"You speak of monopoly, Senator, but you're forming one yourself! You, and your organization, have been fortunate enough, as I was, to have found some of the old books, to have learned some of the old knowledge with which the armament for the Wars was built, and against which, when their horror was finally over, people everywhere rebelled. It was they who burned the books, Senator! Not the ITA! It was they who wanted done with all that seemed to them responsible for the carnage which they had somehow survived! It was they--on a hundred planets--who without thinking, ran down their scientists, their technicians; murdered them for possessing the knowledge which they had misused! And the few technicians who escaped were bitter and frightened men. They managed to salvage a few of the old ships and escape. And theirs was the natural error of assuming that if they were not to suffer what their murdered companions had, they must think in terms of using what they alone knew as a weapon against those who did not and would not be allowed to have that knowledge! "But--and listen to me, gentlemen!--even as the Senator has said, if knowledge is not given room to grow, it deteriorates! And by keeping their well guarded secrets to themselves, entrusting them only to specially selected personnel whom they recruited year after year for training from the planets so that their organization could grow more rapidly in numbers, and by keeping those 'secrets' sacrosanct and unchallangeable, they became at length outmoded, and finally half forgotten and adulterated with pompous nonsense! And if you are to do the same, then the same will happen to you!" He paused quickly for fresh breath, then plunged on headlong. "The solution is not in fighting and battle--for that is what precipitated the whole stupid situation in the first place, as it always will. I told you I could do a double-A that would last five hundred years, and I can! And I will do it! And I will show you how to do it! But only on the condition that your propaganda machine gives the Tinkers the entire credit for it!" "Master Kane, that is enough!"