With the pressures of immediate survival and exhaustion remove his thoughts returned automatically to his problem. What were the people really like-and how had they managed to survive in the dead wilderness? In the city he had been told they were savages. Yet there was a carefully tended and repaired communicator on the wall. Out by the door a crossbow that fired machined metal bolts; he could see the tool marks still visible on their shanks. The one thing he needed was more information. He could start by getting rid of some of his bad information.

“Rhes, you laughed when I told you what the city people said, about trading you trinkets for food. What do they really trade you?”

“Anything within certain limits,” Rhes said. “Small manufactured items, such as electronic components for our communicators. Rustless alloys we can’t make in our forges, cutting tools, atomic-electric converters that produce power from any radioactive element, Things like that. Within reason they’ll trade anything we ask that isn’t on the forbidden list. They need the food badly.”

“And the items on the forbidden list-?”

“Weapons of course, or anything that might be made into a powerful weapon. They know we make gunpowder so we can’t get anything like large casting or seamless tubing we could make into heavy gun barrels. We drill our own rifle barrels by hand, though the crossbow is quiet and faster in the jungle. Then they don’t like us to know very much, so the only reading matter that gets to us are tech maintenance manuals, empty of basic theory.

“The last banned category you know about-medicine. This is the one thing I cannot understand, that makes me burn with hatred with every death they might have prevented.”

“I know their reasons,” Jason said.

“Then tell me, because I can think of none.”

“Survival-it’s just that simple. I doubt if you realize it, but they have a decreasing population. It is just a matter of years before they will be gone. Whereas your people at least must have a stable-if not slightly growing population-to have existed without their mechanical protections. So in the city they hate you and are jealous of you at the same time. If they gave you medicine and you prospered, you would be winning the battle they have lost. I imagine they tolerate you as a necessary evil, to supply them with food, otherwise they wish you were all dead.”

“It makes sense,” Rhes growled, slamming his fist against the bed. “The kind of twisted logic you expect from junkmen. They use us to feed them, give us the absolute minimum in return, and at the same time cut us off from the knowledge that will get us out of this hand to mouth existence. Worse, far worse, they cut us off from the stars and the rest of mankind.” The hatred on his face was so strong that Jason unconsciously drew back.