"Many another has made it - though few have come so near a disastrous success as you and I did, Forester, in our turns.
The common cause, I suppose, is a want of philosophy.
I know that I had none, thirty years ago, when I tried to blow up Wing IV with a rhodomagnetic detonating beam - and fortunately failed.
Egotism ruled me, instead of intelligence.
I wanted freedom, before I had earned it.
Childishly, I forgot the stark necessity behind the humanoids."
Forester struggled protestingly, and had to gasp again with pain.
"Don't move," the old man urged calmly.
"If you'll just wait a few minutes longer, the psychophysical grid will be ready to pick your body up and fix all that's wrong with you.
Thirty years ago, I wasn't quite so lucky. Because Ironsmith hadn't designed his grid."
"Huh?" Forester caught his breath and tried to ease his knee.
"Mark White told me how your own machines exiled you from Wing IV when you tried to modify them, and hounded you on from planet to planet."
His voice was harshly accusing. "I don't suppose you trusted them quite so far yourself, back in those days?"
"I didn't."
"Then tell me why you sold us out!"
"Nobody sold out, Forester." The old man was gravely emphatic.
"In my case, I simply changed - rather, the humanoids changed me.
Let me tell you how it was - from my standpoint, instead of Mark White's.
Perhaps I can help you welcome the grid."
Forester shook his head sullenly, but he had to listen.
"Thirty years ago," Mansfield repeated, "there wasn't any Ironsmith grid.
The humanoids had inherited the same scornful ignorance of the human mind I used to have, and their mechanical mind is not inventive.
The psychophysical properties of the platinum metals were not then known.
When the humanoids finally caught me, after my last defeat, they had to operate."
"Operate?"
Forester stiffened. "For what?"
"To remove the conflict and the hate that kept me from accepting their service.
They also took a part of my memory, because it was dangerous to the Prime Directive.
Difficult surgery - I'm glad the new grid will make such operations needless.
But it did give me freedom."
"So that's the way?"
Forester shivered against the steel. "Did they operate on Ironsmith, too? Or did he get his remarkable immunity in some kind of ugly deal-"
"Neither," Mansfield said. "There aren't any deals.
The humanoids are simply excellent psychologists - you'll have to admit I designed them well."
The lean man smiled briefly. "They were always able to distinguish those who do need watching from that fortunate few who don't. Your own dangerous traits must have been obvious to them, and they could see that Ironsmith was harmless."
Harmless?
Forester caught his breath for an angry protest, but even that slight movement made another surge of pain beneath his matted hair, thrusting him down again.
"They left me free, soon after the operation," Mansfield continued. "They even let me carry on my research.
The physical sciences were still out of bounds, of course, because you'll have to grant that most laboratory equipment is pretty dangerous, even for mental adults.
But there was parapsychology."
Forester's haggard eyes narrowed warily.
"I had always been a skeptic, as I suppose you were." The old man waited serenely for his stiff nod.
"That conscious denial of the psychophysical phenomena usually comes, I think, from some buried rebellion against love - against the creative power of the unconscious psychophysical urge.
Removing hatred from my mind, the humanoids also liberated my repressed psychophysical capacities.
The telepathic function came first, and I was soon in contact with the pioneer philosophers here."
"Philosophers?" Forester rasped his sardonic challenge. "Or traitors?"
"Does this look like a den of treason?" The old man turned soberly to point through the white-pillared doorway at the pleasant land without, the clustered silver towers crowning kindly hills and the wind smiling on the blue estuary.
"No, Forester, this is the Psychophysical Institute.
It was formed nearly seventy years ago, by a few adult and able men released by the service of the humanoids from their physical cares and their limiting preoccupations with physical science.
They turned naturally to philosophy. And then to a new sort of psychology which their true orientation made possible - an actual science of the mind.