They were looking for truth, and they found it.
The service of the machines kept them from placing too much value on such spectacular practical stunts as telurgy-"
Forester frowned his dull puzzlement.
"That's the term for mental transmutation of mass," the old man explained.
"The same art you used, unconsciously, to build your shelter on that extragalactic planet.
Quite a trick, because the telurgist must learn to perceive and grasp all the subatomic structure of the stuff he wants to change, and he requires an exact knowledge of the atomic and molecular and crystalline and gross physical structure of whatever he wants to make.
Your telurgic shelter shows quite a remarkable unconscious adaptation.
"Such practical tools of the mind were useful, even to those first philosophic theoreticians.
Scattered over all the planets the humanoids were overrunning, they discovered one another by telepathy.
Teleportation brought them together here, when the Institute was founded.
Telurgy freed them from an uncomfortable dependence on care from the machines, and clairvoyance soon warned them of the mounting danger to Wing IV from such dangerous fanatics as you are - and I was, when I thought I had made the mechanicals too perfect.
"The Compact was formed when we first warned the humanoids of dangers which they lacked the paramechanical power, as they call it, to foresee or avoid.
They agreed to tolerate and support the Institute, in return for our necessary aid."
Nodding bleakly, Forester contrived at last to heave his shoulders a little higher against the tank.
He reached gingerly to touch his puffy knee, and had to set his teeth against a sob of pain.
His fevered eyes swept back across the neat displays of weapons beyond his reach.
"Part of the Institute." The gaunt man gestured casually at the cases of wooden spears and guided missiles, of blowgun darts and biotoxin ampules, of flint points and rhodomagnetic detonators.
"Collected tokens to remind us of the old enemy born again with every human being.
For life hurts every man, many of us badly.
The wounds must heal before we are actually adult.
Some recover easily, most of us slowly.
A few are deformed beyond any natural cure.
The first great goal of our new psychology has been to mend such mental injuries, safely and completely.
Now I think we can, with Ironsmith's grid."
Forester was doggedly trying to listen, though his knee was a twisting torment and his head had become a beaten gong of torture beneath his clot-stiffened hair and he felt ill from the old agony of his stomach slowly digesting itself.
He moved laboriously against the tank, looking carefully away from that tiny palladium cylinder that still contained a planet's fate.
"I want you to understand," Mansfield rumbled on persuasively. "I want you to see that our motives were simple and human and good.
That all we've done had to be.
Perhaps you don't yet like the humanoids - but the other alternative was death.
They're here to stay, anyhow, and I want to show you the very useful change they've forced in the direction of human progress."
Forester lay sullenly still.
"Technology had got out of step with mentality," the cragged man insisted.
"Don't you see?
Technicians too busy to see the tragic consequences were putting such toys as rhodomagnetic detonators in the hands of mental savages.
I made the humanoids, to put an end to that.
Such technicians as yourself - with the highest possible intentions - had wrecked the balance of civilization, so that it was breaking up like an off-center flywheel. The humanoids simply made them take a holiday until the philosophers could restore a better equilibrium.
"Such rebellious unhappy men as you and Mark White were simply trapped in that dilemma.
Even when desperation turned you to parapsychology, you failed to do much with it because you weren't philosophers.
You needed the humanoids to give you time to learn to think.
Yet you couldn't accept them when they came, because that tragic fault in your world had already flawed your minds with hate - the very antithesis of the creative psychophysical force.
You didn't want the truth, but only tricks you could turn to weapons.
"Ironsmith, now, is another type."
Admiration lit Mansfield's vigorous features.
"The type who made the Institute - though I don't imagine he ever won much success back at Starmont.
Because your true philosopher is free from such destructive drives as excessive ambition.
Probably you considered him something of a bum."
"Completely worthless."
That point, at least, Forester approved, and he tried to grin through a haze of pain. "Except that he was good at math."
"But Ironsmith found himself when the humanoids came.
They saw he had no harm in him, and they left him free.