We're all sorry, 'cause we need you and we like you.
Now it's time for me to go. Mr. White says the black machines are coming-"
He could see another humanoid beyond her, watching with hard, bright eyes of blind- seeming steel through the great window.
Nodding at it vehemently, he whispered at her to kill it.
Before she could turn, however, the crystal panel turned abruptly opaque, shutting out that alert mechanical and the light of the dawn. The glow of the murals on the high walls was also extinguished. Smothering darkness fell upon them, and he heard a terrified gasp from the child.
Chapter SIXTEEN
STAGGERED BY that fall of blackness, Forester nodded in bleak understanding of the move.
The humanoids, with their rhodomagnetic sensory fields, had no need of light.
That efficient brain on far Wing IV intended to bewilder him with darkness, while its invincible units swarmed in to seize him. He wondered how forgetfulness would feel.
"We can't help you." The child's hurt voice seemed too loud, beneath that crushing dark.
"And Mr. White says I must go."
Her tiny questing fingers caught his hand for a moment, and then let him go.
For an eternal second he stood all alone in the dark, until sheer desperation armed him.
"Jane!" he gasped.
"Wait!"
"Please!" Her tiny, frightened voice brought back hope.
"Mr. White says-'
"I can't go with you," he sobbed. "But tell him there's another way."
Careless of the strangling smoke from the machine on the floor, he filled his lungs again.
His narrow shoulders lifted defiantly in the dark.
He had failed to master the paradoxes of psychophysics, but he knew the planet-smashing power of the slender missiles in the vault, already set to seek Wing IV.
"Mr. White says we'll try to help you." Groping in the dark, she had caught the sleeve of his robe.
"But he wants to know your plan. 'Cause there are too many machines - Mr. Overstreet can see them coming. More machines than I can stop."
"Tell Mr. White I have weapons," he whispered swiftly. "Self-guided missiles already ranged and armed to detonate Wing IV - still hidden in that underground station where you came.
Just one of them could stop all the humanoids, in about half a minute." Apprehension rocked him.
"Anyhow, I hope the missiles are still there," he added hoarsely.
"Though I saw an excavating machine, working toward the building above the station."
"Wait," the child breathed. "Mr. Overstreet can look."
For an endless second the room was silent again, while he shivered to the dread of soundless black machines creeping upon them in the dark.
"Mr. Overstreet can see the building," she whispered at last.
"The digging machine has broken through the corner of it, but the roof hasn't fallen in.
He says the black things haven't found the elevator."
"Then we can try!" A savage elation lifted him.
"We must wait until the humanoids open the doors to get at us.
You must be ready to stop them, Jane - as many as you can.
And I'll make a run for the project."
Silence seemed to clot the dark again.
Waiting for the mechanicals to break in, he was startled by the child's quiet voice.
"Mr. White says we'll try your plan.
He says he had hoped to change the Prime Directive without wrecking all the black things.
But we needed you to help us make the new relays for that, and we can't try it now.
So your weapons seem to be the only way, and I'm to stay and help you all I can.
And he says-"
Jane Carter gasped faintly. Forester felt her small hand tighten on his sleeve.
Breathless and afraid, she went on faintly,
"He says there's another danger we must face - worse than all the humanoids.
He's afraid we'll meet Mr. Ironsmith."
"Ironsmith?"
Forester shivered, as if something unseen had breathed upon him from the dark..
"I've been wondering," he whispered huskily, "why he likes the mechanicals so well - and why they leave him so free."