cement-floored garage. Except for three automobiles, abandoned twenty years before in various stages of repair, the room was empty. "We can spend the night here," Pendillo decided.

Lanny and Gill pried open the door at the back of the garage. Behind the building tangled shrubs and live oaks choked the half-mile shelf of land that separated Santa Maria from the coast. They found a ready supply of dry firewood under the trees.

It was dusk. The setting sun was veiled in a mist. Fingers of fog reached hungrily for the warm earth, driven inland by the wind. Lanny and Gill would have been more comfortable outside. They were accustomed to the chilly night air. They could have burrowed sleeping troughs in the soil and restored their strength with earth energy.

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 

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