Lanny saw an occasional opalescent bubble rise in the air. But inevitably, before it could move beyond the city, a force of blazing energy shot up from the lowest tier and brought the capsule down. Here and there in the darkness Lanny saw the furious blast of an energy gun, probing futilely into the chaos. 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." "They all taught us. They made us--" Lanny's voice choked a little as he used his father's familiar phrase. "--a new breed. Gill, we're acting like fools; we're fighting for something we don't want or need." "We have to have weapons, Lan." "We need nothing but what we've been taught. The mind interprets and commands the chaos of the universe. Matter and energy are identical." Lanny turned and walked, erect and unafraid, toward the arsenal. The energy fire from the guards' guns struck him and exploded. He reorganized the pattern into harmless components and stood waiting for the charge to die away. In a moment Gill was beside him, beaming with understanding as he met and transformed a second blast from the guns. "Of course matter and energy are the same!" he cried. "It should have been obvious to us. We have been prisoners twenty years for nothing."