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.