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."
The boy inspected her with a sneer. "Scrawny, aren't they?"
"Take away their machines," Lanny replied, "and this is all you have left."
Lanny and his brother made an easy adjustment to the new community. The social stratification was an uncomplicated division of men into three types: the teachers, the old ones who had survived the invasion, and the children who had grown up since the war—by far the largest group. The classification was logical and unobtrusive; it produced no frustrating social pressures. Since the children had known no other form of society, they assumed that men had always organized their culture with such understandable simplicity.
The chief occupation of the community was always the education of the young. That, too, Lanny and Gill assumed to be the normal activity of man. The teachers were the real government of every treaty area. Their control was subtle, engineered through an unofficial—and illegal—representative body, usually called the resistance council.
Since Pendillo had been a teacher in his home settlement, he took up residence with Dr. Endhart. They kept Tak Laleen with them, a prisoner confined to the house. For nearly a week she lay on a pallet suffering the miseries of a cold. Lanny knew that older survivors in every settlement sometimes had the same malady. Pendillo had taught his sons that sickness happened because some of the survivors of the invasion had been so demoralized by defeat they had lost the mental ability to control their own physical processes. But Tak Laleen was one of the conquerors; nothing had demoralized the Almost-men. There was only one possible conclusion Lanny could reach: the invaders had never learned to control the energy units in their body cells.
A hunter's assignment, Lanny found, was easier than it had been in the smaller Santa Barbara settlement. The Almost-men had set up a vast hunting preserve north and east of the bay; it was kept well-stocked with game. There was no need for the hunting parties to break through the pylon barrier and raid territory ceded to the invaders. The hunters simply crossed the skyport bridge, circled the opalescent dome, and entered the forest, where broad trails had been conveniently laid out under the trees.