_He was a man of a hundred planets, drawn
from the blackness of space to save a
tech-galaxy from disintegration. He was Kane,
the warrior-mechanic ... memory-king of
knowledgeless worlds ... savior to
millions ... maniac to the ruling few--so
they threw a dragnet over the
stars to stop the heretic._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories March 1954.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The relentless heat of yellow-white twin suns boiled the thin desert
air and it seared his laboring lungs, and he knew why this was called
the Desert of One Thousand Mirages. The Desert of One Thousand Hells
would have been a better name.
They said a man could go mad here. If not from the crazily twisting,
undulating heat shapes themselves, then from the pain-tortured vagaries
of his own brain. But mad or not, Jonny Kane knew he must somehow
stay in the saddle that was not fashioned for human buttocks; stay
astride the silver skinned, hairless beast never bred for human
transportation, and ride.
They could be all around him, of course, and he might never know until
it was too late to wheel his fleet qharaak and dash again for freedom
in yet another direction across the shifting, low-duned wastes. They
could be but yards behind him but there was not the strength to look
back, only to grip the thick reins twined about his bleeding wrists,
to keep his cramped legs stiff about the qharaak's sloping flanks. And
ride, and choke on the smoking sand.
His brain bubbled inside his head, and he shut his eyes.
He would tire and lose his grip, and so lose his mount, and fry to
death on the blinding whiteness of the sand. Or he would go crashing
into them, and they would lead him back to the outpost village, and
his death would be of their making. What chance, after all, had an
Earth-descendant against the copper skinned native police of a Procyon
planet, who rode its deserts as if they were the cool, green fields of
the mother world of which his father had so often spoken? What chance?
There was flame in his lungs, and fire was burning the insides of his
half naked, once strong young body into crumbling, blackened ash. Ride--
"Hold! Hold, or there's a barb through your evil heart!"
The booming command was from the left. And he wheeled the qharaak so
sharply it reared and nearly lost its sextuple footing in the shifting
sand. A sudden thrummm went past one ear. He tried to loose his legs
enough for a kick in the lunging animal's flanks, but the muscles in
them were like steel clamps. They would not move.
The reins about his wrists were slippery and stinging with sweat and
sand as both mixed with his blood, and were pulled easily enough from
his grasp by the vicious, sudden tug from one side.
And then the overpowering odor of the other lathered qharaaks flooded
his nostrils as the Dep-Troopers closed in upon him. He retched with
it, and was sick.
"Come on, you! You're lucky our orders were dead _or_ alive! Straighten
up in that saddle or you'll go back dragged from it!"
A uyja-wood quirt split the skin across his back and somehow brought
him nearly erect in the saddle. He let his eyes open a little at a time
against the searing blaze of the desert. They had him ringed with their
bows and barb shafts, already had his qharaak tethered to one of their
own.
And then they were taking him back. Back to the shimmering thing at
the horizon that was the outpost village; back to the place where the
gear box of his track-car had stalled for want of proper lubricant, and
where the chase had begun.
But he would not think about that. He knew about that, knew about the
crime of it, and now he must try to think about the answers for the
Dep-Court magistrate. They would be the same answers he had given
the other times. There could be no new answers. New or old, none
would be understood, or believed, for that matter. But he must think
about something, or the half-visions in his mind would bring certain
insanity now; the half-visions, the things to see that did not exist
to be seen, the glaring white-yellow eyes of Procyon herself and her
satellite star, the cruel black-gold eyes of the bearded, iron muscled
Dep-Troopers that had caught him.
* * * * *
"Make the prisoner stand straight before this court, Trooper!"
The flesh splitting lash of pain wrenched him into a sort of
pseudo-consciousness. He struggled to rise from the rough wooden floor
on which he'd been thrown, and brought sound back to his ears, fuzzy
sight to his eyes. The sound was of the crowd. A muffled crowd sound;
they would still be outside, still struggling for a look at his broken
down track despite the heavy trooper cordons that were around it,
awaiting a qharaak team of sufficient size to haul it away.
And the sight was of a windowless, thin-walled cubicle, sole court of
this narrow, desert fringe Department, and of the Prokyman judge, and
the Troopers standing idly with their stinging quirts at either side
and just behind him.
But he had been before Prokyman judges before. Once, even, there had
been a jury of the local peasantry, and he had won an easy acquittal
then because of his youth--it had been a full five Terrayears ago,
when he had been barely 12 years old.
He struggled unaided to his feet, faced the wooden throne like
structure upon which the magistrate, girdled in coarse ruuk hide,
sat toying with his polished mace of office. Beside him stood his
Stenosmith. The Stenosmith held a slender scroll in one hand, but
for the moment his legal superior let it go unnoticed, and fixed the
Court's prisoner with a gaze as hard as Terrestrial diamonds.
"Jon Kane, aged 17 Sol III years, second generation Sol III descendant,
renegade colonial resident of the Sol III agricultural Department of
J'iira-IX: do you understand the charges against you?"
He struggled to make his tongue move to form the clipped syllables of
the Interplanetary. It was an old language, but he had never spoken it
as easily as the one which his father had taught him, the one which he
said had come from Terra. But he must learn the Interplanetary, his
father had said for some day, he might venture beyond the blue fields
of the Department where he lived; someday, perhaps, even use it to
speak with the starmen of the great ITA, who landed on Procyon V every
seven cycles. Some day, perhaps, and the work of the language tutors
would not have gone in vain.
"Charges? These men have uttered no charges, Senior. They have pursued
and threatened--"
"Silence! Civil use of your tongue, or no tongue at all! The law
prescribes trial even for heretics under the age of eleven cycles,
or you would not be so fortunate as to be standing where you are!
Stenosmith, your scroll!"
In a quick motion the slender scroll was in the magistrate's hands, and
in another it was spread before him.
"You are accused of entering this Department in a tracked vehicle being
driven by its own power. The vehicle is of a type no longer receiving
maintenance by the Intergalactic Technical Alliance, and therefore
could no longer function."
"But, Senior, my vehicle is one which had, by chance, been so well
constructed that it never suffered breakdown until--"
"Prisoner, you are lying, and you know the penalty for perjury!
Stenosmith, make note of the prisoner's falsehood to the Court. The
charges continue: You, Jon Kane, have been apprehended in neighboring
Departments within the last two and one-half cycles, on various
occasions, at the practice of making tools, and on one occasion at
least, of using such tools in the attempted repair of malfunctioning
facilities awaiting the legally prescribed maintenance of the ITA. Do
you deny this?"
"I--"
"It is therefore the conclusion of this Court that the vehicle in which
you rode into this Department was repaired and set into motion by
yourself! Do you deny that?"
And suddenly Kane felt something stir inside him; felt it through the
fatigue, through the pain, through the torture that threatened to be
all-consuming. He stood straight.
"No, Senior! No, I do not deny it! And I not only repaired the
track-car, I built it! I built it from parts I stole at night from
abandoned scrap heaps! And I made it run!"
The words had barely left his lips before the Troopers who had kept the
prescribed distance from him during interrogation by the Court were
closed in upon him, their muscular hands on his arms and shoulders like
so many vises.
The Prokyman judge had suddenly ceased toying with his mace, and then
only the Stenosmith was moving, furiously recording Kane's unthinkable
admission.
Then again the magistrate's voice; a slow, measured thing now, of sound
without movement, of Death itself.
"Prisoner Jon Kane, I hereby grant you your right to admit insanity.
Speak."
He could feel the magistrate's eyes burning into his own, could almost
see the subtle turnings of the unrelenting brain behind them.
"I do not so admit!"
"Then it is the sentence of this Court that, at Meridian tomorrow,
you shall be taken before a bow detachment of the Department Martial
Patrol, and shot in the body until dead! Take him away!"
* * * * *
He had thought that the sleep of exhaustion that must come would be
dreamless, yet it was not; he had thought the pain in him that was so
little relieved by stretching prone on the rough wooden floor of his
tiny cell would keep the past beyond all thought and memory, but it did
not. And on the instant before waking from his tortured sleep on the
hot morning of his execution, the two mingled to flash again across his
numbed brain; there was a split second of it, and it was all his life.
There were the yellow books he had found. Yellow with age, yet somehow
intact when they should have been ashes from the flames that had
consumed all the rest, or disintegrated with the rot of forgetfulness
and two centuries of time.
And there was his father, who had caught him in the act of reading
them; his father, a quiet man who spoke little, as though many thoughts
were forever kept at the threshold of his lips by the force of sheer
will.
"Burn them, boy," he had said. "Burn them after you have finished. And
your life shall depend on how silent you keep about what you have read
in them. Your life, boy. When you have finished burn them!"
That had been all. He had expected a sound thrashing; he had expected
to see the forbidden books torn to bits before his eyes. But that had
been all.
And he had remembered. He had kept his silence as his father had said,
as if his life depended on it, yet something had subtly grown in him
that would not be repressed. He had fought it, he had lain awake in his
rude cot and listened long hours to the night-sounds that wafted gently
across the rolling blue fields of his father's farmland, and he had
fought the thoughts, and had failed. But it was at that point in his
life that Jonny Kane learned that ideas could not be burned.
He remembered how he had fashioned his first tool. With it, he had
shaped better shoes for his father's qharaak teams. And then there had
been other tools which he had learned to link together, and his share
of the day's planting had been done long before the other men returned
from the fields at sunset.
That was the time he had first been caught.