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.
After nearly twenty years, the ribbon of asphalt was still in good repair. Occasional cracks had broken the paving. Grass and weeds choked the crevices and some culverts had been washed out by spring rains.
The primary change was environmental, but only Juan Pendillo was aware of that, for his sons took for granted the young forests that crowded every hillside and the abundant wild game. With no more than a ten minute interruption in their march northward, Lanny and Gill ran down a rabbit and a pheasant, killing them with skillfully hurled stones—the traditional weapons of the hunters. They cleaned the kill and strapped it to their weapon belts.
Late in the afternoon they entered Santa Maria. The town had not been large, but it was the first relic of their defeated culture that Lanny and Gill had ever seen. Sometimes, when their hunting took them south, they saw the site of Los Angeles, but that told them nothing about the past, for it was a flat desert scrubbed clean of rubble to make room for an enemy skyport. Santa Maria had survived the invasion, since it was too isolated from the major centers of population to have been a target of the enemy guns.
Lanny and Gill stood in the empty main street and looked with awe at the deserted stores. Some of the buildings were made of brick; some were actually two and three floors high. This must, surely, have been a great city of the old world. They had no point of reference but the monotonously identical houses of the subdivision which had become their treaty colony. Here the buildings were all different and by that fact alone they seemed beautiful.