He thought he had fallen, somehow, out of that padded chair - until he realized that he was no longer in the villa at Starmont.
Picking himself up from a cold surface of hard-packed sand, he looked around him dazedly.
"Oh, Dr. Forester!"
Unbelievingly, he recognized the thin, clear voice of little Jane Carter. "Did we hurt you?"
His bewildered eyes found her, and then Mark White and Lucky Ford, Graystone the Great, and Ash Overstreet.
They stood spaced around him, all watching him.
Curiously taut at first, their faces were slowly relaxing.
Ford wiped his nervous claws of hands with a bright handkerchief.
Old Graystone dipped his red nose in an awkward bow of welcome.
Overstreet nodded, blinking dimly.
Still majestic in that worn silver cloak, splendid with that flowing, fiery mane and beard, Mark White came striding to help him rise.
"So we got you!" the huge man boomed softly. "Welcome to our sanctuary!"
Grasping White's great hand, Forester came up awkwardly, careful of his leg.
The knee felt weak, but it bore his weight without pain.
He peered around him, shaken by a cold unbelief.
Overhead was an uneven natural dome of water-carved limestone, encrusted with stalactites and shining with white calcite crystals, curving down on every side to the hard black sand.
The air was damp and cold.
Somewhere he heard a thin whisper of water running.
"Where-" He had to swallow.
"Where is this?"
"We're safer if you don't know the precise coordinates," Mark White said.
"But this cave is a good many hundred feet underground. A fortunate discovery of Overstreet's.
There is running water, and air enough for ventilation, but no passage big enough for any mechanical intruders."
"Then you - I-"
"Teleportation."
White nodded his immense, shaggy head. "Your own unconscious mental resistance caused our first failure.
That's why we didn't warn you this time, but just waited for a moment when you wanted to get away from the humanoids."
"I certainly did!" Forester shook hands gratefully with the men who had snatched him out of that efficient prison.
Now no longer tattered new recruits, they were shaved and clean and better fed.
Even Overstreet had lost a little of his unhealthy pallor.
"We were watching you, Forester." White's huge hand fell on his shoulder, heartily.
"I'm glad you didn't sell out to Ironsmith." Bitterness hardened his voice. "Did you know that he nearly trapped us at Dragonrock, before we were expecting any treachery? Come along, and let me show you how we're going to beat him."
Forester limped anxiously after him, to see that buried fortress.
The sandy floor was scarcely fifty feet across.
Low-roofed recesses, under the edges of the glittering dome, made living quarters.
Little Jane Carter proudly showed him a tiny room of her own.
A thrumming generator, in another jeweled alcove, gave current for light strung across the roof.
"You brought all this equipment?" Forester whispered. "By teleportation?"
"There's no other way in," White assured him. "But we're improving with practice.
Our greatest worry now is leaving some clue that Ironsmith can use to find us."
The hard clay floor in another low chamber had been leveled to support a long workbench, which was laden with crucibles, small power tools, and stacked ingots of some silver-colored metal.
"Here's where we need you, Forester." Dramatic in the worn cloak, White gestured at the charred and acid-bitten bench with a great emphatic arm.
"To help us build the new relays to change the Prime Directive."
Forester turned from the small electric furnaces and tiny lathes and drills, back to that imperative giant.
The hard light in his intense blue eyes might be fanatical, Forester thought, yet he seemed much too sure for a blunderer, too keenly alert for a fool.
"Just the interpretation," White was adding. "I've no quarrel with the words you see on that yellow brand - To Serve and Obey, and Guard Men from Harm.
The trouble is that old Warren Mansfield built his first relays to apply them a little too broadly."
Thoughtfully, he weighed a small ingot on his palm.
"Ironsmith would call me a criminal anarchist, I imagine.
He'd probably sneer at my motives as viciously as he fights my aims.