"No." White shook his flowing, fiery mane.
"Our enemy is something vaster and more vicious than the Triplanet Powers.
And the weapon against us is something more deadly than any mass-converter. It is pure benevolence."
Forester sat hunched and shuddering. "I'm afraid you don't understand mass-conversion weapons," he protested faintly.
"They use all the energy in the detonated matter - while the fission process, in the best plutonium bombs, releases less than a tenth of one per cent.
They make a different sort of war.
One small missile can split the crust of a planet, boil the seas and sterilize the land, and poison everything with radio-isotopes for a thousand years."
He stared at White. "What could be worse than that?"
"Our benevolent enemy is."
"How could that be?"
"That's what I brought you here to tell you."
Forester waited, perched uncomfortably on the damp timber, and White kicked aside a straw bed to stand over him impatiently.
"It's a simple, dreadful story.
The beginning of it was ninety years ago, on a planet known as Wing IV, nearly two hundred light-years from here at the far side of the colonized section of the galaxy.
The human villain of it was a scientist whose name translates as Warren Mansfield."
"You pretend to know what happened there only ninety years ago?" Forester stiffened skeptically.
"When even the light that left the star Wing at that time is not halfway to us yet?"
"I do." White's smile had a passing glint of malice.
"The missiles of your secret project are not all that travels faster than light!"
Forester gulped with cold dismay, listening silently.
"Ninety years ago," the huge man rumbled, "the planet Wing IV had come to face the same technological crisis that this one does today - the same crisis that every culture meets, at a certain point in its technological evolution.
The common solutions are death and slavery - violent ruin or slow decay.
On Wing IV, however, Warren Mansfield created a third alternative."
Forester looked up at him searchingly, waiting.
"Physical science had got out of hand there, as it has here.
Mansfield had already discovered rhodomagnetism there - perhaps because the light of the Crater Supernova struck Wing IV a century before it reached here.
He had seen his discovery misused as a weapon, as most physical discoveries have been.
Foolishly, he tried to bottle up the technological devil he had freed."
Forester began to wish he had called the police after all, for this man knew far too much to be free.
"Military mechanicals had already been evolved too far, you see, there on Wing IV," White went on.
"Mansfield used his new science to design android mechanicals of a new type - humanoids, he called them - intended to restrain men from war.
The job took many years, but he was finally too successful.
His rhodomagnetic mechanicals are a little too perfect."
The big man paused, taut with an angry energy, but Forester sat too dazed to ask the frightened questions in his mind. He shivered again, as if the damp wind at his back had the chill of outer space.
"I knew Mansfield," White resumed at last.
"Later, and on a different planet.
He was an old man, then, but still desperately fighting the benevolent monster he had made.
A refugee from his own humanoids. For those efficient mechanicals were following him from planet to planet, spreading out across the human worlds to stamp out war - exactly as he had meant them to do.
Mansfield couldn't stop them."
"He found me a homeless child, wandering in a land that war had ruined. He rescued me from starvation and fear, and brought me up to join his crusade.
I was with him for a good many years, while he was trying one weapon and another, but he always failed to stop the humanoids."
A sad sternness hardened White's bearded face.
"Growing old, defeated, Mansfield tried to make a physical scientist out of me, to carry on after him.
He failed again.
I had learned to hate the humanoids enough, but I lacked his scientific gift.
He had been a physicist. I grew into something else.
"Living like a wild animal in the rubble of ruined cities, hunting and hunted while I was still a child, I had learned powers of the human mind that Mansfield could never recognize.
Our philosophies came to differ.
He had put his faith in machines - and made the humanoids. When he came to see his blunder, he tried to destroy them with, more machines.
He was bound to fail - because those mechanicals are as nearly perfect as any machine will ever be.