Part 3

"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.