Dazed from the impact of that failure, Forester gave way to pain.
He stopped his useless struggles, and Ironsmith mercifully loosed his arm.
His throbbing knee yielded suddenly, and he staggered on the catwalk, snatching frantically at nothing, until Ironsmith reached out to help him.
Clinging to the girder again, he heard Jane Carter speak.
"Service, Clay Forester." He shrank from her, stricken, for now her thin treble voice had a new quality of whining, emotionless melody. It was like the voices of the humanoids.
"We heard your unwise request," that new voice droned, "but we cannot injure Mr. Ironsmith.
You are the one who requires restraint, sir, because Mr. Ironsmith has been faithful to the Compact, and he has loyally defended our relays from your own unhappy effort to alter the Prime Directive."
And she stood appallingly still again.
Even her human terror had been somehow calmed, for now a strange smile was fixed on her tiny face - a white, dreamy smile, that he felt ill to see.
For it reflected the serene tranquillity of the humanoids, without feeling and without life.
It was mechanical.
Forester turned in consternation, to croak accusingly at Ironsmith:
"What have you done to her?"
"Not I." Sternly, Ironsmith shook his bare sandy head. "Though it is a dreadful thing." His cool gray eyes rested on the stiffened child, and Forester could see the shocked pity in them.
"Because the humanoids aren't ready, yet, to cope with such opponents in any humane way.
I'm afraid she'll have to be destroyed.
But you're the one to blame."
"I?" Forester trembled angrily.
"How?"
"Come along - if you really want to talk about it."
Glancing sadly at the child again, he nodded toward the door. "We can't stay here."
He swung, as if in sublime contempt, and Forester limped helplessly after him along that narrow inspection walk, to clutch gratefully at the jamb of the door.
Looking bitterly back, Forester glimpsed the tiny tenders of the brain already hastening to inspect and repair the connections he had unhooked.
Defeated, he stumbled wearily to the rusty swivel chair that old Mansfield had used, and sat down to ease his throbbing knee.
Little Jane Carter had glided after him with the sure grace of another humanoid.
She halted at the end of the battered desk, motionless as any stopped machine, still smiling.
Her set face was pinched and bloodless, and her eyes had dilated into great pools of shadow, lifeless and blind.
Forester looked away from her, mopping his face and trying to swallow the dry horror in his throat and blinking unbelievingly at Ironsmith.
"How?" he croaked huskily. "How am I to blame?"
The mathematician was strolling absently about that gray-lit, stale-smelling room.
He glanced at the faded backs of the reference books, idly spun the loose headstock of a bench lathe, curiously tapped the time-stiffened keys of a tiny portable calculating machine - which must have been a remote cybernectic forebear of the humanoids themselves.
Dust came up in little gray puffs about his shoes, and dust marked his dark suit where he had brushed the benches and the drafting table.
Thrusting both hands deep into his pockets, he turned back at last to Forester with a slow frown of thought.
"The humanoids have to guard the grid." His voice was mild and friendly as if Forester had never urged Jane Carter to detonate the unstable potassium isotope in his blood. "Warren Mansfield built that into them.
When such blundering fools as you and Mark White attack the Prime Directive with paraphysical weapons, they are compelled to develop paraphysical defenses."
"They?" Forester kept his eyes off the frozen child.
"Or you?"
Ironsmith stood silent, watching her with gray troubled eyes, until a sudden gust of wrath brought Forester out of the dusty chair.
His knee gave again, and he had to catch the corner of the desk.
"So you don't deny it?" He spat on the floor.
"I guessed the truth a long time ago - when you began inventing all your sophistic little arguments for accepting the machines, and when they paid you off so well.
You - traitor!"
Gasping for breath, he shook his feeble fist. "But I suppose you can't deny it now. Not when you're right here on Wing IV - murdering the last hope for liberty the rest of us will ever have. Not since I've heard about this Compact - whatever it is - between you and these machines."
"It's true that a mutual pact exists." Ironsmith nodded pleasantly.
"A necessary arrangement. Because the humanoids were created without any psychophysical capacities, and because they aren't themselves creative.
They were unable to protect the Prime Directive from psychophysical attacks, without the human aid the Compact provides."
"I thought so!"
"But you didn't think enough." Rubbing the lean angle of his sunburned jaw, Ironsmith strolled about the shop again, and nodded at last in grave decision.
"You've made things very difficult, Forester - but still I'm going to give you one more chance to join us."
Peering in a bleak perplexity at this amiable and honest-seeming man who had turned so incredibly against his kind, Forester muttered sardonically,