The display that had checked Forester was a long shell of shining metal, shaped for speed, with the parts from inside neatly labeled and spread out below.
"Please." She pulled at his gray sleeve.
"What is that?"
"One of my rhodomagnetic missiles." His voice was a shaken rasping. "From Starmont.
I'd suspected Ironsmith of looting the project, though I never guessed why."
He swung nervously back toward the doorway. "So these are the men we've come to fight - who lay such weapons out to rust, along with displays of throwing sticks and plutonium bombs!"
Jane hung back as he started on, to watch a tiny flying thing which must have strayed from the meadows outside.
She followed the flutter of its rainbow-colored wings above a case of catapults and early cannon, smiling at its hovering loveliness.
Glancing back impatiently, Forester saw it.
His thin face tightened. "Don't look." He swung her from it, with a quivering violence.
A hard light flashed where the winged thing had been.
A clap like thunder made a hollow rumbling against the far walls, and the odor of something burned drifted bitter in the air.
She flinched from him, crying out.
"Why did you do that?"
"I wanted to test the detonation equation again." His haggard face was gray with illness and shining with a cold film of sweat.
"And I suppose that butterfly reminded me of Frank Ironsmith - so lazy and so useless and so brilliant."
Pity erased her hurt bewilderment, and then her face was bleak again with fear.
Clinging to the man's thin arm, she followed him to the gray ugly bulk of a battle tank, placed as if for its rusty guns to command the doorway.
He drew her down behind the bullet-scarred and fire- blackened armor of it, and they watched for Ironsmith to come. The broad steps outside fell to curving walks and wide green lawns.
Beyond a clear stream, the meadows were clumped with strange low trees that flamed with violet blooms.
A man and a girl were walking beside the stream, holding hands.
Showing no visible stain of infamy, they looked happy and brown and strong, and their laughter lifted softly.
No humanoids followed to serve them - although on another green hill, small as a toy in the distance, a tall black ship from Wing IV was standing.
Forester peered at them, crouching lower, and a sudden alarm made Jane Carter tug at his sleeve, whispering anxiously:
"Please don't hurt them!"
"They're the enemy." His voice made her shiver. "If they find us, we must kill them."
"Then I hope - I so hope they don't!"
The laughing couple had chosen a level site beyond the stream, and now they began putting up a gay-color building.
They had brought no visible tools or materials, nor any humanoids to help, yet the house they made went up very swiftly.
The sections of it seemed to form in the stream, and float into place, and flow firmly together.
Those two, Forester knew, must have found the unity of ferromagnetic and rhodomagnetic and platinomagnetic energies, and discovered the philosophers' stone of mind to shape that prima materia to their desires.
He drew himself lower, appalled by the ominous ease of their creation, and started when the child touched him.
"There!" she breathed. "Is that-"
Peering around the war-scarred tank, he saw a man coming up the broad steps outside, but it wasn't Frank Ironsmith.
The stranger was an old man, snowy-haired but lean and straight and tall as Mark White himself.
His cragged, rawboned face had a look of austere command, and his great gnarled hands hung forward in an attitude of competent readiness for anything.
Forester looked unthinkingly for the vehicle in which the man had come, and saw none.
He caught his breath and waited, then, watching covertly with hard narrowed eyes, ready to kill the old man if he started to come inside.
But the stranger turned on the broad level above the steps, looking around expectantly and seeming himself to wait.
Jane relaxed a little, as if relieved that it hadn't been Ironsmith, but Forester was taut and quivering.
Bright sweat shone on his twitching, sallow face, with his illness gray beneath the unshaven stubble, and the gnawing inside him lining his cheeks with pain.
Wishing he had taken another antacid capsule, he set his teeth and held his breath and watched the silver steps.
Waiting too, the vigorous old stranger glanced idly across them into the museum, and then strolled to a low white parapet.
He watched the man and girl across the stream until they saw him and paused at their work to wave to him gaily.
A moment later he smiled and turned, striding to meet the man he must have come to meet.
"Still I don't see Ruth," Forester breathed harshly.
"But here's our man - if that's what he is!"
Still there was no vehicle, but Frank Ironsmith came running up the steps, smiling and holding out his hand.
His sandy head was bare, his pleasant face bright with a quiet elation.
He looked warmly human, and he had to be a man, but Forester still couldn't understand him.