"All this beating around the bush is so foolish." Suddenly she seized Lanny's arm and dug her nails, like claws, into his skin. "But--but it is real! You're not a machine." Her eyes glazed and she fainted again. By dawn the motor of the barge was missing continuously and the speed had been reduced to a relatively slow forty knots. The sun rose, dispelling the fog, and the wind on the sea became a little warmer. Juan Pendillo tried to pace the tiny deck, flaying his arms to restore the circulation. Tak Laleen, having recovered from her second faint, sat brooding with her uniform clutched tightly over her throat. Periodically the missionary talked to Pendillo. She asked again and again what they were going to do with her. Either ransom or murder were the only possibilities that occurred to her. That point of view was a fair index to the attitude the Almost-men held toward the survivors on the planet they had conquered. Mankind they considered filthy, illiterate barbarians; the primitive squalor of the prison compounds was their proof. Lanny understood enough of the religion of the Triangle--that noble abstract of God which the enemy called the All of the Universe--to know why the conquerors had to use a semantic device to define their superiority. The Almost-men were a liberty-loving society. Their government decrees and their religious poetry abounded with vivid words of freedom. They could not have maintained an integrated social soul and enslaved a culture of their peers; therefore, they had to invent a verbal technique for reducing man to the status of a savage. "As we have always done ourselves," Pendillo told Lanny when he first became aware of the inconsistency as a child. "But don't condemn the enemy for it, my son. Words have the peculiar habit of becoming anything we want them to be. If we set our minds to it, we can make anything true. The Almost-men are not merely alien invaders; they are like man himself--the most tragic distortion of our worst traits. Someday we shall make war on them, yes, but before we do we must learn how to conquer ourselves." * * * * * Early in the afternoon the power cells in the barge were exhausted. Gill drove the ship up on a desolate beach, at the place where Monterey had once stood. Nothing survived but an occasional piece of debris, buried in the drifted sand, for Monterey, close to a military camp, had been heavily bombed by the invaders. "We must find a place to camp," Pendillo advised. "I don't believe either Tak Laleen or I have the strength to go any farther today."