Title: The Man the Tech-Men Made
Author: Holden, Fox B.
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Man the Tech-Men Made" ***


                       THE MAN THE TECH-MEN MADE

                           By FOX B. HOLDEN

               _He was a man of a hundred planets, drawn
                 from the blackness of space to save a
             tech-galaxy from disintegration. He was Kane,
                the warrior-mechanic ... memory-king of
                  knowledgeless worlds ... savior to
               millions ... maniac to the ruling few--so
                     they threw a dragnet over the
                      stars to stop the heretic._

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                      Planet Stories March 1954.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


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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