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."