Front matter (continued 2)

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.