"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.
They made beds for their father and the missionary in front of the
fire. Lanny and his brother would have been willing to continue the
march north until nightfall; the food had restored their balance of
energy, as it always did. But they knew the other two had to rest.
Lanny and Gill dug burrows in the warm sand outside the cottage, where
they felt more comfortable. They were consciously an integrated part
of their world, nurtured by the earth and the sun. To them it seemed
absurd to build walls of wood or stone to separate themselves from
a part of their own being. None of the younger generation had ever
understood the need of their elders for artificial shelter. That
feeling, too, was a product of of their education, though neither they
nor their teachers grasped what it implied. The children of the prison
camps lived in a new universe, not yet defined.
Lanny and Gill were immediately asleep. It did not occur to them that
Tak Laleen might try to escape. They assumed she had read the signs of
the plentiful game in the forest: they were a long way from any enemy
installation.
Yet four hours later they were jerked awake by the sound of her
screams, faint and terrified in the night shadows of the forest. They
found her a thousand yards from the cottage. Her back was against a
wall of boulders and with her frail, white hands she was trying to beat
off a snarling cougar which had already clawed her uniform to shreds.
* * * * *
Lanny drew his knife and leaped at the animal. Gill threw a stone which
might have broken the skull with bullet force, but at that moment the
cougar whirled toward them. Its claw slashed at Lanny. He bent low,
driving his knife upward. Momentum carried the big cat forward. As the
tearing fury struck his chest, Lanny plunged his knife again into the
thick hide.
The cougar fell, writhing and howling. Gill smashed a broken tree limb
into the yawning jaws, and the big cat died. Tak Laleen stumbled
toward them. She tried to speak. The words of gratitude choked in her
throat and she fainted.
Again! Lanny thought, with disgust. The Almost-men--or at least their
missionary women--had a limited gamut of emotional reactions. It seemed
an inadequate way to solve a problem.
They left Tak Laleen where she lay. Gill expertly stripped off the skin
of the animal they had killed, another hide they could fashion into a
jacket for Juan Pendillo. Lanny had been superficially wounded--a long,
shallow scratch across his chest. He examined it carefully, feeling
through the severed body cells with his mind and directing the blood
purifiers to seal off the few germ colonies which were present. When
the skin seemed to require no healing exposure to the sun, he allowed
the scratch to heal at once.
Gill shouldered the cougar hide, still warm and dripping blood. Lanny
picked up the missionary and they returned to the cottage. Tak Laleen's
uniform was torn and useless, but the material was a tough plastic
which had protected her from any serious wound. Her chest and arms were
criss-crossed with scores of tiny abrasions. It puzzled Lanny that
she had made no effort to repair her body. It occured to him, with
something of a shock, that the Almost-men might use machines to do
that, too.
Tak Laleen regained consciousness when Lanny put her on the bed in
front of the fire. Pendillo tore off her battered uniform and bathed
the scratches with hot water.
"You saved me; you risked your own life!" She said it with a peculiar
fervor. Lanny couldn't understand why she thought an element of risk
had been involved. A hunter with half his skill and experience could
have done as much.
"I won't try to run away again," she promised. Not much of a
concession, Lanny thought, suppressing a grin.
Pendillo said they would have to spend the next day in the cottage, to
give the missionary a chance to rest. She was suffering, he said, from
something he called shock. Precisely what that was neither of his sons
knew, but they supposed it was an obscure ailment that beset the enemy.
The more they learned about Tak Laleen, the stranger it seemed that
such a weak people could have conquered the earth.
During the interval of waiting, Lanny and Gill dried the two hides they
had taken. They cut breeches and a jacket for Tak Laleen, to replace
the uniform she could no longer wear.
* * * * *
After they resumed their trek north, it took them four days more to
reach the pylon barrier south of the San Francisco treaty area. Tak
Laleen became more and more exhausted. She shivered constantly in
the cold air. Her nose began to run--a phenomenon Pendillo called a
cold--and the wounds in her chest stubbornly refused to heal. When she
saw the towered guns on the barrier, she dropped to the ground and wept
hysterically.
"We can't pass that," she whispered.
"If you're afraid to run the guns," Lanny told her, "we can swim around
them."
"I don't know how."
"There's no other way into the treaty area," Gill said brutally.
She sniffled. "If I could just feel warm again--if you would build a
fire and give me a chance to rest--"
"Not until we're inside the barrier. The police would spot a fire out
here."
Gill picked her up and began to carry her toward the beach. She
screamed in terror and beat her fists against his naked back. When he
did not stop, she cried out,
"I can tell you how to break the circuit on the pylons!"