"I have to expose it to the sun first. I didn't catch it soon enough
last night, and too many germs infested the wound." To their foster
father, Gill added, "I still think you should leave me here. I may
not--"
"You're both my responsibility," Juan Pendillo answered. "We'll survive
together, Gill, or die together."
"What happened?" Lanny asked as he pulled on his breeches and pushed
his stone knife and his wooden club through the loops of his weapon
belt.
Silently Juan pointed toward the dawn sky. High above them Lanny heard
the whine of a score of enemy police spheres. "They insist on the
surrender of all eight hunters who went out last night."
Gill said, "But Tak Laleen killed Barlow with her energy gun. Why are
they blaming us?"
"Barlow was working for them as a spy," Lanny put in. It was a
convenient explanation, but vaguely he knew he was lying. He felt a
pang of guilt, but he couldn't understand why. What had he done that he
should be ashamed of?
What had happened last night? Lanny wracked his brain, trying to
remember.
* * * * *
Eight hunters had been sent out to bring in a cache of rifles which
Lanny's brother, Gill, had found in the rubble of Santa Barbara. It
was risky business, because under the terms of the surrender treaty
men were prohibited the use of all metals in the prison compounds.
But the younger generation--boys like Lanny and Gill, born since the
invasion--were more fiercely determined to resist the Almost-men than
their elders. Armed with fifty rifles, they thought they would be
strong enough to attack the Chapel of the Triangle.
The Almost-men: the children had coined the word, subtly asserting
the pride of man. Yet they knew it was a semantic trick they played
upon themselves. It changed nothing. The conquerors were physically
identical to men; their enormous superiority was entirely technological.
As the eight hunters crept toward the ruins of Santa Barbara, through a
narrow canyon, old man Barlow suddenly emerged from the brush and stood
grinning at them. It was his privilege to join the hunters; any citizen
of the settlement could have done so. But the younger generation hated
Barlow. He was the practical man; he called himself a realist. He never
allowed them to forget they were defeated, imprisoned and without
weapons; he took savage delight in poking holes in their plans for
resistance.
"What are you doing here?" Lanny's brother demanded.
"I came to watch the fun, Gill."
"We're going to bring back fifty rifles; that's all--"
"Right under the noses of our masters? Don't be naive."
"There's only one way the Almost-men would find out--"
Barlow snorted. "Don't think I ran to the Chapel of the Triangle and
told Tak Laleen what you were up to. They don't need that sort of help
from us. When are you going to get it through that thick skull of
yours? We're outclassed; we're second-raters; we'll never defeat them."
From the night sky they heard the low hum of a force-field car. An
opalescent sphere soared above the canyon. Gill's fist smashed into
Barlow's jaw.
"So you did tell her!"
Barlow fell back against the canyon wall, his mouth bleeding.
The sphere came to a graceful stop thirty feet above the hunters and
the de-grav platform lowered a woman toward the canyon. Surrounded by
the faintly opaque capsule of her protective force-field, she moved
toward them, a beautiful, dark-haired woman clothed in white.
This was Tak Laleen, the alien missionary assigned to the Santa Barbara
area. She lived in the Chapel of the Triangle. Under the terms of the
surrender treaty, the missionaries of the Almost-men were guaranteed
immunity to preach and work in the treaty areas. They were selfless,
generous and kind, yet men abhorred them, for they represented the
tangible power of the conqueror.
Tak Laleen glided toward the hunters, forming the alien's triangular
sign of peace with her small, white fingers. "I come in peace, in the
name of the All of the Universe."
"We haven't violated any regulation," Gill snapped stiffly.
Barlow sidled toward her. "Take me back to the Triangle," he begged.
"I'll tell you--"
Gill's fist lashed out again; Barlow reeled under the blow. "We're a
legally elected punishment squad," Gill lied. "This man has broken a
community law."
"You don't understand!" Barlow cried desperately. "They came to get--"
The other hunters fell on him, pummeling him into silence. The violence
sickened Lanny, yet what alternative did they have? Lanny raised his
club. At the same time the missionary came closer to the mob, and his
club touched her forced-field capsule. Normally the energy would have
paralyzed him with pain. But his mind refused to accept the normal, and
Lanny felt the same sort of integrated unity with the energy field that
he had with his hunting club. Command over the matter structure of the
field. The energy flowed into his body and was absorbed, stored in an
explosive concentration of power.
For a moment the opaque capsule dimmed. Tak Laleen clenched her hand
over her mouth and fled into her sphere. The car soared up above the
canyon.
Lanny swung his club again. Since Barlow must die, let him die quickly,
without pain. Murder!--the accusation was a pang of agony in Lanny's
mind. This violated everything Juan had taught him. He was aware that
he wanted Barlow's death not because the old man had tried to betray
the hunters, but because Lanny could not answer Barlow's poisonous
despair in any other way. Lanny was ashamed. But who would know his
real motive if he killed Barlow now? Who--but himself?
Lanny's club touched Barlow's chest. He felt a drain of energy, a
disintegration of structure. The energy Lanny had absorbed from the
missionary's force-field exploded in a fierce, white heat. Barlow
crumbled into dust.
Lanny's awareness of what he had done survived for a fraction of a
second. He stood facing the exploding light and waves of concussion
lashed at his body. A dark chaos, whipped into fury by a floodtide of
guilt, rocked his mind. He willed himself into unconsciousness, a bleak
forgetfulness that sponged the guilt--and the truth--from his mind.
And now he remembered nothing but the explosion and the queasy shadow
of self-accusation.
* * * * *
"The settlement," Juan Pendillo said to his sons, "is required to
surrender the hunters at dawn. That gives us forty-five minutes.
We're all heading for different treaty areas. We are to go to the San
Francisco colony."
* * * * *
The three men slid along the street, clinging to the shadows. Twice
they passed other hunters in flight, but no one spoke, for the enemy
sound detectors on the Chapel of the Triangle were sensitive enough
to pick up a whisper at a distance of half a mile. Lanny and Gill
discarded their moccasins, in order to be more sure of their footing.
The moccasins were useless except as symbols of status. Juan Pendillo
qualified to give the extra skins to his sons, since before the
invasion he had been a Doctor of Philosophy, and the teachers had
become the governing force in every treaty area.
For two hours Pendillo and his foster sons walked north. Occasionally
they saw enemy spheres overhead, but the ships never came closer. After
they reached the coast, the pounding surf formed a protective sound
barrier when they talked.
"How far is the San Francisco treaty area?" Gill asked.
"Three hundred miles, more or less," Pendillo replied.
"How many days?" Lanny inquired. His father, like all the older
survivors in the settlement, always spoke of distance in terms of
miles--a word that was meaningless to the new generation.
Pendillo laughed, with gentle bitterness. "Once, Lanny, we might
have made it by car in eight hours. Now?--I don't know. The couriers
sometimes do it in a week, when the weather is good. It will take us
longer. I won't be able--" He cut himself short. "It's funny, isn't it?
In the old days I used to gripe about the traffic; right now I'd give
ten years of my life to see a Model-T again."
Gill ground his naked heel into the sand. "The Almost-men took
everything from us. But we're not licked. One of these days we'll be
strong enough--"
"As strong as their machines?" Lanny asked.
Gill swung toward his brother angrily. "That's Barlow's kind of talk,
Lan."
"The weapons and the machines of the Almost-men," Pendillo said, "are
more powerful than anything we ever had. Yet we must defeat them; we
must make ourselves free again. And we shall; I have no doubt of it.
Granted, we have no weapons like theirs, and no chance of building any.
We still don't resign ourselves to defeat. The techniques we used in
the past failed; then we must find new ones. How? I don't know. That's
the problem our generation leaves to yours. Men live by their dreams;
without them we are nothing."
The three men continued to move north along the beach until they came
to the barrier that marked the northern boundary of the Santa Barbara
treaty area. The barrier was a series of widely separated pylons
marching across the land. Each pylon served as a pedestal for one of
the enemy's highly sensitive sound receptors and an automatic energy
gun. Any sound detected within seventy feet of the border became
instantly the focal point for a stabbing beam of disintegration. Yet
men crossed the barriers at will. Couriers traveled freely from one
treaty area to another, and hunters crossed the border because the
animal life in enemy territory was more prolific.
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.
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?"