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."