Then another moment of awful silence—the awful timelessness of deliberation.
Jon Kane could feel the cold perspiration that made his well cut cadet uniform tunic damp and clinging. He tried to repress a shiver, to stand as completely motionless as the men before him sat.
"Majtech B-Haaq." It was the Director Gentech himself who spoke. His words were slow, measured, and spoken in a voice which might have been that of a man twenty years his junior. Gentech Starn, at the age of ninety, was still a strong man and a strong leader, and his name had been synonymous with the three letters ITA and the interstellar authority for which they stood for every one of the sixty years since his father, Director Gentech before him, had met death on one of Sol System's cold, hostile outplanets.
"Sire."
"You have prosecuted with excellence. However, may I suggest that I am yet to be wholly satisfied in this matter. Your accused must have admirable potentialities as a technical officer, or he would not have been selected for training, nor would such effort have been expended to obtain him, at the very outset. Whatever challenges, as you charge he has made, could not, then, have been totally irresponsible ones. And it has been a long time since there has been technological challenge of the Intergalactic Technical Alliance!" A hardly discernible smile touched the faded, withering lips, and Kane thought he had detected a momentary lightness in the last words they had spoken. "So it is my suggestion, Majtech—and gentlemen of this panel, that final decision hinge upon the success or failure of the experiment which the accused is held to have proposed, and which he so adamantly refuses to desert!"
"But—Sire, I submit that Cadtech Kane has admitted, by his own words as well as his actions, his guilt in this matter! He has freely confessed to each of the charges; has defiantly and openly held that his experiment will succeed, and has refused retraction of his stand in this very council chamber—"
"Our decision, Majtech B-Haaq, in cognizance of the folly of unduly wasting an otherwise competent cadet technician on the mining planets unless justified to our complete satisfaction, is that the experiment be allowed to proceed! This hearing is therefore adjourned!"
There were no others in the workshop to which he had been assigned. He was to work on his drive unit alone, Majtech B-Haaq had ordered, and of course the reason was obvious. One young heretic was enough.
But what if the glittering, finely-tooled object that rested on the long workbench before him was wrong and would not work? Yet he knew that it would! Mounted in a standard model spacetender, the drive unit which he'd devised would easily produce five times the speed and power, would consume less than half as much atomic fuel, would quadruple range, last twice as long.