Chapter 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!_"