He moved closer to the child. "Who - or what - is Ironsmith?"
"Mr. White says he doesn't know." Trouble slowed her voice.
"Except he's helping the machines against us.
He and others like him - others in far places."
Remembering those chessmen set up in an unfinished game, Forester felt an unpleasant tingle at the back of his neck.
"They tried to trap us at Dragonrock - Ironsmith and his friends - 'cause they're helping the machines fight Mr. White."
Forester nodded uneasily.
While the identity of Ironsmith's chess opponents was still as mysterious as their remote location, the outlines of the plot had begun to appear.
The humanoids, to smooth the way for their invasion, must have bought the aid of a few human traitors - such masquerading things as Major Steel must have done the buying.
And Frank Ironsmith, the sick certainty possessed him, was one of those turncoats.
"I was awful surprised about Mr. Ironsmith," the child was saying with a puzzled regret.
"He seemed so nice and kind when he first came to see us at the old tower.
He talked to me about teleportation and he gave me gum to chew. I liked him then, but-" She broke off suddenly, to listen in the dark. "Mr. White says we mustn't wait any longer." Her voice turned breathless.
"Mr. Overstreet can see them on the roof, fixing the ventilator to blow something in - something to make us sleep."
"So that's the way!"
Forester swayed to the impact of disaster, remembering that the efficient machines took no chances.
"They don't mean to open the door until we're helpless and we can't get out."
"But we can." She tugged urgently at his sleeve. "With Mr. Lucky helping."
"That ragged little gambler?"
Forester peered around him in the gloom.
"What can he-"
Forester's voice dried up, as he realized that he could see.
As smoothly as if a rhodomagnetic impulse from some humanoid unit had tripped the hidden relay, the door was sliding silently back.
Shadowless light poured in from the hall, but he couldn't find the gambler.
"Mr. Lucky isn't here," Jane Carter was explaining gravely.
"But he can reach the lock, anyhow, with telekinesis.
Mr. Overstreet helped him see what to do, and it was just as easy as rolling a seven, he says."
Forester didn't wait to listen.
A slight barefoot man, brown and awkward in the loose blue gown, he darted out into the great hall, where rhodomagnetic screens made bright windows upon so many conquered planets.
A voiceless alarm sent him staggering back.
For two humanoids had darted into view at the end of the hall.
They came running silently, with a terrible blind agility.
One of them held a tiny bright object - a hypodermic needle, Forester thought, doubtless loaded with euphoride.
The other snatched something like a grenade from a bag it carried, and swept back its arm to throw.
Instinctively, Forester had pulled the child behind him. She leaned to look past him with her dark sad eyes - and the humanoids stiffened.
The one with the hypodermic needle turned a grotesque cartwheel.
The other skidded forward on its face, a small gray cloud exploding from the object it had tried to fling at them.
"We must get outside," warned the child -
"Mr. White says the mist from that bomb would make us sleep."
Forester had turned to run with her from that expanding cloud, before the warm feel of the floor reminded him that his feet were bare.
He hesitated, glancing desperately back in search of his shoes, but the tidy humanoids must have locked them up in some closet with a rhodomagnetic latch.
The child was tugging at his hand, and he fled with her on tender naked feet down that spacious hall, past the glowing screens in the niches.
The outer door checked them again, until Lucky Ford could reach from that distant cavern to open it, but at last they came out into the brightening dawn.
The sunken garden outside was as strange as any of the shining scenes behind them.
Spawn of some different evolution, the tall, red-scaled stalks the humanoids had planted were swaying ceaselessly.
A few monstrous blooms were already emerging from the enormous, writhing buds which topped them, to fly free like great awkward iridescent moths on slow fragile wings of violet and dusty gold and black, dancing and fighting and thinly screaming and mating in the air.
The odor of them was a rank sweetness as overpowering as that reek of spilled perfume in which he had found Ruth playing with her blocks, and some dust or pollen from them halted him with a fit of sneezing.
"Those awful flowers!" Jane shrank from them.
"Why do you think the black things brought them?"
To please the victims of euphoride, Forester supposed, for he thought a mind without memory might be easily diverted by the flashing dance of those great wings and that meaningless, unending drama of love and death.