“How did you get in there?” he demanded. “I locked the door, and I told you to keep away from the place.”
“I know you did, but I heard a kind of buzzing sound so I took the spare key the cleaner uses and came in.”
Garrod went rigid with alarm. The buzzer must have been the automatic monitor signalling that the Scenedow’s piezoluctic constant was a constant no longer and had begun to increase. His equipment was programmed to cut out the radiation bombardment when this happened, but there was absolutely no guarantee that it would have any effect. The slow glass panel could erupt like a nova at any time.
“…Scenedow is behaving strangely,” Esther was saying. “It has got a lot brighter, and everything has speeded up in it. Look.” The viewphone panned round and came to rest with the Scenedow filling the screen. Garrod found himself looking at a tree-lined lake with a range of mountains in the background. The scene should have been peaceful, but instead it was suffused with unnatural activity. Clouds swirled across the sky, animals and birds were nearly-invisible blurs of speed, and the sun was falling like a bomb.
Garrod tried to keep the panic in his voice under control.
“Esther, that panel is going to blow. You’ve got to get out of the laboratory right now and close the door behind you. Go immediately!”
“But you told me we might see something in it which would help Dad.”
“Esther,” he shouted, “if you don’t get out of there right now you’ll never see anything again! For Christ’s sake, run!” There was a pause, then he heard the sound of her running footsteps and the slamming of the door. His raw fear ebbed slightly—Esther was safe—but the spectacle of the Scenedow preparing to annihilate two years of stored sunlight in one withering flash held him motionless in his chair. The sun plunged behind the mountains and darkness fell—but only for one minute in which the moon crossed the sky like a silver bullet. Another day came as a ten-second blast of hellfire, then…
The overloaded viewphone screen went blank.
Garrod wiped a cool film of sweat from his forehead and a moment later the viewphone circuits established themselves through reserve channels. When the picture reappeared the expended Scenedow was a panel of polished obsidian, black as midnight. The sections of the laboratory he could see at the sides of the slow glass panel looked strangely colourless, as though seen in monochrome television. A few seconds later he heard the door opening and then Esther’s voice.
“Alban,” she said timidly. “The room has changed. There’s no colour left in anything.” “You’d better stay out of there till I get back.” “But it’s safe now—and the room’s all white. Look at it.” The viewphone panned again and he saw Esther, her red hair and bottle-green dress standing out with incredible vividness against the bleached ghost of a room. Faint ripples of a new alarm began to spread through Garrod’s mind.
“Listen,” he said, voicing his unease, “I still think it would be better if you get out of there.”
“But everything’s so different. Look at this vase—it used to be blue.” Esther turned the little vase over, revealing a disc of its original colouring on the underside which had been protected from the light. Garrod’s sense of alarm grew stronger and he tried to foijce his numbed brain into action. Now that the Scenedow had given up its stored light what danger could there possibly be in the laboratory? The light had been absorbed by the walls and ceiling and…
“Cover your eyes and get out, Esther,” he said hoarsely. “The place is full of experimental pieces of slow glass and some of them have delays of only…”
Garrod’s voice died as the screen lit up yet again. Esther screamed through a network of brilliant rays and her image flared with a ghastly radiance, like that of someone caught in a crossfire of laser beams. Garrod ran for the door of his office, but Esther’s voice pursued him into the corridor and all the way home.
“I’m blind,” she was screaming. “I’m blind!”
Chapter Seven
Eric Hubert was a surprisingly young man to have reached the pinnacle of his profession. He was plump, pink and probably had lost his hair prematurely, because he was wearing one of the ultra-new spray-on wigs. A black organic adhesive had been painted over his scalp, forming an exaggerated widow’s peak, and black silky fuzz had been air-blasted on to it. Garrod found it difficult to cast him as one of the best eye specialists in the western hemisphere. He felt obscurely glad that Esther could not see Hubert as she sat bolt upright at the other side of the huge, smooth desk.
“This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for,” Hubert said in a deep, drawling voice which was completely at variance with his appearance. “All those tiresome tests are behind you now, Mrs. Garrod.”
This sounds bad, Garrod thought. If the news was good would he have started off like that? Esther leaned forward slightly, her small face apparently composed behind the tinted glasses. Hubert’s relaxed tones seemed to be providing comfort in her darkness. Garrod, escaping into irrelevancy, remembered a middle-aged friend of his Aunt Marge’s who wanted to learn the piano and, being self-conscious about her age, had chosen a blind tutor.
“What did the tests show?” Esther’s voice was firm and clear.
“Well, you’ve taken a real punch on the jaw with this one, Mrs. Garrod. The cornea and lens capsule of each eye have been opaqued by the flash, and—at the present state of the art—there is nothing that optical surgery can do for the condition.”
Garrod shook his head disbelievingly. “Surely people get cornea transplants every day. And the opacity of the lens—isn’t that the same as a cataract? What’s to stop you performing both operations at suitable intervals?”
“We’re dealing with an entirely new physical condition here. The actual structure of the cornea has been altered in such a way that grafts would be rejected within a few days. In fact, we’re lucky that progressive degeneration of the tissue hasn’t taken place. We could, of course, remove the lens capsules in the same way—as you quite rightly pointed out—we treat an ordinary cataract.” Hubert paused and fingered his incongruously demonic widow’s peak. “But without a healthy, transparent cornea in front to transmit light your wife would be no better off.”
Garrod glanced at Esther’s peaceful face and quickly looked away again. “I must say I find it utterly incredible that a pig’s heart could be put into my chest almost as a matter of routine, yet a simple eye operation…”
“In this case the operation would not be simple, Mr. Gar-rod,” Hubert said. “Look, your wife has taken a bad kick on the shins, and now she’ll just have to get up and keep right on walking.”
“Is that so?” Hubert’s trick of using analogies like punches on the jaw and kicks on the shin when referring to the catastrophe of being blinded suddenly enraged Garrod. “It seems to me that…”
“Alban!” Esther’s voice was strangely regal. “Mr. Hubert has given me the best attention and advice that money can buy. And I am sure he must have many other patients to attend.”
“You don’t seem to understand what he’s saying.” Garrod could feel the panic building up inside him.
“But I understand perfectly, darling. I’m blind—that’s all there is to it.” Esther smiled at a point just to the right of Garrod’s shoulder and took off her glasses, revealing the blanched orbs that were her eyes. “Now take me home.”