It had always puzzled them that the older survivors, like Juan, could not do the same. Pendillo's generation made very poor hunters, too, often dying of a wheezing sickness if they spent many nights on the trail. Pendillo's sons carried wood into the garage, where Juan sat shivering on a wooden bench with his rabbit-skin jacket hunched around his shoulders. Lanny and Gill stripped off their jerkins and gave them to their father. Pendillo's sons were naked, then, except for their short, crudely cut breeches and their leather weapon belts. And only the belts, which held their stone knives and their clubs, would either of them have considered essential. The rest was superficial, a mark of status. In a general way Lanny and Gill were physically alike--sturdy, bronzed giants, like all the children who had survived in the treaty areas. They were both nineteen, or perhaps a little older. Dr. Pendillo had found them abandoned as he fled the final enemy attack. Gill's hair was yellow and a pale beard was beginning to grow on his chin. Lanny's black hair curled in a tight, matted mane; his beard was heavy, already covering much of his face and giving him a sinister, derelict appearance. Since metal was forbidden in the prison compounds, no man was clean-shaven. After a fashion they did occasionally trim their hair, with treasured slivers of glass which foraging hunters brought back from the ruined cities. Lanny and Gill made fire in a rusted waste can. Pendillo watched them with admiration. That was another shortcoming in the older survivors that puzzled Lanny: they were very clumsy about producing fire, and almost none of them could hurl a stone accurately enough to kill an animal. Yet both skills, so essential to the hunters, had been taught the children by their elders. On an improvised wooden spit Pendillo's sons roasted the pheasant and the rabbit which they had killed that afternoon. The three men ate hungrily, Pendillo with a fastidiousness that secretly amused the bronzed giants who sat cross-legged beside him. Dr. Pendillo tore the meat daintily from the bones with his fingers; at intervals he wiped the grease from his lip with a corner of his jacket. Pendillo built a bed for himself from a pile of dry, rotting rags close to the fire. Lanny restoked the can with fresh wood so his father might be warm during the night. Then Pendillo's sons spread their skins close to the open door, where they felt more at ease. Almost at once Lanny was asleep. It was an instinctive process of will. He ordered his body to rest, and it responded; just as he could be instantly awake and alert at any energy change that indicated danger. He had never examined the process consciously, and he considered it in no way unusual; but he might have recalled, if he had pressed his memory back into his earliest childhood, that it was part of a pattern Pendillo had taught his sons.