"Fair enough!" Langford said.
Ten minutes later the Patrol captain was climbing into a small jet
plane at the edge of the spaceport. Far to the east the skyline of Mars
City rose above the horizon like a glittering copper penny swimming in
a nebulous haze. A penny flipped in desperation that had miraculously
come heads.
Part of the wonder he felt was due to his knowledge that he would soon
be flying straight through the penny toward a tall white building he
would have braved the sun to scale.
2
A grave-faced physician met Langford at the end of the corridor and
beckoned him into a small white-walled room. The physician was not
talkative; he didn't need to be. The girl who sat under the bright
lamps with her eyes swathed in bandages told Langford all he cared to
know.
Her lips were smiling and she held out her arms as her husband came
into the room. Langford went up to her, and kissed her tenderly on the
cheek, his big, awkward hands caressing her hair that lay in a tumbled
dark mass on her shoulders.
She had tried to keep back the tears, but they came now, so that her
body quivered with the intensity of her emotion. "I'm going to see,
darling!" she whispered; "I know I'm going to see again. I wouldn't let
them remove the bandages until you came."
"Sure you are!" Langford said, gruffly. "And you'll have better sight
than ever before! Both kinds of sight, just as you had before!"
"I was afraid you might be hurt, darling!" Joan Langford whispered,
running her forefinger down his wet cheek as she held his head close.
"I used the other sight that makes me so different, and terrifies
people much more than it should!"
"You should not have done that!" Langford said, scowling; "I was in no
real danger!"
"You were being hunted like a criminal!"
She turned her head toward Dr. Crendon as she spoke. The physician
looked away, feeling her gaze on him through the bandages.
"The law of compensation, child," he said, gently. "Mutants are
clairvoyant; their vision is piercingly sharp where vision matters
most. When nature confers a priceless gift she sometimes withdraws a
lesser one; no one knows why, not even the biologists." He smiled,
"There I go, personifying the impersonal again. Perhaps ordinary sight
will someday be vestigial in all of us."
Langford glanced up. The physician was pressing his finger to his lips
and gesturing toward the door. Langford got quickly to his feet. A
chill wind seemed to blow into the room, driving all the warmth from
his mind.
Just outside the door Dr. Crendon turned and spoke in a cautious
whisper. "I haven't given up hope!" he said. "But the chances are not
too good, we don't know why, but mutants have defective vision from
birth even when their eyes are normal."