Because the holder of such a weapon had to be forever ready to use it instantly, or else to perish by it, this silent vault had become his last refuge from fear, where he caught uneasy naps on a cot beside the launching station and lived on coffee and hurried sandwiches and waited for the teleprinters to thump out orders to strike.
Now the child's intrusion had demolished even this uncertain sanctuary.
"Nobody-" She stammered and trembled and gulped.
Big tears started down her pinched cheeks, and she dropped a handful of yellow-flowered weeds to wipe them away with a grimy fist.
"Please don't be mad, mister," she whispered.
"Nobody let me in."
Sensitive to pollens, Forester sneezed to the rank odor of the blooms.
Shrinking back from him, as if that had been a threatening gesture, the child began to cry.
"Mr. W-White said you wouldn't l-like me, mister," she sobbed faintly. "But he said you'd have to l-listen to us, if I came to see you here."
Forester had seen Triplanet agents, trapped and waiting for the firing squad.
He suffered nightmares, in which he thought Project Thunderbolt had already been betrayed.
But this shivering, big-eyed waif surely didn't look as if she had come to kill him, or even to loot the safe behind him, and he tried to soften the rasping anger in his voice.
"But how did you get past the guards?"
"Mr. White sent me." Shyly, she offered him a thin gray card. "With this."
Sneezing again, Forester kicked away the weeds, and took the finger-smudged card.
His breath went out as he read the brief message on it, boldly inked:
Clay Forester:
Sharing your concern for the People of these endangered planets, we can trade distressing and vital information for the aid we need from you.
If you want to know how Jane Carter reached you, come alone to the old Dragonrock Light, or bring Frank Ironsmith - we trust nobody else.
Mark White, Philosopher
Hearing the child's bare feet pattering on the steel floor, he looked up in time to see her running back down the tunnel to the elevator.
He darted after her, shouting at her to wait, but the door closed in his face and a green arrow lit to show that the disguised cage was going up.
Shaken with dismay, Forester ran back to his desk in the shop to telephone the upper project.
Armstrong had seen no intruders, certainly no small girl in a yellow dress, but he promised to meet the rising elevator and hold anybody in it.
Forester waited an agonized three minutes, and started nervously when the telephone rang again.
Armstrong's voice seemed oddly constrained.
"Well, Chief, we unlocked the door and searched the elevator."
"Did you catch her?"
"No, Chief," Armstrong said slowly. "There wasn't anybody in it."
"But I saw her go in."
Forester tried to hold down his voice. "There isn't any other landing, and the door can't open between stops.
She had to be in the elevator."
"She wasn't," Armstrong said. "Nobody was."
Forester considered himself a man of reason.
Technological marvels no longer astonished him, but he preferred to ignore any stray bits of experience which refused too stubbornly to fit the ordered pattern of physics.
The planet-shattering missiles of the project no longer aroused any particular wonder in him, because they were part of the same pattern.
But the urchin's visit wasn't.
The grotesque impossibility of her coming and going left him shuddering.
Restraining himself from starting up the escape ladder beyond the emergency door, he kept his numb forefinger on the elevator button.
The cage came back at last, and he went up to join the two technicians, greeting them with a hoarse-voiced demand.
"Have you caught her yet?"
Staring oddly, Armstrong shook his head.
"Sir, there has been no outsider here."
The man's voice was too courteous, too flatly formal, his level gaze too penetrating.
Forester felt a sudden sickness.
Sneezing again, from his allergy to those weeds the child had dropped, he said flatly:
"Somebody brought that elevator up."
"Sir, nobody went down." Armstrong kept on staring. "And nobody came up."
"But she was - down there," Forester croaked.
These men knew the intolerable strain upon him always. Perhaps it wasn't strange for them to think that he had cracked, but he insisted huskily,