"Can you suggest a better way to get weapons?"
And the moderate admitted, "True, we can't defeat the enemy unless we have weapons comparable to theirs."
It was the last gasp of an old argument. Everything that could be said had already been said; every delegate knew both sides to the debate, and every delegate was driven by the same instinct to make a fight to reclaim his lost world. When the vote was counted, a majority of the council favored war. A committee was appointed to make the final disposition of forces and to set the time for the attack. Lanny was not surprised when Gill was named a member of the committee.
On the afternoon following the meeting, Lanny was assigned to a group of traders so he might learn the geography of the skyport before the attack. As the enemy capital on Earth and a tourist attraction, the San Francisco skyport was a miniature replica of an enemy city. Under the dome were tiers of streets and walkways, interwoven in complex patterns, and the battlement spires of luxury hotels, theatres, cabarets, public buildings. The streets overflowed with a flood of jangling traffic, and the air was filled with the well-to-do riding their de-grav cars in the enviable security of their private capsules.
Lanny's overall impression was a place of intolerable noise and glitter. The Almost-men seemed to make a fetish of their machines. They found it necessary to use their clattering vehicles even though their destination might be a building only one tier away. The air under the dome was fetid with the stench of vehicle fuels.
The trading area was confined to a small, metal-surfaced square on the lowest level of the city, close to the narrow, neutralized vent through the force-field dome. Tall buildings swarmed above the trading booths, blotting out the sun. Lanny felt boxed in, imprisoned by the high walls, choked by the artificial, filtered air.
He sold a satisfactory quota of trade goods to the tourists who had adventured down to the booths. And he dutifully noted the location of the walkway to the power center and the arsenal. But he gave a sigh of relief when his duty was done and he was free to go back across the bridge to the treaty area. He filled his lungs with the crisp, damp air, unsterilized by the fans of the enemy city. How could the Almost-men survive, he wondered, how were they capable of clear-headed thinking, in such seething confusion?
In the treaty areas, where men could put their naked feet upon the soil and feel the life-energy of the earth, where men breathed the fresh wind and held sovereignty over their environment—only there were men really free. Would he trade that for the city walls that blotted out the sun, and the monotonous throbbing of machines? The victor was the slave; the conquered had found the road to liberty. For the first time in his life Lanny understood the paradox. Stated in those terms, what did men actually have to fight for?
As he always did when he had a problem, Lanny went to Juan Pendillo. It was late in the afternoon. Already the cooking fires were being lighted on the small rectangles of earth in front of the houses where the older survivors lived. But Pendillo and Dr. Endhart were still inside, packing away the models which Endhart had used to teach his last class for the day. They usually waited for Lanny or Gill to make their night fire, since Pendillo's sons did the work so effortlessly. Tak Laleen was with the teachers. She sat on the only chair in the room, playing abstractly with one of Endhart's teaching tools—a crude mock-up of the structure of a living energy unit. It was the same sort of learning-toy Lanny himself had been given when he was a child.