Surprisingly, it glided toward the door.
An identical machine was waiting in the hall, and the two escorted him out of the building and on across the newly landscaped grounds, where everything seemed too precise, the lawns too level and too neatly rectangular, the walks too painfully straight, where even the tall evergreens had all been uprooted and replaced in stiff, forbidding rows.
Oddly, however, the irregular grove about the computing section had not been disturbed.
The grassy hillock had not been leveled, nor the old gravel path replaced with any shining plastic stuff.
Sheltered among the trees, the old wooden building with its red man-made shingles remained unchanged.
And Forester saw an even stranger thing.
For Frank Ironsmith came on his bicycle down the gravel path to meet them.
That itself was unaccountable - for even a cycle, as Forester recalled from his own youth, could painfully damage its rider.
Yet Ironsmith rode alone, with no mechanical to guard him.
More disturbing still, he was smoking that underslung brier.
Riding with no hands on the handlebars - in a shocking defiance of the Prime Directive - he was holding a dangerous flame to the pipe.
And Forester's own keepers made no protest.
The cruel unfairness of that filled him with a stunned resentment, but he tried to stifle his envy.
For here, apparently, was one man free - free to launch a missile against Wing IV.
"Glad to see you, Forester!"
That hail of welcome had a warmly genial ring.
Grinning happily, Ironsmith braked the cycle to a perilous stop, alighted safely, and gave him a strong brown hand - too strong.
He dropped it, staggering abruptly back.
His knees turned weak, and sweat burst out on his face.
For logic had struck him a cruel, foul blow. If men were not allowed to go about alone, or to handle fire, or to use any dangerous machines, then the conclusion was terribly clear. Ironsmith was not a man.
Shivering, he remembered little Major Steel "Why, Forester!" Ironsmith's pink and boyish face showed a friendly, shocked concern.
His startled voice seemed altogether human. "Are you ill?"
He reached out anxiously, and Forester shrank from his hand. It looked human enough.
The fair skin showed a convincing pattern of red sunburn and freckle and tan.
The fine hairs were bleached with sunlight.
The nails needed trimming, and one was a little broken.
It seemed entirely human - yet how was he to tell?
Frantically, Forester studied the old bicycle with its rusty frame and worn tires and chipped enamel.
He searched the lank and vigorous form propped a little awkwardly against it, the sagging slacks and faded shirt and comfortable old shoes, the sandy hair and friendly face and keen gray eyes, wide and puzzled now.
But he could find no useful clue.
"Just tell the humanoids, if you don't feel well," Ironsmith was urging warmly.
"They know all the medicine that human doctors ever did, and more.
Whatever is wrong, they'll know how to fix it."
Forester fought the shudder which swept him, but everything fitted too well.
Even the two names had a frightening likeness now - Ironsmith and Steel!
The ruthless mechanism inside this plausible and pleasant-seeming mask must have come to spy on Starmont.
It must have inferred the secret of the project from the problems he had brought for it to solve.
It had even been with him at Dragonrock, and heard the plans of Mark White - and then he saw the contradiction in his logic.
Ironsmith wasn't a machine.
That knowledge warmed him with relief, and oddly it drained the little strength left in his knees.
He clung to the frame of the battered cycle, beaming at Ironsmith's astonished face with a fatuous joy.
"I'm so glad!" he gasped.
"For a moment, you know, I was afraid-" Awareness of the two real machines checked his voice. He was afraid to say what he had feared, but Ironsmith had been at Dragonrock.
And Mark White, who had learned to perceive rhodomagnetic fields and so discover such disguised machines as Steel, had obviously trusted him. That seemed proof enough of his humanity.
"Afraid of what?" Ironsmith was asking.
"That - that they had given you euphoride," Forester whispered desperately.
"I'm glad to find you still remember!"
Strength came back to his wobbling knees, and he let go the bicycle frame.
"And I'm all right." He tried to stop the trembling of his hands.
"Just a little nervous and upset.