come to take a vote?"
A moderate protested mildly, "But have we weighed all the risks? If we make a mistake now—"
"Can you suggest a better way to get weapons?"
And the moderate admitted, "True, we can't defeat the enemy unless we have weapons comparable to theirs."
It was the last gasp of an old argument. Everything that could be said had already been said; every delegate knew both sides to the debate, and every delegate was driven by the same instinct to make a fight to reclaim his lost world. When the vote was counted, a majority of the council favored war. A committee was appointed to make the final disposition of forces and to set the time for the attack. Lanny was not surprised when Gill was named a member of the committee.
On the afternoon following the meeting, Lanny was assigned to a group of traders so he might learn the geography of the skyport before the attack. As the enemy capital on Earth and a tourist attraction, the San Francisco skyport was a miniature replica of an enemy city. Under the dome were tiers of streets and walkways, interwoven in complex patterns, and the battlement spires of luxury hotels, theatres, cabarets, public buildings. The streets overflowed with a flood of jangling traffic, and the air was filled with the well-to-do riding their de-grav cars in the enviable security of their private capsules.
Lanny's overall impression was a place of intolerable noise and glitter. The Almost-men seemed to make a fetish of their machines. They found it necessary to use their clattering vehicles even though their destination might be a building only one tier away. The air under the dome was fetid with the stench of vehicle fuels.
The trading area was confined to a small, metal-surfaced square on the lowest level of the city, close to the narrow, neutralized vent through the force-field dome. Tall buildings swarmed above the trading booths, blotting out the sun. Lanny felt boxed in, imprisoned by the high walls, choked by the artificial, filtered air.
He sold a satisfactory quota of trade goods to the tourists who had adventured down to the booths. And he dutifully noted the location of the walkway to the power center and the arsenal. But he gave a sigh of relief when his duty was done and he was free to go back across the bridge to the treaty area. He filled his lungs with the crisp, damp air, unsterilized by the fans of the enemy city. How could the Almost-men survive, he wondered, how were they capable of clear-headed thinking, in such seething confusion?
In the treaty areas, where men could put their naked feet upon the soil and feel the life-energy of the earth, where men breathed the fresh wind and held sovereignty over their environment—only there were men really free. Would he trade that for the city walls that blotted out the sun, and the monotonous throbbing of machines? The victor was the slave; the conquered had found the road to liberty. For the first time in his life Lanny understood the paradox. Stated in those terms, what did men actually have to fight for?
As he always did when he had a problem, Lanny went to Juan Pendillo. It was late in the afternoon. Already the cooking fires were being lighted on the small rectangles of earth in front of the houses where the older survivors lived. But Pendillo and Dr. Endhart were still inside, packing away the models which Endhart had used to teach his last class for the day. They usually waited for Lanny or Gill to make their night fire, since Pendillo's sons did the work so effortlessly. Tak Laleen was with the teachers. She sat on the only chair in the room, playing abstractly with one of Endhart's teaching tools—a crude mock-up of the structure of a living energy unit. It was the same sort of learning-toy Lanny himself had been given when he was a child.
Lanny burst in on them excitedly. He began to talk at once, trying to put in words the conviction that had come to him as he stood on the bridge. Suddenly the words were gone. In his own mind it was clear enough, but how was he to explain it? How could he tell them it would be self-destruction to capture the city of the Almost-men?
"You wanted to talk to us?" Pendillo prompted him.
"It—it's this vote we've taken for war, father." Lanny glanced at Tak Laleen. His father and Endhart smiled disarmingly.
"You can talk quite freely," Endhart said. "Tak Laleen knows the vote has been counted. She knows what it means."
"Unarmed men are going to attack the city," the missionary said without expression. "You are very courageous people. But you are certain you will win—against our machines and our energy guns." With a frown, she put aside the model she had been holding. Her face was drawn and tense; there was doubt and fear in her eyes.
"Of course we'll take the skyport," Lanny assured her. "That doesn't worry me. It's what happens afterward—what we do when we have your guns and your machines."
Endhart and Pendillo exchanged glances, in subtle understanding. "The city will belong to us," his father said.
"Why do we want it? The city is a prison!"
The eyes of the elders met again. "We need guns to protect ourselves. Haven't you always said that, Lanny? You've heard all the discussions in the council meetings."
"But do we, father? Answer me honestly."
"You can answer that better than I, my son."
Tak Laleen stood up, wringing her hands. "You will face the force-field and our guns—but you wonder if you need weapons." With an effort she checked the hysterical laughter bubbling in her throat. "My people would say you had gone mad; but who knows the meaning of madness?"
Pendillo took the missionary's hand firmly in his. "She's tired, Lanny. Our ways are still new to her."
"And we've had her cooped up in the house too long," Endhart added.
Pendillo glanced sharply at his friend. Endhart nodded. "It is time," he said cryptically.
Pendillo turned toward his son. "A walk outside would do her good, Lanny."
"Is it safe?"
"She won't try to escape; you and I will go with her."
Pendillo led her toward the door. Her face glowed with hope. She glanced eagerly down the long street, lit by the evening fires. Lanny was sure she was looking for the nearest Chapel of the Triangle, calculating her chances of escape. She was the enemy. What reason did his father or Endhart have to trust her so blindly?
At the door Pendillo turned for a moment toward Endhart. "You'll make sure Gill knows?"
"At the proper time; leave it to me."
"Knows what?" Lanny demanded.
"That we may be a little late for dinner," his father answered blandly. He nodded toward Tak Laleen and Lanny understood.
Lanny walked on one side of Tak Laleen and slid his arm firmly under hers. She kept running her fingers nervously over his arm. She tripped once, when her foot caught in a shallow hole; her nails tore a deep gash in Lanny's flesh as he reached out to keep her from falling. He healed the wound at once, except for a small area where the germ colony needed exposure to the life-energy of the sun. She looked at his arm. Her lips were trembling; her face was white.
"So you can do it, Lanny."
For a moment he had forgotten her remarkable inability. "You mean the healing? All men do that; we always have. A rational mind controls the structure and energy of organized matter."
"I've listened to Dr. Endhart teaching that to the small children," she replied. "It—it is difficult to believe." She began to laugh again; waves of hysteria swept her body. "I'm sorry, Lanny. I've thought, sometimes, that I'm losing my mind. We're never really certain of ourselves, are we? Two plus two doesn't have to make four, I suppose; it's just more convenient when it does."
"I could show you how to heal yourself, Tak Laleen."
"Ever since I came here I've been learning, Lanny. But it does no good unless I'm willing to learn first. My mind is tied down by everything I already know. I can put my two and two together as often as I like, and I still come up with four. Any other answer is insanity."
Twice, as they walked through the streets, Pendillo took a turn which led toward one of the enemy chapels. Lanny swiftly guided the missionary in another direction. The third time they came upon the Chapel of the Triangle suddenly, and before he could pull Tak Laleen back she broke free and fled toward the glowing Triangle, crying for help in her native tongue.
Lanny sprinted after her. Tak Laleen beat with her fists on the metal door. From the air above them came the high whine of a materializing force-field. Capsules swung down upon them. The missionary was swallowed within the church. Lanny and his father were enveloped in a single bubble.
It rose on an automatic beam and arched toward the skyport. In panic Lanny glanced down through the opalescent field at the settlement rolling by beneath them, and the choppy water of the bay, turned scarlet by the setting sun. Pendillo leaned calmly against the curved wall of their prison.
"She betrayed us!" Lanny cried.
"I expected her to, my son."
"You—you knew this would happen?"
"A teacher must sometimes contrive a unique—and possibly painful—learning situation. It's one of the risks of our profession."
"Why, father? She'll tell the Almost-men about the attack on the skyport; she'll tell them—"
Pendillo tapped the curved wall of force. "We're in a tight spot, Lanny. It's up to you to get us out—without a gun and without any of the enemy machines. All you have to work with are your brains and what we've taught you for the past twenty years. I think you can count on some help from Gill later on. He'll have to attack the skyport tonight, without working out all his fine plans for seizing the arsenal. And Gill won't have any guns, either."
"So you and Endhart planned this."
"That's why I insisted on keeping Tak Laleen alive. I thought we might need her as—as a catalyst. The vote of the resistance council rushed things a little, but on the whole I think it worked out quite satisfactorily. Your education is finished, Lanny—for all of you who are the new breed. Now start applying what we think you know."
For a brief time the prison sphere that held Lanny and Juan Pendillo was suspended above the teeming tiers of skyport streets. Enough time, Lanny guessed, for the enemy to question Tak Laleen and to reach some decision based upon what she had to tell them. Abruptly the capsule was hauled down. Lanny and his father were dumped into barred cells buried somewhere in the bowels of the city.
"What will they do with us?" Lanny asked.
From the adjoining cell his father answered placidly, "It depends on Tak Laleen's statement—and how much of it they believe."
"Will they condemn us to readjustment?"
"Undoubtedly, unless you solve our problem first—and these bars seem thoroughly solid to me."
Lanny drew in his breath sharply, suddenly afraid. "What's it like, father—the readjustment?"
"No one knows, really. A machine tears your mind apart and puts it together again—differently."
Lanny shivered as he remembered the half-dozen readjustment cases he had seen in the Santa Barbara treaty area—living shells, with all initiative and individuality drained from their souls. He moved to the barred door of his cell. For a split-second of panic he seized the bars and futilely tried to pry them apart. Slowly edging into his consciousness came a vague awareness of the structural pattern of the energy units in the metal. It was the same extension of his integrated community of cells which he had with his hunting club. His panic vanished; he felt a little ashamed because he had been afraid. It would be no problem to escape.
He held the bars and allowed his mind to feel through the pattern of energy organization. The metal was very different from any of the familiar substances Lanny knew, but far less complex because the arrangement was so rigidly disciplined. There were two things that Lanny might do. He could fit the energy units of his own body past the space intervals of the metal—in effect, passing through the metal barrier. But that would be slow and exacting work. It would require a considerable concentration to move the specialized cells of his body across the metal maze. The second method was easier. As he extended his cerebral integration into the metal, he could rearrange the energy unit pattern. The bars should fragment and fall apart.
Lanny was amazed how rapidly the change took place. Before he could adjust the pattern of more than half a dozen energy units, a chain reaction began. Lanny found he had to absorb an enormous flow of superfluous energy to prevent an explosion.
As soon as he crossed into the corridor, watching photo-electric cells sent an alarm pulsing into the guard room on the tier above. The metal-walled corridor throbbed with the deafening cry of a siren.
Lanny darted toward his father's cell. "Hold the metal and make it over with your mind—just as we integrate with our clubs. It's the same principal, father."
Pendillo shrugged. "I can't, Lanny. I don't know how."
Lanny had no time to weigh the significance of what his father said for the scream of the siren stopped and a guard appeared at the head of the corridor. The guard wrapped himself hastily in the shell of a force-field capsule. He fired his energy gun. The knife of flame arched through the corridor and struck Lanny's face. His body reacted instinctively, absorbing and storing part of the charge and re-constructing the rest so that it became a harmless combination of inert gasses.
But as the blinding flame splashed bright in Lanny's eyes—the way it had once before, when he murdered old Barlow—Lanny's mind faced the traumatic shock of remembering. Lanny had murdered Barlow—he knew that, now—murdered him with a blaze of energy which he had stored when he brushed against the force-field capsule surrounding Tak Laleen.
It was not the fact of murder that had clamped the strait-jacket of forgetfulness on Lanny's mind and allowed him to think Tak Laleen had killed Barlow. He had known, for one split-second, the full maturity of the education Pendillo had given his sons. Known it too soon, with too little preparation. Now he understood why he had felt ashamed, why he'd retreated deliberately from the truth: because he had killed Barlow to resolve an old argument, not to be rid of a traitor. The method of murder had, ironically, given him the answer to Barlow's poison of despair; but because the two had happened simultaneously, the emotional shock of one had affected the other.
The bursting charge of energy washed away his absurdly exaggerated sense of guilt. He achieved the mature integration he had lost before; his mind was whole again. The integration was nothing new—merely a restatement of what Pendillo had taught him, what all the treaty area teachers taught the new children. The mind of man could control the energy structure of matter. Pendillo called that rationality. But matter and energy were synonymous. The teachers had implied that without teaching it directly. A mind that could heal a body wound was also able to control the energy blast from an enemy gun.
From his father's cell Lanny heard a stifled groan. He looked back. The bars of the cell had been twisted by the blast; Pendillo was badly hurt. His wounds seemed to be extensive, but Lanny was sure his father would heal himself quickly.
Lanny sprang at the guard. The Almost-man had enough courage to hold his ground, still sure of his impregnable machines. He was aiming his energy gun again when Lanny touched the opalescent capsule. That, too, was nothing now; Lanny had found his way into the new world. The field of force was simply energy in another form. Lanny could have reshaped the field, intensified it, or dissolved it as he chose.
He shattered the capsule, like a bubble of glass. He smashed the gun aside. The guard stood before him, stripped of his mechanical armor—a man, facing his enemy as a man.
As the guard turned to run, Lanny reached out for him leisurely. Weakly the guard swung his fist at Lanny's face. Lanny laughed and slapped at the ineffectual, white hand. The guard howled and clutched the broken fingers against his mouth. Desperately he kicked at Lanny with his metal-soled boots. Lanny dodged. The unexpected momentum sent the guard reeling and he had no efficient capsule to hold him up.
He sprawled on the metal floor close to his energy gun. He grasped for the weapon as Lanny leaped toward him. For one brief moment Lanny saw madness film his enemy's eyes. Then the guard began to scream. He thrust the muzzle of the energy gun against his own chest and pressed the firing stud.
Lanny turned away from the smoldering heap of charred flesh and went back to his father's cell. He disorganized the energy units of the tormented knot of metal bars and knelt beside Pendillo. Lanny was amazed that his father had made no effort to heal his wounds. Juan was bleeding profusely; his eyes were glazed with pain. Lanny lifted Pendillo tenderly in his arms.
"Father! You must begin the healing—"
"I do not know how, Lanny."
"All men control their own body cells!"
"So you were taught, and what a man believes is true—for him."
Cautiously Lanny extended his energy integration into his father's body. It was something he had never done before with a living man. The weak disorganization of cells frightened him. Clearly Pendillo was telling the truth; he was incapable of ordering his own healing. Then how had he taught his sons so well, if he could not use the technique himself?
Hesitantly Lanny released into his father's body some of the energy he had stored. He wasn't sure what the effect would be, but it seemed to help. Pendillo tried to smile; his eyes became clearer.
"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—"
"Could we duplicate that for all your people, Tak Laleen?" Gill asked doubtfully.
"Yes, I'm sure we could, Gill. We have a clue; we know what has to be done. And we have an experimental laboratory." The missionary nodded toward the mob of cringing Almost-men coming in from the preserve. "We have a city of people, disorganized by panic, with their faith in the machine already shattered. While we teach these people how to make the reorientation, we'll learn the methods that will work most effectively with my world."
They left the city and began to cross the bridge toward the treaty area. Tak Laleen passed her arms through theirs. She said, with sorrow in her voice, "No matter what we do, no matter how carefully we try to cushion the panic, we still have no way of being entirely sure of the results. Something that works with our prisoners or with us might destroy my world; it could send a planet into mass paranoia."
"That risk is implied in all learning, Tak Laleen," Lanny answered. "We can never escape it. I'm not sure we ought to try. The individual who lives in a closed world of absolutes—shut in by prison walls of his own mind—is already insane. The sudden development of a new idea simply makes the condition apparent."
"In a sense," Gill added, "there is no such thing as a teacher. There are people who expose us to data and try to demonstrate some techniques we can use, but any learning that goes on must come from within ourselves."
"We will develop the most effective method we can," Lanny said. "Then we will apply it to your world, Tak Laleen. The rest is up to them. That's as it should be—as it must be."
Arm in arm they crossed the bridge—two men and a missionary from an alien world. They had been enemies, but during a night of chaos and death they had learned to become men—the first men to catch the vision of the new world of the mind. Each of them was soberly aware that the discovery was not an end, but a beginning. And they faced that beginning with neither fear nor regret, because they had the confidence that comes of maturity. The unknown was not a god-power or a devil-power, but a problem to be solved by the skill of a rational mind.