He started to explain the symbols.
"I can't read." She stopped him shyly,
"I never went to school, really, except to Mr. White.
Some things I can do, like holding back the cold." She nodded, unafraid, at the black, silent savagery crouched outside.
"But I can't understand when anybody tries to 'splain how I do it."
And Forester sat scowling at the paper in his hand.
Here, he knew, was the ultimate key to knowledge and to power that other men had sought in vain since the days of alchemy.
He had used it triumphantly, and then inexplicably forgotten how.
Grim with resolution, he set out to get its secret back.
"Better go and play," he urged the child, "Or do you want to rest?"
But she refused to leave the dim-lit dome.
Standing silently against the railing above the stair, she watched him work at the little desk, and sit scowling at the merciless dark, and finally work desperately again.
"These are the expansions and transformations of that prime equation," he explained.
"I'm trying to derive complete mathematical descriptions for all the psychophysical phenomena. Because they ought to tell how to do those things I must have done and then forgotten."
She shook her head confusedly, and kept on watching.
"Huh!"
He caught his breath, and wrote something hastily, and then peered outside at the fields of frozen gravel where she had looked for nuggets.
Suddenly his gaunt face smiled, and he whispered softly, " See it, Jane!"
And a worn bit of metal dropped from nowhere to the table.
He reached as if to touch it, and cautiously drew back his fingers. For the rich whiteness of palladium was swiftly covered with the brighter white of frost, which hissed and crackled and increased as the dreadful cold sucked moisture from the air.
Forester looked up at the cruel sky, frowning slightly as if with effort, and the nugget was abruptly gone.
His pencil hurried again.
He paused to study Jane's uneasy face with somber eyes that seemed unseeing as if that new machine possessed him.
His thin yellow fingers plied the new slide rule - until he caught his breath, and made another quick notation, and called a warning to the child:
"Cover your eyes!"
A flash brighter than lightning shattered that frozen night.
A new blue star burned for an instant above those dead hills, before its brief splendor faded and went redly out.
"No, I don't remember yet." Forester shook his head at Jane's breathless question.
"That's just one transformation of prime equation, describing the detonation of mass into free energy when the psychophysical component is canceled.
I tested it on that nugget."
He nodded triumphantly at the quarter of the sky where that savage light had burned and vanished.
"I teleported the nugget out in space, and set it off.
An eight-ounce supernova!
That's our weapon.
A little better than Project Thunderbolt - and one I don't think Frank Ironsmith and his peculiar friends can steal."
"Then we can help poor Mr. White?" she whispered anxiously.
"Before the machines kill him with their 'speriments?"
"I think we can." Forester nodded soberly.
"Though there's something else we must do first, to give us any chance against the humanoids.
We must find Ironsmith, and smash that gang of traitors with him."
"I guess he's the first one to fight." She nodded reluctantly, moving uneasily toward Forester in the shadows of the cupola.
"He seems so terrible now, not a bit like he used to be.
He doesn't really seem quite human any more."
"I don't know what he is." Forester's thin face set. "But we can fight him now."
With Jane Carter watching, he looked for the traitor's nest.
Once he told her, with a hard wry smile, that what he needed was the computing section back at Starmont, because Ironsmith had always worked out the beautiful abstractions, and he had only applied them to reality.
It was an endless time of scowling concentration and empty staring and hurried work with the new slide rule, before he set down another brief equation.
"Still I don't remember anything," he told her.
"But that's another derivation.
It defines space and time - as the electromagnetic effects I thought they were, but joined by a psychophysical binding effect that keeps the universe from shattering into an infinity of tiny space-time manifolds, one around each separate quantum."