Numbed and tingling at the scalp from the vanishing of Ironsmith, Forester shuffled blankly toward it between his guards.
The idle-seeming clerk from Starmont, a cold certainty struck him, must have somehow learned to control exchange-force probability for himself.
Agile as any mechanical, Jane Carter sprang nimbly over the railing to the deck of the waiting craft.
Forester's two graceful guards helped him aboard, and the little ship rose silently.
Watching through the one-way transparency of the hull, he saw the smoke-veiled vastness of that endless spaceport sink and spread.
And he saw his destination.
His bad knee shuddered again, and the two intent machines moved closer to his arms, asking gently if he wished to sit.
But he didn't sit.
He stood between them, scarcely breathing, watching the red curve of that unfinished dome rise up ahead.
He could see the scaffolding still about it, a dark metal veil across its sullen glow.
At last, as the cruiser dropped, he found the toiling machines on the platforms, the merest insects, still scarcely visible.
He thought their work was almost done.
"Service, sir," droned one of his keepers. "What disturbs you now?"
"I just begin to get it!"
The tiny craft banked, coming down to land, and he tried to guard his knee. "I begin to see what this monstrous thing is for."
His bad knee gave as the deck leveled again, and the humanoids reached quickly to support him.
He cuffed at them impatiently, but they held him up until the cruiser had settled gently beside a long windowless building, with the scarlet dome looming up beyond, fretted with the black scaffolding, huge as a strange moon rising.
Forester shrank from it.
"Now I think I see the truth," he rasped at his guardians.
"I think those platinum relays are paraphysical.
I think Ironsmith and his gang of renegades have taught you how to generate paraphysical energy and helped you build this new grid."
His voice turned hoarse. "And I think it's intended to operate men."
"That is partly true, sir."
His brooding eyes had moved to Jane Carter, and now her thin body broke suddenly out of that stark immobility, moving a little toward him with a quick mechanical grace. "The platinum rays are to be energized with paramechanical force, and the grid has in fact been constructed to control the minds and bodies of men. But our purpose with it is not evil, sir, in any way."
Sweetly melodious, her thin bright voice reflected nothing human.
"Our only function, as you should know, is to secure the greatest possible measure of happiness for all men, under the Prime Directive.
In the past, we have sometimes failed.
A few unhappy individuals have developed paramechanical abilities, enabling them to elude our care and endanger our whole service, but this new grid is designed to govern them.
We shall use it to cause all men, everywhere, to do only what is good."
Forester stood numbed and voiceless.
"Men have need of such guidance," droned the mechanized child.
"Because most men cannot truly control the working of their own bodies, or even understand the functions of their own minds.
Our function is to guard men from the consequences of their own ignorance and folly and vice.
You cannot call that evil, sir."
Gulping painfully, Forester found no reply.
"Now come."
The door of the cruiser was sliding open. "Here is our new paramechanical laboratory." The two humanoids helped him carefully down from the deck.
Shivering in the red shadow of that enormous dome, he limped stiffly after the child.
Watching her strange new grace, he could see all men moving like puppets on the invisible strings of the grid.
He could glimpse the ultimate despotism of old Warren Mansfield's altruistic idea, utterly benevolent and unthinkable.
His narrow shoulders drew furiously straight, but he limped on helplessly after the child.
In a windowless vastness of gray wall ahead, a narrow doorway opened.
Beyond was a dark enormous space, where he could see the loom and gleam of strange machines.
A sharpened apprehension checked his feet - for he didn't want to be a guinea pig.
"You need not be alarmed for yourself, sir." His keepers must have seen his hesitation. "Or concerned about Jane Carter.
Because we are careful to conduct our paramechanical research without causing any pain or needless bodily harm to the human subjects, and we always cause a complete suspension of awareness in individuals under paramechanical control."
Forester didn't want his mind dissected, not even by the most efficient methods, and he hung back until the two machines moved to catch his shrinking arms and thrust him, with an almost tender deftness, forward into the shadowy cavern of the research laboratory.
The humanoids had no use for light, and the only illumination came through the bars of an endless row of cages built along the foot of one high wall - cages much like those he had seen containing animals intended for biological experiment.
They seemed quite small at first, in that enormous space, so that he wondered for an instant what sort of animal they were built to hold.
The dim light, spreading from them a little way across the floor and diffusing upward toward the unseen ceiling, outlined here and there the dark bulk of some immense unknown mechanism, picked out some polished metal surface, or caught the hastening sleekness of another humanoid.