His knee shuddered under him, so that he clung weakly to the bars.
For he had seen the face of the marching thing, strangely stiff and pale.
He had seen the eyes, huge and dark and blank, their sullen blaze of hate dead at last. And he had seen the look behind the splendid beard, a smile that came from some far place of cold, forgetfulness, lost beyond all feeling.
He stared after the stalking creature, stricken, until it vanished in the dark.
Even its movements, the realization hit him, no longer had any characteristic of Mark White.
Its striding gait had been too quick and sure and soundless.
Like little Jane Carter, it had become a mechanical puppet of the grid.
And it was not alone, for the others came marching after it out of the whispering dark.
Still tall and gaunt, old Graystone was no longer awkward now, his nose no longer ruddy. Overstreet, for all his puffy bulk, moved lightly as a child. Not nervous any more, little Lucky Ford came gliding by with a swift mechanical grace.
Forester found no voice to call again, and none of them seemed aware of him - for all awareness was suspended, in those controlled by the paramechanical relays.
All their eyes had blind, distended pupils, and all their faces smiled out of unfeeling oblivion.
"Service, sir." He started when his keeper touched his arm.
"Those unhappy men can cause no trouble now - and you can only tire your leg, standing too long.
You should let us bathe you now, and massage your knee.
And then you should sleep."
Chapter TWENTY-FOUR
BLANKLY, Forester turned away from the murmuring dark and the monstrous shape of defeat.
Limping obediently toward the narrow bathroom behind his cage, he nodded at the way those smiling automatons had gone, inquiring listlessly,
"How did you capture them?"
"Through Jane Carter," the machine said.
"They had hidden from us in a cave which had no physical entrance, but we reached them with the child's mind, and took hold of them with paramechanical impulses from the energized test sections of the new grid.
We controlled their own paramechanical capacities to bring them here."
Stumbling on his painful knee, Forester had to let the quick mechanical support him.
"Come along and let us tend you." He heard its droning only vaguely.
"Your test section of the grid will soon be energized, so that we can try it to repair the damaged ligaments."
He limped passively along with the machine, and he let it put him to bed.
Lying in the narrow cot, he tried to forget the glowing bars and the finality of his failure.
He closed his eyes against an unendurable solicitude, and he tried to solve a riddle.
He had no conscious purpose left, but he was still a scientist.
The old habits and disciplines of abstract thought were still working in him, even when all the plan and meaning of his being had been shattered, and his sick mind turned back now to seek relief in the old pursuit of fitting facts together to form new patterns of the truth.
Project Thunderbolt had never left him mental peace or freedom to develop all the theoretical implications of his first basic discoveries in rhodomagnetics, but now in the relaxation of despair he found his mind turning from practical things to consider that long- neglected challenge.
For the humanoids had not yet conquered the realm of pure thought, nor closed it to men.
Lying on his cot, he resumed the oldest quest of science: the ancient search for the first fact of all things and the law of its multitudinous manifestations, for the prima materia and the philosophers' stone.
Electromagnetics, even with all its ambitious achievements in smashing and rebuilding atoms and draining off their energy, had never quite blueprinted atomic architecture.
Mighty as it was, that old science of iron had never quite accounted for the nuclear binding force - for that incredible something, not itself electromagnetic, which somehow contained the furious electrostatic repulsions within unfissioned atoms.
Once he had thought he saw that other energy, revealed long ago in the supernova's light.
If space and time were really electromagnetic effects, as all the phenomena of his new science suggested, then it followed that the quantum nature of all electromagnetic energy must be reflected somehow in the structure of space and time.
Space-time should exist, he thought, in tiny, indivisible units. And the dimensions of such uncuttable units of space-time, as he inferred them, placed definite lower limits on the action of such electromagnetic forces as the mutual repulsion of bound positive particles in atomic nuclei.
Because all such forces, with their finite velocities of propagation, must have time and space in which to act - and must vanish, therefore, at those certain, almost infinitesimal magnitudes at which time and even distance disappeared.
Such reasoning, by removing the very space and time which the disruptive forces of the atom must have for action, also took away the need of any actual binding force - almost.
And he thought he had found the necessary remainder, expressed as a function of his constant, rho.
For rhodomagnetic forces, existing apart from electromagnetic space and time, were not restricted by the limits of the electromagnetic quantum.
Timeless and continuous, they must still act within the atom, even at those distances so tiny that space and time fell apart into paradoxic quanta in which other forces disappeared and motion lost its meaning.
Some such cohesive force was surely necessary to bind together all the discrete units of atomic space and atomic time into one continuous universe, and the supernova's spectrum had showed him the working of an actual rhodomagnetic component in matter, essential to the intricate balance of opposing forces in suns and atoms alike.
Rho had been his symbol for the constant of mutual equivalence with which he had hoped to join the twin systems of energy, electromagnetic and rhodomagnetic, expressing their basic nature and reciprocal relation.
He had used the symbol to write an equation which seemed to unite the two sciences into the final fact he sought - until young Ironsmith so casually and cheerily proved that seeming prima materia to be just one more illusion.
For rhodomagnetics, like the older science built on the properties of the first atomic triad, had also failed.
Forester had carried the light a little farther, but vast areas of dark were left.
He had detonated matter with his new partial knowledge, as men with even less knowledge had split atoms, but both sciences were still not enough to explain why all atoms didn't fission at once, and all matter detonate itself.
Stable atoms still existed, to prove the presence of some third component, acting to preserve all substance from spontaneous fission and dissolution into free energy under the furious disruptive force of the two components he knew.