He stared at the child, trying not to shiver.
"Let me show you, Dr. Forester." She held out a small grubby hand, and he saw the shining eagerness in her eyes.
"Now - let's go!"
And he knew the way. He caught the spark of her courage, and he gave her his trust.
She led him, and they didn't even have to step across a line.
He felt no movement at all - but they were on that balcony.
"See!" she whispered. "It wasn't hard at all."
He squeezed her tiny fingers with a voiceless gratitude, and then looked around him blankly.
The narrow metal floor jutted from a wall which gleamed with the gray color of oxidized aluminum.
The wall reached, windowless, immensely far to right and left. It soared above them, topless.
It dropped beneath, a featureless metal precipice, so far that his breath went out when he tried to look down.
He found the narrow door at the end of the balcony which would let them through the old shop into the grid, but he couldn't keep his awed gaze from drifting up again. Because the vastness of that tower dazed him.
The original level of the ground, he knew, must have been near this high platform, and Mansfield's original shop could only have been housed in some kind of rough temporary building - for that misguided idealist had exiled himself alone here in the beginning, in the rubble of a continent that rhodomagnetic war had shattered to build his new machines to vanish war forever.
But eighty years of the humanoids had changed Wing IV.
Looking down again beyond the low gray railing, Forester shivered to a paralysing awe.
The shadow of this tremendous solitary tower fell dim and vast before him, an endless blot across a queerly flat plain, where mountains must have been leveled. For now, out to the gray rim of the murky sky, all he could see was a single unending spaceport, beneath interstellar craft arriving and departing.
All those long black ships must be enormous, he knew, as those which had brought the humanoid invasion to his own world, yet those in the far distance seemed tiny and multitudinous as dark insects swarming.
A few of those mighty vessels were landing on the surface of that endless field, near enough for him to glimpse the chutes down which they poured dark rivers of ore - metal, he thought, for new humanoids.
Another was loading, and he could see ordered armies of tiny black mechanicals marching ceaselessly up its gangways - ready, he supposed, to quiet all the quarrels of some troubled world with the crushing benevolence of the Prime Directive.
Most of those vast transports, however, streamed down into wide black pits spaced across the field, or emerged from others, as if their docks were somewhere far beneath.
The entire planet, it came to him, must have become a single, busy labyrinth of shafts and landing cradles, ore bins and smelters, foundries and assembly lines - the dark metal matrix of Mansfield's unimaginable machine, in which all the humanoids were born.
Forester withdrew from the railing, humbled and shuddering.
Jane Carter had crouched close against his legs, breathlessly silent, and they retreated now to the cold face of the metal wall behind.
She had been smiling proudly, showing him the way, but her huge eyes had turned solemn now, and she hung back when he tried to lead her toward that narrow door.
"Wait!" she whispered.
"Mr. White wants you to look at that." She pointed uneasily out across the gray vastness of that mechanized planet.
"He says you're an engineer, and maybe you can tell him what it is."
Looking the way she pointed, he saw the new dome the humanoids were building.
Dim in the smoky distance, it was taller than its breadth, colored darkly red. Scaffolding made a fine dark web around it. Towering far-off and alone, it gave him no clue to its size until he saw an ascending interstellar vessel - creeping up across its crimson face, tiny as a black insect. He knew then that it was unimaginably huge.
"I tried to go inside it for Mr. White, but I somehow couldn't." Her voice was stifled and afraid.
"Even Mr. Overstreet can't see anything inside, but he thinks it's going to be something to use against us."
Forester tried to study that remote red dome.
Were the humanoids attempting to improve themselves with a new grid of platinum relays better than the palladium brain Warren Mansfield had designed?
That seemed scarcely possible - they were already far too perfect.
"Tell Mr. White I don't know what it is."
A thin wind had brushed his face, stinging his eyes with biting smoke and chemical fumes.
That was the bitter breath of the machine, and it doubled him with coughing before he could go on.
"The shape doesn't tell me anything - and platinum would be no better than iron in rhodomagnetic equipment.
So it couldn't be anything rhodomagnetic." "But it's something bad."
He felt her small hand trembling, and then tugging him toward that weathered aluminum door.
"Mr. White says we must hurry, now. Mr. Overstreet can see the shape of trouble waiting for us - only he can't tell quite what it is, with that always getting in the way."
She nodded fearfully at the far red dome, as he followed her toward the narrow metal door.
Oddly, in this world without men, it had a knob shaped to fit a human hand, which yielded stiffly when he tried it.
A short hallway, the walls glowing faintly with a gray radiant paint, let them into the old room where the first humanoid was made.
"Wait." He felt her small hand tighten.
"Mr. White says wait," she breathed. "Mr. Overstreet is watching the sections we must change, and he can see one of the black machines working near it now. We must stay out here till it goes away."
Waiting, taut and almost ill with the stress of hope and dread, Forester looked wanderingly around this scene of old Mansfield's monstrous blunder.
The cold dull radiance of the paint fell on a scarred wooden desk and a worn swivel chair, on a dusty drafting table with a tall stool pushed against it, on rough shelves filled with technical books in faded bindings, on cluttered benches and rusting tools.
A few moldering blankets were still folded on a cot where he must have slept, and a little table rudely made of packing crates was still stacked with soiled dishes and rusted cans and a faded carton which must have held some cereal - as if he had interrupted his disastrous creation only reluctantly, to snatch the simplest essentials of life.
The room had a dry stale odor of years and slow decay, and a comfortable disorder the tidy humanoids would never have allowed.