Chapter I: Front Matter

THE MAN THE TECH-MEN MADE

By FOX B. HOLDEN

_He was a man of a hundred planets, drawn
from the blackness of space to save a
tech-galaxy from disintegration. He was Kane,
the warrior-mechanic ... memory-king of
knowledgeless worlds ... savior to
millions ... maniac to the ruling few--so
they threw a dragnet over the
stars to stop the heretic._

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories March 1954.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The relentless heat of yellow-white twin suns boiled the thin desert air and it seared his laboring lungs, and he knew why this was called the Desert of One Thousand Mirages. The Desert of One Thousand Hells would have been a better name.

They said a man could go mad here. If not from the crazily twisting, undulating heat shapes themselves, then from the pain-tortured vagaries of his own brain. But mad or not, Jonny Kane knew he must somehow stay in the saddle that was not fashioned for human buttocks; stay astride the silver skinned, hairless beast never bred for human transportation, and ride.

They could be all around him, of course, and he might never know until it was too late to wheel his fleet qharaak and dash again for freedom in yet another direction across the shifting, low-duned wastes. They could be but yards behind him but there was not the strength to look back, only to grip the thick reins twined about his bleeding wrists, to keep his cramped legs stiff about the qharaak's sloping flanks. And ride, and choke on the smoking sand.

His brain bubbled inside his head, and he shut his eyes.

He would tire and lose his grip, and so lose his mount, and fry to death on the blinding whiteness of the sand. Or he would go crashing into them, and they would lead him back to the outpost village, and his death would be of their making. What chance, after all, had an Earth-descendant against the copper skinned native police of a Procyon planet, who rode its deserts as if they were the cool, green fields of the mother world of which his father had so often spoken? What chance?

There was flame in his lungs, and fire was burning the insides of his half naked, once strong young body into crumbling, blackened ash. Ride--

"Hold! Hold, or there's a barb through your evil heart!"

The booming command was from the left. And he wheeled the qharaak so sharply it reared and nearly lost its sextuple footing in the shifting sand. A sudden thrummm went past one ear. He tried to loose his legs enough for a kick in the lunging animal's flanks, but the muscles in them were like steel clamps. They would not move.

The reins about his wrists were slippery and stinging with sweat and sand as both mixed with his blood, and were pulled easily enough from his grasp by the vicious, sudden tug from one side.

And then the overpowering odor of the other lathered qharaaks flooded his nostrils as the Dep-Troopers closed in upon him. He retched with it, and was sick.

"Come on, you! You're lucky our orders were dead _or_ alive! Straighten up in that saddle or you'll go back dragged from it!"

A uyja-wood quirt split the skin across his back and somehow brought him nearly erect in the saddle. He let his eyes open a little at a time against the searing blaze of the desert. They had him ringed with their bows and barb shafts, already had his qharaak tethered to one of their own.

And then they were taking him back. Back to the shimmering thing at the horizon that was the outpost village; back to the place where the gear box of his track-car had stalled for want of proper lubricant, and where the chase had begun.

But he would not think about that. He knew about that, knew about the crime of it, and now he must try to think about the answers for the Dep-Court magistrate. They would be the same answers he had given the other times. There could be no new answers. New or old, none would be understood, or believed, for that matter. But he must think about something, or the half-visions in his mind would bring certain insanity now; the half-visions, the things to see that did not exist to be seen, the glaring white-yellow eyes of Procyon herself and her satellite star, the cruel black-gold eyes of the bearded, iron muscled Dep-Troopers that had caught him.

* * * * *

"Make the prisoner stand straight before this court, Trooper!"

The flesh splitting lash of pain wrenched him into a sort of pseudo-consciousness. He struggled to rise from the rough wooden floor on which he'd been thrown, and brought sound back to his ears, fuzzy sight to his eyes. The sound was of the crowd. A muffled crowd sound; they would still be outside, still struggling for a look at his broken down track despite the heavy trooper cordons that were around it, awaiting a qharaak team of sufficient size to haul it away.

And the sight was of a windowless, thin-walled cubicle, sole court of this narrow, desert fringe Department, and of the Prokyman judge, and the Troopers standing idly with their stinging quirts at either side and just behind him.

But he had been before Prokyman judges before. Once, even, there had been a jury of the local peasantry, and he had won an easy acquittal then because of his youth--it had been a full five Terrayears ago, when he had been barely 12 years old.

He struggled unaided to his feet, faced the wooden throne like structure upon which the magistrate, girdled in coarse ruuk hide, sat toying with his polished mace of office. Beside him stood his Stenosmith. The Stenosmith held a slender scroll in one hand, but for the moment his legal superior let it go unnoticed, and fixed the Court's prisoner with a gaze as hard as Terrestrial diamonds.

"Jon Kane, aged 17 Sol III years, second generation Sol III descendant, renegade colonial resident of the Sol III agricultural Department of J'iira-IX: do you understand the charges against you?"

He struggled to make his tongue move to form the clipped syllables of the Interplanetary. It was an old language, but he had never spoken it as easily as the one which his father had taught him, the one which he said had come from Terra. But he must learn the Interplanetary, his father had said for some day, he might venture beyond the blue fields of the Department where he lived; someday, perhaps, even use it to speak with the starmen of the great ITA, who landed on Procyon V every seven cycles. Some day, perhaps, and the work of the language tutors would not have gone in vain.

"Charges? These men have uttered no charges, Senior. They have pursued and threatened--"

"Silence! Civil use of your tongue, or no tongue at all! The law prescribes trial even for heretics under the age of eleven cycles, or you would not be so fortunate as to be standing where you are! Stenosmith, your scroll!"

In a quick motion the slender scroll was in the magistrate's hands, and in another it was spread before him.

"You are accused of entering this Department in a tracked vehicle being driven by its own power. The vehicle is of a type no longer receiving maintenance by the Intergalactic Technical Alliance, and therefore could no longer function."

"But, Senior, my vehicle is one which had, by chance, been so well constructed that it never suffered breakdown until--"

"Prisoner, you are lying, and you know the penalty for perjury! Stenosmith, make note of the prisoner's falsehood to the Court. The charges continue: You, Jon Kane, have been apprehended in neighboring Departments within the last two and one-half cycles, on various occasions, at the practice of making tools, and on one occasion at least, of using such tools in the attempted repair of malfunctioning facilities awaiting the legally prescribed maintenance of the ITA. Do you deny this?"

"I--"

"It is therefore the conclusion of this Court that the vehicle in which you rode into this Department was repaired and set into motion by yourself! Do you deny that?"

And suddenly Kane felt something stir inside him; felt it through the fatigue, through the pain, through the torture that threatened to be all-consuming. He stood straight.

"No, Senior! No, I do not deny it! And I not only repaired the track-car, I built it! I built it from parts I stole at night from abandoned scrap heaps! And I made it run!"

The words had barely left his lips before the Troopers who had kept the prescribed distance from him during interrogation by the Court were closed in upon him, their muscular hands on his arms and shoulders like so many vises.

The Prokyman judge had suddenly ceased toying with his mace, and then only the Stenosmith was moving, furiously recording Kane's unthinkable admission.

Then again the magistrate's voice; a slow, measured thing now, of sound without movement, of Death itself.

"Prisoner Jon Kane, I hereby grant you your right to admit insanity. Speak."

He could feel the magistrate's eyes burning into his own, could almost see the subtle turnings of the unrelenting brain behind them.

"I do not so admit!"

"Then it is the sentence of this Court that, at Meridian tomorrow, you shall be taken before a bow detachment of the Department Martial Patrol, and shot in the body until dead! Take him away!"

* * * * *

He had thought that the sleep of exhaustion that must come would be dreamless, yet it was not; he had thought the pain in him that was so little relieved by stretching prone on the rough wooden floor of his tiny cell would keep the past beyond all thought and memory, but it did not. And on the instant before waking from his tortured sleep on the hot morning of his execution, the two mingled to flash again across his numbed brain; there was a split second of it, and it was all his life.

There were the yellow books he had found. Yellow with age, yet somehow intact when they should have been ashes from the flames that had consumed all the rest, or disintegrated with the rot of forgetfulness and two centuries of time.

And there was his father, who had caught him in the act of reading them; his father, a quiet man who spoke little, as though many thoughts were forever kept at the threshold of his lips by the force of sheer will.

"Burn them, boy," he had said. "Burn them after you have finished. And your life shall depend on how silent you keep about what you have read in them. Your life, boy. When you have finished burn them!"

That had been all. He had expected a sound thrashing; he had expected to see the forbidden books torn to bits before his eyes. But that had been all.

And he had remembered. He had kept his silence as his father had said, as if his life depended on it, yet something had subtly grown in him that would not be repressed. He had fought it, he had lain awake in his rude cot and listened long hours to the night-sounds that wafted gently across the rolling blue fields of his father's farmland, and he had fought the thoughts, and had failed. But it was at that point in his life that Jonny Kane learned that ideas could not be burned.

He remembered how he had fashioned his first tool. With it, he had shaped better shoes for his father's qharaak teams. And then there had been other tools which he had learned to link together, and his share of the day's planting had been done long before the other men returned from the fields at sunset.

That was the time he had first been caught.

The tools had been destroyed. And then--

Then he had measured the dimensions of a new plot of land without moving from the spot where he had made his computations with a stone in the soft loam, and that time--

Oh, the magistrate had not exaggerated. There had been many such crimes that he had committed, and he had not been able to help himself. Something within him would not let him stop--something that cried _why_ and would not let him rest.

But when he had unearthed the rusted scrap heap of metal forged in strange shapes, he had not told his father. Nor did his father know when he had made the new tools, or when, a full cycle after that day, he had completed the thing of old metal for which the tools had been used. By stealth he had stolen the crude oil which fueled the lamps in his father's house, and after that--

After that, he knew only that it _ran_!

Until this village. Until yesterday. Until the day before he was to die.

And then Jonny Kane came awake at last.

He had barely opened his eyes, and had not yet risen to his feet when the sound of chains rattled noisily on the other side of the narrow cell door. Not so soon--not so soon; he had slept too long!

The narrow door was flung open, and his eyes hurt with the sudden burst of sunlight. But he saw the Prokyman jailer who had thrown him in here, and there was another. A somewhat shorter, more broad-shouldered man with skin the color of his own, who did not wear the crude tunic of the Dep-Troopers. His body was clothed in a silver-black uniform the like of which he had never seen before. And his face--

Jonny studied the face, shadowed though it was by the bright light that limned it.

It had to be a Terraman's face.

"You are the youth--Jonny Kane?" The Terraman spoke the Interplanetary fluidly but with a strange accent, and slowly, the only possible truth was bursting upon him. But why--here--? "Answer me!"

"Yes--yes, Senior, Jonny Kane."

"You are of interest to the Intergalactic Technical Alliance."

"I am to pay for my crime--"

"I have secured your release. My name is B-Haaq; you will address me by my rank, which is Majtech. You will come with me. Your crime will only be paid for if you prove unworthy of your recruitment for cadet training. Do you understand?"

Dazedly, Kane stumbled to his feet. Perhaps, after all, he had not awakened. He managed a feeble nod to the question which the Majtech had put to him.

"Very well then. Come along."