Handing the clerk some small metal object, she sat down again by the fire.
"Please, Mr. Graystone." She watched the simmering pot, with enormous eager eyes. "Please, can't we eat?"
"You've already met Jane Carter," White was drawling softly.
"Her great accomplishment is teleportation."
"Tele-" Forester gasped, wrestling with a sudden overwhelming surmise. "What?"
"I think you'll have to agree that Jane's pretty good." The big man smiled down through the red beard, and she looked back, her eyes luminous with a mute admiration.
"In fact, she has the richest psychophysical capacities that I've found on any of the planets where I've looked for resources to fight our common enemy."
Forester shivered to the wind at his back.
"Jane was another misfit," White went on.
"In this age of machine worship, her young genius had been ignored and denied.
Her only recognition had come from some petty criminal, who attempted to turn her talents to shoplifting.
I took her out of a reform school."
Her thin blue face smiled up at Forester.
"I'm not going back to that bad place," she told him proudly.
"Mr. White never has to beat me, and he's teaching me psychophysics." She spoke the word with grave care.
"I went to find you in that deep cellar in the mountain, all by myself.
Mr. White says I did very well."
"I-I think you did!" Forester stammered faintly.
She turned hopefully to watch the stew again, and Forester peered sharply about that smoke-darkened room, where a few driftwood timbers and little piles of straw made the only furniture.
"A curious fortress, I know." That ruthless purpose burned again in White's blue eyes.
"But all our weapons are in our minds, and the hard pursuit of the enemy has left us no resources to waste on needless luxuries."
Forester watched the little gambler roll another nervous seven.
That must be some kind of trick, he thought, and the child's appearance at Starmont another.
He refused to take any serious stock in this paraphysical stuff, but he tried to conceal that bleak mistrust as he swung back to White.
He must stall, study these people, discover the motives and the methods of their strange chicanery.
"What enemy?" he demanded.
"I see you aren't taking my warning very seriously." White's rumbling drawl became ominously intense.
"But I think you will when you hear the news."
The big man took his arm, to lead him away from the fire.
"Mason Horn is going to land tonight."
Forester swallowed hard, unable to cover his shock.
For Mark White, whether a desperate Interplanet agent or merely a clever rogue, had no right to know even the name of Mason Horn.
Chapter SEVEN
THE MISSION of Mason Horn was another high secret, as closely guarded as Project Thunderbolt itself.
Two years ago, when the pen traces in the new search dome at Starmount first began to hint of neutrino bursts from some nearer and less friendly source than the supernova, that competent astronomer had been drafted from the observatory staff to find why the Triplanet fleets always selected Sector Vermilion for their space maneuvers.
Hurriedly briefed in the dangerous art of interplanetary espionage and equipped as a legitimate salesman of medico-radiological supplies, he had taken passage on a Triplanet trading vessel.
No word of him had yet come back.
"Mason Horn!"
Forester felt ill with shock.
"Did he find-"
Caution choked him, but White's great shaggy head had already nodded at Ash Overstreet.
Turning slowly from the fire, the clairvoyant looked up with an expression of lax stupidity.
"Horn's an able secret agent," he rasped hoarsely.
"In fact, though the man himself doesn't suspect it, he has fairly well-developed extrasensory perceptions.
He was able to penetrate an Interplanet space fort stationed out in the direction designated as Sector Vermilion, and he got away with some kind of military device.
I don't understand it, but he thinks of it as a mass- converter."
Forester's legs turned weak, and he sat down on a driftwood block.
During all those ghastly years, while he had been perfecting the slender missiles of his own project and waiting beside them in the vault through anxious days and sleepless nights, this was what he had most greatly feared.
He had to swallow before he could whisper:
"So that's your bad news?"