He failed to bridge the gaps or remove the contradictions, but once more he learned.
Watching Jane Carter flit out of that closed cavern and back again, to bring some useful tool that Overstreet's clairvoyant vision had discovered, he came to accept her ability more fully, and he slowly shaped a rational theory to bind it to the truth he knew.
"It's making sense," he told White hopefully at last.
"All this psychophysical stuff used to seem impossible, but now I think I see how it could fit into the old science of quantum mechanics.
Teleportation, now - that could be just a matter of exchange-force probability."
The huge man looked up alertly from his work at the bench.
"You know the theory of exchange forces?
Anyhow, the concept arose from the fact that all electrons - and all other similar atomic particles - are actually identical.
Mathematically, any movement of any electron can be treated merely as an exchange of identity with another, and the mathematics seems to reflect actuality.
In every atom there appears to be a rhythmic pulsation of identity between electrons, and between other identical wavicles.
And the forces of that ceaseless exchange - like most atomic phenomena - are governed by probability."
"But what has that to do with teleportation?"
Staring past the other man, at the closed, calcite-frosted walls of that deep crypt, Forester felt something cold against his spine.
An icy wonder numbed him, that any mere act of the mind could open that living stone.
But he was here, and he had seen Jane Carter come and go, and now he thought he saw the way.
"Those exchange forces are timeless - there's a place for them in the theory of rhodomagnetics," he said.
"And they aren't limited to subatomic distances, except by a factor of decreasing probability.
Because each atomic particle can be regarded as only a reinforcement in a standing wave-pattern - a wave, if you like, of probability - which pervades the entire universe.
"I think that's the answer!" He caught an eager breath.
"When Jane goes out to that cold planet, I think there is no actual movement of matter, but only an instantaneous shift of those patterns of identity." He nodded, pleased with that distinction.
"While I can't yet describe the precise mechanism of atomic probability, she has already proved that she can control it to detonate unstable potassium atoms.
Perhaps teleportation is just as easy-"
"No doubt!"
White grinned briefly through his beard, and frowned again with thought.
"I've worked on a hypothesis that physical time and physical space aren't actual, but just illusions-"
"They aren't fundamental," Forester agreed. "But something more, I'm sure, than mere illusion.
In the light of rhodomagnetics, space-time appears to be a somewhat incidental side- property of the electromagnetic energy components in those complex units that manifest themselves as particles and waves.
And the exchange forces would seem to be a kind of rhodomagnetic bridge across space."
He blinked up at White, hopeful and elated.
"There I think we've found it - the mechanics of teleportation!
No transfer of actual substance, but rather an exchange of identities, brought about by controlled probability.
That gets us around the old electromagnetic problems of inertia and instantaneous acceleration, which used to make it look so utterly out of reason."
"Might be." The big man nodded, still frowning.
"Probably you're right - but still you haven't got the whole answer.
What is the actual force of the mind?
How does it act to govern probability?
Anyhow, what is probability?
What are the mathematical equations of psychophysics?
The laws? The limits?"
And Forester shook his wistful gnome's head, baffled again.
That uncertain hypothesis, he saw, had been only a flicker in the dark.
White always found more questions and answers, and the ultimate truth lay somewhere far ahead.
Yet that feeble illumination had restored his belief in the reality of some single basic fact underlying all the confusing things and events of the experienced world, and it cheered him on toward the nearer goal on remote Wing IV.
When he came to study the layout of that grid, to identify the relays that had to be changed, White had him take Warren Mansfield's yellowed plans and blueprints into the low grotto where Ash Overstreet sat wrapped in a blanket and looking with vague eyes beyond the lacy calcite fretwork on the walls.
"Yes, I can see the central grid," the clairvoyant whispered.
"It hasn't been blocked off, like whatever is in that new dome the machines are putting up." He took the drawings in his puffy hands, peering as if his dim eyes could scarcely see them.
"Here's old Mansfield's shop, where we sent Jane to get the specifications."
His pale forefinger pointed.
"And here, just inside the tower door from it, are the relays Mansfield built himself, to operate his first handmade unit.
That unit manufactured others, and the new humanoids have kept on adding new relays, but those first sections are still there."