For two hours Pendillo and his foster sons walked north. Occasionally they saw enemy spheres overhead, but the ships never came closer. After they reached the coast, the pounding surf formed a protective sound barrier when they talked. "How far is the San Francisco treaty area?" Gill asked. "Three hundred miles, more or less," Pendillo replied. "How many days?" Lanny inquired. His father, like all the older survivors in the settlement, always spoke of distance in terms of miles--a word that was meaningless to the new generation. Pendillo laughed, with gentle bitterness. "Once, Lanny, we might have made it by car in eight hours. Now?--I don't know. The couriers sometimes do it in a week, when the weather is good. It will take us longer. I won't be able--" He cut himself short. "It's funny, isn't it? In the old days I used to gripe about the traffic; right now I'd give ten years of my life to see a Model-T again." Gill ground his naked heel into the sand. "The Almost-men took everything from us. But we're not licked. One of these days we'll be strong enough--" "As strong as their machines?" Lanny asked. Gill swung toward his brother angrily. "That's Barlow's kind of talk, Lan." "The weapons and the machines of the Almost-men," Pendillo said, "are more powerful than anything we ever had. Yet we must defeat them; we must make ourselves free again. And we shall; I have no doubt of it. Granted, we have no weapons like theirs, and no chance of building any. We still don't resign ourselves to defeat. The techniques we used in the past failed; then we must find new ones. How? I don't know. That's the problem our generation leaves to yours. Men live by their dreams; without them we are nothing." 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.