“That’s an interesting voice,” Esther would say. “Does the owner match it?”
At other times she would take the lead and give long visualizations of the owners of voices, then ask him to confirm that she had been right. But, almost invariably, she was wrong—even in cases where Garrod suspected she could have described the person from memory—and greeted his corrections with a taut, wistful smile which told him he was forgiven for blinding her, and being forgiven was even deeper in thrall. Or at other times she would say the most forgiving, most smothering words of all, the ones Garrod dreaded to hear, delivered with a radiant countenance:
“I’m sure the scenery I’m creating for this play is much better than what the viewers have to watch.”
Now, however, Esther could supply her own images, the light for her own eyes, and perhaps he would be able to breathe again.
“We’ll go along and visit Mrs. Garrod now if you like,” Hubert said.
Garrod nodded and followed the surgeon to the private suite. Esther was sitting up in bed in a bright room filled with prisms of sunlight slanting from the windows. She was wearing heavy, side-shielded glasses and, judging by the continuing rapt expression on her face, had not heard them enter the room. Garrod crossed to the bed and, deciding he had better get used to the results of the bizarre surgery, looked into his wife’s face. Flawless blue eyes blinked at him through the lenses of her glasses. The eyes of a stranger. He took an involuntary step backwards, then noticed that the eyes had not responded to his presence.
“I should have told you,” Hubert whispered. “Mrs. Garrod decided against dark glasses. Those are Retardite lenses programmed with another person’s eyes.”
“Where did you get them?”
“They’re available commercially. Girls with pretty eyes can earn extra cash by wearing Retardite lenses all day. Some women who haven’t got eye complaints wear them for cosmetic reasons—by using a fine grating of Retardite you can make spectacles through which a person can see normally, but anybody looking at them sees the programmed eyes. Surely you’ve seen them before?”
“No, I hadn’t—I’ve been out of circulation lately.” Garrod spoke loudly to attract Esther’s attention.
“Alban,” she said immediately, and held out her hands to him. Garrod gripped his wife’s warm dry fingers and kissed her lightly on the lips, and all the while the stranger’s blue eyes gazed tolerantly through Esther’s glasses.
He lowered his gaze. “How do you feel?”
“Wonderful! I can see again, Alban.”
“Is it just like…before?”
“Better than before—I’ve just discovered I was always a little short-sighted. Right now I’m looking out over the ocean at Piedras Blancas Point, I think it is, and I can see for miles. I’d forgotten how many shades of blue and green there are in the sea…” Esther’s voice faded away and her lips parted with pleasure.
Garrod felt the beginnings of hope. “I’m glad, Esther. I’ll send your discs anywhere in the world you want to see. You’ll be able to take in Broadway plays, pleasure trips…”
Esther laughed. “But that would be like being away from you.”
“You won’t really be away. And I’ll always be around.”
“No, darling. I don’t want to waste this gift by spending the rest of my life watching travelogues.” Esther’s fingers closed over his. “I want to do simple personal things. Things that concern us—like going for walks together in our own gardens.”
“That’s a nice idea, honey, but you wouldn’t be able to see the garden.”
“Yes, I would—provided we went for our walk at the same time every day, and always along the same paths.”
A cool breeze seemed to blow over Garrod’s forehead. “That means living in yesterday. You’d be walking in a garden one day but seeing it as it was the day before…”
“Won’t it be wonderful?” Esther raised his hand to her mouth and kissed his knuckles. Her breath was warm on the back of his hand. “You’ll wear a pair of discs for me, won’t you, Alban? I want you to wear them all the time, everywhere you go. That way we’ll always be together.”
Garrod tried to withdraw his hand, but Esther clung to it.
“Tell me you’ll do it, Alban.” Her words were glass rods snapping. “Tell me you’ll share your life with me.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Garrod said. “I’ll do whatever you want.”
He raised his eyes from her frantically clawing hands and looked into her face. The stranger’s blue eyes regarded him with a calm, vacant contentment.
Chapter Nine
The murder of Senator Jerry Wescott took place at 2.33 a.m. on a lonely road several miles north of Bingham, Maine.
His death was timed with precision because the weapon used was a laser cannon so powerful as to vaporize most of the car in which the Senator had been travelling. The murderer had chosen a spot where the road dipped abruptly through a hollow and thus had prevented the flash from being seen by anybody in the surrounding area, but it had been picked up by a Sk-eye II military observation satellite and the information telemetered to an underground tracking station. From there it went to the Pentagon and eventually, but still within the hour, came’into the hands of the civil authorities.
A laser cannon, while effective, is anything but discreet and it was deduced that it had been employed because it was certain to destroy the Retardite telltales on the car and any other pieces of slow glass which might have been in the vehicle. The criminal community had been quick to learn that it was inadvisable to be “seen” by a piece of slow glass even at night, even at a distance, because of the special optical techniques which could be employed for interrogating the glass. And now that Retardite could be played back at will, without having to wait for its nominal delay period to elapse, it was even more imperative to take precautions against it.
In this instance, the laser did effectively destroy all incriminating Retardite on the vehicle. It also charred the Senator’s body far beyond recognition and, had it not failed to incinerate the contents of his fireproof briefcase, the identity of the dead man might not have been ascertained for some days.
As it was, the expanding ripple of information which had begun with a minute surge of photons in an orbiting camera spread outwards through the broadcasting networks and, within a matter of hours, had assumed the proportions of a tidal wave.
No matter how much it might have been predicted, no matter how many times it had occurred in the past, the assassination of a man who in less than a year would probably have been President of the United States was still big news.
Chapter Ten
It was a sunny evening, but they walked in the gardens while Esther admired yesterday’s rain.
“It’s really wonderful, Alban.” She pulled on his arm, forcing him to pause near a clump of deep-hued shrubs. He remembered they had halted at the same place on the previous day, and Esther liked to create an illusion of being normally sighted by matching today’s bodily movements with yesterday’s changing viewpoints.
“I can see the rain falling all round me,” she continued, “but all I can feel is warm sunlight. The sun is my umbrella.”
Garrod was almost certain Esther was trying to be profound or poetic, so he squeezed her hand encouragingly, while making sure his face did not come within range of the two black discs which glinted on her lapel. He had discovered that a look of impatience or anger recorded by Esther’s vicarious eyes, but not passed to her brain until twenty-four hours later, was a bigger strain on the relationship than a spontaneous mutual clash.