But rho had failed him.
The unknown force refused to obey the established laws of either science, and its actual nature still escaped him.
Unless, just possibly - Forester caught his breath, recalling that the periodic table offered still a third triad - composed of the three precious heavy metals, platinum and osmium and iridium.
The same elements the humanoids were using to build their dreadful new relays!
Could that last triple group prove to be another convenient key, ready to unlock yet a third sort of energy?
While some such rousing notion had crossed his mind long ago at Starmont, on that tremendous night when he first grasped the awesome gift of the rhodium triad, he had then been forced to dismiss it as nothing more than a purely logical possibility, as inaccessibly far beyond his reach as the whole science of electromagnetics must have been to that observant barbarian of the mother planet who first noticed a floated steel needle seeking the north.
Project Thunderbolt had left him no leisure for any such nebulous speculations, but now his short remaining time was good for nothing else, and the hint of those platinum relays had already begun to shape another pattern in his mind, waiting for that idea to complete it.
The youthful thought spread a swift excitement through him now, but he tried to keep his body quiet.
Afraid to look at his keeper, or even to let the rhythm of his breathing change, he tried to analyze and demonstrate that breathtaking new conception in the uninvaded laboratory of his mind.
The heavy elements of the platinum triad were indeed the logical key to that unknown component, it came to him, because the more powerfully disruptive electromagnetic and rhodomagnetic forces of the more massive atoms must obviously require a far greater intensity of that stabilizing energy to balance and contain them - it was only the ultimate failure of the binding component in the very heaviest atoms that allowed the fission of such elements as uranium.
Lying very still, wishing absently that he had Frank Ironsmith's computing section to help him with the math, he groped with his mind alone for the nature and the laws of that unknown energy.
Since electromagnetic effects varied with the second power of the distance, and rhodomagnetic with the first, he thought this third sort of energy should logically be invariant with distance.
Again, since the velocity even of electromagnetic light was finite in time, and the speed of rhodomagnetic energy infinite, then the effects of the platinomagnetic force might reasonably somehow transcend time.
And, if those two fumbling hypotheses were true-
His breathing paused again, and he couldn't keep his body from stiffening on the cot.
For Ash Overstreet could look into the future and the past, and the curious abilities of Lucky Ford and little Jane Carter were unlimited by distance.
Trembling to a startled understanding of the platinum relays in that new grid, he recognized the unknown component.
It was - it simply had to be - psychophysical energy!
"What disturbs you, sir?" inquired his keeper. "Are you still unhappy?"
"No trouble." He mumbled the words, turning carefully on the cot to keep his face away from it.
He breathed again and made his limbs relax, trying to seem merely restless, in his sleep.
"And I'm going to be very happy now."
He was.
Because that flash of intuition had been a wide illumination, lighting many things.
It had closed the gaps in Mark White's half-science, and swept away the baffling contradictions.
It actually explained Jane Carter's gift and Lucky Ford's ability and Overstreet's searching perception - with an answer more complete than the shadowy conjectures and the mocking uncertains hiding behind vague unknowns, out of which he had tried to shape his exchange- force hypothesis of mind and probability.
Lying still, relaxed again, he forgot the alert machine behind him. He forgot the bars, and his painful knee, and the long failure of his life. Absently regretful that Ironsmith couldn't check his speculations, he began an awed exploration of the universe, by that tremendous, sudden light. It wasn't hope that urged him on - not consciously - for he thought hope was dead.
He had yielded his body to the machines, and ceased all resistance.
Waiting, resigned to whatever fate, he had simply released his intelligence upon the familiar paths of science, and now his triumphant mind began to rove through atoms and far galaxies.
For he had reached the oldest goal of alchemy and science.
The fabulous prima materia, when now at last he grasped it, proved to be a very simply equation, so plainly obvious that he thought he should have found it long before.
It merely stated the relation and equivalence of electromagnetic and rhodomagnetic and psychophysical energies, as involved most simply in the equilibrium of a stable atomic particle - revealing all three as different aspects of the single basic unity science had ever sought.
The sheer mathematical beauty of that equation brought Forester a deep glow of pleasure.
For the integration was complete.
The terms described the fundamental stuff of nature, neither electromagnetic nor rhodomagnetic nor psychophysical, but all three at once - the keystone of all the ordered splendor of the universe.
Now at last, too late to help anything, he saw the picture whole.
The alchemists of Ironsmith's historical fragments, taking mercury for their prima materia and sulphur to be the philosophers' stone that made it into lead or iron or gold, had been but little farther from the truth, it occurred to him, than the ambitious thinkers of the later age of iron, who had attempted to balance their universe upon another single leg.
Rhodomagnetics, adding a second leg, had improved the balance only slightly.
But psychophysics, the third aspect of one reality, completed a firm tripod of truth.
The transformations and derivations of that equation of equivalence, Forester perceived, would explain the origin of atoms and the universe, the gravitation of matter and the dispersion of the galaxies, the dark paradox of time and the nature of space, and doubtless even the birth and meaning of life and mind themselves.
Lying quiet on that hard cot, he was lost in the elemental grandeur of that concept.
He had forgotten the gray-walled cage around him, and his sleepless keeper watching, and the unpleasant fact that he himself was waiting for the scalpels of another research project - until the humanoid touched his arm.
"Service, Clay Forester," it said.
"We're ready now."
Then he was no longer in the cage.
Chapter TWENTY-FIVE
HE WAS standing on a flat gravel bed, at the bottom of a shallow, dry watercourse.
On his left were low dark cliffs, formed where the vanished stream had cut against an outcropping granite ridge.
The barren gravel fields spread far to his right, and beyond were hills, lying low and naked and dead beside the wide shallow valley of the ancient river.
It was night, and cruelly cold.