I think I know the place to wait."
"Where?"
"On that planet where the humanoids are paying off their human friends."
His stubbled face was taut and dark and savage. "It's about three light-years from IV - as near as the machines want men to come. The renegades seem to be the only people there - and they're doing pretty well, thank you!" He scowled at the toppling arch of far-off stars.
"That must be one of the first worlds the humanoids took, I think, too late to prevent atomic and rhodomagnetic wars; looking back a hundred years in time, I couldn't find anything but charred ruins, and huge bomb craters, and sterile deserts still deadly with atomic residues.
But the machines have fixed everything up for their friends.
The craters are level now, and the continents green again, and the residues all cleaned up.
I suppose the renegades gave some psychophysical help with that, because radioactives aren't easy to remove from the soil and the seas."
He wiped his lean face with the loose gray sleeve.
"I still don't understand," he told her. "Not how men could do what they have done.
But Frank Ironsmith isn't the first.
I could see others like him gathering there, years ago.
I can't tell all they've learned or done - spying on them can't be very safe.
But they're - powerful!"
Jane was biting her grimy knuckles, listening silently.
"I didn't see any weapon, but such men don't need physical weapons," he went on bleakly.
"I don't know what unseen traps they may have set, or what unknown forces they have ready to destroy us.
But I didn't see any evidence that they understand mass-detonation.
Perhaps I can kill Ironsmith, and what others I must, and then somehow force the humanoids to give men a better deal."
She nodded apprehensively, and then, when she found they had still an hour to wait, she shyly confessed that she was hungry.
He took her down to that white kitchen which the new unconscious power of his mind had shaped from the substance of the rock, and inexpertly fixed a meal. He watched her eat, but his own stomach felt too uncomfortable for food and presently he went to his room for another antacid capsule.
The mirror in the bathroom gave him a shocking glimpse of sunken, bloodshot eyes and a sick gray pallor beneath his unshaven beard; and the flapping gray pajamas seemed a comic battle dress.
When he tried to change into a new blue suit he found in the closet, however, he couldn't work the rhodomagnetic snaps, and the thin gray cloth proved too tough to tear.
He gave it up, and washed his face, and limped wearily back to where Jane waited in the dim cupola.
"It's time," he told her.
"In about five minutes - if that was really Ironsmith - he'll be coming back to Ruth."
He paused to study his notations on another scrap of paper.
"The equation of teleportation," he said.
"It describes the instantaneous deformation of the exchange forces, through that psychophysical binding component, to shift patterns of atomic identity - such patterns as we are - to new co-ordinates of space and time.
The uncertainty factor seems to rule out any actual travel in time, but the shift in space is the art Mark White taught you."
Jane shook her head at the words, reproachfully, and trustingly put her hand in his.
He glanced at the paper again, and crumpled it savagely, turning with the child toward the distant galaxy.
Chapter TWENTY-SEVEN
THE GLOOMY cupola was gone instantly, and they stood in a strange, enormous room.
Immense square pillars the color of silver supported the lofty roof, and wide windows of something clearer than glass showed the green rolling hills and blue friendly sky of the traitors' planet.
Other great white-pillared buildings shone like silver crowns on other hills, and wind made a sparkle on dark far-off water.
"He'll meet her there." Forester nodded at the wide stair outside the open doorway, his voice hoarse and cold.
"We'll be ready."
Beckoning sharply for her to follow, he limped hastily across that vast floor, between rows of tall transparent display cases.
"Where are they all?" she whispered uneasily.
"Mr. Ironsmith's terrible friends?"
"Not here." He didn't look back.
"Because this is a museum of war.
I suppose all these old weapons were collected for historical research - I don't imagine the renegades would need them for anything else.
Anyhow, the place isn't popular. I think we can wait here, safe - Huh!"
An impact of sharp surprise had stopped him.
For a moment he stood gaping blankly at something in a long crystal case, before he stumbled dazedly toward it.
Jane watched him apprehensively.
All the cases held weapons men had made. Clubs and spears and trays of arrow points. Knives and swords and rusty guns.
And later illustrations of the long evolution of the tools of death.