When they learned of his interest in parapsychology, they put him in touch with the Institute - he used to play chess with me, when he was learning telepathy.
Now, designing the platinomagnetic relays that made the new grid possible, he has turned out to be a brilliant psychophysical engineer as well as a philosopher."
"I see." Forester nodded painfully.
"So that grid's the god you spoke about - built to run men everywhere like streamlined machines!"
"Won't you try to understand?" Mansfield begged.
"Can't you see that any society must shape and train its members?
And somehow discover and control and reclaim maladjusted individuals - before they destroy others or themselves?
That's the real function of the grid - education.
Don't you see that?"
"I see Mark White, after it got him," Forester whispered harshly.
"A meat machine, smiling out of some cold hell!
I don't want to be another mechanical unit, operated by Ironsmith's relays - not even if they are efficient.
I'd rather-"
His whisper failed, for breathing, even, had become laborious to him now.
He lay glaring helplessly at Mansfield.
He was afraid to look at that bright detonator, but his blood-stiffened fingers itched to feel the cold weight and the ultimate, conclusive power of it.
"Your mind's still closed," the old man was chiding him patiently. "Or you could see that the grid is just another tool, like the humanoids, built to serve mankind.
Certainly it's no monstrous god arisen from the machine - the God our mystics see, existing in the total creative force of all the universe, is incomparably more than any mechanism."
Forester shook his head, because it hurt too much to think.
"The Ironsmith grid is just an instrument," Mansfield insisted.
"It was designed to focus and apply the unconscious psychophysical energies of all mental adults, everywhere - I think you're physicist enough to understand that the residual platinomagnetic fields of the relays themselves would be rather too weak to coerce one unwilling moron.
It's no mechanical brain, but something far more useful - a convenient vehicle for the racial human mind.
The perfect instrument of a new order of intelligence.
It can't be evil or destructive, because its very nature is creative.
The power of it won't be arbitrarily authoritarian, as you seem to fear, but completely democratic.
Because it is just a tool to unite the unconscious minds of all people in whom love had displaced hate, and each will share equally in the direction of it."
The tall man's voice was booming now.
"This new emergence of the mind of the race is a huge stride forward in the long evolution of intelligence from the mental component of matter.
It follows the gradual birth of organic life from almost lifeless atoms, and the slow rise of the individual mind from life.
It is another higher synthesis, on another level of unfolding creation - and no one not a mystic can see what lies beyond."
Mansfield looked down at him, compassionately.
"You're sick, Forester. You need the grid - as most men do.
Because the whole race was sick on my old world and yours.
The cause beneath most of our symptoms, I think, was a runaway physical technology - killing us like the runaway cells of an organic cancer.
But the humanoids have removed that social cancer, and now I believe the new control of the Ironsmith grid will assure a balanced growth and heal such unhealthy cells as you are-"
The old man broke off suddenly, smiling, and Forester stiffly turned his head to see Ironsmith come striding briskly in between the silver columns.
"Ruth stayed on duty," the young man said. "And we're reaching out! The operating potential is coming up fast, as we find and unite more and more well-integrated minds." He glanced down brightly at the man on the floor.
"Ready, Forester?"
Chapter THIRTY
PROPPED AGAINST the battered tank, the child whimpering silently beside him, Forester didn't try to answer.
His pain-fogged brain hadn't followed all the brief against him, but he knew the case was closed.
He was condemned, and Frank Ironsmith the cheery hangman.
He lay now looking at that white cylinder he couldn't reach, enduring the slow thudding in his head and the swollen tightness of his knee and the gnawing fangs of his ulcers, waiting for the platinum brain to seize his being.
"Please!" Jane Carter's breathless whisper startled him.
"I know how to help you now!"
He felt her leave his side. He glimpsed her instantly again, stooping to pick up the rhodomagnetic detonator in that transparent case.
Then she was already back, thrusting the small palladium cylinder into his grasping hands.
His blood-stained fingers moved with an automatic skill, stripping out the safety keys.
He set his trembling thumb on the firing bar, gasping hoarsely at the child:
"Thank you, Jane.