And now again. After eight diligent years of trying to learn all that had been darkly forbidden to him before, and to thousands of others like him--after the happening of some miracle that had plucked him from a Proky death cell and placed him where he was encouraged to learn secrets that had once nearly cost him his life--after all that, now again, somehow, he had offended. These men were not cruel men. Nor were the instructors overbearing taskmasters, nor the labortechs the arrogant men whom the planet-bound guardedly cursed with their derisive oaths "Space Tinker!" Yet they were bound to their ideas; ideas which must be clung to for dear life lest they become exposed to the risk of change. Kane had often enough been reminded of why that was so. The ideas, the techniques, the procedures, they'd been savior to an entire segment of a once great civilization in a half forgotten past which the ITA stubbornly called its "history." And so they must be preserved at all costs. And that was why it was wrong to question; wrong to challenge the refusal of a new idea. And that was why he was in trouble. Because these men were, in the last analysis, so little different from those who had surrounded him those eight years ago in the desert with their long bows. Guardians of two star systems, they were. The spine of civilization for over a hundred planets. Without which, the civilizations of each would surely backslide a second, and last, time. Implements of wood and stone would not support their ancient and infinitely complex structures for long, and before the evil but necessary secrets of the past could be faced with sufficient courage and re-learned, there would be only mouldering ruin. Thus taught his instructors. Therefore, this procedure and that technique are to be protected and held inviolate if men are to be kept from savagery! Remember the Holocaust, Cadet! _This_ is the proven way! But the something in him that he had never been able to suppress--whatever it was that had made him build his vehicle despite his father's warnings to silence--that "something" was again to be his downfall, even among those who had been his rescuers. "A point of final clarification, if I may, Majtech B-Haaq." A uniformed Coltech of the Director Gentech's panel had spoken without rising from his seat. "You have charged that past difficulties with the accused have involved actual _challenge_ of the instructorship under which he was assigned?"