for the past twenty years. I think you can count on some help from Gill later on. He'll have to attack the skyport tonight, without working out all his fine plans for seizing the arsenal. And Gill won't have any guns, either."

"So you and Endhart planned this."

"That's why I insisted on keeping Tak Laleen alive. I thought we might need her as—as a catalyst. The vote of the resistance council rushed things a little, but on the whole I think it worked out quite satisfactorily. Your education is finished, Lanny—for all of you who are the new breed. Now start applying what we think you know."

For a brief time the prison sphere that held Lanny and Juan Pendillo was suspended above the teeming tiers of skyport streets. Enough time, Lanny guessed, for the enemy to question Tak Laleen and to reach some decision based upon what she had to tell them. Abruptly the capsule was hauled down. Lanny and his father were dumped into barred cells buried somewhere in the bowels of the city.

"What will they do with us?" Lanny asked.

From the adjoining cell his father answered placidly, "It depends on Tak Laleen's statement—and how much of it they believe."

"Will they condemn us to readjustment?"

"Undoubtedly, unless you solve our problem first—and these bars seem thoroughly solid to me."

Lanny drew in his breath sharply, suddenly afraid. "What's it like, father—the readjustment?"

"No one knows, really. A machine tears your mind apart and puts it together again—differently."

Lanny shivered as he remembered the half-dozen readjustment cases he had seen in the Santa Barbara treaty area—living shells, with all initiative and individuality drained from their souls. He moved to the barred door of his cell. For a split-second of panic he seized the bars and futilely tried to pry them apart. Slowly edging into his consciousness came a vague awareness of the structural pattern of the energy units in the metal. It was the same extension of his integrated community of cells which he had with his hunting club. His panic vanished; he felt a little ashamed because he had been afraid. It would be no problem to escape.

He held the bars and allowed his mind to feel through the pattern of energy organization. The metal was very different from any of the familiar substances Lanny knew, but far less complex 

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