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.