Dull behind the heavy lenses, his eyes looked away again.
"I can still make out the numerals that Mansfield painted to identify the sections. The first three sections - this and this and this - contain the Prime Directive." His fat finger moved on the tattered plan.
"The next two - numbered four and five - are ones which govern the interpretation.
That's where Mansfield blundered.
He made them the way he did because of a sick horror of war and a bitter conviction that men must be protected from themselves and one another, even against their will.
And those two sections are the ones you must change."
Toiling at the bench, in that closed cave sealed against the flow of day and night, Forester lost track of time.
For White had conquered sleep.
Forester failed to grasp the method of it fully.
Sometimes the weight of his weariness almost bore him down. But, following White's stern regimen, he came to share something of the huge man's driving vitality. And he had no time for sleep.
His hands were blistered from lifting hot metal.
His eyes ached from straining to see tiny parts, and his back was sore from bending.
His weak knee throbbed and swelled.
But still he worked on - until his fatigue began to fall away.
His old dyspepsia ceased to trouble him, so that he could eat his hurried meals with relish. White assured him heartily that he was learning psychophysics.
The silvery ingots of rare palladium were fused and cast and machined, rolled and stamped and drawn.
Dangerous automatic machines from the new junkyards of the humanoids milled and welded delicate units.
White and Ford and Graystone worked at the bench, assembling the new relays, and Forester mounted them in the two replacement sections.
While time was suspended in that deep cavern, however, the machines on far Wing IV kept moving, until a moment when Ash Overstreet came shuffling stiffly from the corner where he watched, to touch Forester's arm almost apologetically.
"Sorry, but I see trouble." His husky whisper was thin with worry. "I can't see it clear - and still I can't tell why. But I've got a feeling that whatever the humanoids are building in that new dome is almost done.
Still there's a barrier around it, as far as I can see ahead, but I think it's aimed against us."
Behind the heavy glasses, his puzzled eyes seemed vague and dark and strange.
"I think we had better do what we can, right now.
If you're ready."
Forester tested a last relay and adjusted a tiny screw.
Laying down his tools and his loupe, he agreed reluctantly that he was ready.
Chapter TWENTY-ONE
THE TIME was now.
The replacement sections were complete, and Forester had said that he was ready.
Watching little Jane Carter vanish and return, he had reduced the stunning wonder of teleportation to a rational manifestation of sane exchange-force theory.
But Wing IV was two hundred light-years away.
Standing with the child and White beside the two long sections gleaming in their rectangular palladium shields on the workbench, Forester shrank from the impact of that staggering magnitude.
Twelve hundred trillion miles!
That was several times farther than the naked human eye could see the blaze of an average sun.
The vastness of the distance brought his old doubts back, and made the calcite walls close in again.
The dark water mocked him, whispering through passages where men couldn't go.
He felt smothered by the stuffy deadness of the air, and crushed beneath the merciless weight of stone above.
His stomach fluttered, and his bad knee turned weak.
All the orthodoxies of his old training came trooping back to haunt him, out of dusty forgotten laboratories and gloomy observatories.
It couldn't be done, his old habits screamed.
No man could simply step across twelve hundred trillion miles, as if that frightful abyss of distance were only a line drawn on the floor.
"I can't do it." He turned uneasily away from the shining urgency of the new sections, those two long palladium boxes heavy with the last hope of man.
"It's just too far!"
Mopping his cold forehead, he looked from the impatient giant to the solemn-eyed child.
"Perhaps - perhaps we could try shorter hops - just across the cave - till I get the feel of it."
"Nonsense!" boomed White.
"Of course you can do it - remember your own theory.
That balcony on Wing IV, outside the entrance to Warren Mansfield's old shop, is just as near us - in the geometry of paraphysics - as I am to you.
And Overstreet says we've got to strike."
He nodded impatiently at the long new sections, the blue hate in his eyes an unquenched flame. "So - go ahead. Jane can help - if you'll just relax your unconscious opposition."