Stipock followed the starpilot to the end of the storage room, where he opened a door. Jazz Worthing watched him as he stepped through the door. Stipock looked around — there were three sets of gauges and dials grouped around three doors. He resisted the impulse to ask questions, though he could think of no good reason not to. He just didn't want to converse with a man whom he had long hated (from a distance) and who now had a great deal of power over him (from close up).

Jazz parted the seal on the door marked A, opened it, and stepped back. Stipock moved to the door and looked through.

Dazzling sunlight poured in through a long oval slit in the roof. It took a moment for Stipock to adjust to the light. When he could see clearly, he gasped. The long tube, which had been lined with coffins, was a ruin. All the metal was melted down, and a clear swath had been cut through. There was no way a single passenger in that section could have survived. "What happened?" Stipock whispered.

"An enemy ship. Two of them, as a matter of fact. I had a choice between letting a projectile hit the stardrive and vaporize us all, or letting it hit here, in the hope that some would survive."

"What a choice," Stipock said. "Were either of the other two tubes hit?"

"All the life support in C tube was destroyed by the heat of the projectile's passage," Jazz said. Stipock noticed that the starpilot formed some of the words and sentences with difficulty, as if he were unaccustomed to saying them.

"I was in B tube?"

Jazz smiled patiently. "Isn't that obvious?"

Then Worthing stepped into the ruined tube, and Stipock followed. They walked carefully along the tube. Stipock looked up as he passed under the tear in the roof. The sun was blinding. He looked away, covering his eyes. A purple spot blocked some of his vision. "Don't look at the sun," Jazz said.

"Thanks for the warning," said Garol Stipock.

They made their way to the end of the tube and didn't have to open a door, because the hole left by the projectile was ample. They clambered through, and Stipock was horrified by what he saw — the tape rack mostly fused and melted by heat. "The memory tapes," he said, "Look at this — this is terrible."

Jazz reached out with his toe, and showed Stipock an empty slot in the lower right–hand corner of the B–tube tape rack. "That's where the only B tube tape that was usable was."

"Mine."

"Again, obvious."

Stipock leaned against the wall. "But what about the others? They won't have any memory at all, no training, no education. They'll be like infants. What are we going to do?"

"It's all been done."

Stipock was puzzled. "But how? If you didn't have the tapes — you said I was the last one wakened! Why? How long did you leave me asleep after landing?"

"Fifty–eight years."

It was too much to understand all at once. Bad enough to wake up from somec and find that your last waking had been wiped and you were in the colonies, irrevocably off somec until you died — that much he had bargained for, had known the risks when he joined the conspiracy. But the deaths of two–thirds of the colonists in a battle in space, and then the loss of every survivor's tape except his own — And why had he been left asleep for fifty–eight years?

"It wasn't an easy decision," Jazz said, answering Stipock's unspoken question. "A dozen times that first year I headed for the Star Tower — for the ship — to waken you. I needed your help."

"Then why didn't you? Because I was a rebel against your conspiracy? In a case like this, you forget political differences. Captain Worthing, I would have helped you."

Jazz smiled slightly. "Would you?"

"Damn right!" Stipock said. "Damn right! Of course I would!"

"Well, that's the question, isn't it?" Whether you'll help me, or whether you'll work against me."

"Now? Aren't they all functioning adults by now?"

Jazz nodded, then went to the door from the schoolroom to B tube, opened it, went in. Stipock followed. Most of the coffins were empty, standing open. But twenty of them were occupied. Jazz touched each one as he passed, said a name. Most of them Stipock recognized — Fritz Kapock, the designer; Sara Hamilton, a wholesaler who had been one of the foremost leaders in the rebellion; Arran Handully, the best–known actress in the Empire and a primary financial backer of the rebellion. Others he didn't know, of course — he hadn't been that high in the ranks of the rebellion, to know everyone.

"Why are they still here? I thought you said I was last?"

"They aren't still here," Jazz answered. "They're back here. These are the ones who have proved themselves — the most creative, the most capable, those best able to lead. I bring them back here to sleep, so I can use them again."

"You still have people on somec," Stipock said. "But that's absolutely forbidden in the colonies."

"You worry about law?" Jazz asked. "You're the man who invented the probe, Garol Stipock."

Stipock flushed again, was embarrassed again that his anger showed so obviously. "I also invented the geologer, which you no doubt used for your planetary survey."

"Of course. I'm just pointing out that in special circumstances, law–abiding people break laws. You must admit these circumstances are special."

"When the next Empire ship comes, let's see what they say about it."

"There won't be any Empire ship," Jazz said. "We left Capitol more than a thousand years ago."

Another piece of unassimilatable information. "A thousand years! Then we must be —"

"Very, very far from the pale of human settlement. And the Empire doesn't know we're here."

"Why!"

"Does it matter? Here we are. Now I'll explain this carefully, and you'll listen carefully, and we shall see what happens next. Dr. Stipock, these people all had empty minds, like infants. No conditioning from Capitol culture. No knowledge of somec."

"They know now, anyway," Stipock interrupted.

"I said listen. They know nothing about the universe except what I could teach them. They know nothing about law except what I have taught them. And in all of this, I was limited by what they could understand. On Capitol, children were surrounded by the artifacts of civilization. All the little gadgets that kept us alive and made life fun. How many people on Capitol actually know how those things work?"

Stipock snorted. "Almost no one."

"Only the specialists. Now if people who see these things and use them every day have no idea how they work, how could I explain, say, a laser to these colonists, who have never seen one?"

"I never thought of that. They don't have a fragment of the science of the last four thousand years, then," Stipock said. "What have you done?"

"I haven't tried to teach them."

"But they should know! They have to know —"

"Why? On a planet where the technology they and their children will have can't possibly extract iron or aluminum from the earth? On a planet where coal is inaccessible and oil even harder to get? Should I tell them about star travel and telephones and loops and food processors and tubes and toilets? Should I tell them that they're living in squalor and ignorance and make them hate their lives?"

Stipock shook his head. He sat on an empty coffin, looked at his hands. "But not to tell them anything. Captain Worthing, I couldn't do it."

"Yes you could," Jazz said. "I even tried to tell them. But they didn't understand. I told them I brought them down from the sky in the ship, and they decided that I must be superhuman. How could I explain the science of the stardrive? They have no need for higher mathematics — it would just be a game to them, and a pretty damned hard one. None of them has time to learn things that can't be used — it takes all their time from dawn to dark just to stay alive."