She stood frozen now, poised on that narrow gangway like a mechanical at rest.
Her pinched face was bloodless, and her staring eyes seemed enormous in the gloom, watching the door where they had come in.
Chapter TWENTY-TWO
CLUTCHING THE flange of that great girder to balance himself, Forester turned fearfully back to the door.
It was still closed.
In that breathless hush of inconceivable energies, he could hear nothing at all.
He was glancing blankly back at that intent humanoid when the first faint creak of the opening door spun him back.
A man came out, striding toward him confidently along that giddy path.
"Stop it, Forester!"
His instant of weak relief was shattered by a stark dismay. For he knew that clear, pleasant voice, echoing so alarmingly through those dim corridors of the grid, and it belonged to a man more dreadful than any humanoid. Frank Ironsmith came stalking out along the catwalk, urbanely indifferent to any risk of falling.
"You blundering fool, Forester!"
Lower now, restrained, his voice reflected neither hate nor anger, but only an infinite shocked regret.
His boyish, sunburned face looked lean and stern, and his gray eyes held a wounded sadness as he looked past Forester at the rigid, staring child.
"Look what you have done!"
For an instant Forester stood heartsick and shaken, swaying on that gangway meant for sure machines, wishing hopelessly that this grave antagonist had been merely another mechanical that Jane could have stopped.
Fighting a sudden giddiness, he tightened his sweaty grasp on the girder.
The silent forces of the brain seemed to roar around him, an unheard hurricane.
"I tried to warn you, Forester."
Scarcely hearing that sad reproof, he blinked unbelievingly at Frank Ironsmith - who should have been still idling his useless life away at Starmont, reading his ancient books and playing his mysterious chess and riding his rusty bicycle.
But this startling intruder was changed, somehow, from that lank and callow youth in the computing section, indolently squandering his brilliant gifts on fantastic new geometrics instead of crossword puzzles.
Youthful still, he looked leaner and firmer and browner, older and sobered.
"I thought Mark White would call on you, but-"
Forester interrupted that suave, regretful voice.
He stood empty-handed, for even the pliers had fallen in his first alarm, but now, when he had reached the most vital part of Mansfield's monstrous creation, he didn't intend to be stopped.
Sudden purpose clenched his stringy fist, and sudden fury drove his lashing blow.
Darting forward, Forester forgot all his dizzy fear of the vast black spaces of the brain beneath, and all his dread of the busy blind machines behind him.
All he remembered was Ironsmith's shrewd defense of the humanoids, and his unfair freedom, and his treacherous hunt for White.
He tried to knock the urbane traitor off that unrailed way, but Ironsmith evaded the blow.
"That won't help you, Forester."
Smiling apologetically, Ironsmith caught his quivering wrist. Quick and strong as any humanoid, the mathematician twisted it up and back, to pin him against the gray panel faces.
He gasped and pulled and tried to strike again, and somehow hurt his injured knee.
Throbbing pain checked his fury.
"You aren't fit to fight."
Ironsmith's low calm voice held no resentment, but only smooth regret. "You had better give up."
Not yet!
Forester shook his head to clear the mist of pain.
He twisted in Ironsmith's ruthless grasp, trying to ease his arm, and shifted his weight to relieve his trembling knee.
Looking desperately behind him on that perilous catwalk, he found Jane Carter. She stood still and pale with fright, but he knew the dreadful power she had learned. "Jane!" He fought that agony, and found his voice.
"Stop him!"
Ironsmith was twisting back his arm again, with the merciless efficiency of a machine. He had to flinch from the excruciation of that, but red hatred surged back against the crushing weight of pain. Chilled with sweat, he gulped for the breath to gasp:
"Stop him, Jane!
You can do it - the way you stopped those machines.
Because he has potassium in his body - not in beads but everywhere.
Mr. White can help you find it - and you know how to break the atoms."
Cold waves of agony were beating him back against the glowing panels, but still he whispered faintly, "Just find the K-40 atoms - explode them in his blood!"
But the little girl had shaken her head, the movement stiff and slight.
Her blue lips seemed to quiver, but then she froze again, motionless as a humanoid not working.
All the color had drained from her hollowed face, and her immense dark eyes seemed fixed and blind as those other orbs of shining steel.
And nothing happened to Ironsmith.
The detonation of even a tiny fraction of the unstable potassium atoms in his body would have killed him instantly, but not even his calmly compassionate expression changed.