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he introduced himself, obviously unnecessarily for most of those present. “Chairman of the Department of Medical Sciences.” He preened his robe for a moment. “In recent days, the Trader and Elector Esias de Tenebre has provided us with evidence for Colonel Volkov’s remarkable, nay, extraordinary, claim. We have all had an opportunity to acquaint ourselves with it, and we must, I think, admit that it is extraordinary evidence. Documents of undisputed provenance, photographs, fingerprints. . . . Likewise, we and our predecessors have had many years indeed to examine such evidence of the level of scientific knowledge prevalent in the Solar System at the time of the, ah, Bright Star’s departure as has trickled in over the past two centuries. We have no reason to doubt the possibility of the treatment of which the Colonel has spoken.”
    He cupped an elbow in one hand, his chin in the other, and gazed around the auditorium.
    “However,” he went on, “the method that the Colonel proposes by which we could independently, as he puts it, rediscover the nostrum must surely strike all men—and women!—of science as preposterously cumbersome and, above all, uncertain. This is not how science is done at all! The scientific method is based upon logical reasoning from observation, and from logical analysis of available data. An immense wealth of such data is available to us already. An even greater addition to it has been bestowed on us by the successful expedition of the family de Tenebre, which beyond the memory of the oldest man now living, set forth to bring from distant Mingulay the full fountain-head of that knowledge of which we and our predecessors have long lapped up the veriest drops and trickles. I have every confidence that a few years of careful study and exact reasoning will enable us to deduce the composition of the elixir.”
    A low hum of approbation greeted this. Others stood up, one by one, and held forth on the power of logic to reason from old facts to new.
    “Let us take for example the theory of evolution,” one man, depressingly young, said. “Could that have been discovered experimentally? No! A thousand years ago, Alexander Philoctetes stood in this very hall and explained to the Academy how in each generation more are born than can survive, how consequently there is a struggle for existence, and how therefore small variations conducive to survival must necessarily be preserved—and so on, in that masterly deduction of the origin of species with which we are all familiar. If Philoctetes had used this vaunted experimental method—fossicking about in quarries, no doubt—he would have found the most misleading results in the fossil record, and come up with some theory of successive creations, or spontaneous generation, or such like.”
    And more in the same vein. Volkov would have sat with his head in his hands if he’d had anywhere to sit. As it was, he just stood there, feeling his jaw muscles first slacken and then, increasingly, clench.
    “Your pardon,” he said finally to Sejanus, “but I must speak.”
    Sejanus bowed him to the rostrum. Volkov gripped it and leaned forward.
    “I fully understand,” he said, “and deeply appreciate what the sciences of this great city have accomplished by examining and comparing information obtained by your own careful observations and from study of the information won on Earth in the past. You have indeed accomplished great things. But not all, not by any means all, of what anyone can see in this wonderful metropolis was built by such methods. No amount of reasoning, from observation or from first principles, could have built the machines I have seen in the shops, the ships I see on the ocean, the vehicles in your streets, and the crops in your fields. They were designed by the method I suggested, the empirical method, the method of trial and error, of hypothesis and induction as well as—indeed, hand in hand with—deduction. Your mechanics and artisans, your pharmacists