The Indian and Alan came at last to the end of the ammunition that had bulged out their trousers' pockets. They clubbed their rifles and waded into a melee that staggered back and forth between two office buildings, across the scarlet-stained grass. Then Alan lost his rifle, and drew his automatic. The range was always short and his hand was steady as a granite statue's. He was recognizing his foemen at every turn, and putting away the recognition and thinking, _They are rebels from the stars, mutineers against a good people, it was their plottings brought on the smashing of our cities. This is not Dr. Coulterre, it's a creature eight hundred years old who wanted to make me into a brainless slave. That isn't Dr. Simms curled up with my bullet in his belly, it's the slayer of a million New Yorkers as sure as if it had put its own damned finger on the trip release._ He could tell the robots because they yelled, and those he left alone, because the saucermen were shooting them with numbing rays that did not kill. It was a humane method as far as it went. Sometimes he had to blow a robot's brains out, or be slain by him. Then he said, I've killed a friend. He went looking for more aliens to fight. In all the press of bodies Alan and Brave were easiest to see. Brave was huge and his head was that of a savage buck, the lips writhed back from teeth athirst for blood; Alan, naked to the waist and with a white bandage over his right ear, put on by a surgeon in the saucer, was a figure differing radically from the barbaric saucermen and the sedately-clothed rebels and robots. They had taken off their shirts in the dance for a better reason than holding the attention of the soldiers. Among a hundred men like them they would have been indistinguishable had they stayed fully clothed. It's simple, he thought, to tell the good guys from the bad guys; the good guys haven't got any shirts. The two of them made excellent targets. Brave knew he carried a slug in his leg just next the groin; Alan had no idea whether he had been hit. Enemies were continually firing at them both. Alan was knocked to the turf by a man who leaped on his back and beat at his head with a pistol butt. Brave swung the rifle, a terrible war club in his hands, and broke the man's head like a rotten gourd. Alan got up with the feeling that he should have a headache. But he felt nothing. Then the rebel outlanders gave up. Suddenly, all over the scattered fields of battle, they had thrown down their weapons and thrust up their hands above their heads in the universal signal of surrender. Their robot people followed suit. The saucermen had won. Project Star was theirs. CHAPTER XIII