"When I learned of your captivity by warp-beam from Titan and was told about you and the woman and was asked if I wanted you, I said yes. I spared you, Kane, and went to great trouble to obtain you, because you know the Tinkers as we could never hope to know them. And, more importantly, you can handle technology far better than either we or they. Is that true?" Jon hesitated, looked at the faces up-turned to him, saw the cold bitterness in their eyes. "I can make a double-A good for five hundred years." "Just as we thought. You're dangerous to them, Kane, because for some reason you know more than they do. People would start looking to you, rather than to them, for their needs, and they're scared stiff you'll go around blabbing all you know, ruining their hold. Well, that is just the chance we want to give you. Help us, and later, you'll be able to name your own price. Go back to the Tinkers, and you're a dead man." The room was silent again, but their eyes were still upon him. He tried to think, tried to evaluate what the big man had said. It all seemed so logical, yet--yet there was something wrong. There was something they did not understand. Or, perhaps, understood too well. "I--I agree with you about the tremendous power they wield," Jon said slowly, "but you're wrong about destroying them. It's true they're not the technicians they once were. They have polluted logic with belief and historical fact with legend; they do know _how_, but they don't know _why_, and that's affecting their know-how, if you see what I mean. They use belief more and more and reason less and less--" Stine nodded. "Precisely. If knowledge is not given room to grow, it deteriorates, and finally is nothing more than half understood pseudo truths. Therefore I fail to see--" "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.