"Thank you!"
"Not me." Ironsmith shook his head.
"Your thanks should go to someone else, who is still willing to forgive the most of your follies and to risk far too much to help you.
To Ruth - who was your wife."
"Ruth?
But she's at Starmont, under euphoride."
"She was." Ironsmith smiled innocently.
"You left her there with the humanoids.
But I had always liked her, Forester - more, I suppose, than you ever did - and I brought her away with me when I came to leave Starmont.
She has her mind and her memory back, and now she's with us in the Compact.
She's anxious for you to join us."
He paused hopefully. "What shall I tell her?"
"So she's with you?"
Forester's bad knee shuddered and he felt cold inside.
Leaning weakly against the desk, he nodded to a painful understanding.
He had never entirely liked Ironsmith, not even before the humanoid invasion, and now he thought he saw the reason.
And the cause of Ruth's unhappiness that the humanoids had tried to cure with euphoride.
For the desert observatory had been an isolated, intimate little world, and this ingratiating traitor, the realization stunned him, had too often been with Ruth.
At the office and the cafeteria, talking with his indolent brilliance of some quaint bit of forgotten history or useless philosophy he had translated from the dead languages of the first planet.
At staff parties and on the tennis courts, always conveniently free to spin his aimlessly glittering mathematical paradoxes - while Forester was busy with Project Thunderbolt.
Forester's skin felt hot, and he heard a roaring in his brain.
His whole body tensed and shook with hatred, but his knee was useless and he knew he couldn't fight.
His eyes fell from Ironsmith's blandly urgent face, and he saw Jane Carter again.
He looked at her blind, smiling stillness, until a shiver swept him.
"I'll go with you." He swung abruptly back to Ironsmith. "On one condition."
"So you'll join us?" Ironsmith turned suddenly genial.
"You're ready to accept the humanoids for the useful machines they are?
And to help them defend the Prime Directive?"
He offered a vigorous, sunburned hand. "Then welcome, Forester."
"On one condition," he repeated flatly.
"Jane Carter comes with me - free."
"Sorry, but that's out of the question." Ironsmith was smoothly regretful.
"We can rescue you, but she has unfortunately used psychophysical powers of her own against the humanoids, and I'm afraid there's nothing we can do for her."
"Then there's nothing you can do for me."
"If that's the way you want it." Ironsmith nodded soberly.
"Ruth will be hurt - but I imagine the humanoids will need another guinea pig, to test their new relays."
He looked at Jane Carter.
"Service, Mr. Ironsmith."
She spoke to him with that high, inhuman whine. "Since Clay Forester refuses to enter the Compact, we must keep him in our care because of his dangerous knowledge of rhodomagnetics."
"All right," he cut at Ironsmith. "Let them kill me!"
The child's strange voice answered,
"It will not be necessary to destroy you immediately, sir, because you have displayed no independent paramechanical capacities of your own."
Beyond her, two identical humanoids had come in through the balcony door. Beautiful with flowing gleams of bronze and blue, they glided silently to Forester's elbows.
"Service, sir," the child said. "Come with us."
Smoothly as any humanoid, she moved toward the balcony.
Following between his keepers, Forester looked back twice.
The first time, Ironsmith still stood beside the desk, tall and young and stern, watching him with a look of dispassionate regret.
When he looked again, the dusty shop was hushed and empty.
Chapter TWENTY-THREE
A LITTLE RHODOMAGNETIC cruiser was waiting outside, hovering silently above the low aluminum railing of the narrow balcony, the smooth oval hull of it reflecting the gray vastness of the tower and murk of the smoky sky and the dark flatness of that endless busy spaceport, all in shimmering distortion.