His old office safe was still packed full of his notes and drawings and preliminary models, and she brought back everything you ought to need."
"Let me see."
Forester waited eagerly for White to find a stack of yellowed notebooks and a sheaf of faded blueprints in the clutter on the bench, and anxiously watched him pull out racks of plastic trays filled with tiny stampings and castings and machinings of silvery palladium.
Hopefully opening one of the books, he frowned in bewildered disappointment at the dim hieroglyphics.
"It isn't quite so bad as that," the big man rumbled softly.
"I worked with Mansfield for many years, remember.
I can translate everything for you - even though most of the math is over my head." And he gestured at the long bench.
"All the tools Mansfield used in that shop are duplicated here - collected mostly from junkyards where the humanoids are piling up confiscated machines. Gadgets too dangerous for men to use!"
A stern amusement flashed across his face, before he continued soberly,
"We'll build the new grid sections here. Enough of them to contain our revised interpretation of the Prime Directive.
When they're done, you and Jane must go to Wing IV.
All you'll have to do there is to cut out the old sections of Mansfield's - the ones which make the humanoids so devastingly thorough - and hook in our new ones."
"So that's all?"
Forester riffled through a stack of dusty drawings with unsteady fingers, and bent to study another tray of tiny machinings.
"Didn't Mansfield once try to change those relays?" he whispered hoarsely. "And didn't the humanoids stop him?"
"Mansfield didn't use psychophysics," White protested quietly.
"And I believe he built his own blind spot for that science into the humanoids, because they haven't learned to cope with it - not yet.
They failed to discover Jane when she visited the shop, and I think you'll have time to change the relays before they find you."
"They're fast," Forester reminded him.
"But blind," White said.
"Literally blind.
Anywhere else, their rhodomagnetic senses are far quicker and keener than human sight or hearing, but there inside the grid the intense rhodomagnetic fields interfere with the weaker sensory fields of the individual units, so Mansfield told me, and with any luck at all you'll have the job done before they know you're there."
Screwing a jeweler's loupe into his socket, Forester stirred a tray of almost microscopic screws with thin-nosed tweezers.
His fingers still were awkwardly uncertain, and he listened doubtfully.
"It's a brain operation, actually.
Like the human brain, the grid has no effective sense organs inside it, and I believe you can perform the operation without disturbing the patient - if we're ready in time.
I'm afraid our time is running out, however, because Overstreet can see the humanoids building something new, there on Wing IV."
"Huh?" Forester looked up blankly.
"What's that?"
"My guess frightens me." White hunched a little under the silver cloak, as if to a fearful expectancy.
"But we haven't found out what it is. Overstreet says it's going to be as big as the grid.
He can see underground levels full of mass-converters, ready to pour energy into banks of huge devices somewhat like transformers, but mostly made of platinum.
Above the ground, he says the humanoids are putting up an enormous dome made of some new synthetic, to cover something else."
"That something else?"
"A second grid, apparently.
Overstreet can't see inside it - a very disturbing circumstance - but he can observe the humanoids manufacturing new relays, which are carried in there as if for assembly."
"Maybe the machines are just enlarging their own brain."
"They've been doing that from the first, just piling new sections on the old, but this is something different.
For one thing, the relays going into that new dome are made largely out of platinum and osmiridium alloys, instead of palladium.
I don't know what it is."
"Could Jane find out?"
"I took the risk of sending her there." Above the ruddy magnificence of his beard, White's massive face was bitten deep with acid apprehension. "She met a barrier that kept her out of the dome.
She can't describe that obstacle, but I think it wasn't physical.
I think the humanoids have somehow discovered that built-in blind spot, and begun psychophysical research for themselves.
Which means we must get to work!"
They did.
Listening to the haunting whisper of dark water running through channels too small for a man, oppressed by the crushing weight of that calcite-crusted roof, Forester set out to master the laws and resolve the mocking contradictions of White's half-science.
He grasped at the amazing arts of old Graystone, and little Ford's telekinetic skills. He sought the far vision of Overstreet's myopic eyes, and the ultimate fleetness of Jane Carter's feet.
He even tried at first to hope that White's discoveries would somehow reach beyond the revelations of rhodomagnetics, to disclose the prima materia that he had pursued so far in vain - the total understanding of all the universe.
That elusive fundamental fact evaded him again, however, as tantalizingly as when Ironsmith had demolished the relevance of his symbol rho.