"Very well then. Come along."
II
The gently curved metal walls of the room gleamed softly in the pale, shadowless light, and for a moment the silent chamber seemed as huge and merciless as the infinity of Space which surrounded the great ship of which it was a part. The aged man who sat in full Alliance dress uniform before him, the Director Gentech himself, might for the moment have been a statue, and the panel of officers which flanked him hewn from the same stone.
He could feel the eyes of fully a third of the ship's huge complement, twelve hundred labortechs strong, boring steadily into his back as he stood, alone in the moment's awful silence, between them and these statue-men whose swift minds were, he knew, coldly weighing the accusations against him.
And then the silence was broken. Majtech B-Haaq was speaking again, his still-young face red with the heat of impressively realistic outrage.
"Sires, I have laid this man's record for the last eight years as a cadet technician before you plainly, with no embellishment. And his thanks to you for selecting him from among thousands of other less fortunate youths on his planet for training as an officer of the Intergalactic Technical Alliance has been—what other word can describe it—but mutiny?" And then Cadtech Jon Kane felt the full force of his accuser's glance upon him.
"You were taken from death itself in some hell town on a cinder of a planet in Canis Major. And in repayment for eight years of instruction that most men would gladly risk their lives to obtain you have compounded your long list of wrongdoings with this ultimate insult—refusal to accept your commission as Lenantech unless you are allowed to perform an experiment which is not only preposterous but which has had fair evaluation by your superiors and been found worthless." B-Haaq paused for a quick breath. "Sires, I admit that perhaps the error has been ours from the first, and that the Prokymen who intended death for this young heretic knew whereof they spoke! As Cadtech Jon Kane's Section Overseer, I recommend his reduction, both mental and physical, to mineslave, and subsequent dispatch to one of the mine worlds of the star system from which he was recruited!"
It seemed suddenly to Kane that here was a crazy kind of irony—doubly crazy, doubly ironic because for the second time in his young life he was standing trial for things he had done which were not wrong! Had it been wrong in that other time, that other part of his life when he had built a vehicle that would move under its own power, with his own bare hands? Had that been so great an offense—and if so, against whom? The simple peasant folk of his planet? Against the ITA itself? If so, how?
And now again. After eight diligent years of trying to learn all that had been darkly forbidden to him before, and to thousands of others like him—after the happening of some miracle that had plucked him from a Proky death cell and placed him where he was encouraged to learn secrets that had once nearly cost him his life—after all that, now again, somehow, he had offended.