Jane Carter!
She came creeping timidly around the foot of his bed, peering uneasily at the quiet mechanical on the floor.
That immense bright room seemed warm to him, and she was huddled in a worn leather coat too large for her, yet he saw that she was shivering.
Under a thin yellow dress, her bare knees and feet were blue with cold.
"Huh - why, hello, Jane!" He answered her shy smile with a feeble grin, and nodded stiffly at the fallen machine.
"What happened to that?"
"I stopped it."
He searched her frightened face silently, and then turned back to that fallen unit of the ultimate machine.
A dazed incredulity shook his voice.
"How?"
"Like Mr. White taught me." She retreated uneasily from the thing on the floor.
"You just look in a certain way he taught me, at a little white bead in its head.
That bead is - potassium." She was careful with the word.
"You just look - that certain way - and the potassium burns."
Forester couldn't see any potassium bead, or anything else, inside the bald plastic-covered head of the stopped machine, but he shrugged with a numbed acceptance.
He remembered the unstable isotope of potassium, and Mark White's boast that this hungry urchin had learned to control atomic probability, to detonate K-40 atoms by a simple act of her mind.
"Please, won't you come and help us now?"
Staring at her black, limpid eyes, so wistful and afraid in their dark circles of weariness and want, Forester scarcely heard her thinly urgent voice.
He felt a tingle in his scalp, and he failed to stop his shivering.
For the human body, it occurred to him, also contained a fatal quantity of that radioactive isotope.
If this strange child could stop a humanoid by looking at it in a certain particular way, she could doubtless also kill a man.
"Please come!"
The meaning of her imploring words burst upon him then, sweeping away his dazed reflection that the old tales of that deadly kind of vision called the evil eye must be something more than superstition.
A wave of hope dispelled his momentary terror of her solemn stare, and broke the nightmare chains of his total frustration.
He smiled at her breathlessly. "I'm coming," he whispered.
"But where?"
He was scrambling out of bed, a slight anxious figure in a loose blue night robe, when the motionless machine caught his glance.
Its handsome narrow face was still the same, faintly astonished and eternally benign, but now the steel-colored eyes were tarnished with heat, and thin gray smoke as seeping from the black nostrils.
"We must get away from that!" Flinching from it, he caught the child's thin arm to draw her hastily beyond the bed.
"It's still dangerous," he breathed huskily. "With secondary activity.
You can't see the rays, but they still could burn us badly."
He searched the room for any way out, rubbing his burning eyes and coughing to that bitter smoke - which must be laden with deadly radioactives, he thought, from that small atomic explosion.
The sliding doors and the huge window were all secured with inaccessible rhodomagnetic relays, however, and he could see no possible escape.
Unless - The thought struck him abruptly, shocking as the unexpected touch of a cold hand in the dark.
Peering dazedly at the child, he heard her worried voice:
"-and Mr. White says we must come right away, 'cause the black things will know this one has stopped, and more of them will come to see what stopped it."
That acrid smoke had caught his throat, so that he could hardly breathe, and hot tears from it blurred his vision.
He had to put a hand against the smooth shining wall to steady himself as he whispered to the child,
"But how - how can we get out?"
"Come," Jane Carter said.
"Just come with me."
She put up a grubby little paw for him to clasp, thin and shivering.
He stared at her, nodding bleakly at the locked doors.
"There's no way out."
"For us there is," she said.
"We go by teleportation."
Forester dropped her hand. His dry laugh was almost hysterical, and the smoke changed it to a coughing paroxysm.
He wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his robe, gasping huskily,
"But I can't do teleportation."
"I know," she told him solemnly.