The three men slid along the street

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.