"Sure. Descendants of armorers of the past. Be glad you're not called gypsies! You're getting the benefit of the doubt. At least it's pretty well realized that the ITA can trace its ancestry to _real_ technicians!" Kane grinned at her, and fleetingly thought how much the quick flush of anger added to the beauty of her patrician features. "Anyway, for Tinker eyes and ears, there's never been anything but welcome and praise wherever they've landed. Nothing but, and very militantly so, too, I'll tell you. Nobody wants to die when Tinker medicine can save them, to freeze when Tinker repaired heating plants can keep them warm in Winter. But underneath--underneath, the power the ITA holds over the very livelihood of civilization is pretty painfully felt." "But--but we are not dictators, Kane! That is a lie! We have never taken advantage--" "True enough, and that's all on the credit side. I don't think the ITA has ever had any other motive than keeping itself safe. Making sure that it would never suffer the near-extinction that its forbears did. But in so doing, you see, they've had to work themselves into a pretty commanding position. And they've succeeded. They've denied technical learning and training to all the planets, under penalty of forfeiture of the very necessary periodic technical service upon which the planets depend to retain the comforts of civilized living--" "I realize all that. Where, after all, would any of the planets be if the Gravity-Justifiers finally gave out for lack of proper maintenance? At least the history that I was taught said that during the Wars, planetesimals and even whole planets were annihilated in an effort to so upset a system's gravitational balance that the resulting upheavals would mean death to every living thing in that system. But there were some technicians--" "Scientists, Deanne." "Well, whatever they were, who were able to devise mechanisms to float in orbits of their own, warping Space in such a way as to create an artificial balance. Those Geejays saved billions of lives, and after the bloody reaction from the Wars and the men who invented them were killed, who else was left to keep them in working order? I should think people would--" "Thank the ITA?" "Well, yes, of course." There was a defiant look on her face, but Jon Kane was grinning. Saturn hulked far to their starboard side, now, and the ship's automatics were bringing them in dead on Titan. The planetoid was growing visibly bigger by the minute, and the other Ring of its primary was casting the interior of the spacetender in weird, vari-colored shadow. "If you were out there in a suit and somebody else was holding your oxytank, controlling just how much air you could have, how would you feel about him? Would you feel like thanking him for letting you have air to breathe?" "Well, I--"