"If we could knock out just one of the guns, we could walk through the
barrier, couldn't we?"
Gill set her on her feet. She ran back to Lanny, stumbling over the
rough ground and wiping her nose with the back of her hand. "Lanny, you
and your brother can hit anything with a stone. Couldn't you knock out
the power unit in a pylon?"
"Sure, if we knew where it was. We've tried for years to find that out,
but we can't get close enough to examine the towers."
She pointed eagerly. "It's the criss-crossed framework, just under the
sound receptor at the top."
He measured the distance critically. "It will take careful marksmanship
to hit anything so small. Think we could do it, Gill?"
"We'll have to try; the lady's afraid to get her feet wet."
Gill threw the first stone. It fell short of the target. The automatic
energy guns swung on the stone, efficiently disintegrating it before it
touched the ground. Lanny tried; and his brother threw again. It was
Lanny's fourth missile that struck the tiny mechanism. A puff of smoke
filled the air and the top of the pylon became a mass of twisted, metal
girders.
Lanny grinned at the missionary. She was a fool, he thought; for the
sake of her own comfort, she had given away one of the most valuable
secrets in the arsenal of enemy weapons. When the treaty areas knew
it, the barriers would go down; men would be free when they chose. And
Tak Laleen was so grateful to have escaped a cold swim in the sea, she
seemed unaware of the extent of her betrayal.
They walked across the barren ground. The missionary clung with
feverish hands to Lanny's arm. Half a mile beyond the barrier, they
ascended a steep hill. From the crest they looked down upon the
peninsula and the sprawling arms of the bay in the background.
Except for the jumbled ruins of downtown San Francisco, at the point
of the peninsula, the land from the ocean to the bay was crowded with
closely packed rows of dwellings. Some were flat-roofed, whitewalled
houses similar to the subdivision settlement where Lanny and Gill grew
up. Others, built since the surrender, were ugly hovels made from clay
and grass.
* * * * *
The San Francisco treaty area was the largest on Earth, perhaps because
it was the city where the invasion had begun. Lanny had always known
it was big, but he was awed to see so many men, so many of his own
kind, assembled in one place.
Across the bay, on a flat, white plain where Oakland had once stood,
was the crowded, multi-tiered skyport of the enemy. From all the
surrounding hills the pliable, white tubes poured an endless stream
of resources into the port. Automatic machines, working ceaselessly
day and night, loaded the plunder into machine-navigated, pilotless
spheres; at five minute intervals an endless parade of spheres lifted
from the field beyond the skyport and headed toward the stars, while a
second parade of empties came in for a landing.
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."