His knee shuddering under him, Jane too heavy in his arms, he came to the top of the steps. His anxious eyes found the white palladium cylinder of the rhodomagnetic detonator among the labeled parts of the stolen missile displayed in the case - a weapon even smaller than his knobby fist, but big enough.
Stumbling on, he glanced back fearfully. The three behind had not moved to interfere.
Perhaps they didn't guess his object. Or maybe their psychophysical powers, like his own, were useless for violence.
They merely stood watching, Ruth with an aching pity on her face.
He was suddenly sorry she must die.
"Please!" Jane was whimpering.
"Please don't-"
He was sure he hadn't noticed any raised threshold across the wide door before, but something tripped him now. His bad knee folded, pitching him forward. He tried to save his balance, and tried to shield the child, and finally fell. His head struck the armor of that rusty battle tank.
For a time he merely lay there, dazed with his pain and his unexpected failure.
Jane Carter was kneeling by him, crying.
At first he thought, he had hurt her as he fell, and then he felt her trying to lift his bursting head.
He scrambled feebly to get up, and felt a sickening stab in his knee.
"Better wait, Forester," he heard the old man booming. "Wait for the grid."
Laboriously, he pushed his elbows beneath him, and hitched himself painfully backward far enough to prop his body against the massive treads and the armored trucks.
He could feel warm blood in his hair, but he tried to grin at Jane's tearful face.
"Good try," he breathed. "Nearly - made it!"
He tried to push himself a little higher, but the surging breakers of pain hammered him down again.
"Lie still, you blundering fool." The aged stranger's voice seemed faint and far away.
"Don't you think you've made mistakes enough?"
He could see the gaunt man dimly then, following through that wide entrance with a vigorous stride - and now there was no longer any lifted threshold, where he had tripped.
He looked dully beyond for Frank Ironsmith and Ruth, but they were gone.
"They went back to Wing IV," the old man said.
"While the platinum grid is entirely automatic, there's a control room from which it can be stopped.
The room is closed to the mechanicals that maintain the grid, and shielded against its own operating forces.
We are going to keep watchers posted there, and Ironsmith has gone back to put Ruth and another on duty.
A needless precaution," he added, "because that grid is perfect as the one that runs the humanoids.
It can't go wrong."
Propped against the cold rusty steel, Forester waited blankly.
Blood made a sticky rivulet down his stubbled cheek, dripping slowly on the gray pajamas.
He reached with a feeble gesture of farewell, to touch the child's dark hair. For the trial was over.
The verdict was guilty.
The sentence was death - by a very special sort of gallows, which made a mechanized puppet of the victim.
He was waiting for the hangman.
"Don't you worry, Dr. Forester." Jane bravely tried to smile. "That machine had me once, and it doesn't really hurt."
"It doesn't hurt at all," the old man promised heartily.
"It heals."
His rugged face seemed kindly now, as if he felt apologetic for a sentence too severe. "It can really help you, Forester. And I want to help you. Because, you see, I once shared your own sort of insanity. I fought the humanoids, and even attempted to alter the Prime Directive."
Forester blinked at him, rasping faintly,
"Who are you?"
"My name's Mansfield," the tall man said.
"Dr. Warren Mansfield."
Chapter TWENTY-NINE
FORESTER TRIED to sit up, but the pressure of pain forced him back against the blackened tank.
A weary detachment had begun to soothe his useless fury, but now a bitter wonder shook him.
"Mansfield?" he muttered bleakly. "A Mansfield made the humanoids."
"That was I." The gaunt man nodded serenely.
"Because I wanted to save men from themselves. I built the Prime Directive into the relays that govern them, and protected it from change - and tried mistakenly to change it."
Beyond the maker of the humanoids, Forester could see a display case made of something scarcely visible, and a tiny silver-colored cylinder inside it.
He tried once more to lurch his body higher against the rusty armor, and again ruthless pain pressed him back.
"A common error." Mansfield shook his head sadly.