  He was a man of a hundred planets, drawn [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from The relentless heat of yellow-white twin suns boiled the thin desert air and it seared his laboring lungs, and he knew why this was called the Desert of One Thousand Mirages. The Desert of One Thousand Hells would have been a better name. They said a man could go mad here. If not from the crazily twisting, undulating heat shapes themselves, then from the pain-tortured vagaries of his own brain. But mad or not, Jonny Kane knew he must somehow stay in the saddle that was not fashioned for human buttocks; stay astride the silver skinned, hairless beast never bred for human transportation, and ride. They could be all around him, of course, and he might never know until it was too late to wheel his fleet qharaak and dash again for freedom in yet another direction across the shifting, low-duned wastes. They could be but yards behind him but there was not the strength to look back, only to grip the thick reins twined about his bleeding wrists, to keep his cramped legs stiff about the qharaak's sloping flanks. And ride, and choke on the smoking sand. His brain bubbled inside his head, and he shut his eyes. He would tire and lose his grip, and so lose his mount, and fry to death on the blinding whiteness of the sand. Or he would go crashing into them, and they would lead him back to the outpost village, and his death would be of their making. What chance, after all, had an Earth-descendant against the copper skinned native police of a Procyon planet, who rode its deserts as if they were the cool, green fields of the mother world of which his father had so often spoken? What chance? There was flame in his lungs, and fire was burning the insides of his half naked, once strong young body into crumbling, blackened ash. Ride— "Hold! Hold, or there's a barb through your evil heart!" The booming command was from the left. And he wheeled the qharaak so sharply it reared and nearly lost its sextuple footing in the shifting sand. A sudden thrummm went past one ear. He tried to loose his legs enough for a kick in the lunging animal's flanks, but the muscles in them were like steel clamps. They would not move. The reins about his wrists were slippery and stinging with sweat and sand as both mixed with his blood, and were pulled easily enough from his grasp by the vicious, sudden tug from one side. And then the overpowering odor of the other lathered qharaaks flooded his nostrils as the Dep-Troopers closed in upon him. He retched with it, and was sick. "Come on, you! You're lucky our orders were dead or alive! Straighten up in that saddle or you'll go back dragged from it!" A uyja-wood quirt split the skin across his back and somehow brought him nearly erect in the saddle. He let his eyes open a little at a time against the searing blaze of the desert. They had him ringed with their bows and barb shafts, already had his qharaak tethered to one of their own. And then they were taking him back. Back to the shimmering thing at the horizon that was the outpost village; back to the place where the gear box of his track-car had stalled for want of proper lubricant, and where the chase had begun. But he would not think about that. He knew about that, knew about the crime of it, and now he must try to think about the answers for the Dep-Court magistrate. They would be the same answers he had given the other times. There could be no new answers. New or old, none would be understood, or believed, for that matter. But he must think about something, or the half-visions in his mind would bring certain insanity now; the half-visions, the things to see that did not exist to be seen, the glaring white-yellow eyes of Procyon herself and her satellite star, the cruel black-gold eyes of the bearded, iron muscled Dep-Troopers that had caught him. "Make the prisoner stand straight before this court, Trooper!" The flesh splitting lash of pain wrenched him into a sort of pseudo-consciousness. He struggled to rise from the rough wooden floor on which he'd been thrown, and brought sound back to his ears, fuzzy sight to his eyes. The sound was of the crowd. A muffled crowd sound; they would still be outside, still struggling for a look at his broken down track despite the heavy trooper cordons that were around it, awaiting a qharaak team of sufficient size to haul it away. And the sight was of a windowless, thin-walled cubicle, sole court of this narrow, desert fringe Department, and of the Prokyman judge, and the Troopers standing idly with their stinging quirts at either side and just behind him. But he had been before Prokyman judges before. Once, even, there had been a jury of the local peasantry, and he had won an easy acquittal then because of his youth—it had been a full five Terrayears ago, when he had been barely 12 years old. He struggled unaided to his feet, faced the wooden throne like structure upon which the magistrate, girdled in coarse ruuk hide, sat toying with his polished mace of office. Beside him stood his Stenosmith. The Stenosmith held a slender scroll in one hand, but for the moment his legal superior let it go unnoticed, and fixed the Court's prisoner with a gaze as hard as Terrestrial diamonds. "Jon Kane, aged 17 Sol III years, second generation Sol III descendant, renegade colonial resident of the Sol III agricultural Department of J'iira-IX: do you understand the charges against you?" He struggled to make his tongue move to form the clipped syllables of the Interplanetary. It was an old language, but he had never spoken it as easily as the one which his father had taught him, the one which he said had come from Terra. But he must learn the Interplanetary, his father had said for some day, he might venture beyond the blue fields of the Department where he lived; someday, perhaps, even use it to speak with the starmen of the great ITA, who landed on Procyon V every seven cycles. Some day, perhaps, and the work of the language tutors would not have gone in vain. "Charges? These men have uttered no charges, Senior. They have pursued and threatened—" "Silence! Civil use of your tongue, or no tongue at all! The law prescribes trial even for heretics under the age of eleven cycles, or you would not be so fortunate as to be standing where you are! Stenosmith, your scroll!" In a quick motion the slender scroll was in the magistrate's hands, and in another it was spread before him. "You are accused of entering this Department in a tracked vehicle being driven by its own power. The vehicle is of a type no longer receiving maintenance by the Intergalactic Technical Alliance, and therefore could no longer function." "But, Senior, my vehicle is one which had, by chance, been so well constructed that it never suffered breakdown until—" "Prisoner, you are lying, and you know the penalty for perjury! Stenosmith, make note of the prisoner's falsehood to the Court. The charges continue: You, Jon Kane, have been apprehended in neighboring Departments within the last two and one-half cycles, on various occasions, at the practice of making tools, and on one occasion at least, of using such tools in the attempted repair of malfunctioning facilities awaiting the legally prescribed maintenance of the ITA. Do you deny this?" "I—" "It is therefore the conclusion of this Court that the vehicle in which you rode into this Department was repaired and set into motion by yourself! Do you deny that?" And suddenly Kane felt something stir inside him; felt it through the fatigue, through the pain, through the torture that threatened to be all-consuming. He stood straight. "No, Senior! No, I do not deny it! And I not only repaired the track-car, I built it! I built it from parts I stole at night from abandoned scrap heaps! And I made it run!" The words had barely left his lips before the Troopers who had kept the prescribed distance from him during interrogation by the Court were closed in upon him, their muscular hands on his arms and shoulders like so many vises. The Prokyman judge had suddenly ceased toying with his mace, and then only the Stenosmith was moving, furiously recording Kane's unthinkable admission. Then again the magistrate's voice; a slow, measured thing now, of sound without movement, of Death itself. "Prisoner Jon Kane, I hereby grant you your right to admit insanity. Speak." He could feel the magistrate's eyes burning into his own, could almost see the subtle turnings of the unrelenting brain behind them. "I do not so admit!" "Then it is the sentence of this Court that, at Meridian tomorrow, you shall be taken before a bow detachment of the Department Martial Patrol, and shot in the body until dead! Take him away!" He had thought that the sleep of exhaustion that must come would be dreamless, yet it was not; he had thought the pain in him that was so little relieved by stretching prone on the rough wooden floor of his tiny cell would keep the past beyond all thought and memory, but it did not. And on the instant before waking from his tortured sleep on the hot morning of his execution, the two mingled to flash again across his numbed brain; there was a split second of it, and it was all his life. There were the yellow books he had found. Yellow with age, yet somehow intact when they should have been ashes from the flames that had consumed all the rest, or disintegrated with the rot of forgetfulness and two centuries of time. And there was his father, who had caught him in the act of reading them; his father, a quiet man who spoke little, as though many thoughts were forever kept at the threshold of his lips by the force of sheer will. "Burn them, boy," he had said. "Burn them after you have finished. And your life shall depend on how silent you keep about what you have read in them. Your life, boy. When you have finished burn them!" That had been all. He had expected a sound thrashing; he had expected to see the forbidden books torn to bits before his eyes. But that had been all. And he had remembered. He had kept his silence as his father had said, as if his life depended on it, yet something had subtly grown in him that would not be repressed. He had fought it, he had lain awake in his rude cot and listened long hours to the night-sounds that wafted gently across the rolling blue fields of his father's farmland, and he had fought the thoughts, and had failed. But it was at that point in his life that Jonny Kane learned that ideas could not be burned. He remembered how he had fashioned his first tool. With it, he had shaped better shoes for his father's qharaak teams. And then there had been other tools which he had learned to link together, and his share of the day's planting had been done long before the other men returned from the fields at sunset. That was the time he had first been caught. The tools had been destroyed. And then— Then he had measured the dimensions of a new plot of land without moving from the spot where he had made his computations with a stone in the soft loam, and that time— Oh, the magistrate had not exaggerated. There had been many such crimes that he had committed, and he had not been able to help himself. Something within him would not let him stop—something that cried why and would not let him rest. But when he had unearthed the rusted scrap heap of metal forged in strange shapes, he had not told his father. Nor did his father know when he had made the new tools, or when, a full cycle after that day, he had completed the thing of old metal for which the tools had been used. By stealth he had stolen the crude oil which fueled the lamps in his father's house, and after that— After that, he knew only that it ran! Until this village. Until yesterday. Until the day before he was to die. And then Jonny Kane came awake at last. He had barely opened his eyes, and had not yet risen to his feet when the sound of chains rattled noisily on the other side of the narrow cell door. Not so soon—not so soon; he had slept too long! The narrow door was flung open, and his eyes hurt with the sudden burst of sunlight. But he saw the Prokyman jailer who had thrown him in here, and there was another. A somewhat shorter, more broad-shouldered man with skin the color of his own, who did not wear the crude tunic of the Dep-Troopers. His body was clothed in a silver-black uniform the like of which he had never seen before. And his face— Jonny studied the face, shadowed though it was by the bright light that limned it. It had to be a Terraman's face. "You are the youth—Jonny Kane?" The Terraman spoke the Interplanetary fluidly but with a strange accent, and slowly, the only possible truth was bursting upon him. But why—here—? "Answer me!" "Yes—yes, Senior, Jonny Kane." "You are of interest to the Intergalactic Technical Alliance." "I am to pay for my crime—" "I have secured your release. My name is B-Haaq; you will address me by my rank, which is Majtech. You will come with me. Your crime will only be paid for if you prove unworthy of your recruitment for cadet training. Do you understand?" Dazedly, Kane stumbled to his feet. Perhaps, after all, he had not awakened. He managed a feeble nod to the question which the Majtech had put to him. "Very well then. Come along." II The gently curved metal walls of the room gleamed softly in the pale, shadowless light, and for a moment the silent chamber seemed as huge and merciless as the infinity of Space which surrounded the great ship of which it was a part. The aged man who sat in full Alliance dress uniform before him, the Director Gentech himself, might for the moment have been a statue, and the panel of officers which flanked him hewn from the same stone. He could feel the eyes of fully a third of the ship's huge complement, twelve hundred labortechs strong, boring steadily into his back as he stood, alone in the moment's awful silence, between them and these statue-men whose swift minds were, he knew, coldly weighing the accusations against him. And then the silence was broken. Majtech B-Haaq was speaking again, his still-young face red with the heat of impressively realistic outrage. "Sires, I have laid this man's record for the last eight years as a cadet technician before you plainly, with no embellishment. And his thanks to you for selecting him from among thousands of other less fortunate youths on his planet for training as an officer of the Intergalactic Technical Alliance has been—what other word can describe it—but mutiny?" And then Cadtech Jon Kane felt the full force of his accuser's glance upon him. "You were taken from death itself in some hell town on a cinder of a planet in Canis Major. And in repayment for eight years of instruction that most men would gladly risk their lives to obtain you have compounded your long list of wrongdoings with this ultimate insult—refusal to accept your commission as Lenantech unless you are allowed to perform an experiment which is not only preposterous but which has had fair evaluation by your superiors and been found worthless." B-Haaq paused for a quick breath. "Sires, I admit that perhaps the error has been ours from the first, and that the Prokymen who intended death for this young heretic knew whereof they spoke! As Cadtech Jon Kane's Section Overseer, I recommend his reduction, both mental and physical, to mineslave, and subsequent dispatch to one of the mine worlds of the star system from which he was recruited!" It seemed suddenly to Kane that here was a crazy kind of irony—doubly crazy, doubly ironic because for the second time in his young life he was standing trial for things he had done which were not wrong! Had it been wrong in that other time, that other part of his life when he had built a vehicle that would move under its own power, with his own bare hands? Had that been so great an offense—and if so, against whom? The simple peasant folk of his planet? Against the ITA itself? If so, how? And now again. After eight diligent years of trying to learn all that had been darkly forbidden to him before, and to thousands of others like him—after the happening of some miracle that had plucked him from a Proky death cell and placed him where he was encouraged to learn secrets that had once nearly cost him his life—after all that, now again, somehow, he had offended. These men were not cruel men. Nor were the instructors overbearing taskmasters, nor the labortechs the arrogant men whom the planet-bound guardedly cursed with their derisive oaths "Space Tinker!" Yet they were bound to their ideas; ideas which must be clung to for dear life lest they become exposed to the risk of change. Kane had often enough been reminded of why that was so. The ideas, the techniques, the procedures, they'd been savior to an entire segment of a once great civilization in a half forgotten past which the ITA stubbornly called its "history." And so they must be preserved at all costs. And that was why it was wrong to question; wrong to challenge the refusal of a new idea. And that was why he was in trouble. Because these men were, in the last analysis, so little different from those who had surrounded him those eight years ago in the desert with their long bows. Guardians of two star systems, they were. The spine of civilization for over a hundred planets. Without which, the civilizations of each would surely backslide a second, and last, time. Implements of wood and stone would not support their ancient and infinitely complex structures for long, and before the evil but necessary secrets of the past could be faced with sufficient courage and re-learned, there would be only mouldering ruin. Thus taught his instructors. Therefore, this procedure and that technique are to be protected and held inviolate if men are to be kept from savagery! Remember the Holocaust, Cadet! This is the proven way! But the something in him that he had never been able to suppress—whatever it was that had made him build his vehicle despite his father's warnings to silence—that "something" was again to be his downfall, even among those who had been his rescuers. "A point of final clarification, if I may, Majtech B-Haaq." A uniformed Coltech of the Director Gentech's panel had spoken without rising from his seat. "You have charged that past difficulties with the accused have involved actual challenge of the instructorship under which he was assigned?" "At times, Sire, challenge that has been tantamount to outright refusal to accept certain standard procedures of operation, accompanied in each instance with the claim by the accused that his own would be a superior procedure! There was, you may recall, the affair of the burned out variable thrust transformer, a standard instructional problem. Cadtech Kane argued that replacement of a specific fuse in a specific circuit was ample solution, rather than replacement of the entire complement of fuses, which has of course been standard procedure in such an instance for two full centuries. And again—" "That quite fully answers my question, Majtech, thank you." Then another moment of awful silence—the awful timelessness of deliberation. Jon Kane could feel the cold perspiration that made his well cut cadet uniform tunic damp and clinging. He tried to repress a shiver, to stand as completely motionless as the men before him sat. "Majtech B-Haaq." It was the Director Gentech himself who spoke. His words were slow, measured, and spoken in a voice which might have been that of a man twenty years his junior. Gentech Starn, at the age of ninety, was still a strong man and a strong leader, and his name had been synonymous with the three letters ITA and the interstellar authority for which they stood for every one of the sixty years since his father, Director Gentech before him, had met death on one of Sol System's cold, hostile outplanets. "Sire." "You have prosecuted with excellence. However, may I suggest that I am yet to be wholly satisfied in this matter. Your accused must have admirable potentialities as a technical officer, or he would not have been selected for training, nor would such effort have been expended to obtain him, at the very outset. Whatever challenges, as you charge he has made, could not, then, have been totally irresponsible ones. And it has been a long time since there has been technological challenge of the Intergalactic Technical Alliance!" A hardly discernible smile touched the faded, withering lips, and Kane thought he had detected a momentary lightness in the last words they had spoken. "So it is my suggestion, Majtech—and gentlemen of this panel, that final decision hinge upon the success or failure of the experiment which the accused is held to have proposed, and which he so adamantly refuses to desert!" "But—Sire, I submit that Cadtech Kane has admitted, by his own words as well as his actions, his guilt in this matter! He has freely confessed to each of the charges; has defiantly and openly held that his experiment will succeed, and has refused retraction of his stand in this very council chamber—" "Our decision, Majtech B-Haaq, in cognizance of the folly of unduly wasting an otherwise competent cadet technician on the mining planets unless justified to our complete satisfaction, is that the experiment be allowed to proceed! This hearing is therefore adjourned!" There were no others in the workshop to which he had been assigned. He was to work on his drive unit alone, Majtech B-Haaq had ordered, and of course the reason was obvious. One young heretic was enough. But what if the glittering, finely-tooled object that rested on the long workbench before him was wrong and would not work? Yet he knew that it would! Mounted in a standard model spacetender, the drive unit which he'd devised would easily produce five times the speed and power, would consume less than half as much atomic fuel, would quadruple range, last twice as long. It had taken slightly over a month to build; B-Haaq had grudgingly granted him all the time he estimated he'd need, but he'd hurried nonetheless—sixteen, sometimes eighteen hours at a stretch. Yet the work had not been difficult. As he'd tooled and formed the simple, compact parts and watched his creation grow steadily from one day to the next, he had marvelled that certain self-evident innovations of design had not been adopted years before. It was not, he knew, that he was so much cleverer than they! Rather, it was almost as though such improvement had been deliberately avoided. And ITA space drives had remained cumbersome, overly-complex and unwieldy. He straightened from his work. It was done, and the ships of the Intergalactic Technical Alliance would be caught up a solid century at least! He had now only to request an installation crew of labortechs, supervise for a few hours, and then— "Master Kane!" The startled cadtech snapped to immediate attention. It was B-Haaq. He had entered the workshop without signalling. "Yes Sire!" "I must make a report of your progress to the Gentech's headquarters." He spoke levelly, but Kane could feel the resentment in his voice. "My work is completed, sire. I was at this moment preparing to summon a labortech installation crew, and to supervise—" "I'll do the summoning, Master Kane! And the supervision! I don't believe it necessary to remind you that even if you have refused your commission, I accepted my own quite some time ago! This mechanism is completed, you say?" "Yes, sire. I hope that I shall be permitted to pilot—" B-Haaq was bending over the gleaming unit, his face expressionless. "No one is to pilot the craft, Master Kane," he said without looking up. "We of the ITA still know something of remote radio control, I assure you. You will work from Navigation Information Center, at controls already set up there for the purpose." Kane kept his silence, and tried to keep his disappointment from showing in his face. "Tell me, Master Kane—" and the Section Overseer had straightened and was now facing him squarely again, "—have you ever been told why you were picked—I believe a better word is rescued—from that hell planet of yours in Procyon for the ITA?" "Yes, sire, I was, during basic indoctrination," Kane answered. "That is fortunate, then. You know, at least, that we thought we could make a technician out of you! Report to the NIC room in one hour, Master Kane! Your little show will be all ready by then. You're dismissed!" Director Gentech Starn himself, flanked by three of his closest aides, entered the NIC room. They took standing positions behind Kane. And behind them, at the prescribed distance of respect, were grouped the ship's full complement of Section Overseers and instructors. Kane stood before the central nav-screen and its compact banks of controls. Suddenly a red blinker flashed, dully reflected from the myriad tiers of sensitive mechanism which lined the room's curving bulkheads. He pressed a stud, and the screen before him came alive. Blackness, studded with the tiny white-hot sparks that were the suns of the Milky Way. And then suddenly a larger one which moved swiftly. And then he was no longer aware of the electric silence that engulfed him, and there was no sensation, no thought but the singular sensation and thought which co-ordinated nerve and sensitively disciplined muscle; which directed his fingers unerringly across the studded control-banks and guided the streaking spacetender as surely as though they reached into Space and touched it, holding it by their own strength to its wide, curving course. Relay gauges hummed and clicked softly; velocity and power readings registered, and nav-grid traced the fleet craft's path through the void. Then Kane spoke. "Sires, as you can see, the spacetender in which my drive unit has been installed is now proceeding at what is usually considered to be topmost velocity and with what would normally be maximum power output for such a craft." He could feel his voice waver at first, and then with the sound of it and the reassuring feeling of the control studs beneath his fingertips, it strengthened, became firm. And he knew they were listening. Listening as though it were the Gentech himself who spoke. Then he summoned up all his courage. "I will now," he said, "accelerate the tender to treble its present speed, while increasing power output by approximately six-fold. If you will watch the central group of gauges carefully, please." He jammed his finger down on a white, diamond shaped stud, and his breath clogged in his throat. The screen followed the tender's course faithfully. The gauges chuckled and hummed. And then the blackness was torn open with a coruscating, soundless flash, and the tender was in an instant nothing but a white cloud of rapidly dissipating atoms! No!... No!... No! There was no sound from behind him, but he knew that the huge chamber was quickly and silently emptying. He did not turn from the screen. It was black again, now, relieved only by the tiny sparks that were the stars. He did not know how long he stood there or how long he watched. Minutes—or even hours, perhaps. He knew only that there was an uncontrollable thing of rage and disbelief and helpless frustration seething bitterly inside him that would not abate, and with it was a crazy jumble of thoughts that made no sense at all. He heard a man behind him then. It was B-Haaq. "A pity you've learned your lesson so late," he heard the Majtech say, "Mine slave!" III Jon Kane's compact quarters seemed more restricted than ever; the curved bulkheads closed in upon him, and he was an animal in a trap. Waiting, he thought, for the slaughter. He knew it would be that. He would not have a chance when his trial resumed. There would be no way of tricking B-Haaq into admitting the thing he'd done, and no matter how the charge were uttered, it would be the charge of a prisoner, and would fall on less than unsympathetic ears. And of course with the spacetender so many blasted atoms adrift in Infinity, there could be no proof. Why did B-Haaq hate him so? This was more than an officer simply doing his duty as he saw it—this was singular, personal hatred! But why? He glanced for the tenth time in thirty minutes at his wristime; the sleeping-period was half over, and he knew he would probably be awake for the remaining half. And the remaining half was so slow in going. If only there were something he could do. If he could only build another unit and install it himself! If— Fully clothed, he sat up in his bunk. Hesitated only a moment, then crossed the small cubicle to its single narrow hatch. The simple time-lock that secured it was all that held him prisoner—a traditional matter of form, since any skillful mastertech could, with a length of slender wire, applied in the right places.... The plan took shape in his mind in the few moments it took him to render the sensitive mechanism useless; it had been rigged for alarm, but the alarm never sounded. In a moment he was on the catwalk. He strode swiftly and silently, the fine length of wire still in one hand. He almost passed the seldom used hatch when he came to it, so cleanly was it hinged into its bulkhead. But he knew what was beyond it, and the knowledge seemed to hasten his skillful fingers. Within moments, the hatch opened soundlessly, and he was inside the chamber. The Flagship's armory. Were it not for the labortech articifers, the neatly stacked weapons would have been rusted, useless things long since. "For use ONLY on alien, unknown and possibly hostile planets" the ITA regulations read. It was a rule that applied throughout the entire fleet, and as far as he knew, had been all but forgotten. For within the scope of the ITA's interest there no longer were any "alien, unknown and possibly hostile planets," and on the rest, arms had been unnecessary to the ITA for centuries. For it had a far more powerful weapon than any it could devise of metal. It had merely to refuse its services for awhile. A smile spread slowly across Jon's face as he began a selective examination of the weapons. Maybe he'd even find a longbow! Lord, here was even a device that propelled small projectiles by means of explosive cartridges! These things had been unnecessary for centuries! But slowly, the smile changed to a worried frown. First one weapon and then another he discarded, and then another. But he must find one! And then he could make B-Haaq admit what he'd done. It was a muffled, metallic sound but it registered on his consciousness and he whirled. Even as he came erect the lights glared suddenly at full strength; whoever had so silently stepped in behind him had lost no time in finding the bulkhead transformer stud. It was the sleep period duty officer, and a hastily snatched hand gun was levelled at him. And even in the sudden brilliance of the lights, he recognized her. Lenantech Deanne Starn, the Gentech's niece, herself! "Get your hands up, Cadet!" "Why? The thing you've got in your hand hasn't held a charge since Hanna grew teeveeyes." He grinned. Even in the white glare, she wasn't hard to look at. There were a number of stories that had circulated their way through the cadet quarters, but then. Most rumors had it that B-Haaq himself was the lucky man, and there were few others that held differently. Those of the ship's women who didn't have the slender figure, the crisp cut pale blonde hair or the wide blue eyes and fine features and quick, alert mind that so typified the family of Starn were never too badly off, for that reason. For to the men aboard, she was B-Haaq's, and that was the end of it! She seemed not to have heard what he said. "You're Cadtech Kane, aren't you? Do you think this additional charge of attempted unlawful procurement of arms is going to help your case to any extent?" "I did think so, yes." "You're as good as in the mines now. And I don't follow your logic. Don't move a muscle!" "You might as well throw that thing away, Lenantech, it's no good. I'm still looking for one that is, myself. And if you're going to report me, I'm certainly not going to try to stop you. That'd just get me in even deeper, wouldn't it?" Her features were white, motionless. Only her wrist moved; she deflected the muzzle of her weapon but a fraction of an inch and squeezed the trigger. The gun clicked emptily, and that was all it did. "You—" "I nothing. Just told you. Look, Lenantech, people have shot at me with longbows, hauled me almost naked through the deserts of Prokyfive, beat me with lashes, and sabotaged me. Now I've had enough." "You're not making any sense to me, Master Kane. You have just one minute to get out of here, or—" "You mean you wouldn't report me if I did?" She flushed. "I didn't say that. But since you're already as good as—" "That's just it. But if I can find what I'm after here, I just might be able to change that a little. That spacetender of mine didn't fall apart out there because it wouldn't work! Not by a damn sight it didn't!" "Be careful what you say, Master Kane!" "Truth's the truth, isn't it? Even if I can't prove a certain Majtech wanted to see me flop and get thrown out of here badly enough to ruin my experiment? Maybe I asked too many questions; or answered too many the wrong way. Your guess is as good as mine. But instead of logical explanations or fair evaluations, I got a court-martial instead. Maybe you can tell me, Lenantech—why replace an entire distributor head assembly on a farm tractor when replacement of the rotor may be all that's necessary? Why a new spark plug when all that is required is the resetting of its points? Why stick to a logarithm with a base of 10 when other bases could often make an entire mathematical operation far more simple? And if a man can build you a better drive unit, why smash it for him and discredit him?" "I think the court took ample cognizance of those questions, Master Kane." She had lowered the weapon, and had even come a step closer to him. And for a moment, he thought that he had seen a flash of interest in her eyes. "I know what the court did. But you can think as well as anybody else, can't you? What are your answers, ma'am?" "This is hardly the place for a history lecture, Master Kane. But the ITA was formed of those few technicians who managed to escape the wrath of the war weary civilizations who turned upon them and upon men called scientists, whatever they were, as those to blame for system-wide destruction and wholesale death. You have been taught that. Many of their methods and much of their knowledge was lost. You have been taught that also. But it was those methods and that knowledge which saved them from destruction once, and made the ITA possible. What was not lost is sacred knowledge, Master Kane, and for only a few to know, and for those few to guard militantly lest one jot more of it become lost!" "You're right. I've been taught all that. But you still haven't answered my questions! Suppose I told you I could do a Project AA in less than an hour's time, and guarantee it good for five hundred years. What would you say to that?" He saw her eyes widen. "That is sheer nonsense and you know it, cadet! A double-A takes six solid months except in event of emergency, and is good for fifty years at maximum! Why, even the geniuses of those ancient war years who were forced to conceive and devise the Project could not have done better—" Jon grinned again. "Some day maybe I'll show you, Lenantech! Me and the planets and you! But you better get going and report me before you get yourself in a jam—" "Yes, indeed she had!" The girl blanched, and Jon felt sick. It was B-Haaq. It was always B-Haaq. Standing now in the hatchway, black eyes blazing. Suddenly Jon felt something snap inside him; suddenly the delicate mechanisms of his brain which had kept reason and desire on a tautly balanced plane of stability failed him, and frustrated rage was in his throat again, and the blinding white of the exploding spacetender swam again before his eyes. He felt his right arm sweeping up over his head, felt the weight of something at its end, and then felt the arm go down, relieved suddenly of the weight. The heavy hand gun flew straight at B-Haaq, and glanced from his head. The man slumped, fell almost soundlessly. And for a full second, it seemed to Jon that time had stopped. The girl was motionless, the look of disbelief frozen on her features, and there was a numbing paralysis gripping his own body. Then he was in motion, and it was an automatic thing, his arms and legs moving swiftly as though fully independent of his brain. Within seconds he had pulled the unconscious B-Haaq into a far corner of the armory and covered him with his own cloak of office. He pulled a double rack of neuro-rifles in front of the shapeless heap, and then before she could pull away from him he had the girl by one arm and was propelling her toward the hatchway. "Kane, what do you think—" "No time to talk, ma'am. These lights have been on too long—somebody's going to notice the energy consumption in General Control any minute now. Besides which, B-Haaq saw you with me, and heard me telling you to get going and report me. So if I didn't kill him—" "You're crazy! He wouldn't—" Jon tightened his grip, looked straight into her eyes. "You know he would, ma'am. If only because he hated me so much, and he found you with me. We've got to get going." "You let me go!" With a quick wrench, she twisted free of him. "You're forgetting, aren't you, that no matter where in the ship you go it will be only a matter of time before you're found? And if they can give you anything worse than the mines—" "All right then, stay if you want to! Go ahead and gamble that our friend's either dead or has a forgiving nature hidden away somewhere—the only thing I'm sure about is that he didn't blow up all the ship's spacetenders." "You'll be overhauled in no time!" "Ten minutes' work and I can triple the speed of any one of those buckets. You coming, or not?" He turned from her, ducked swiftly through the hatchway and chose a port-side ramp that would carry him up to the Maintenance deck. There would be at least one tender berthed there in good working condition. He flattened himself against the ramp wall as he neared its end; listened. Nothing. Maintenance was just sitting around as usual, and during the sleep period, there'd be only a skeleton crew. In the semi-darkness, he reached up, felt his fingers brush along the curved, smooth ceiling of the gently inclined passage. There; an emergency pressure duct, designed to open automatically in the event of malfunction of the ship's atmospheric regulators. Emergency pressure could be built up through the ducts in the event of any sudden fall of more than eight ounces per square inch; and would be instantly released should it mount more than three pounds above. All he had to do was jam this single duct to the "excess" position and hold his breath. It was like picking a lock with his bare fingers, and they felt like fat sausages. And then he had it. There was a sudden scream of escaping air about him, and he plunged forward. Somewhere an alarm clanged, and he knew that within moments the skeleton maintenance crew would be suited and pouring in on the ramp with everything it had, from Geiger counters to baling wire. Already, even above the near deafening alarms, he could hear the pounding of their feet. He dashed for it. Reached the berth, and there was a tender snuggled into it, ready and waiting. He had the small craft's outer lock opened within seconds. "KANE!" He whirled, even as the inner lock was sliding open. It was Deanne Starn. And she was running toward him. The inner lock was open, and Jon pushed her through it, and then had himself strapped before the miniature control console almost before the blinker winked to signal that the outer and inner lock ports were sealed. He waited a nerve wracking twenty seconds before the Flagship's flank yawned open, and then jammed the firing studs down with his accelerators full open. The tender leaped from its berth like a wounded thing, and for a moment Space spun sickeningly, and Jon's eyes blurred from the unprecedented take-off acceleration. Might as well break all the rules in the book. Then the stabilizers were taking over, and things began to straighten out. He flipped the craft's automatics in, unbuckled his straps and got weightlessly underway toward the tender's aft-section. "Kane, where are you going? Where are we going?" "I'm going to diddle with this tub until that big barge back there can't pick us up for Spacedust. And we're going to a little backwater planetoid that the ITA only gets to once every thirty years or so. They used to call it Titan." "A satellite of one of the Sol planets, isn't it?" "You're coming up with a lot of smart answers all of a sudden." "Can you—can you find it? All by yourself?" "My father was born right next door. I can find it." IV Earth trembled. She shook like a palsied animal, and great fissures rent her thick hide as tidal waves lashed like gigantic hammers at the coastlines of her continents and mercilessly overran a host of the jewel-like islets that studded her vast oceans. Her artificial satellites had long since come crashing down, and her natural moon teetered threateningly in its age-old course. Great, jagged chunks broke loose as the barren mass of rock circled perilously close to de Roche's Limit. Some of the lower, sturdier buildings in the cities which dotted her wide continents were yet intact, and in the largest, the capital city itself, a number of the broad, deep-laid malls and thoroughfares were still at least partially passable. But Senator Martin Stine, Conservative Socialist representing the state of Penn-York, had trouble keeping his temper in check nonetheless. It was temper aroused as much from the anxiety of deep rooted fear as from the irritation of trying to guide his pneumo-car through the debris-littered avenue leading to the capitol, and the thought jittered again through his mind that he should have taken one of the overheads even though some of them were sagging dangerously in places. But he hadn't taken one, and there was less than a quarter-mile to go. If he hadn't been adding so indiscriminately of late to his normally 195-pound, six-foot two-inch frame he could've parked the damn car and run the rest of the way. Only a block or so yet. And at this session, the fur was going to fly for sure if the planet hung together long enough for it to even get underway. He'd warned them the last time about the Tinkers. Deaf. Everybody. His heavy face was red when he at length arrived in front of the capitol mainramp. He didn't wait for a robotparker to come and take over, but simply stopped his vehicle in its tracks and abandoned it where it stood. And despite the extra pounds he'd recently put on, he moved with an almost feline grace up the broad, inclining ramp, the anger steadily mounting in him. He entered the vast chamber and took his seat, just as the muted roar of private, nervous conversation was broken by the tri-diannouncer. "Gentlemen, the President-General of the United Earth Republics!" Silence. Then the crashing noise of a thousand men getting to their feet. A small, gray-looking man with a prematurely bald head crossed the front of the great chamber flanked by his Secretaries of State and Defense, then mounted the podium alone. And the emergency session of the Senior Congress of the United Earth Republics was begun. Senator Martin Stine was the tenth man to be recognized. He rose quickly and plucked the jeepmike from its recessed spot in his desktop. "So far," he began, omitting even to begin his remarks with the traditional salutation to the President and the group as a whole, "I have heard ten recommendations for procedure in the present crisis, and each one has been about as jelly-kneed as the one before it! There's one solution to this thing and only one. If we don't want this planet to be scattered to the four corners of Space within the next 72 hours we must get Project AA underway and damn quick! I've been informed that there is a Tinker ship within thirty hours' flight of this system. If we act now, and call them in as we should've, on an ESR, five years ago, we still might be able to get out of this one with whole skins. Some of us, anyway. Gentlemen, the casualty lists as of an hour ago weren't very encouraging." "Will the Senator from Penn-York yield for a question?" Stine's cold blue eyes snapped. "Yield for one minute to the Senator from Texamerica." "The ITA effected a Project AA for this system about eleven years ago, did they not? And have answered exactly seven Emergency Service Requests in the last one hundred twenty years, have they not? In view of such frequent assistance, it would seem—" "What the Senator from Texamerica really means is that if the ITA had to do a double-A for the second time in eleven years, the reflection on their prestige would make things a little gummy in some quarters—isn't it?" A gavel rapped sharply. Stine threw a quick glance at the section reserved for native Earth political representatives of the ITA, and he saw that one was already on his feet demanding recognition. "I yield for all the time you need! Go ahead!" Stine sat down, his youthful looking face mottled with tension. "I may remind the Senator from Penn-York that the ITA has some one hundred twelve other worlds in addition to this planet to look after! And as far as it is concerned, nuisance planets are better off dead! If our torsion screens were inoperable; if there were no other way to hold the planet together until the next scheduled visit nine years from now, then perhaps an ESR would be in order. But since it is obvious that this system's Gravity-Justifier is only in temporary disorder, and was designed to be self repairing, an ESR for a double-A is simply out of the question. I repeat. As far as the ITA is concerned, a nuisance planet—" "Yes, and that's just the stranglehold you've got on all of your hundred and thirteen worlds!" Stine had leapt to his feet, and the President-General's gavel banged furiously, but he paid it no heed at all. "'Be good boys and do what we tell you and leave us alone while we're busy playing God or we'll let you go back to stone axes and caves'—that's what you're trying to say, isn't it?" The gavel clamored deafeningly through the President-General's lectern-mike, and the gray, bald man was now standing himself. But there was a sudden surge of voices and a scattered applause throughout the entire chamber that had begun quickly to swell, drowning out even Stine's own voice. Then died slowly, so that his words could be heard again. "Playing God might be all right if you can prove all the time to all the people that you've got all the answers to all the problems! But it might not be so easy if you begin to lose your touch; lose some of the answers! I hope the ITA representative isn't trying to tell us that the organization for which he works is no longer capable of repairing a Gravity-Justifier so that it will keep the planets in their orbits where they belong! Or am I right?" "That is a preposterous accusation and—" The gavel thundered. "—and I demand its retraction immediately!" "Friend, I was born on this planet the same as you were but I work for it. I'm not standing idly by to see it destroyed because your buddies are afraid to admit they might be slipping a little and don't want it to show! I—" Thunderous applause. Half the chamber was on its feet, now, and even without the jeepmikes the cheers would have been deafening. "I say, Mr. President, if we're to believe the ITA is what it pretends to be—a technological service organization dedicated to the galactic welfare—it be called in immediately for a Project AA, and, if it refuses, that it be publicly denounced by this government as no longer competent in that capacity!" When Stine sat down this time, the ovation that followed his words left the chief executive little choice. A vote was called, and Stine realized that somehow, his laborious weeks and months of propagandizing and mass proselytization had at last taken root. It had been comforting to know, at least, that had he failed, there was a well-appointed, powerful space-cruiser waiting for him at a secret place in the mountains to the north. It was still comforting to know. Because the Tinkers would have to come, now, if only to save face. And, of course, they wouldn't be able to deliver. And then— He stirred restlessly in his seat as the vote was being tallied, was nearly thrown from it once as a great tremor shook the massive building; excited knots of men who had begun crowding the aisles were bowled in scrambled confusion to the floor. And Stine smiled a tight, small smile to himself. Even Nature was doing her bit. A hurrying page boy brushed past his desk in the crowded aisle, and he suddenly felt something small and hard pressed into his palm. He knew what it was by the feel of it, but it would have to wait until he could leave. He did not have to wait long. The President-General himself announced the result of the vote, and within the next half hour an ESR would be on its way to the nearest Tinker ship. There were a few cries of "Railroad!" and "—demand a recount!" amid the noisy babble of the adjourning session, but Stine was already on his way. A second tremor brought him to his knees at the main exit of the great chamber; it stopped the post-mortems cold, and sent the august body of Senior Congressmen scurrying for other exits themselves, and Stine's early departure went unnoticed, even by waiting newsmen who had themselves been scattered unceremoniously half the length of the wide exit corridor. The pressurelift lowered him quickly to his basement offices. A panel slid silently from his impressive Martian drokii-wood desk. Then it was but a matter of slipping the tiny microfilm spool from the flat, coin-sized container that the page boy had so carefully delivered to him and inserting it in the compact projector long enough to completely memorize the coded symbols. Then he destroyed the strip and container together. Almost casually he plucked the comphone from its cradle, but nicked a tiny stud that would keep the televideo blank. He dialed, waited. "Newton? For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The answer is yes." He hung up. V Saturn pulsed palely in the void before them as though painted in three dimensions by a master artist. Kane pointed through the duraglass conning bubble at the spectacle. Ringed planets were rare, even in the wide fastnesses of Space which the ITA commanded with its far-flung fleet. And off to the huge, banded planet's lee swung the largest of its satellites, long since made livable by the now forgotten cleverness of the Solmen. "Titan?" Deanne asked. "It is," Jon said. "May I ask you why you decided on it? There seem to be others. Full sized planets, even." She was standing close to him now, watching the silent beauty of the Spacescape as though, for the moment, she had forgotten all else. Jon looked at her, and wondered. Why, really, had she come with him. "Before the Wars," he began, "Solmen made of that satellite their first project in conversion; battled it from a dead, frozen wasteland to a fertile, life sustaining oasis in Space. Back in the days before the Scientists were eliminated and the technicians shot down where they stood. Back when spaceships didn't even look like spaceships—clumsy, triple-sphered affairs—but they worked. I don't think the Solmen left on Titan ever quite forgot how it felt that day their last link with Sol III was severed; their last ship destroyed by the mobs that came from the mother planet despite the feeble resistance they were able to put up. Last link except for the ITA, that is, but of course they didn't know there'd even be an ITA in those days. Things were pretty rough for awhile." "How do you know all this? According to what is taught in the history classes—" She let her sentence trail off and suddenly looked him full in the face. And comprehension stirred in her eyes. "You're not—not some erratic, mutant genius, then, as B-Haaq told my uncle." "Hardly, Deanne, hardly. You've guessed right, I think. I got ahold of some old books once. That's all. In some ways, I know more than the ITA has forgotten in two hundred years. And that's why I picked Titan. I could be wrong, of course. But of all places where resentment might still smoulder, even after so long a time, Titan seemed like the place. The Solmen there knew what science and technology could accomplish for men's benefit; they knew best of all because they had helped accomplish the miracle of creating a living planet out of a hunk of sterile rock. And because they had, many of them were slaughtered, as were the other technicians and scientists in the dark days following the Holocaust. Somehow I don't think they've forgotten. And that's why I think they'll help us." "You mean there's—you mean the ITA is actually resented? That's impossible! There are great welcomes for us wherever one of our ships lands! Why, were it not for us, civilization would—" "You're forgetting, Deanne, that those technicians that were able to save their hides during the dark days, and who later became the ITA, were running away; beating a hasty retreat, a strategic withdrawal, whatever you want to call it. They withdrew into a pretty impregnable shell of their own, from which, I might add, they've never even tried to come out. The Space Tinkers, they're occasionally called—" "Space Tinkers!" "Sure. Descendants of armorers of the past. Be glad you're not called gypsies! You're getting the benefit of the doubt. At least it's pretty well realized that the ITA can trace its ancestry to real technicians!" Kane grinned at her, and fleetingly thought how much the quick flush of anger added to the beauty of her patrician features. "Anyway, for Tinker eyes and ears, there's never been anything but welcome and praise wherever they've landed. Nothing but, and very militantly so, too, I'll tell you. Nobody wants to die when Tinker medicine can save them, to freeze when Tinker repaired heating plants can keep them warm in Winter. But underneath—underneath, the power the ITA holds over the very livelihood of civilization is pretty painfully felt." "But—but we are not dictators, Kane! That is a lie! We have never taken advantage—" "True enough, and that's all on the credit side. I don't think the ITA has ever had any other motive than keeping itself safe. Making sure that it would never suffer the near-extinction that its forbears did. But in so doing, you see, they've had to work themselves into a pretty commanding position. And they've succeeded. They've denied technical learning and training to all the planets, under penalty of forfeiture of the very necessary periodic technical service upon which the planets depend to retain the comforts of civilized living—" "I realize all that. Where, after all, would any of the planets be if the Gravity-Justifiers finally gave out for lack of proper maintenance? At least the history that I was taught said that during the Wars, planetesimals and even whole planets were annihilated in an effort to so upset a system's gravitational balance that the resulting upheavals would mean death to every living thing in that system. But there were some technicians—" "Scientists, Deanne." "Well, whatever they were, who were able to devise mechanisms to float in orbits of their own, warping Space in such a way as to create an artificial balance. Those Geejays saved billions of lives, and after the bloody reaction from the Wars and the men who invented them were killed, who else was left to keep them in working order? I should think people would—" "Thank the ITA?" "Well, yes, of course." There was a defiant look on her face, but Jon Kane was grinning. Saturn hulked far to their starboard side, now, and the ship's automatics were bringing them in dead on Titan. The planetoid was growing visibly bigger by the minute, and the other Ring of its primary was casting the interior of the spacetender in weird, vari-colored shadow. "If you were out there in a suit and somebody else was holding your oxytank, controlling just how much air you could have, how would you feel about him? Would you feel like thanking him for letting you have air to breathe?" "Well, I—" "You'd keep a damned close eye on him. And if he started telling you what to do and when to do it or he'd suffocate you, you'd get to hating his guts even if he behaved like the spirit of Christ Himself!" "Who taught you all this, Master Kane? Who is this Christ?" "Look, Deanne, a grown man should be capable of thinking for himself! But before you go getting sore at me again, just answer this one about the guy holding your oxytank—suppose, somehow, he forgot, little by little, how to work the valve—and realized that there was a chance you might find out about it? He wouldn't be in the pilot's seat anymore, would he?" "He wouldn't be able to shut me off, if that's what you mean," she said quickly, going along now with his analogy. "But he wouldn't be able to give me more air in a hurry if I needed it, either!" "And so then what happens?" The girl's face was suddenly grim. For a long moment, Kane could see, she was thinking, and thinking hard. And then she said at length, "Is that where you come in?" "If I can give you back your tank of air, I guess it is." "And if you can't?" "Then I'm afraid the one in the worst trouble will be the guy who's holding it," Jon answered. And then he turned from her, reseated himself before the control panels and kicked out the automatics. In minutes, he had the tender swung to, and was climbing down his jet to one of Titan's largest spaceports. It was still a bright planet, and its artificial atmosphere, islands and great lakes were as his father had described them. Titan was, indeed, an oasis in the cruel coldness of the void. He landed the tender with scarcely a jar, and then wordlessly, he and Deanne opened the small craft's locks and stepped out on the tarmac to greet the landing party that had been alerted to receive them. Two tall, cloaked men strode forward. "Jon Kane and Deanne Starn?" "Greetings—" Kane began. "You will come with us," one of them said. His short red beard seemed to glisten in the sun-like atmospheric light. "You are under arrest!" The small, air-conditioned cell was clean, at least, and a far cry from those on Procyon V. There was even a low tablet on which to lie, and Jon sprawled himself out upon it. He wished, vaguely, that they hadn't separated him from the girl. She was a pretty thing—and, had brains. Between the two of them they might've figured a way out, but alone it was like beating your head against a carbonite wall. He'd been as wrong as a man could get about the Solmen on Titan, all right. The security police who'd booked them and brought them here hadn't said much, but it took little enough intelligence to reason that the Tinker Flagship, having discovered that the tender wasn't to be overtaken, had simply broadcast an all-planets bulletin. He'd been a fool to put down at a regular spaceport. He'd just walked straight into it. And now it was simply a matter of waiting for either another tender or the Flagship itself to come and get them. He wasn't sure what would happen to Deanne, but for himself, a murder charge, surely. That accounted for the cell they'd assigned him to. It was unlike the Proky jails in more ways than one; as escape-proof as the tomb itself. Kane even had the feeling that the cell was watching him. He rolled over on his back, examined the rivetless steel ceiling with his eyes. And all the walls and the floor were the same, save for the tiny vents at the far edge of the ceiling for air circulation, and the almost microscopically fine lines in the near wall that outlined the foot-thick cell door. He surveyed the walls, ceiling and floor again, and the only opening was the air duct, far too small for a man to crawl through, even without its solid looking louvres. Suddenly, Kane remembered the ruse he had employed aboard the Flagship. Instantly he was on his feet. He hauled the pallet beneath the tiny grilled spot in the ceiling, and standing on it, was barely able to touch the louvres. The Solmen of Titan grew taller than those of Terra. He had stripped himself to the waist, and folded the firm fabric of his Cadtech tunic into a solid wad. Then held it against the air vent with all the strength of his fingers until his arms ached! The cubicle grew stuffy, and sweat trickled maddeningly down across his bared ribs. He relaxed the muscles of his arms just as a faint draft flitted across his back. The door was sliding silently open behind him! He was through it almost before the wadded tunic he had dropped hit the floor behind him. He kept moving with all the strength that was in him down the long, wide corridor. But there were no guards. Peculiar. Suddenly a strange vibration shook the corridor floor. Probably something in the planetoid's artificial gravity rectifier that needed looking after. Lord, if the ITA took care of the rectifier the way it did the air conditioner alarm, everybody'd soon be floundering in the normal, unpleasantly-slight gravitation of the tiny planetoid. A man would be lucky if he weighed forty pounds! The corridor trembled again, this time more violently; it threw him momentarily off balance, and he could not regain it before the next one hit and sent him sprawling. He struggled to his knees, and there was a terrible rending sound above him. He looked up. A jagged rent was splitting the corridor even as he watched! A 'quake of some kind. He paused for a moment, catching his breath, trying to think. And then suddenly there was the sound of running feet and a guard commander's voice booming in a resounding echo down the smooth corridor sides. "Man the control boards. Let 'em out!" Doors slid open at every side of him; some were already buckled and opened only partially, but the men inside got out, and within seconds the corridor was full of running, howling humanity from every colony in the system. Jon almost bowled a guard off his feet. He grabbed the man at the shoulder, thumbs digging in at the painful points. "Talk! What the seven hells is going on?" "Run, you fool! Let go! The Rings are coming in on us! The whole damn planetoid is starting to break up! Ow—damn you! It's the Geejay. Earth's been going to hell for over an hour now!" "And they let it hit here without warning? ANSWER ME!" "You crazy? Warp beams are only for the ITA. Old fashioned radio's all we've got, and it takes eighty minutes—" "Thanks!" Jon released the desperate man and thrust him aside, fought his way back into the crowded corridor. He had to get out of the building but he was trapped in this crazy mob. Another tremor, this one worse than any of the rest, sent the choked corridor into a maelstrom of kicking, clawing confusion. And Jon was the first to see the small panel now blinking EMERGENCY EXIT, sliding slowly, grudgingly back against a bent frame. He was through it first. He broke into an open prison yard where the squat, streamlined form of a jetgiro was parked. Crazy thing, jetgiro sitting that way in a prison yard, as though it were just waiting for somebody who'd be coming out the emergency exit. He bolted for it. Had to hurry—the others weren't far behind, and if they caught up he'd never get the thing into the air. They'd claw him down. He took a quick look upward at the sky, and it seemed to be on fire. Even in the brightness of Titan's artificial daylight the hurtling particles from the disturbed rings flamed blindingly. Saturn itself filled half the sky, and even to the naked eye the great rings were flaring dangerously at the edges. He got behind the controls of the giro just as the mob broke through the exit. He prayed that the engines weren't too cold, and even as the durastone floor of the yard split jarringly beneath him and swallowed a dozen men, he punched the Lift stud and the small vehicle rose heavily into the air. Cold, of course. No ... engine-heat almost normal. Then— "Sorry, Master Kane." And that was all he heard. There was an awful, sudden pain in his head and then he felt nothing else. VI Deanne saw the panel blinking EMERGENCY EXIT too late, and her momentary hesitation at the cross corridor spelled an abrupt finis to her desperate attempt. The lone guard who otherwise would never have seen her brought his springbow up with a look of dazed astonishment on his bearded features, and she froze. "Don't—please!" "How did you escape?" He moved closer, springbow was cocked taut. "My—my cell door. For some reason it failed to shut properly, and I—I—" "That is a likely story indeed, pretty one! Escapes are not made from this prison quite so easily! You come along with me ... come on!" His command ended in a sharp yell of surprise. The springbow clattered from his grasp as the corridor suddenly rocked crazily, and Deanne felt herself thrown bodily against the exit panel! It slid back at her touch, and she was through it, and then thrown headlong as a second tremor wrenched her from her feet. The whole world seemed to be disintegrating around her. She found strength somehow and ran again, trying vainly to keep her balance, to keep the pitching corridor floor beneath her feet. And then running toward her—God, another guard— No! No, it was no guard! And it couldn't be— He caught her, held her without a word. "B-Haaq! B-Haaq—how—" "Majtech B-Haaq to you from now on! Just on my way to your cell to take you back where you belong! And that upstart Kane! Only this might save me the trouble—" He hauled her roughly after him into the open rampway which dipped gently into the wide parking yards. The ramp trembled, bucked beneath them but she somehow kept from falling. "I—I thought you—Kane—" "Thought he killed me, did you? He came close enough, and he'll pay for it! Come along...." They crossed the yards at a half run. B-Haaq was hauling her up on the fin-step, and then the outer lock was opening, and they were inside. The small space craft rocked sickeningly on its mounts. B-Haaq barked to his waiting pilot. "Up-ship, you fool! Do you want us wrecked before we're even underway?" The grim faced labortech punched his studs almost before Deanne had secured herself in an ackseat, and then with a dangerous overload of power, the tender jumped free of the shuddering planetoid. "B-Haaq—for the love of Pluto, what's happening—" "Haven't you learned yet what it's like when a Geejay breaks down? Sol III has been taking this for over an hour. Fortunately for you planetary imbalance doesn't affect all bodies in a system simultaneously, or that piece of rock back there would be rubble by now...." "Is there a Project AA underway yet?" "Of course there is. The Flagship received a warp-beam ESR from Sol III, and of course we dispatched a crew to take care of those nuisances immediately. One of our duties, after all...." The girl unbuckled her ackseat straps and sat up straight. "You mean they had to call?" "What do you expect, that we keep a constant watch on all these backwater planets—" "According to Regulations—" "A lot you know of Regulations, young woman! Do you realize what the charge against you is? And that the lives of two men were risked to bring you back in one piece?" "All I know is that this system's Geejay was serviced only eleven Periods ago, and was supposed to be good for at least—" "That will be enough of that, or you'll find yourself facing more than just loss of rank!" She reddened. "What of the man Kane?" she asked. "He's lucky," B-Haaq answered, grinning slowly. "He'll be killed down there before they finish the double-A job." An alarm clanged in the ship, and it veered sharply on its automatics, dodging the hurtling masses of debris that were still being flung into Space from the Outer Ring of Saturn. Minutes passed before the labortech at the controls, face drained of color with the tension of watching for the first sign of failure of the automatics, was able to relax and set course outward toward the looming hulk that was Director Gentech Starn's Flagship, drifting slowly at the system's rim. Deanne paused on the catwalk, blended herself with its shadows. She had heard nothing. She knew every inch of the great Flagship as she knew the limited dimensions of her own quarters; knew the main traffic corridors and the hours of each cycle when traffic was at its height and at its ebb. And she knew the mazed web of maintenance catwalks as well. Her orders had read "Confined to quarters pending disposition of the following charges—" but her Section Commander knew nothing of men like Kane, knew nothing of the fire that could touch a man's soul and ignite the rebellion that now blazed so brightly in her own. The chances were few that it would even occur to Coltech Q-Jaax that she could be anywhere but in her quarters. At any rate, that was her gamble, and it was far less desperate a one than that which Kane had taken for what he believed. The conference chamber loomed below her in the gloom of the ship's cavernous mid-section, and it would not be difficult to locate one of the many pressure duct leads. But she would need to remove a small transition piece, and—no! What would Kane have done—simply extract a single, strategic machine screw, and swing the piece aside! It would save minutes. Hearing the men below would then be as simple as though she stood in the chamber with them. And she must hear, must know what they planned. So that somehow, Jon, if he still lived, could know. Within seconds she had swung from the narrow walk and dropped soundlessly atop the wide expanse of the chamber's metal ceiling. Quickly she estimated the area beneath which the main council table lay, then sought the duct nearest the spot. In only seconds more, she was lying prone in the deep shadows, able to hear. "—and to be quite blunt about it, I am genuinely worried...." It was her uncle. "My niece's extraordinary behavior can be discussed later, gentlemen. Right now this matter of the Gravity-Justifiers is of the most importance. First of all, Captech D-Yun, why was I not immediately notified of the perilous difficulty in Sol system? These people depend upon us for their very lives! Well?" "There is no excuse, Sire." "Yes, I think perhaps there is! If not excuse, then reason, at least! If my memory serves me correctly, it has been a scant eleven Periods since the Sol Gravity-Justifier was last serviced, a piece of work, gentlemen, that has in the past been valid for fifty at minimum! Was I, perhaps, to be kept from knowing that what work was performed eleven Periods ago was a failure?" A tight pause. And then, "Certainly not, Sire," in a soft tone from D-Yun. "But these people have been such—well, nuisances. We have given them so much more than their share of service that sabotage of some sort naturally suggested itself. We had been in the process of analytical survey—" "I'll have none of that, not from any of you! Sabotage indeed. Why, it is a matter of record that Sol is not the only system in which breakdown has occurred far ahead of schedule tolerance! Yes, I know that, too, gentlemen! There is another thing I know as well. I know that there is no sabotage. I know that my personal staff of copytechs has been overworked for a full period in an effort to keep the peoples of over twenty different star systems unaware of the major technical difficulties which have been increasingly frequent in each of the others! I know that propaganda, instead of technical skill, has been keeping the prestige of the Alliance intact! The fault cannot be laid to Captech D-Yun's saboteurs! It must be laid squarely at our own door step, gentlemen! For some reason which I would like to know, we have simply not been able to keep up. We are not the technicians our fathers were, and careful study will show that they were not technicians to match their fathers, nor they their fathers before them! Slowly but too surely, we are losing something! Why?" Deanne breathed shallowly, straining to hear every word. "Perhaps, Sire, the efficiency of our Cad tech recruiting system could be improved. Although I admit, the planets have not been producing youths of the caliber of—" "Bah! If anything, they're getting quicker-witted all the time! And we have had little trouble, from among twenty-one star systems in two galaxies, in obtaining the necessary periodic quota! Yet our new ships are not as good! Our number increases, but that is all! And mere number, by itself, is worthless!" Another voice replied, but she could not identify it. "That might be traced, Sire, to the poorer quality of raw materials which the planets are obliged by law to furnish us at the scheduled intervals in return for our service—" "That is starwash, and you know it! If anything, quality has improved, since the discovery of new mining planets. I can still read records, young man! Perhaps you are not fully acquainted with the Director whom you're attempting to deceive!" "If, Sire, I may hark back for a moment to the question of sabotage...." A curious chill coursed the length of Deanne's slender back. That was B-Haaq speaking. "I suggest that in this particular instance, Captech D-Yun may well be correct. I speak in light of the renegade, Cadtech Kane. Prior to his capture on Titan, there is little telling to what lengths he may have gone for revenge, Sire. As a Fourth Period Cadtech, he knew Geejay co-ordinates for at least twelve systems, and he knew also upon what the power of the ITA depends—technical efficiency. If that were to be flagrantly misrepresented through such sabotage, ITA prestige and power would of course suffer, and Kane's thirst for revenge slaked. I think perhaps it is of paramount importance that we seek to discover where he might strike next! If, that is, he survived the disintegration of Titan." A murmur went up, grew noisier, and Deanne felt herself holding her breath. Then there was her uncle's voice again— "You use the word 'power' strangely, Majtech." "Not at all strangely, Sire! Our technical excellence has made all planets completely dependent upon us! You may say that it is not revenge that we seek, but only safety. You may say that if we do have power and prestige, it is only for self protection, so that what happened to our ancestors centuries ago may never again be repeated. All these things are true. But also true is the fact that power is power. We have it, for two galaxies depend upon us for the very life of their civilizations! It is Kane who would threaten it! To give it up, or to let it be so easily taken from us, is to make of ourselves the fools that Kane so confidently assumes us to be! Centuries of work and progress hang in the balance, gentlemen! If this Kane has escaped Titan, we must find him! And if he has not, then we must undo his work! We must, in short, show these planets who holds the whip-hand, first, last and always!" There was a moment of silence. Then suddenly a swelling flow of voices lifted in approval, and there was scattered applause. And it did not quiet immediately when the Director Gentech spoke. "Gentlemen! Gentlemen. You must know that I thoroughly disapprove of the views that Majtech B-Haaq has just expressed, and I am certain that, upon a moment's self-examination, you will feel as I do. I have thought often of the man Kane, and have as often wondered how close he may have been to many truths which we have either overlooked or forgotten! However, in all fairness to the Majtech I will call for a vote. Those in favor of the Majtech's proposals to comb the Sol system for Cadtech Kane, and to assert the prestige of the ITA will ballot 'yea.' Those opposed will cast blank ballots." Silence, then, and Deanne counted her heart beats, thought surely they must be loud enough now to be heard the length and breadth of the ship. "—the ballots have been counted, gentlemen...." The deep voice was slow and deliberate as it always was—yet it seemed, somehow, too slow now, too deep. "Majtech B-Haaq's proposals are approved by a majority of—of one vote. We will therefore begin our search immediately, and will trust that I was also incorrect in my evaluation of our present technological efficiency. This session is now adjourned." Director Gentech Starn had suffered the first overruling of his long career. VII There were hard, stinging sensations in his face. They pierced the infinity of darkness until somewhere in it they touched his naked nerves and the darkness receded, slowly and became a blinding light. A space-suited figure was standing over him, and it held the limp form of an empty suit in one hand, and a hand-weapon in the other, and the weapon was extended toward him, butt first! He could see the hard, beetle-browed face behind the sealed face piece of the helmet. The mouth was moving rapidly, but he could not hear. Jon's head hurt, and the pain spread throughout his body when he moved to get his feet beneath him, stood up. Subconsciously he knew he was aboard a ship in Space; there was the subtle, rippling vibration so familiar to any man with Spacelegs, and there was the smell of pumped atmosphere and the curious feeling of artificial gravity. He tried to think even as he took the suit shoved into his arms by the man who had brought him back to consciousness, and began climbing dazedly into it. A suit, inside a ship in which the atmosphere was perfectly breathable? A ship! Tinker? No—no ITA craft, even the newest, had such thick-looking bulkheads, or was equipped with suits of such peculiar design—hard to get into the thing, nothing was in its right place. But if not an ITA craft, then—but that was not possible! He had no sooner gotten the helmet adjusted than the radiophones in it crackled. "Snap it up, get that face plate sealed! Here, you may need this—" He had taken care of the face plate, and now the curiously fashioned hand weapon was pushed into his right hand. "What—" "There's half a hundred Tinkers out fumbling around with a Project AA. Things are letting up on the planets, but they still haven't got the damn thing fixed the way it should be ... found us, though...." "Us?" His tongue was still thick in his mouth and it was difficult to talk, or even think of words to say. "You'll find out about us later. But in about a minute more they'll be in range, and those Space cannons of theirs'll be whaling away at us for all they're worth. They'd be dead ducks if this bucket was equipped the way it should be...." The man cursed. "... but there's not enough E-blasters to go around yet, or I-drives either, and that's why we're going to be a big sieve in less time than it takes to tell it. I suppose it ain't your fault—" "My fault? Last I knew—" "Sorry if I slugged you too hard, but the boss said to be sure. Be sure, he says, and he sends us out in one of the first tanks we made instead of one of the new jobs! Sometimes, I—" "No escape craft? No—" "You kidding? We sit here and take it! We could take to the ports, but the power packs on these suits are no match for those space tenders of theirs. They'd pick us up sure. Me, I'd die ten times first!" Jon tried to assimilate the information, tried to take it all in even as he struggled to gain back his full consciousness. "Mind telling me where we are? Where we're headed? Why in hell I was shanghaied?" "Right now, about two points spherical north-northwest of Jupiter, minus about twelve to the ecliptic. Where we're headed you'll find out, if we live through this. And you weren't shanghaied. Not all the way, anyway. You didn't think that alarm system stayed quiet all by itself, did you? Or that the jetgiro flew itself to where you found it? The boss is still going to be sore. We were supposed to put the net over two of you—" So it had been too easy! Of course the 'quake hadn't been counted on and that had disrupted the plan, but at least there had been a plan, and that meant that there was someone who wanted him away from the ITA. "You weren't on Titan five minutes before we knew." "But what about the girl? The Lenantech arrested with me?" Something cold was suddenly eating away inside him, and the memory of the awful quakes came back to him in a rush, and he could visualize Deanne, lying lifeless somewhere. "Don't know. As it was, we almost missed you after the quake started. Plans went completely haywire as far as she was concerned. But no more damn fool questions. I was supposed to get you oriented before they were on top of us and you've got it all, except for—" There was a sudden lurch and Jon was thrown sprawling, was suddenly picked up as though by some gigantic hand and thrown bodily toward a self-sealing hatch that closed just as he crashed heavily into it. The chamber was now all but airless. They'd been hit by a Tinker missile, and there was a gaping, ragged hole somewhere in this ship's hide. He struggled to his feet. Then saw the other man, not moving, crumpled to the deck. A jagged fragment of metal was embedded in his chest. There was another sickening lurch and another. They were being clobbered with everything the Tinker-ship had. But somehow he got to the wounded man's side. The hard eyes opened for but a moment, and the lips moved. The sounds they made were but a whisper in his earphones. "Six ... nine-X. Point ... oh one-Y. Eight six. Z—" And then the eyes opened wide, and the lips closed, and the man was dead. The ship shuddered again, and through his helmet Kane heard a dull, booming explosion, and he knew the craft had been fatally hit. Another second and it would be pulling apart at the seams. All Tinker guns were on-target and firing at will. The locks! Where the hell would the locks be on this strangely designed ship? He breathed again when the hatch popped open because of the dwindling air pressure. He was aware of the conglomeration of noises in his earphones. Somewhere a man was screaming. There had been men screaming for the last full minute, but only now were the sounds beginning to register on his taut brain. "Where in hell is Zetterman?" "Don't know—aft with the guy we were sent for I guess. Oh God." "Then he's within twenty feet of a lock if he's still alive. But he hasn't answered us. So what d'you want to do? We're all that's left and they're almost alongside." "They'd get us either way. If only we could get aft that lock's on the port side, away from 'em—" Jon let the words make sense. Port side. Twenty feet away—THERE! In seconds the inner port was open, and then he was waiting for the outer one, not even bothering to cycle the lock down. He'd be blown a little, but a running start out would help. He wanted to communicate with the men he'd heard talking, find out what the numbers meant that the dead man Zetterman had mouthed, but the Tinkers would be monitoring everything, and they'd pick up even a helmet set at this range. The outer lock cracked slowly open, and what little pressure there still was in the lock held him gently against the widening opening as it dissipated entirely with a low howl into the black infinity of space. He popped out, and it was like stepping from an invisible mountainside into a night that was too dark, with stars that looked too close. Only crazily, you didn't fall— He drifted on the slight momentum the spent air pressure in the lock had given him, the telltale flicker of his power pack this close to the huge gray shape that loomed less than a hundred yards to the other side of the broken ship he was leaving would mean the end of him. He thought at top speed. Of course their screens would pick him up but he gambled that he'd be discounted as simply another chunk of wreckage smashed by the Tinker guns. Jove loomed hugely, fantastically, slightly above him. Soon his drift would become free-fall, but he must wait until the last possible moment to use the pack. Yet if he waited too long— He clenched his teeth until they hurt, willed his arms to his sides, his hands away from the pack controls. The multi-hued bands of the great planet were alternately dark and bright, undulating slowly, as though readying to seize him, devour him, freeze him. The Gargantuan mass seemed but yards away rather than well over a million miles. Yet it was too close, and it was slowly moving in upon him. He turned his body, tried to watch the Tinker ship. It had closed with the shattered wreck which he'd escaped, grappled to it. A port opened, and there was a pinprick of fiery light from the dark maw. Boarding in suits. But there was no orange-violet flash of a spacetender's exhausts, so perhaps, then, he had been unnoticed. But he must still drift and he knew now that he had started to fall. Ever so slightly, but he was heading straight for the great mass of Jupiter, and his initial direction had been almost tangent to its orbit. The massive orb seemed even more flattened at its poles than usual, and its satellites were orbiting erratically, due, he knew, to the Geejay failure that had rocked the whole system. Yet even as he watched, and as slowly as they swung, Jon Kane's practiced eye and mind detected retrograde movements, and realized that the tiny moons were slowly falling back in what he knew were approximately their former orbits. The Tinkers were somehow succeeding. But the suit was getting cold. Its insulation was surprisingly efficient, but it was still only an emergency feature of the rig, to keep a man alive for a short period in the event of heater failure. And using the heater meant radiation, yet he'd have to risk it now. And soon, the pack itself. But it would be of little avail if he wandered aimlessly, and that, he had to gamble, was where the numbers came in. With the three letter combinations, they could be spherical co-ordinates. For his life, they would have to be. 69-X. .01-Y. 86-Z. With planes of reference calculated to the median plane of planetary ecliptics relative to the Sun. Then. Swiftly, his brain analyzed the values, gave him an approximation. And it would be a point— And where he looked there was only blackness. It was the damn time factor, of course, that was lacking. Yet Zetterman would not have given him figures for yesterday or next month. They'd have to be figures for now, or for expected time of arrival at destination, but where? How far? Near Jove? The satellites? One of them? That would make the time factor next to zero. And— Of course! The figures would no longer be completely valid; margin of error would be wide after the gravitational imbalance that was only now beginning to be righted! If he scanned several hundred thousand miles to either side of his point of dead reckoning. And there it was! Callisto. He was almost astride its orbit, and because it was nearer to his reckoned point than any of the rest, it would have to be the most probable destination. If, of course, he was right about the time factor. If the co-ordinates referred to the location of bodies in the ship's immediate vicinity when it was attacked. He was numb from the cold, and to wait longer with his powerpack would mean to become ensnared in Jove's awful gravity field before he could make the necessary right angle break in direction and set course for the barren planetoid. His arms ached as he drew them up inside his suit, and his fingers were clumsy, senseless things groping for the power and heat toggles. Then he found them. In moments there was warmth, and then the gray satellite toward which he headed began getting larger with each passing second. The ragged circle of the plain was unbroken for almost as far as he could see in the dim reflected light of the satellite's primary, save for recent fissures in its surface that had been caused by wrenching quakes during the failure of the Geejay, and occasional pockmarks left by the wandering bits of cosmic flotsam that had been ensnared by the surprisingly slight Callistan gravity. The plain on which he had touched down was ringed with low mountain chains that looked like giant dragon's teeth poised to impale him at any moment. And Jove itself looked weirdly tilted with its atmospheric bands now inclined steeply away from the horizontal. Its pale light cast eerie shadows across the plain; made the cracks in its surface and miniature craters deceptively large and small. And there was no sign of human habitation, no artificial structure shone against the dark horizon, and it meant he would have to waste precious fuel, blasting in great leaps across the moon's not inconsiderable surface, looking. He was not even certain for what. If Zetterman had intended to have him find this particular one of eleven satellites, then why had he not included grid co-ordinates of latitude and longitude? Or had the man been about to when death intervened? Unless ... whatever artificial installation existed on the planet could be located with the same co-ordinates! It would be ingenious.... Rapidly, Jon envisioned a standard tri-dimensional system grid in his mind's eye; applied it to the satellite upon which he stood, substituting its ecliptic-apparent north-south axis and solar-apparent X and Y equatorial axes for the Z, X and Y axes of the standard celestial sphere. Applying Zetterman's co-ordinates, then, his direction would be generally north-northwest, to a point below the satellite's surface! For a moment the thought sent his mind spinning back into confusion, and then he realized that by the standard spherical method of point determination, his chances would have been one in a theoretical infinity of arriving at a point exactly on the planetoid's surface. The installation was subterranean, then, which was logical, but which made matters all the more difficult. Unless, of course, there would be some slight surface indication. God, if only Zetterman had lived an instant longer. With a muttered prayer that his deductions and dead reckoning calculations were substantially more than empty rationalizations of desperation, Jon thumbed the power toggles of his suit pack and leapt lightly off across the planetoid's hostile surface. He would, of course, have to be right. For there was only a limited amount of oxygen left in his tanks, and his power would certainly not last forever. He kept track of his position by the most primitive way Man knew; the orb that was the Sun. And mentally, superimposed that orb against the tri-di grid that seemed now to be stamped imperishably upon his brain, simultaneously allowing for orbital speed differential and solar parallax. He fell back gently to the planetoid's volcanic terrain for a final time, and knew that the spot he sought, if it existed at all, was now within scant yards of him. Mighty Jupiter was now at zenith, yet even in its directly mirrored, undulating illumination it was more difficult to see than before, and each step was an experiment. Pumice spattered over his spaceboots, solid looking stuff which could be but a shifting overlay for some bottomless fissure or yawning crevasse. And above him and down to the horizon to every side, stars gleamed tauntingly, coldly in the blackness, as though to remind him that a man could not live forever. He began walking in ever widening circles. Something would show. VIII Deanne was never certain whether her decision had been wholly a product of her own mind, seething as it had been with the awful conflict between her life's learning and what she knew to be right, or if it had been made for her by the clanging of the ship's alarm intercom unit in her quarters. She had been lucky. She had succeeded in getting back undetected from her breach of arrest; return from her vantage point atop the conference chamber had been as uneventful as her stealthy escape through the catwalk maze to it, and once safely back in her quarters she had tried to rest, to get her mind in order and to think. Her uncle, the Director Gentech himself, had been beaten by B-Haaq, and B-Haaq was not a man to let an advantage be wasted. It would be only a matter of time, now. A matter of time, and the Majtech would be giving the orders, and her own fate would be in his hands. She had to decide. To stay and try to help a faltering old man or to make an outright attempt to escape even as Kane had done, and then somehow to find him! For Kane had been right! Oh, yes, Kane had been right. For power was not an end in itself, and in the last analysis, the end did not justify the means! The ITA, right or wrong ... no! The ITA was wrong! The alarm clanged, and then the speaker squawked raucously. "Attention all officers and techpersonnel! Man your combat stations! An unidentified spacecraft lies nine point three points starboard ecliptic minus twelve oh three at three hundred thousand and we are overhauling. Presence of the fugitive Kane aboard is strong probability, therefore orders are to fire to destroy. Repeating, all officers and techpersonnel, man your combat stations! An—" Deanne snapped the communicator into silence with a force that nearly tore the toggle from its socket. The stupid fools! Enemies had always been destroyed in the past, and so now this enemy was to be destroyed! Regardless of the fact that they would never find Kane, alive or otherwise, if every ship aboard which he might be were blasted to bits! In moments, the corridors and catwalks would be alive with scurrying Cadtechs, officers and labortechs, rushing pell-mell to half forgotten battle stations, trying desperately as they did to remember precisely how the Flagship's long silent cannon were operated. There would be no eyes for a shapeless, space-suited figure. She waited tensely until the clamor outside her cubicle was at its height, then swiftly opened the narrow bulkhead hatch, stepped through it and into the milling chaos of men and women, and let herself be swept toward the suit lockers, and the bank or lock ports near them. The corridor lights were blazing, now, and the white faces that bobbed beneath them were strained. Deanne found a suit and donned it even as the first of the craft's spacecannon was fired. The deck shuddered beneath her feet, and she was nearly knocked off balance by a trio of guntechs who had not yet found their posts. But there was more order now, and she would have to hurry. The other ship must be close, for the guns had already begun firing barrages, and that was only done when the target was in naked-eye view. Swiftly, she slipped into an air lock, flattened herself against a narrow bulkhead as its inner port slid shut, and remained immobile as its automatic pumps cycled down to zero pressure. Now she would wait, watch and pray that no one looked into the lock in passing. It was a crazy gamble, and if Jon were not aboard.... She watched the star strewn blackness, narrowed her eyelids against the awful glare in it each time a battery fired, and there was a sudden little catch in her throat as the limn of mighty Jupiter swung majestically into her field of vision. Somewhere, out there, in that awful infinity—there! Ice seemed to form in a lump inside her. The alien ship was a perfect target, silhouetted against the huge shining disc of Jove! And it was breaking up! Great gouts of fire were bursting from its engine housings, molten fragments of jagged metal glowed as they gyrated crazily from it in great showers of white-hot flame, and she could feel the awful vibration of the Flagship's guns as they continued firing mercilessly on target. A tiny pinpoint of fire. She saw it, and in the eye searing holocaust it did not at once register on her reeling brain. A tiny pinpoint of blue-white fire that had not emanated from the stricken alien, but had suddenly appeared for a mere fraction of a second at a considerable distance from it! A suit pack! With the silent prayer at her lips that it had escaped the eyes of the others, Deanne triggered open the outer lock port and launched herself into Space. Somehow she knew the man was Jon Kane, even as she knew she had found him too late. She stood, rooted to the spot in the deep shadow of the ragged crag beneath which she had landed, unable even to warn him of the man who had suddenly appeared behind him. A man with a weapon in one hand, aimed straight at the Cadtech's back! To use her radio at such a distance would mean a power output that would bring a spacetender down upon her within minutes. Helplessly, she watched. Watched as the other touched Jon with his weapon, forced him over the lip of a wide crater— "No—!" Her choked scream all but deafened her inside her helmet. Then she saw that the other followed over the lip, and realized that their destination was somewhere inside the depression itself. For long, silent moments she stood in maddening frustration, watching the two men disappear into the crater, as powerless to act as she had been to warn. She could not go back, now, nor could she go further. IX The crater walls had been moderately magnetized with a thin coating of metallic spray, and Kane walked before his captor down their sloping incline with greater ease than he had been able to negotiate the planetoid's natural surface. He hesitated as the crater bottom suddenly began to yawn slowly open, and there was the prodding in his back again. "Keep moving, mister. There's a ladder, and you're first!" Kane moved carefully, looked over the smooth lip of the now fully opened shaft. The ladder was a thin, tubular affair with narrow rungs. He dropped to his knees, swung one leg over; held with his elbows, groped with the other foot for the next lower rung. Then felt with one hand, found the top rung, and started down. "I can't cover you on the way down," the man above him said. "But I have a fresh supply of oxygen, and I don't think you have. And I've got both guns!" The shaft closed silently above them, and then there was sudden illumination, and Jon blinked after the half-light of the bleak world outside. The folds of his suit began to feel loose, and he knew that the shaft must also function as an air lock, and was cycling up to pressure as they descended. When they at length reached bottom, his captor gestured at him with a hand weapon. "Get your suit off. It stays with me. Whether you get it back again or not'll be up to you. Move!" Jon fumbled with unfamiliarly placed dogs and buckles, then surrendered the suit, and took deep lungsfull of air. "Where now?" But the other couldn't hear. His helmet was still in place, and Jon knew that whoever wanted him wasn't taking any more chances than necessary. But as if in answer to his question, a concave panel in the shaft wall was suddenly sliding open, and the stockily built man who stepped in it covered him almost casually with a strange looking two-handed weapon. He signaled to the other, then looked at Jon as if noticing him for the first time. He stepped aside, motioned toward the open panel with the ugly snout of the gun he carried. "After you, mister. And step along. You've kept the boss-man waiting a little!" Both men had spoken in the language of Terra, yet it sounded strangely distorted to Jon. He had known the language almost all his life, but his father had taught him the words as they were said in a part of the planet that had once been called Vermont, and he noticed an odd difference in the other's speech. He wondered, idly, if any of them spoke the Universal. But at least, now, he knew who they were. Solmen of Earth, who had somehow learned to build space ships and weapons; who had somehow escaped the alert eye of Earth's Tinker spies. But he did not feel the surprise he had expected. There were legends about the men of Earth. The heavy footfalls of the stocky, heavily muscled man behind him echoed hollowly in the narrow corridor. The passageway curved gently, sloping downward, then came to an abrupt end. "Turn to your right." He did, and a panel similar to the first was opening for him. He stepped through it, and his second captor followed. "O.K., hold it." They were in a compact room, and it was not empty. There were about ten men in it, Jon estimated at first glance, all similarly dressed in the green leatheroid coveralls that his captors wore, and barren of any insignia of rank. They looked up from their places around the paper-littered conference table, and a big man at its head half rose from his chair. "Haine! I thought I told you—oh, is this the man?" "Darwin be with us, sir, it is." The big man's face changed expression quickly. He resumed his seat, and suddenly the room was quiet, and others were turning in their chairs, fixing Jon with their eyes. The big man gave no signal for him to be seated in one of the empty chairs, but spoke to him as though he had been placed under arrest. "You are Kane? The Tinkerman arrested on Titan?" "I am," Jon answered, trying to keep self confidence strong in his voice. "But I don't—" "Just answer my questions, Master Kane. My name is Stine—Martin Stine. On Earth I'm a Senator. My men got you out of the lockup on Titan. Apparently you and the Tinkerwoman escaped them afterward—" "I don't know what happened to the Lenantech, but as for myself, I'd have tried!" Jon said, rankling slightly at the smug tone of the man's voice. "Apparently you haven't heard of what happened to the ship you sent to pick me up. You won't see it again. And the only reason I'm here is that I elected to come, following the directions of one of your men that was dying." The Senator glanced quickly at the men surrounding him. Then, "You can tell me that part of the story later, Kane. I understand you're sort of a—renegade Tinkerman, is that right?" "That's right, but how did you learn—" "My organization has many men in many places. I understand that you're a rather out of the ordinary technician, Kane, and that at this minute the ITA is after your hide. So I've a proposition for you. We can use technicians." Stine was leaning back in his chair, now, relaxed, sure of himself. The others did not look so relaxed, and to Jon, seemed far from being as certain. "First of all, I want to know who you are," Jon said, speaking Stine's Terra dialect to the best of his ability. "Earth is no different a planet than the rest." "I said I would ask the questions, Kane! But for your information, this organization is made up of men much like yourself. I'm assuming that you achieved your technological proficiency by obtaining certain books for yourself; books the Tinkers ordered destroyed, and no longer have themselves. Well, your case is not exactly unique. The difference is, you were trapped into selection for training by the ITA. My men were not. We are, in the respect that we're free, in better position than you are to break the ITA. And certainly you did not hope to do the job single-handed." "Break the ITA?" Jon asked. He felt a peculiar note of discord. These men were not hiding. Not just hiding. "Why of course." The big man shifted in his seat, again glanced around at the others. Their eyes were still fastened on Jon as though they had never seen a Tinkerman before. "They may not be dictators in the true sense of the word, but they wield a tremendous political power over more than a hundred planets, Kane. You know that. They have only to refuse a planet its scheduled service visits, and the economy and civilization of that planet is suddenly faced with collapse. Ultimately, such a set-up is going to mean ruin anyway. Someday, there is bound to be rebellion, and not on any single planet, but on many. It will free men from the ITA perhaps, but it will also mean quick retrogression; civilization will, because of its complexity, backslide faster than men can regain what the Wars destroyed, or re-learn what the Tinkers have kept from them. "It might have worked if the ITA had not become sloppy. But it can no longer even do a decent Project AA! It imperils the lives of two galaxies, yet refuses to give men the knowledge to protect themselves! Therefore, we are going to destroy the Tinkers, Kane. Our propaganda machinery is gaining momentum daily, and this most recent Geejay breakdown in Sol system is grist for our mill. Our technical achievements are improving daily despite the fact that they have been carried out under the handicap of utmost secrecy over a long period of extremely difficult years. "When I learned of your captivity by warp-beam from Titan and was told about you and the woman and was asked if I wanted you, I said yes. I spared you, Kane, and went to great trouble to obtain you, because you know the Tinkers as we could never hope to know them. And, more importantly, you can handle technology far better than either we or they. Is that true?" Jon hesitated, looked at the faces up-turned to him, saw the cold bitterness in their eyes. "I can make a double-A good for five hundred years." "Just as we thought. You're dangerous to them, Kane, because for some reason you know more than they do. People would start looking to you, rather than to them, for their needs, and they're scared stiff you'll go around blabbing all you know, ruining their hold. Well, that is just the chance we want to give you. Help us, and later, you'll be able to name your own price. Go back to the Tinkers, and you're a dead man." The room was silent again, but their eyes were still upon him. He tried to think, tried to evaluate what the big man had said. It all seemed so logical, yet—yet there was something wrong. There was something they did not understand. Or, perhaps, understood too well. "I—I agree with you about the tremendous power they wield," Jon said slowly, "but you're wrong about destroying them. It's true they're not the technicians they once were. They have polluted logic with belief and historical fact with legend; they do know how, but they don't know why, and that's affecting their know-how, if you see what I mean. They use belief more and more and reason less and less—" Stine nodded. "Precisely. If knowledge is not given room to grow, it deteriorates, and finally is nothing more than half understood pseudo truths. Therefore I fail to see—" "If you destroy them," Jon interrupted, "you suddenly remove the last recognized seat of technical knowledge that exists in our two galaxies. Recognized, you understand. And that'd mean real chaos, Senator. The people would be so scared and helpless at the prospect of being helpless that they'd revert to savages even faster than the way in which you described. They'd panic for certain—panic as panic hasn't been known since the Wars themselves." Jon let the sentence trail off, half wondering as he spoke why he was suddenly championing a system which he hated, defending a reactionary philosophy of existence which stunted men's minds at every turn. For Stine was at least half right—the Tinkers did threaten the very essence of intellectual freedom. Yet at the same time he knew that to destroy them would be to cause even worse harm. It was as though the others around the table and the man who was his captor did not exist, now. It had become a quiet, tense drama between two minds, and Jon knew he had not been brought here to do Stine's thinking for him. "You know, Kane," Stine was saying then, his voice suddenly smooth and soft, his big face relaxing into a studied grin, "they got their hooks into you more deeply than I'd thought. You're still half-Tinker, aren't you?" "But I'm not speaking from loyalty! Only from logic—" The big man waved a meaty hand deprecatingly, interrupted easily. "Master Kane, the Space Tinkers must be forced to give up their books and charts. They must be forced to relinquish this semi-intellectual, semi-religious hold they have on over a hundred planets; their monopoly, in short, must be broken!" A huge fist slammed emphatically down on the littered table top. "My organization has worked long and hard and preserved its secrets at great risk toward that end! We have the ships, we have the weapons—some better, we believe, than those of the ITA—and we have the men! And you, sir, are either with us or against us!" His face had become florid, and Jon knew now that Stine was playing for effect on the others; knew suddenly that his own logic was right, and that it was again recognized as a threat, even as B-Haaq had recognized it. A threat to personal power! And suddenly words were coming in heated torrents from his own lips. "Secrecy! It is all you and the ITA can think of! Whatever it is you know or learn, it must be kept from others! Yes, even while you speak of breaking the ITA monopoly of knowledge and power, you seek to form an identical one yourself! Can't you understand that where there is secrecy, peace and progress cannot exist? Can't you understand that in the realm of science and technology, there are no secrets? The facts of nature are everywhere in Creation, Senator! You cannot hide them! For awhile you may blind people to them, but they cannot be hidden, they are for everyone to see and use as he will, regardless of which side he is on! The Tinkers have kept people blind to them for a few years, but it has become increasingly difficult; and they are learning the hard way that the worst of keeping secrets is the forgetting of them yourself!" Stine's face was becoming white and tense, and the others gave uneasy glances in his direction, but he did not interrupt, and Jon kept going, unleashing the whole torrent of thoughts that had tormented his soul for so long, so very long. "You speak of monopoly, Senator, but you're forming one yourself! You, and your organization, have been fortunate enough, as I was, to have found some of the old books, to have learned some of the old knowledge with which the armament for the Wars was built, and against which, when their horror was finally over, people everywhere rebelled. It was they who burned the books, Senator! Not the ITA! It was they who wanted done with all that seemed to them responsible for the carnage which they had somehow survived! It was they—on a hundred planets—who without thinking, ran down their scientists, their technicians; murdered them for possessing the knowledge which they had misused! And the few technicians who escaped were bitter and frightened men. They managed to salvage a few of the old ships and escape. And theirs was the natural error of assuming that if they were not to suffer what their murdered companions had, they must think in terms of using what they alone knew as a weapon against those who did not and would not be allowed to have that knowledge! "But—and listen to me, gentlemen!—even as the Senator has said, if knowledge is not given room to grow, it deteriorates! And by keeping their well guarded secrets to themselves, entrusting them only to specially selected personnel whom they recruited year after year for training from the planets so that their organization could grow more rapidly in numbers, and by keeping those 'secrets' sacrosanct and unchallangeable, they became at length outmoded, and finally half forgotten and adulterated with pompous nonsense! And if you are to do the same, then the same will happen to you!" He paused quickly for fresh breath, then plunged on headlong. "The solution is not in fighting and battle—for that is what precipitated the whole stupid situation in the first place, as it always will. I told you I could do a double-A that would last five hundred years, and I can! And I will do it! And I will show you how to do it! But only on the condition that your propaganda machine gives the Tinkers the entire credit for it!" "Master Kane, that is enough!" "I'm not finished yet! Can't you see the effect such a move will have? The Tinkers will be grateful, first of all, because they're in desperate straits right now. Secondly, they will realize that there is superior knowledge to their own, and that it can be a beneficial thing, rather than a threat to their well being. From that point they might be convinced that their 'secrets' should no longer be kept, but instead given back to the very people who once destroyed them in anger. And thirdly, the people will have new faith in the ITA and its ability; new respect for the technical knowledge which they now fear and covet so dangerously! In such a way, gentlemen, you can get civilization climbing again in such a way that the Tinkers will be eliminated, but of their own volition, because they will at length have no more to fear, and no further defensive purpose to serve. "Unless—" and Jon paused for a long breath, "Unless, Senator, you simply want the power the Tinkers now enjoy, for yourself!" Stine looked at him for a long moment. And then he smiled, but there was Winter in his eyes. "We all make mistakes," he said softly. "Sorry. Haine! Take him away!" X Stealthily Deanne picked her way from shadow to shadow toward the smooth walled depression, her feet scarcely touching the planetoid's riven surface in the slight gravity. Yards from it, she got to her stomach and crawled to the lip, peered over. Every muscle in her body went tense as she saw the hidden hatch at the crater's bottom sliding soundlessly closed. As she had thought, the crater wall was artificially magnetized, and in a half crouch, clinging to the deepest shadow cast by the grotesque ball of Jupiter above her, she edged her way downward. She reached the spot where the camouflaged hatch had closed, and, again prone, waited. There was only the space of seconds before the round slab of metal began opening! She tensed, and with her helmet touching the ground, heard the sound of heavy footsteps climbing upward, making the hollow, clanging sounds of space boots on metallic ladder rungs. A space helmet suddenly thrust itself above the opening, and for a frozen second, she could see the man's face. It was not Jon's! There was a look of stunned surprise upon it for that timeless moment, and Deanne knew even as she moved that it was this space between seconds or never at all. With all the strength in her body she swung her right leg, swung the heavy toe of her spaceboot straight at the man's face plate! He tried vainly to dodge, to drop downward to safety. Had Deanne waited a heartbeat longer she would have missed. She felt the terrible impact as her boot hit squarely, shattered the thin plastiglass of the helmet, went through it to strike flesh and bone. Instinctively her eyes went shut tight as the man inside the ruptured suit virtually exploded. But there was no time to think of what she'd done, to wonder if this was murder or the duty of warfare: the man was dead. Half in, half out of the yawning hatchway, sprawled like a bloody puppet, his weapons still in their holsters at his sides. She took them. And even in the light gravity of Callisto, it took nearly all the strength she could summon and all her courage to haul the limp thing that had been a man all the way out of the gaping shaft and then push it, over and over, away from her, away from the hatch that had already begun to automatically swing downward. She squirmed quickly beneath it, found the ladder rungs with her boots, and then clung to the slender ladder in the sudden darkness without moving, her muscles trembling at the edge of panic. To misjudge now was to fall hideously through blackness to certain destruction only God knew how abysmally far below. Then somehow she steeled herself. Made her legs move mechanically; found the next rung below. And then the next and the next. The red blindness of exhaustion under the blaze of desert suns flooded over his numbed brain in a dark backwash of pain, and with it were all the past tortures of Prokyman stockades and the hopeless defeat that had lain at the fringe of every movement of his life; Jon Kane could not see and could hear only weirdly distorted sounds for he was, if not yet dead, then close to death, and only through some freak of neural reaction, not quite beyond the threshold of consciousness. But he had not spoken. And now that power was quite lost to him. But he could still somehow feel the animal presence of his torturers, ringed tight around him yet in the tiny, glaring cubicle of polished steel; there was new pain in his shattered face, and he knew it was the freezing carbon dioxide spray designed to shock him back to full consciousness. But now it was only a new pain. There was the voice of Haine. "Hurry up, get him around. If he cashes in before we get anything out of him Stine'll blow a connection. That's a man who hates to lose on an investment." "Didn't invest much. Didn't risk much either, if you ask me. What else was that broken down tank good for anyway? I say kill the—" "Get him around and shut up." The freezing pain again. But the darkness held. New sounds. Stine. "What have you been trying to do, kill him outright? How much have you gotten?" "Nothing yet, sir. He's either the craziest man in the universe or the toughest. Or else he doesn't know anything." "Nonsense! The things this man knows can put us all in the shade, and don't you forget it! But if we don't find out just how much his people still know—or don't know—it'll be your necks as well as mine! They realize there's somebody else besides themselves in Space, now." The darkness seemed to be lifting a little; the numbness seemed to be thawing from his brain, and the pain became more agonizingly acute. "We'll try again, sir—" "Never mind. There's a better use for this fellow than killing him by inches. Perhaps he places little value on his own life, but when it comes to those of a few billion people. Yes. Haine, do you think you could wreck a Geejay?" "Wreck a—" There was the sound of hoarse breathing from a half dozen men, and Jon felt something stir inside him, but it was as though he were a thing disconnected from his physical body; that he no longer had power of decision over it. "—sure, I guess so. A double-A in reverse! Haw! Where?" "Canis Major, Proky system, if that's where he's from." "Don't look like a Prokyman to me." "Never mind that. Could you do the job so that the ITA couldn't repair it? And I mean NOT AT ALL?" "Hell, sir, one of our E-blasters would do that much—" "I have a feeling that one very simple way to gain our end, Haine, would be through the use of our E-blasters against every ship the ITA possesses—and just what do you suppose that would leave us? This fellow here wasn't so far wrong, you know, when he pointed out what would happen in the event the ITA were suddenly destroyed. We'd be left with a universe full of the screaming meemies. We'd be on top, but on top of the biggest booby hatch you ever saw! If we're going to do ourselves any good, we leave the ITA in one piece. The only difference being, we tell them what to do!" "Now ain't that nice of us, to just walk in like that without firing a charge—" "I'm doing the thinking around here, Johnson!" "It's a cinch you ain't doing much of the shooting! Letting fancy-brains, here, tell you—" Jon heard the sudden sound of bone crunching against bone; there was a choked yelp of pain, and the sound of a man falling heavily. Then Stine was talking again, softly. "Anyone else here who prefers muscle to brain power?" "Sir—Johnson's—you—" "Bury him later, and listen to me now! I want the Gravity-Justifier in Procyon smashed so that the Tinkers can't do a thing with it—but so that he can! Do you understand, Haine?" "I can smash it up so that we couldn't put it back together in a million years." "You'll be responsible. Let's get this man aboard the New World and be ready to up-ship within an hour. We're going to have our cake, gentlemen, and eat it, too! Unless, of course, our friend Kane, here, will be able to watch ten billion people die as an entire planetary system breaks up, and do nothing about it! All right, let's get going!" And then there was the sound of another man coming into the already crowded cubicle. "Senator Stine, sir! Look what we found coming down the ladder! And in a shooting mood, too! I'll need a new space rig—" "JON!" "Well! The ITA hasn't lost much time! She looks a little bit white, doesn't she, Thurston? And seems to know our friend, here! Gentlemen, I think things are going to work out rather well...." And that was the moment that Jon Kane returned to full consciousness, and full pain. But he kept his eyes shut, his voice silent. The banks of viewscreens in the New World's NIC room reflected a kaleidoscope of horror as no man had seen horror before, and as only a man of Kane's century could understand it. To the uninitiated observer of an earlier time whose entire life experience had been within the narrow confines of a single planet, the softly glowing spheres in the screens would have seemed remote things; untouchable, and of only speculative interest. The interest may have been heightened slightly by the sudden rifts that appeared in the surfaces of some, or by the peculiarly undulating ocean masses that seemed bent on erasing the land masses of others. But to Jon, securely shackled to an ackseat as was Deanne beside him, the screens showed an impending wave of death and destruction on a scale that bordered on the unthinkable. Procyon I and II were already torn near the point of total break-up; III, IV and V, because of their greater masses, were trembling with a slower rhythm, but the close-up screens showed their largest cities had already begun to crumble. Their streets were clogged with both dead and living, and the gaping mouths of panic stricken faces were eerily silent. The six outer planets had not yet felt their first tremors, but they had begun to enter subtly-altered orbital paths, and whole continents were unnaturally bathed in the hellish light of twin suns that spewed great, flaming masses of their life-stuff with unchecked abandon into the infinite well of the void. The largest screen showed a wide, wafer-thin disc floating with an inhuman serenity in the blackness, its flat plane tipped gently to the ecliptic, its surface crawling with tiny ant-like creatures that were men. Hovering above it was a glistening, pencil-shaped object from which more men came, their tiny forms followed by irregularly shaped masses, weightless on the invisible tow-lines. "Not doing much good, are they, Kane?" The big man hulked above him, beefy face florid but split with a relaxed, confident grin. Jon broke his long silence. "Starn has told you he would surrender! Why can't you accept it, and then I promise you I'll—" "You'll do what? You'd pull everything in the book and you know it, Kane, and we'd end up having to kill you or be killed ourselves. And if you were to die." Jon turned his glance toward Deanne, saw her shudder, then turn her eyes away from the screens, bitter defeat mingled tightly with the tears in them. "And anyway," Stine was saying, "Starn's not the boss anymore! And what good d'you think it's going to do me to push over a has-been? B-Haaq is the one who's calling their plays now, Kane. And B-Haaq is the boy who wants to fight! Too bad you didn't kill him when you had the chance! Look at him out there! Trying to tell me he can fix it, or anything I can do to it! Telling me if I move this ship in a mile closer he'll blow me out of Space! Oh, brother—" "He could, Stine," Jon said. And the big man whirled. "With those antiquated pop guns he carries? Don't try to make me angry, Kane. He's going to sweat it out there until he and his whole damn crew drops. And then I'm sending you in! By that time things'll be so bad I'll know I can trust you. You're the type, Kane! Fight like hell up to the last second, and then comes the noble, heroic sacrifice part. Oh, you'll do the job, all night after you've sat here watching long enough!" Jon bit his lip, watched the big man stalk back and forth before the wide banks of screens. "I could beat him in less time than it takes to tell it with E-blasters!" Stine was saying. "But they say there's a better way of winning arguments than with guns, don't they, Master Kane? Slaves are always more valuable than corpses, for one thing, and for another, I think people ought to know that Martin Stine has more to his string than guns alone! Yes...." His broad back was to both Jon and Deanne, now, and he was staring out through a wide port into the gem-studded blackness, and his words were for his own ears. "They will know who is a technician and who is not! The ITA is weak with age—and the weak become the slaves, and the strong become the masters! They shall see." "Stine, you're a fool!" The big man turned, faced Jon, and his big face blanched in sudden anger, and then the color flooded back to it and he laughed. "Stine, do you know what B-Haaq will do when he realizes that he has failed? When he realizes that the woman who spurned him and the man who deserted his ranks are aboard this ship? Do you know what he'll do rather than knuckle under to you? He's the same kind of man you are, Stine. He'll come gunning with everything he's got! You'll be a seive before you know what hit you ... and for once I'll be glad to see B-Haaq take a trick!" He heard Deanne gasp, could almost feel the trembling of her body. "That's enough out of you, Kane, or there'll be a couple dozen more bandages on that honest face of yours! If that puppy even turns his nose toward me, I'll show him what real guns are! And let him sweat out there without his engines for awhile!" "You only think you will! You haven't the faintest idea of what alloy the Tinkers build their ships, and you know it! And it's going to be fun watching you find out." "If they use the tin they use to fix everything else." "They may be stupid, Stine, but they've been around quite awhile." "All right, so you know what alloy their hulls are built of! So my batteries of electro-cannon will—" "Bounce off like a flashlantern beam, Stine. But I guess you'll want to wait and see for yourself. And if I know B-Haaq, you'll get the chance!" And suddenly Stine was towering over him again. Jon winced at the vicious slap that landed squarely on his misshapen face. "You'll tell me the alloy! Do you hear me?" A slap harder than the first. "Do you understand, Kane?" Jon felt blood trickle down his chin. "I'll not tell you a thing, Stine. Not about the alloy, or even how to rig your guns to beat it." The next blow was with Stine's closed fist. Jon's head snapped back viciously, and he held on by sheer will to consciousness. He tensed for another blow. It did not come. And suddenly, Stine's voice was a calm, almost silky thing, barely loud enough for Jon to hear. "A pity," he was saying, "that your man is so defiant a fellow, Lenantech. I almost imagine that even after the risk you took to save his hide, he'd watch your pretty face be beaten to a pulp rather than tell me the things I'd like to know! That's the way with these noble fellows, you know. Of course, a girl's face isn't everything. But, I suppose that he'd even—" "Stine, you wouldn't dare!" "Care to try me, Master Kane?" "Damn you, Stine—" The big man clenched his right fist, raised it, and Jon watched Deanne's face whiten, saw the silent plea in her eyes in the quick glance she gave him. But her taut lips did not move. "You had better speak, Kane—" "All right! All right, I'll rig your guns for you!" "And you'd better hurry! Unless my screens are out of order, your precious ten billion Prokymen haven't too much time left." Jon looked at the screens again, and he knew his horror was reflected in his swollen face. Something writhed sickeningly inside him and he looked at the screen in which the Geejay swung. B-Haaq and his men were at last leaving it! Leaving it, giving up. But he said nothing as Stine summoned Haine from in-ship, and kept his silence as the squat, burly man unshackled him while Stine held a hand weapon at Deanne's head. "I'll need her to help," he bit out then. "On your guns, as well as on the Justifier. She's worked on double-A's before." "She stays, Kane!" "Very well, she stays. But if this outfit can't get the Geejay fixed either, people won't be too impressed, will they. I say I need her, Stine. That thing out there is too badly wrecked even for me, now, alone. But it's up to you. I'll rig your guns." "All right, Kane! All right. The woman goes with you. But she stays right here until you've done a job on my batteries!" "You win, I'm not arguing. Let's get it over with." Haine led him out of the NIC room, and he could feel Deanne's accusing eyes at his back. She hated him now. He knew it. XI The thin disc shown weirdly in the light of the tortured binary, and Jon guided Deanne's suit-bloated figure up over its lip, then clambered to its sleek metal surface himself. It was a tricky business, without weight, and without sufficient handling knowledge of the alien-built power pack to attempt the delicate maneuvering required with it. Together, wordlessly, they reeled in the cylindrical capsule which contained their tools. A scant ten thousand miles off, B-Haaq waited in the Flagship. Waiting, Jon knew, for an element of Tinker ships to arrive and form about him in battle formation. And when they came. Yes, he knew what B-Haaq would do. He looked back, and could barely discern the dark mass of Stine's great craft as it blotted out the myriad of stars behind it. Power against power. They would have to hurry. He moved toward Deanne, and she moved away. He grabbed her wrist, pulled her to him, touched her helmet with his, and spoke rapidly. "Keep your radio off, and we'll talk this way! Now do just as I say, and before you put me down for a sellout, work like you've never worked before! We may have thirty minutes—an hour maybe, before this whole system goes to pieces! And less than that before the other fireworks start!" Then he was busy getting at the tools, getting at the heart of the Justifier. Stine's men had messed it up pretty badly. B-Haaq's men had not made matters any better. The operation itself was a simple one, but there was so much to be undone. Wordlessly, Deanne worked with him in the awful silence. He thought as he worked how ridiculous it must seem to whoever watched—two pygmies on the face of a mechanism hardly a hundred yards across, pitting their wits against a Nature gone mad—two pygmies, attempting to come to grips with an entire solar system! Working alone, in the cold and the dark, with only their helmlanterns to guide their eyes and hands. Deanne worked smoothly where she recognized the few standard procedures that Jon employed, fumbled a little as he took shortcuts that she had never imagined possible. Yet somehow, he noticed, she managed almost to keep up with him, seemed to be following his thinking almost by instinct. And that was about all it was that differentiated him from the standard ITA technician. Instinct; imagination coupled with it, and the knowledge that could only be learned by an ever-inquiring mind. Jon Kane. Scientist. Finally, he touched her helmet again. "That does it, girl. She's going. Within twenty hours the storm'll be over; within less than one, things will start taming down on the planets. And then we'll get your uncle to take us back to Sol system, and do a real job on the one there." He saw her eyes widen. "My—uncle?" "Yeah. Now keep quiet a minute. I—" "Turn around, both of you! I want to see your faces just once more!" Jon whirled. He saw Deanne shriek inside her helmet. At the lip of the great disc, B-Haaq stood, a hand-weapon in each gauntlet! "I knew who they'd send, Master Kane! Did you think I would leave this little project all to you, and give away all the credit to boot? Stand still!" "It's Director Gentech Starn who gets the credit for this one, B-Haaq! And I'm pretty sure, after seeing you in action, that he'll know, this time how to use it! Because he knows now that you can't do today's business with yesterday's tools and be in business tomorrow!" "Damn pretty, lover boy! Is that the way you take other men's women, too?" Damn him, Jon thought. Time's running out now. Running out. "Suit yourself on that! I think I trimmed you good!" And with that Jon kicked viciously against the ponderous mass of the tool cylinder, launched himself straight at B-Haaq! Two guns flared! The twin beams flashed straight into Jon's flying figure, then bounced harmlessly into Space! And then the two of them were drifting in the void, fighting silently and desperately for a death hold. The universe wheeled crazily as Jon fended off the other's gauntlets as they grabbed for his tank hoses, and then he struck with all the strength he could at the fragile face plate. And was parried. Then for a moment their helmets touched. "You're a real jerk, Majtech! Why do you think I didn't take any of those guns with me from the Flagship's arsenal? Hell, there wasn't one in there that worked!" B-Haaq made a desperate grab for the side-dog on Jon's helmet; caught it, began to twist! Jon clamped the suited arm, held it ... held it, twisted his body. Then fingered the suit pack into blazing life, melting a horrible, gaping hole in the Majtech's suit! For the merest fraction of a second he saw the terror stricken grimace of hatred and disbelief on B-Haaq's thin face, and then the interior of the helmet was a mass of exploding flesh and blood. He whirled. Blasted recklessly back to the Justifier, almost missed; back-blasted, slid. He grabbed Deanne about the waist of her suit, and then flicked on his space radio. "This is Kane calling Stine! Kane, calling Stine! Do you hear me, Stine?" His earphones crackled. "What the blue Jupiter is going on out there, Kane? Have you—" "Stine, you're a real dumbhead! A real Prokyman bat brain! You should have learned better who to trust by this time! The girl and I have done a job for you out here. You'll never get it fixed now, not in ten million years! Sure, a system dies; it gives its life, but so that people like you can't make other people think you're God and enslave others like it! You're through, Stine!" "Kane, you're going to die where you stand!" The earphones almost shook from their connections. And Jon pulled at Deanne, pulled her prone beside him on the smooth metal of the nearly-flat disc! "Shield your eyes!" Every gun in Stine's batteries blazed. Blazed, and smashed inward in a blinding, coruscating sea of blue-white flame that for a moment seemed to rival Procyon herself! For silent seconds, the great ship seemed to devour itself in the pent up energies suddenly unleashed in a single hell-spawned torrent of fire from its erupting bowels, then it was no longer matter but a great wraith of superhot gasses fast dissipating into the dark of Infinity. "Jon! Jon, darling—" "It's O.K., princess. It's O.K. now." "But you—" "I fixed his guns for him. He made me do it, remember? Oh, I fixed 'em good!" And then they both laughed. Laughed until the tears came, two pygmies in Space, two pygmies against a solar system of planets with a whole universe to hear them. Then slowly, two fine trails of fire started toward a slender, streamlined shape that hovered ten thousand miles off. Somewhere high above them, a Cepheid winked. Knowingly. |
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