Lanny grinned at the missionary. She was a fool, he thought; for the sake of her own comfort, she had given away one of the most valuable secrets in the arsenal of enemy weapons. When the treaty areas knew it, the barriers would go down; men would be free when they chose. And Tak Laleen was so grateful to have escaped a cold swim in the sea, she seemed unaware of the extent of her betrayal.

They walked across the barren ground. The missionary clung with feverish hands to Lanny's arm. Half a mile beyond the barrier, they ascended a steep hill. From the crest they looked down upon the peninsula and the sprawling arms of the bay in the background.

Except for the jumbled ruins of downtown San Francisco, at the point of the peninsula, the land from the ocean to the bay was crowded with closely packed rows of dwellings. Some were flat-roofed, whitewalled houses similar to the subdivision settlement where Lanny and Gill grew up. Others, built since the surrender, were ugly hovels made from clay and grass.

The San Francisco treaty area was the largest on Earth, perhaps because it was the city where the invasion had begun. Lanny had always known it was big, but he was awed to see so many men, so many of his own kind, assembled in one place.

Across the bay, on a flat, white plain where Oakland had once stood, was the crowded, multi-tiered skyport of the enemy. From all the surrounding hills the pliable, white tubes poured an endless stream of resources into the port. Automatic machines, working ceaselessly day and night, loaded the plunder into machine-navigated, pilotless spheres; at five minute intervals an endless parade of spheres lifted from the field beyond the skyport and headed toward the stars, while a second parade of empties came in for a landing.

From a distance the skyport, under its opalescent dome of a force-field, looked like an enormous spider with its sprawling, white tentacles clutching the green earth. The San Francisco skyport was the largest the enemy had built, and the seat of the territorial government they had set up to rule the captive planet.

Grotesque relics of man's bridges still spanned the bay and the Golden Gate; columns of rusted steel held up the graceful loops of a single, rusted cable. An enemy bridge, like a fairy highway supported by nearly invisible balloons of de-grav spheres, joined the skyport and the treaty area.

As the three men and their captive descended the hillside, they were stopped by four nearly naked youths who mounted 

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