"Thank you, Mr. Ironsmith!"
"Come along!" Forester shouted hoarsely. "Before they shoot!"
But the smiling mathematician lingered maddeningly, to shake the trembling hand of the old magician and murmur some farewell to White.
He had turned out the pockets of his baggy slacks, to give Jane Carter a few coins and all his stock of chewing gum, and she followed him outside, when at last he came, waving a grave farewell.
"They won't shoot." Grinning, Ironsmith displayed a dark bit of metal.
"Because little Jane brought me the firing link out of their rocket gun."
Shuddering to the cold sea wind, still desperately waving his hat, Forester scrambled ahead of Ironsmith across the great wet stones of the broken causeway.
He was breathless when they came back to the car, and cold with sweat from something else than running.
"You had us worried, sir," Dodge called gratefully from beside the tripod in the ditch.
"That hour was almost up."
Turning to peer uneasily back at the old round tower, dark in the driving mist, Forester told him to unload the launcher and test the mechanism.
He obeyed, and shouted a startled curse.
His jaw dropped when Ironsmith silently handed him the missing firing link.
"Don't ask questions now." Forester clung weakly to the door of the car.
"Just stow your gear, and let's get back to Starmount.
Because I think the project is going to be alerted.
Soon!"
He didn't feel like driving. Armstrong took the wheel, and he sat with Ironsmith and the folded tripod behind.
Chilled, and stiff with fatigue, and vaguely ill from the motion of the car, he studied Ironsmith uneasily.
The clerk sat comfortably sprawled with his feet propped on the launcher tube, watching the landscape with a casual interest until they left the mountains and dropped back to the brown monotony of the desert, when he stretched and closed his eyes and went to sleep.
Tortured with apprehensive uncertainties, Forester jogged him back to a quiet alertness.
"I'm a physicist." Hoarse with worry, Forester felt that he had to talk.
"I'm used to limiting my inquiries to phenomena that are reproducible at will, by mechanical means, under strict controls.
This psychic stuff - I just don't want to believe it."
"I understand." Ironsmith nodded cheerfully.
"I recall a paper you wrote to attack the evidence for extraphysical action. You were pretty violent."
"Just a lab report," Forester protested defensively.
"You see, Ruth's instrument firm had supplied equipment for some crackpot experiment.
There were dice in a little frame that tilted to roll them, mechanically, making the conditions for each fall identical.
The experimenter claimed that he could control the fall mentally, and I thought Ruth was taking him too seriously.
I ordered a duplicate frame and tried to repeat the experiment - just to show her that it was all nonsense.
And my results showed a curve of random distributions."
"Which itself was a pretty good proof of extraphysical action." Grinning quizzically at his startled gape, the clerk added innocently,
"Because that was what you wanted.
Any sort of extraphysical research, don't you see, requires a slight modification in the methods of classical physics.
The experimenter is also a part of the experiment. Your negative results were a logical outcome of your negative purpose."
Forester stared, as if discovering a stranger.
Ironsmith had never seemed much more than a convenient accessory to the electronic calculators, serenely content with his insignificant job.
He had annoyed Forester with his careless dress and his chewing gum and his commonplace friends.
He had always showed an irritating irreverence for the established aristocracy of scholarship, and Forester was startled into silence, now, by his unexpected cogency.
"Purpose is the key," he went on casually.
"But Mark White has too much of the wrong sort - he's looking for weapons, instead of the truth.
That's why I think he'll never learn enough to control those mechanicals. He hates them too hard."
"But he has reasons." Resentment of the clerk's pleasant calm spurred Forester to a harsh protest.
"He knows the humanoids, remember, and we don't.
I intend making a full report of his warning to the Defense Authority.
Whatever the circumstances, our military forces ought to be alerted against any such planned invasion."
"I'd think that over, sir." Ironsmith shook his head.
"Because this whole affair would look a little odd, don't you realize, to anybody who wasn't on the spot.
You'll have to admit that our own testimony wouldn't sound very impressive to a military commission, what with White's rather childish theatrics and the trampish look of his associates."