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while I was still a child, I had learned powers of the human mind that
Mansfield could never recognize. Our philosophies came to differ. He had put
his faith in machines - and made the humanoids. When he came to see his
blunder, he tried to destroy them with, more machines. He was bound to fail -
because those mechanicals are as nearly perfect as any machine will ever be.
"I shared his hatred, but I saw the need of some better weapon than any
machine. I put my trust in men - in the native human powers I had begun to
learn. If men were to save themselves, I saw they must discover and use their
own inborn capacities, rusty as they are from long neglect.
"So at last we separated. I'm sorry that our parting words were too bitter - I
called Mansfield a machine-minded fool, and he said that my science of the
mind would only end with another regimentation of mankind, worse than the rule
of the humanoids. He went on to try his last weapon - he was attempting to
ignite a chain reaction in the oceans and the rocks of Wing IV, with some kind
of rhodomagnetic beam. I never saw him again, but I know he didn't succeed.
Because the humanoids are still running."
"I'm still fighting them, and these are my soldiers." The huge man nodded
indignantly at his ragged followers squatting by the fire. "Look at them - the
most talented citizens of this planet. I found them in the gutter, the jail,
the madhouse. But they are the last hope of man."
Flinching from the angry boom of his voice, Forester whispered uneasily, "I
don't quite see - what are these weapons of the mind?"
"One of the simplest is atomic probability."
"Eh?"
"Take an atom of Potassium-40." White's great voice turned softly patient
again. "A physicist yourself, you can easily picture such an unstable atom as
a sort of natural wheel of chance, set to pay off only once during several
billion years of spinning."
Forester nodded skeptically, thinking that nothing could be deadlier than the
missiles of his own project.
"Like any machine of chance," White went on, "an unstable atom can be
manipulated. Just as easily as a pair of dice - it seems that size and
distance aren't important factors, in telekinesis."
Forester blinked unbelievingly at the withered little gambler crouching by the
fire, who had just rolled a five and a two. "How do you manipulate an atom?"
"I don't quite know." Trouble darkened White's burning eyes. "Although Jane
does it easily, and the rest of us have made a few successful efforts at it -
children learn the mental arts more readily, I think, perhaps because they
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don't have to unlearn the false truths and break the bad habits of mechanistic
science. And Jane is unusual."
His brooding face warmed for a moment, as he glanced at the little girl, who
was eagerly watching old Graystone dip out her bowl of stew.
"But I don't know," he muttered wearily. "The facts I have discovered are
often apparently contradictory, and always incomplete. Perhaps the uncertainty
principle involved in atomic stability doesn't apply to psychophysical
phenomena. Perhaps it is merely an illusion, born of the fact that our
physical senses are too coarse to look into atoms. I have suspected that
physical time and space are similar illusions - I don't know. But I do know
that Jane Carter can detonate K-40 atoms."
White shrugged heavily, in the silver cloak.
"I've had dreams, Forester." His voice turned wistfully sad. "Magnificent
dreams, of a coming time when my new science might free every man from the
old, cruel shackles of the brute and the machine. I used to believe that the
human mind could conquer matter, master space, and govern time.
"But the most of my efforts have failed - I don't know why." He shook his
fiery, shaggy head. "I run into blind alleys. I stumble over obstacles that I
can never really identify. Perhaps there's some barrier I fail to see, some
limiting natural law that I've never grasped."
He moved restlessly, towering over Forester.
"I don't know," he repeated bitterly. "And there's no time left for trial and
error now, because those machines have taken most of the human universe. This
is one of the last planets left - and I don't think you know that their first
scouts are already here!"
Forester stared up in slack-jawed unbelief.
"Yes, old Mansfield's humanoids are already infiltrating your defenses."
White's voice turned wearily grim. "They make efficient spies, you see. More
clever than the human agents employed against you by the Triplanet Powers.
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