Trying to get up, he fell back on his face in the oily water, and knew that his leg was broken.
The slow waves of dark agony surging from it against his consciousness were not yet so keen as the pain of his failure.
Half strangled by the foul water, he coughed until he could breathe again, and then began crawling laboriously over the jagged basalt on his hands and one raw knee, dragging his leg and looking for those rhodomagnetic missiles.
His groping fingers found only bare concrete, however, and the sheared bolts which had held the generators and the rotary converters to their foundations.
Project Thunderbolt had been efficiently dismantled.
That fact was more stunning than his fall, and he couldn't understand it.
He had seen no hint that the disguised elevator had even been discovered, and certainly no sign of the special tackle necessary to hoist the heavy machinery out of the shaft.
There had been no other entrance to the vault, and his crawling search discovered no new tunnel that the humanoids might have dug.
But still the missiles were gone.
His dull brain wrestled with that crushing riddle, and abandoned it. His nerve was used up.
He retched feebly from the pain in his leg and finally lay still, vaguely grateful for the numbing chill of the shallow water, which gradually made that throbbing agony remote and bearable.
Tclink! A crash like shattering glass roused him from a merciful drowsiness, and woke a new ache in his leg.
Obviously, he should have had Overstreet look down here for the missiles, but he wasn't quite used to this paraphysical stuff.
Old dog and new tricks. Listening sleepily, he heard another crystal crash, and knew at last that it was only a falling waterdrop.
Shivering, he waited for the next. There was nothing else to do.
He was done, and nothing mattered now.
The next splash was plainly made by something larger than a waterdrop, but he didn't try to rouse himself until light struck painfully against his closed eyes.
Blinking, then, he watched the slim machines jumping down into the pit and gathering around him.
The gleams of bronze and blue were beautiful on their smooth black bodies, and their legs didn't break.
"Service, Dr. Forester." That silver voice was melodiously kind.
"Are you badly injured, sir?"
But his injuries weren't important now, and he nodded stiffly toward the black emptiness on the concrete shelf above, where the launching station had been, muttering faintly,
"So you found it, eh?
"We found you, sir," droned the machine.
"We observed your reckless indiscretion in entering the collapsing building above, and we followed as quickly as possible to rescue you.
We were delayed, however, first by the child with you and then by the fall of the dome, and we had to clear away part of the rubble and repair the elevator in order to reach you."
A sick astonishment lifted his head. "Don't you attempt to move, sir," warned the machine.
"You might increase your injuries."
Too ill to laugh at the irony of that, he nodded feebly at the empty foundations. "How did you find it?" he whispered hoarsely. "This installation?"
"We discovered the elevator shaft when we removed the debris of the building above to look for you." Serene steel eyes watched him.
"Can you speak without pain, sir?
Then will you tell us what equipment was once installed here?"
That question stunned him.
It meant that the humanoids knew nothing, even yet, of Project Thunderbolt.
And it posed a monstrous problem: who had removed the missiles and equipment?
Frank Ironsmith?
He shivered from something colder than the black water.
But even that remarkable mathematician, sanity assured him, could scarcely have carried away a hundred tons of heavy machinery on his rusty bicycle.
"What was this installation, sir?" persisted the machine.
"Our first neutrino lab." An impulse of defiance spurred him to that feeble invention.
"Our first unsuccessful search tubes were built and installed here, for the sake of secrecy.
Later, after the military guard had been established, we built and mounted the new tubes in the dome above, because of the water seepage here.
The old equipment was junked, but we left the pit for an emergency shelter."
The machine seemed satisfied with that, but his own weary brain couldn't let the riddle go.
He dismissed a fleeting notion that the project had been looted by the use of some psychophysical agency.
Mark White obviously hadn't known of the loss - and even Jane Carter, he thought, would have found it difficult to teleport sixty tons of storage batteries.
But somebody had those dreadful missiles now, and all the specifications he had left in that sealed safe.
Somebody had stolen the power to detonate any inhabited planet, as easily as one savage could brain another with a wooden club.
Retching weakly again, Forester felt a kind of pity for that unknown thief who had stolen his monstrous burden.
"-more questions, sir." He heard the insistent whine of that nearest machine again, as if from far away.