Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Fox B. Holden

  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 setup 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 upturned 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 d
rama 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 semiintellectual, 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 IT A—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. Maine! 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 dung 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 bl
indness 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—”