Now save yourself!"
He waited to see her frightened nod. Then his shuddering thumb came down, in an act of ultimate rebellion against the humanoids and that omnipotent mechanical brain, in a last savage stroke against Ironsmith's pink-faced, intolerable rightness, in a frantic last attack against the very pain tormenting him.
For the detonating field would instantly unstabilize all mass within forty yards - the stuff of the rusty tank and the museum floor and his own sick flesh - and convert it into energy to shatter the planet.
The bar moved easily, and he felt the spring begin to yield.
Yet something stopped his thumb.
He shook his head painfully, glaring feebly at his enemies.
The old man's ramblings hadn't impressed him. He still hated Ironsmith, and he still feared the grid.
Here in his hands was escape, and triumphant retaliation.
But something in him refused to press the bar.
"I don't know why," he breathed to Jane, "but I just can't."
Carefully, he locked the two safety keys back into their slots, and returned the cylinder to her.
"Please put it back."
"But I can tell you why." Ironsmith had strolled easily nearer, smiling in candid friendship.
"You didn't kill us - not even when we let you try - because you don't want to, really.
Because you're already yielding, in spite of yourself, to love."
They had let him try.
That meant they must already have foreseen his failure, with their extratemporal vision, before they allowed him to begin that last useless effort.
Apathetic frustration overwhelmed him, but he would acknowledge no surrender to love.
"Go ahead," he muttered harshly.
"I'm ready now."
And he turned his scornful face away from the old man's cragged kindliness and the young one's sunburned benevolence.
The strength fled out of him, dropping his body back against the rusty steel.
His emaciated head sagged on his shoulder, smearing the gray pajamas with tears and sticky blood.
He lay quivering stiffly to his painful sobs of self-defeat, waiting for the power of the grid.
Forester waited - and then he was standing again in the huge bedroom the humanoids had built for him at Starmont.
The transition was abrupt. He had felt no power seize him, and now he had no sense of any time gone.
Automatically shifting his weight from his hurt knee, he looked anxiously around him for Jane Carter.
The village swains and maids still danced in the high murals, luminous and gay.
The vast east window was now an amber green, filling the room with a mellow radiance.
Motionless before him stood a steel-eyed humanoid.
But he couldn't find the child.
He recoiled from the machine - until his first unthinking terror dissolved into a keenly pleased awareness of the molten gold of light flowing across its lean, ideal perfection, accenting its lean, alert solicitude.
He smiled a little at the serene beauty of it, puzzled and already faintly astonished at that shock of irrational revulsion.
"Where's Jane Carter?" he asked huskily. "Did that platinum brain - take her?"
For he thought that his own awakening psychophysical capacities must have somehow snatched him out of danger again, but failed to save the child.
The machine's serene reply brushed him with a vanishing wonderment.
"Miss Carter did require special service," it purred.
"She was admitted to the care of the Ironsmith grid at the same time you were."
"I?"
A momentary disbelief lifted his voice. "But I didn't feel ... "
His voice faded, with the dissipation of his first startled incredulity. For he knew somehow, without any conscious recollection, that the stimulating energies of the grid had remolded and restored him, and he felt a fleeting wonder at his own astonishment, as if the knowledge of everything lay in him, just below the level of awareness.
"Men don't ever feel the grid," the machine was saying, "because the individual consciousness is suspended."
"What-" Dread tried to choke him, but he shrugged it lightly off.
Because the grid was nothing more terrible than a channel and a tool for the good will and the unconscious aid of people who loved him.
How could anyone fear that?
Swallowing his huskiness he asked quietly,
"What did it do to me?"
"It repaired your body, and retrained your mind."
Lifting quickly to his face, his searching fingers found that clotted stiffness of drying blood gone, and the unshaven beard.
Reaching higher, to examine the long gash where his scalp had been cut against that armored tank in the war museum, he found no wound or scar.