Here the buildings were all different and by that fact alone they seemed beautiful.

Lanny and Gill stopped at each store window, to stare in wonder at the goods still on the shelves. In an automobile agency, a solitary sedan still stood, on deflated and frayed tires, in the center of the showroom floor. Here at last was visible proof that men had once built a machine technology. The automobile was as big and as shiny, beneath its generation of dust, as any of the spheres of the Almost-men.

"Were they all like that?" Lanny asked in an awed whisper.

"Fundamentally, yes," Pendillo said.

"And they moved over the roads faster than a deer!" Gill's eyes glistened. "But where are the weapons, father?"

"Our cars weren't armed, Gill; we used them for pleasure. But don't get me wrong. We had guns—vicious and terrible things; we were no more civilized than the Almost-men. Our weapons just weren't the equal of theirs, so our civilization was destroyed."

"You're saying the Almost-men are better—"

"No, Gill. The Almost-men are mirror images of ourselves—man at his worst. That's why we understand each other so thoroughly," Pendillo paused before he added, "And that's why we can't destroy them on their terms; we must make our own."

They pushed open the door of the agency and went into the showroom. Hesitantly, like children with new Christmas toys, they ran their fingers over the dusty hood of the sedan. Lanny felt a strange, electric empathy as he touched the cold metal, as if it were a familiar part of himself. For a moment he saw in his mind the geometric structure of the alloy atoms, just as he could visualize the more complex cell make-up of his own body. Judging from the expression on Gill's face, he guessed that his brother had perceived the same relationship.

"And the Almost-men took all this from us," Gill said in a choked voice. "Why, Juan?"

"In our wars among ourselves, we always had the same motivation. They came here for resources. Every skyport they have built on Earth continuously ships out tons of metal and chemicals—oil, coal, ores. On their home world the Almost-men have exhausted their own resources; they must have ours to keep their mechanistic civilization going."

Juan opened a door at the rear of the showroom into a large, 

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