"My past is an open book to you, Edipon. I come from a land where we know all the secrets of nature—"
"What is the name of this land? Are you a spy from Appsala?"
"I couldn't very well be one since I have never heard of the place." Jason pulled at his lower lip, wondering just how intelligent Edipon was, and just how frank he could be with him. This was no time to get tangled up in lies about planetary geography: it might be best to try him on a small dose of the truth. "If I told you I came from another planet, another world in the sky up among the stars, would you believe me?"
"Perhaps. There are many old legends that our forefathers came from a world beyond the sky, but I have always dismissed this as religious drivel, fit only for women."
"In this case the girls happen to be right. Your planet was settled by men whose ships crossed the emptiness of space as your caroj pass over the desert. Your people have forgotten about that and lost the science and knowledge you once had, but in other worlds the knowledge is still held."
"Madness!"
"Not at all, it is science, though many times confused as being the same thing. I'll prove my point. You know that I could never have been inside your mysterious building out there, and I imagine you can be sure no one has told me its secrets. Yet I'll bet you that I can describe fairly accurately what is in there—not from seeing the machinery, but from knowing what must be done to oil in order to get the products you need. Do you want to hear?"
"Proceed," Edipon said, sitting on a corner of the table and balancing the knife loosely in his palm.
"I don't know what you call it, the device, but in the trade it is a pot still used for fractional distillation. Your crude oil runs into a tank of some kind, and you pipe it from there to a retort, some big vessel that you can seal airtight. Once it is closed you light a fire under the thing and try to get all the oil to an even temperature. A gas rises from the oil and you take it off through a pipe and run it through a condenser, probably more pipe with water running over it. Then you put a bucket under the open end of the pipe and out of it drips the juice that you burn in your caroj to make them move."
Edipon's eyes opened wider and wider while Jason talked until they stuck out of his head like boiled eggs. "Demon!" he screeched and tottered towards Jason with the knife extended. "You couldn't have seen, not through stone walls, yet only my family have seen, no others—I'll swear to that!"