I'm sure I did nothing-"
"But you did," she broke in softly. "
'Scuse me, but you really did."
"Maybe it was Mark White." Looking up again at that remote plume of mist that was a billion stars, he ignored her shy protest. "Maybe he somehow beat the machines, after all!"
That exciting possibility lifted his voice. "Maybe he had this place ready - and somehow broke free from that grid, long enough to teleport us here."
She shook her head.
"But it wasn't Mr. White."
"How do you know?" He shivered again, to the monstrous cold that crouched outside the dome.
"Somebody from our world must have built it - quite lately."
Blinking at her breathless astonishment, he dropped his shoulders helplessly. "I just don't get it! Everything's so - familiar. The books I like. My kind of toothpaste. Even a bottle of the capsules I take for indigestion, with Dr. Pitcher's name on it, and the right prescription number!"
"But don't you remember?" Jane was frowning gravely, perplexed as he was.
"Don't you know?"
He could only shake his head.
"It's funny you don't," she said softly, " 'cause you're the one who did it all.
You took me away from the brain machine, that still has poor Mr. White and his poor men.
All I did was show you where to come - far away from the black things."
He opened his mouth, and found no voice.
"Don't you really remember?" Her tiny voice was hushed with wonder.
"How you fought the brain machine?
And how you made this warm place for us, while I tried to stop the cold?" She nodded toward the empty valley, her dark eyes afraid again.
"And how you helped me, here at the door, when I was about to die?" A bleak disappointment shadowed her face. "It's a pity you don't remember," she whispered faintly. " 'Cause you could be awful good at psychophysics."
Chapter TWENTY-SIX
FORESTER LOOKED down at his hands, and flexed them unbelievingly.
Small and wiry, they had seemed sensitive and competent until he had seen the efficient limbs of the humanoids, beautiful with the flow of light on smoothly molded silicone synthetics and powerful with beamed energy.
They had served him once, but now his fingers were still clumsy and aching from the cold, his knuckles still dark-scabbed where he had peeled them awkwardly when Ironsmith came upon him in the tower of the grid.
They were numbed and useless to him now.
"But you didn't use your hands at all." Jane Carter seemed to read his groping doubt.
"You did it with your mind - how could you forget?"
Trembling with his stunned perplexity, Forester looked around that little cupola again.
The small table, lit from a shaded fixture was like one he had used in the observatory at Starmont - even to the brown familiar scar where some forgotten cigarette had burned it.
Neatly arranged on it were scratch pads and sharpened pencils, a slide rule, and several technical handbooks; one of them, listing tables of rhodomagnetic coefficients, published by the Starmont Press, was by Clay Forester, Ph.D.
"That's my name!" The back of his neck was prickling uncomfortably.
"Those are values I worked out, or had Ironsmith calculate for me.
But the book was never printed, because of the censorship.
There was only the one typed copy I kept in the safe.
I don't see how ... " And his voice fell away into a chasm of wonder, dark as the dead night above.
"You did it with your mind," Jane insisted gravely. "You did it with paraphysics, the way I used to change potassium atoms to stop the black machines.
Only I think you can change any atom, to let it go into energy, and then make the energy right back into any other atom you want.
'Cause you made all this place out of the rock, just by thinking how you wanted it to be."
Forester stood speechless, unbelieving.
"I saw you do it," Jane told him.
"I watched you cut the hollow in the cliff, with only your mind, and turn the rock into machines and air and food and everything we need.
And I'm awful glad you did. I was nearly dead!"
He walked slowly to look at the thermostat beside the stair, near the ventilator register.
It was a good copy of the one in the nursery at Starmont that he and Ruth had never needed.
The enamel on the case showed precisely the same diagonal scratch.
"I suppose you're right." His narrow shoulders lifted uneasily.
"Because I can see that everything is copied, somehow, from something in my own mind - from things I know or ideas I had thought about.
But I don't see how." A stubborn doubt shook his head.
"There simply wasn't time! Nor for anything like that. Because the whole place just came here - instantly!"