"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.
