"If I really need any medical attention," he protested uneasily, "I'll just go back to Dr. Pitcher."
"He has retired," the machine said.
"No human doctors are permitted to practice now, because drugs and surgical instruments can become so extremely dangerous through misuse, and because our own medical skill is so much greater than any man's.
Dr. Pitcher is writing a play."
"Anyhow," Forester insisted, "Ironsmith will help me."
Waiting for the mathematician, he sat on a wide terrace at the villa, watching the desert redden in the dusk.
The cruiser ready on the stage was a long smooth egg, bright-streaked with reflections of land and sky.
A small humanoid, far beyond, was guiding a humming lawn mower.
The whole scene was quiet enough, but he couldn't forget the frozen alertness of the machines behind his chair or the enigma of Ironsmith's freedom growing more and more disquieting as he tried to solve it.
"Service, sir," the nearest humanoid said suddenly.
"Mr. Ironsmith wishes to know if you will meet him aboard the cruiser, for your trip to his new place on the coast."
Even that gentle purr made him start up nervously, for he had begun to face the evening with an uneasy dread.
He hurried silently down to the rhodomagnetic craft, and let the two machines help him up to the deck.
Watching through the hull's dark transparency, he saw Ironsmith pedaling alone to join him, bareheaded in the cool twilight and whistling cheerfully.
A pang of envy stabbed him, for it simply wasn't fair.
Bitterly, he watched that blithe young man lean his cycle against the villa and run lightly to the cruiser.
The covered deck was chest-high, with no gangway or ladder, but he asked no aid to come aboard and the mechanicals, oddly, offered him none.
Vaulting through the door, with almost the effortless ease of another machine, he sank into the deep seat beside Forester with a genial grin.
A hidden relay closed the door, and another lifted the silent craft.
As the butte dropped back into the thickening darkness, Forester risked another glance at the old search building.
It still stood, but that excavating machine, carving long slow slices from the mountain, was creeping steadily toward its secret.
Careful not to look again, Forester turned to Ironsmith with a guarded wariness, even though the younger man was not behaving like any devious antagonist.
He had left his pipe behind, as if from courtesy, and he offered a stick of chewing gum.
"It helps," he urged, "if you mustn't smoke."
Forester chewed the gum distastefully, tautly alert, as the other began casually pointing out the luminous roofs of new villas scattered across the dark landscape, and talking brightly of tunnels the humanoids were already boring and enormous pumping stations they were building, to raise whole rivers from the humid eastern valleys to this and plateau.
Lifting out of the twilight over Starmont, the little ship curved high through the violet night of the ionosphere to overtake the setting sun. It dropped again, in its swift trajectory, toward a dark and jagged edge of land against the ruddy brightness of a hammered copper sea. A stark granite headland flung up to meet it.
Red sunset shimmered on the wet black stones of a broken causeway. White spray plumed up from black fangs of stone.
Startled, Forester blinked at his pleasant-faced companion.
"I call the place Dragonrock," Ironsmith was murmuring. "After the old lighthouse that used to stand here."
Forester nodded stiffly, afraid to ask what had become of those curious fugitives hiding in the old tower, Mark White and his tattered disciples.
"Pretty wonderful, isn't it?"
Ironsmith was beaming innocently, and Forester turned uncomfortably to look at the new building crowning that bleak headland.
Golden columns and balconies and clustered towers made a luminous filigree too elaborate for his taste, and high roofs burned crimson.
When the craft had landed on a wide stage, Ironsmith took him proudly to tour the monumental halls and the exotic gardens sheltered from the cold sea winds by crystal parapets.
"Pretty gorgeous, don't you think?" Ironsmith inquired happily.
"I might move down here, if I had time."
Forester eyed him narrowly, wondering what else he had to do, and then blinked angrily at his own silent keepers, blurting impulsively,
"Can't you send them away - so we can talk alone?"
To his stunned surprise, Ironsmith nodded calmly.
"If you like.
I'm afraid you let their presence upset you too much, and maybe I can help you accept them."
He turned quietly to the machines. "Please leave us alone for half an hour.
I'll be responsible for Dr. Forester's safety."
"Service, sir."
Incredibly, the two guards departed.
Forester looked hard at Ironsmith. All he could see was a lean and harmless-seeming man with untidy clothing and gray, friendly eyes, but something touched him with an icy awe.
Beckoning cheerfully, Ironsmith led him on across the warm soundless pavement of a vast court, where the heated air was bitter with the fragrance from huge crimson fungi, fringed and intricate, towering out of tall golden jars.
A crystal wall stopped them, and white surf was moaning over black rocks far below.
Forester caught his breath, to plunge vehemently:
"Frank, I want to know what you've done with Mark White and that remarkable child and the others."