don't have much time left. The idea for our new breed of men began at the time of the invasion. Lanny, there wasn't much to choose from between our people and the enemy. Our cities were like theirs; we were enslaved by machines—by the technological bric-a-brac of our culture—as they are. Only our science was different. We had exploited the energy of coal and oil and water-power; we were beginning to accumulate a good deal of data about the basic atomic structure of matter.

"But we would have ridiculed any serious consideration of degravitation, or the magnetic energy of a field of force. These were the trappings of our escapist fiction, not of genuine science. We had a more or less closed field allowed to legitimate scientific research; any data beyond it was vigorously ignored.

"Then, from nowhere, we were invaded and utterly defeated by an alien people who used the precise laws of science we had scorned. Furthermore, we saw them ridicule our principles as semi-religious rituals of a savage culture. In the invasion less than a tenth of mankind survived. We were herded into the treaty areas, with no government and no real leadership. Some of us had been teachers before the war; the survivors looked to us to preserve the spirit and the ideals of man.

"We had to make a selective choice, Lanny. We had no books, no written records, no way to preserve the whole of the past. The teachers in all the treaty areas quickly established contact by courier. The lesson of the invasion had taught us a great deal. Men had been imprisoned by one scientific dogma, which had produced a mechanized and neurotic world. The Almost-men were trapped by another that had produced the same end result.

"So we had our first objective: to teach our children the supreme dignity, the magnificent godliness, of the rational mind. We didn't tell you what to think—which had been our mistake in the past—but simply the vital necessity of rational thought. We taught you that the mind was the integrating factor in the universe; everything else was chaos, without objectivity or direction, until it was controlled by mind. After that, we jammed your brains with data from every field of knowledge that had ever been explored by man. That's why we interchanged couriers so frequently. In our world we had been specialists; we had to share the facts among ourselves so the new breed might have them all."

Far away they heard the dull thunder of an explosion. Lanny's head jerked up. Pendillo coughed up blood again, but there was a satisfied smile on his lips. "That will be Gill 

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