"But Mr. White thinks I can carry you. If you will help, the best you can."
"Help?" he muttered harshly.
"How?"
"Just think of where we are going," she told him. "And try to be there."
Shuddering, he attempted to believe.
"Where are we going?"
"To a far, dark place, underground.
It's always cold there, and you can hear water running.
I don't like it - but there's no opening in the rocks, and no way in but by teleportation, so the black things can't get us there.
Mr. White says he will help you find the way."
Forester took her hand again, trying to picture some dark cave where Mark White and his tattered followers must be hiding from the humanoids.
He tried hard enough, he thought, because his mind could already see the efficient mechanicals swarming to investigate the one Jane Carter had stopped.
He longed, with a savage intensity, to escape this glittering prison and the threat of euphoride.
Surely, he tried desperately enough.
But he was still a physicist.
He couldn't quite imagine the mechanics of instantaneous translation.
Even if time were really only an incidental electromagnetic effect, it was still as actual as space and motion.
Even the swift rhodomagnetic missiles of the project didn't quite reach infinite accelerations, and anything faster was still impossible, even to the different physics he had found in the supernova's spectrum.
He wasn't surprised when nothing happened.
"Please - try!"
Her voice was strained and breathless. "Harder!"
"I did." Forester let go her hand, his voice a gasp of baffled failure.
"I did - but I don't know how.
Sorry, Jane, but it's no use."
"But you must!" Her cold, tiny fingers clutched his hand again.
"Mr. White says we can carry you - if you will only let us.
By myself, I can move a rock as big as you.
If you'll just turn loose-"
He tightened his grasp on her small hand, looking down at her black anxious eyes and thinking of Mark White and Overstreet and old Graystone and little Lucky Ford, waiting for them in some deep cavern.
He thought he tried.
But he knew that nothing would happen and nothing did.
"But I did try, Mr. White!" Jane Carter's fingers grew frantically tight and then relaxed, limp and quivering in his own. Big tears of frustration washed grimy streaks down her pinched blue face.
"We did too try, 'cause we know it's so awful important.
But we just can't."
And Forester caught a flicker of motion, then, outside the huge window, as something dark and very swift ran past.
He knew the machines were closing in.
Turning shakenly back to the child, he was choked with a sudden tenderness.
For one moment of hopeless yearning, he wished that he and Ruth had found time for children - instead of Project Thunderbolt.
"It's all right, Jane-"
He reached awkwardly for the little girl, wanting to comfort her, but some cruel school must have taught her independence. She refused the caress.
Her bare skinny knees shook with fear and cold, but she stood proudly straight.
"No, it isn't all right." Her voice was high and bitterly clear.
"Mr. White says this is very bad, for all of us.
He says the black machines are sure to take your memory now, if you don't get away.
And he says they will know a lot about us, from studying the one I stopped.
He says it will be very hard for us, now, to change the Prime Directive."
She stood a little away from him, tiny and indomitable.
Her blue lips moved, murmuring silently. Her apprehensive eyes looked at something far away.
Her famine-hollowed head tilted, as if she listened. And then she turned gravely back to him, sadly offering her small grimy hand.
"I'm sorry, Dr. Forester.