"I shared his hatred, but I saw the need of some better weapon than any machine.
I put my trust in men - in the native human powers I had begun to learn.
If men were to save themselves, I saw they must discover and use their own inborn capacities, rusty as they are from long neglect.
"So at last we separated.
I'm sorry that our parting words were too bitter - I called Mansfield a machine-minded fool, and he said that my science of the mind would only end with another regimentation of mankind, worse than the rule of the humanoids.
He went on to try his last weapon - he was attempting to ignite a chain reaction in the oceans and the rocks of Wing IV, with some kind of rhodomagnetic beam.
I never saw him again, but I know he didn't succeed.
Because the humanoids are still running." "I'm still fighting them, and these are my soldiers." The huge man nodded indignantly at his ragged followers squatting by the fire.
"Look at them - the most talented citizens of this planet.
I found them in the gutter, the jail, the madhouse.
But they are the last hope of man."
Flinching from the angry boom of his voice, Forester whispered uneasily,
"I don't quite see - what are these weapons of the mind?"
"One of the simplest is atomic probability."
"Eh?"
"Take an atom of Potassium-40." White's great voice turned softly patient again.
"A physicist yourself, you can easily picture such an unstable atom as a sort of natural wheel of chance, set to pay off only once during several billion years of spinning."
Forester nodded skeptically, thinking that nothing could be deadlier than the missiles of his own project.
"Like any machine of chance," White went on, "an unstable atom can be manipulated.
Just as easily as a pair of dice - it seems that size and distance aren't important factors, in telekinesis."
Forester blinked unbelievingly at the withered little gambler crouching by the fire, who had just rolled a five and a two.
"How do you manipulate an atom?"
"I don't quite know." Trouble darkened White's burning eyes.
"Although Jane does it easily, and the rest of us have made a few successful efforts at it - children learn the mental arts more readily, I think, perhaps because they don't have to unlearn the false truths and break the bad habits of mechanistic science.
And Jane is unusual."
His brooding face warmed for a moment, as he glanced at the little girl, who was eagerly watching old Graystone dip out her bowl of stew.
"But I don't know," he muttered wearily.
"The facts I have discovered are often apparently contradictory, and always incomplete.
Perhaps the uncertainty principle involved in atomic stability doesn't apply to psychophysical phenomena.
Perhaps it is merely an illusion, born of the fact that our physical senses are too coarse to look into atoms.
I have suspected that physical time and space are similar illusions - I don't know.
But I do know that Jane Carter can detonate K-40 atoms."
White shrugged heavily, in the silver cloak.
"I've had dreams, Forester." His voice turned wistfully sad. "Magnificent dreams, of a coming time when my new science might free every man from the old, cruel shackles of the brute and the machine.
I used to believe that the human mind could conquer matter, master space, and govern time.
"But the most of my efforts have failed - I don't know why."
He shook his fiery, shaggy head. "I run into blind alleys.
I stumble over obstacles that I can never really identify.
Perhaps there's some barrier I fail to see, some limiting natural law that I've never grasped."
He moved restlessly, towering over Forester.
"I don't know," he repeated bitterly.
"And there's no time left for trial and error now, because those machines have taken most of the human universe.
This is one of the last planets left - and I don't think you know that their first scouts are already here!"
Forester stared up in slack-jawed unbelief.
"Yes, old Mansfield's humanoids are already infiltrating your defenses." White's voice turned wearily grim.
"They make efficient spies, you see. More clever than the human agents employed against you by the Triplanet Powers.
They don't sleep, and they don't blunder."
"Huh!" Forester gulped, astonished.
"You don't mean - spying machines?"
"You've met them," White said.