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Mansfield once try to change those relays?" he whispered hoarsely. "And didn't
the humanoids stop him?"
"Mansfield didn't use psychophysics," White protested quietly. "And I believe
he built his own blind spot for that science into the humanoids, because they
haven't learned to cope with it - not yet. They failed to discover Jane when
she visited the shop, and I think you'll have time to change the relays before
they find you."
"They're fast," Forester reminded him.
"But blind," White said. "Literally blind. Anywhere else, their rhodomagnetic
senses are far quicker and keener than human sight or hearing, but there
inside the grid the intense rhodomagnetic fields interfere with the weaker
sensory fields of the individual units, so Mansfield told me, and with any
luck at all you'll have the job done before they know you're there."
Screwing a jeweler's loupe into his socket, Forester stirred a tray of almost
microscopic screws with thin-nosed tweezers. His fingers still were awkwardly
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uncertain, and he listened doubtfully.
"It's a brain operation, actually. Like the human brain, the grid has no
effective sense organs inside it, and I believe you can perform the operation
without disturbing the patient - if we're ready in time. I'm afraid our time
is running out, however, because Overstreet can see the humanoids building
something new, there on Wing IV."
"Huh?" Forester looked up blankly. "What's that?"
"My guess frightens me." White hunched a little under the silver cloak, as if
to a fearful expectancy. "But we haven't found out what it is. Overstreet says
it's going to be as big as the grid. He can see underground levels full of
mass-converters, ready to pour energy into banks of huge devices somewhat like
transformers, but mostly made of platinum. Above the ground, he says the
humanoids are putting up an enormous dome made of some new synthetic, to cover
something else."
"That something else?"
"A second grid, apparently. Overstreet can't see inside it - a very disturbing
circumstance - but he can observe the humanoids manufacturing new relays,
which are carried in there as if for assembly."
"Maybe the machines are just enlarging their own brain."
"They've been doing that from the first, just piling new sections on the old,
but this is something different. For one thing, the relays going into that new
dome are made largely out of platinum and osmiridium alloys, instead of
palladium. I don't know what it is."
"Could Jane find out?"
"I took the risk of sending her there." Above the ruddy magnificence of his
beard, White's massive face was bitten deep with acid apprehension. "She met a
barrier that kept her out of the dome. She can't describe that obstacle, but I
think it wasn't physical. I think the humanoids have somehow discovered that
built-in blind spot, and begun psychophysical research for themselves. Which
means we must get to work!"
They did. Listening to the haunting whisper of dark water running through
channels too small for a man, oppressed by the crushing weight of that
calcite-crusted roof, Forester set out to master the laws and resolve the
mocking contradictions of White's half-science. He grasped at the amazing arts
of old Graystone, and little Ford's telekinetic skills. He sought the far
vision of Overstreet's myopic eyes, and the ultimate fleetness of Jane
Carter's feet.
He even tried at first to hope that White's discoveries would somehow reach
beyond the revelations of rhodomagnetics, to disclose the prima materia that
he had pursued so far in vain - the total understanding of all the universe.
That elusive fundamental fact evaded him again, however, as tantalizingly as
when Ironsmith had demolished the relevance of his symbol rho. He failed to
bridge the gaps or remove the contradictions, but once more he learned.
Watching Jane Carter flit out of that closed cavern and back again, to bring
some useful tool that Overstreet's clairvoyant vision had discovered, he came
to accept her ability more fully, and he slowly shaped a rational theory to
bind it to the truth he knew.
"It's making sense," he told White hopefully at last. "All this psychophysical
stuff used to seem impossible, but now I think I see how it could fit into the
old science of quantum mechanics. Teleportation, now - that could be just a
matter of exchange-force probability."
The huge man looked up alertly from his work at the bench.
"You know the theory of exchange forces? Anyhow, the concept arose from the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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