"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 drama 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 semi-intellectual, 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 ITA—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!"