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." II