their elders.

On an improvised wooden spit Pendillo's sons roasted the pheasant and the rabbit which they had killed that afternoon. The three men ate hungrily, Pendillo with a fastidiousness that secretly amused the bronzed giants who sat cross-legged beside him. Dr. Pendillo tore the meat daintily from the bones with his fingers; at intervals he wiped the grease from his lip with a corner of his jacket.

Pendillo built a bed for himself from a pile of dry, rotting rags close to the fire. Lanny restoked the can with fresh wood so his father might be warm during the night. Then Pendillo's sons spread their skins close to the open door, where they felt more at ease.

Almost at once Lanny was asleep. It was an instinctive process of will. He ordered his body to rest, and it responded; just as he could be instantly awake and alert at any energy change that indicated danger. He had never examined the process consciously, and he considered it in no way unusual; but he might have recalled, if he had pressed his memory back into his earliest childhood, that it was part of a pattern Pendillo had taught his sons.

There was a sputter of sound. Lanny leaped to his feet, his hand closing on his stone knife. He heard a roar of clanging metal in the automobile showroom. Then silence.

Lanny sprang through the open door. Dimly he saw Gill sitting in the sedan, his hands gripping the wheel.

"What happened?"

"It started, Lanny. I just came in to look at it, to touch it again, and—"

"So you made the motor turn over?" This came from Dr. Pendillo, who was feeling his way through the door behind Lanny. "How, Gill?"

Gill slid out of the car, backing away from it. "I don't know. I don't know!"

"You must, Gill."

"I got in. I was—I was pretending it was before the invasion and I was driving the machine down the road. I could see the matter structure of the motor in my mind, and how the parts fit together. I must have touched the starter."

"After twenty years, the battery would be dead and the fuel would have evaporated. Tell me what you really did, Gill."

Gill clenched his fist against his mouth. "It seemed as if it 

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