He stared at the crawling dark, hiding in the narrowing fissures where no light had ever been, and he heard the whispered mockery of water running through crevices too tiny for anything else.
The cavern was a grave, and he was buried here - until he could do the impossible.
But he set his chattering teeth, and feebly clutched at reason.
If teleportation had brought him here, it could get him out again.
The shadows in the crevices receded a little, and he caught a sobbing breath, turning shakenly to White.
"I'm sorry, but the weight of that rock just hit me. A sort of shut-in feeling."
He straightened uncertainly. "I'll do the best I can but you know I've failed before."
"You can do it," White said quietly.
"Because you're a scientist. For paraphysics is a science.
That means that observed phenomena can be linked by hypothesis, illuminated by theory, and integrated by law.
It means that effects are subject to analysis by logic, to prediction from experience, to control through cause.
"A difficult science, I admit." He shook his bright mane regretfully.
"Necessarily so, because the instrument of research is also the subject. The dissecting knife can't easily dissect itself.
In all my years of effort, I've found more new questions than satisfying answers.
What, for example, is mind?"
White's huge shoulders lifted heavily, and then his intense eyes stared away through a low archway of shining calcite into an avenue of darkness.
That was another blind passage, Forester knew, which ended against physical barriers of living rock - but now Jane Carter came out of it.
The child stood blinking for a moment, as if dazzled by the crystal glitter of the cavern, and then she came running across the dark sand to White.
Forester saw the sudden dust of frost forming on the worn fur collar of her coat and on her dark hair.
Blue and shaking with cold, she gave White a heavy little leather bag.
The white nuggets he poured from it into a balance pan were instantly covered with feathers of frost, and smoky trails of condensation began to drift downward from the pan and flatten on the bench.
Shivering to a chill of his own, Forester blinked at the urchin, who stood wiggling her bare toes against the sand, looking up at White with huge, adoring eyes.
"Must I go back?"
"No, I think that's all we need." Glancing at the frosty mound on the pan, White smiled gently through his flaming beard.
"You've done a wonderful job, and now Graystone has some hot broth waiting for you."
"Oh, thank you!
I'm so glad I needn't go back, 'cause it's awful cold out there."
She ran on, happily, toward the crystal alcove where Graystone's pot simmered on a small electric stove.
Staring at the dusty frost on her coat and her hair, Forester was numb and still with wonder.
"It is cold there," he heard White saying.
"Those rich gravels must have been washed down a long time ago, because that planet has no more erosion now.
It's lost from the star that must have warmed it once, and it's far too cold to have any gaseous air or liquid water.
The temperature is very near the absolute zero."
Forester blinked and shook himself.
"You mean she can defy every law of nature?"
"No," White said.
"She has merely learned to use the principles of paraphysical nature - I think unconsciously.
She just - adapts.
At first she was always shivering with the cold, at Dragonrock and even after we came here - until she learned enough of our new mental science to keep herself warm."
"But-" Forester gasped. "How?"
"She can't tell you how.
I'd like to know, but I suppose she has developed an unconscious psychophysical control over the molecular vibrations of heat, and the molecular flow of evaporation - nothing else can explain the way she can prevent the loss of heat and water and oxygen from her body, on that cold planet.
I think she can even disassociate carbon dioxide, to renew the oxygen in her blood.
However she does it, she can live under that absolute vacuum - long enough."
A cold something had touched Forester's spine.
"Are you sure she's - human?" he breathed uneasily. "Not some mutation?"
"She's human!" the big man boomed vehemently. "I know that. For all my failures, I know that psychophysical capacities are as old as life - perhaps they are life!
I know they are born in the brain of every man. They lie there - unused gifts greater than Jane's - within your unconscious grasp and mine." Exasperation shook his great voice. "I know that - and yet I've somehow always failed to reach the real secret of conscious control. Perhaps there's some barrier that I can't see - something perhaps as obvious as this."
Impatiently, he picked up a precious white ingot and slammed it down again.
Forester saw the undying hate sweep through him like a bitter wind and blaze like a sullen fire in his eyes.