By the time he had finished there was less than an hour to go till Esther’s arrival and he was in no mood for sleeping-He went to the bathroom and, scorning the idea of blacking; it out, took a shower with all the lights on. His short association with lane Wason, he realized, was what had made him careless of vicarious watchers. Conscious of and uplifted by the beauty of her own body, she simply refused to hide under cover of darkness at any time, including the hours with him. The thought of her brought with it a mingled pang of desire and regret. Life with Jane would have been so…
Garrod panicked as he understood that already, before a word had been spoken, he was anticipating a victory for Esther.
I choose Jane, he told himself, stepping out of the shower cubicle. I choose life.
But later when his doorbell sounded he felt himself begin to die. He opened it slowly and saw Esther standing there accompanied by her personal nurse. She was carefully dressed, with a minimum of make-up, and was wearing ordinary black glasses of the type used by people who have disfigured eyes.
“Alban?” she said in a pleasant voice. She’s going to be brave, he thought sadly. Blind—hence the dark glasses—but brave.
“Come in, Esther.” He included the nurse in his gesture, but she had obviously been primed by his wife and moved backwards into the corridor, her coral-pink antiseptic face showing her disapproval of him.
“Thank you, Alban.” Esther held out her hand, but he took her elbow instead and led her to a chair.
He sat down opposite. “Did you have a good trip?”
She nodded. “You were right all along, Alban. I can get around in spite of my handicap. I’ve just flown thousands of miles to be with you.”
“I’m…” The significance of Esther’s final words was not lost on Garrod. ’That’s wonderful, for you.”
She in turn picked up his final words. “Aren’t you glad to see me?”
“Of course I’m glad to see you out and about again.”
“That isn’t what I asked you.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No.” Esther was sitting very erect, hands neatly folded in her lap. “When did you begin to hate me, Alban?”
“For God’s sake! Why should I hate you?”
“That’s what I’m asking myself. I must have done something very…”
“Esther,” he said firmly. “I don’t hate you.” He looked at her precision-cast features, saw the faint lines of stress there, and his heart sank.
“You just don’t love me, is that right?”
This is it, he thought. This is the exact second on which your whole future depends. He opened his mouth to give the answer she had invited, but his mind was engulfed in a cryogenic chill. He stood up, went to the window and looked into the street below. The anonymous specks which thought of themselves as people were still swarming down there. How the hell, he asked himself, could an observer in a satellite, looking straight down, tell one man from another?
“Answer me, Alban.”
Garrod swallowed, wishing he could escape, but unrelated pictures were flickering behind his eyes. A small crop-spraying aircraft drifting across the sky, shining like a silver crucifix. Schickert in a panic because his plant could not keep up with orders for Retardite dust. The dark countryside, glowing…
Esther’s groping hands touched his back. She had risen from the chair without his noticing. “You’ve given me all the answer I need,” she said.
“Have I?”
“Yes.” Esther took a deep, quivering breath. “Where is she now?”
“Who?”
Esther laughed. “Who? Your new bedmate, that’s who. That… hooker who wears the silver make-up.”
Garrod was appalled. It seemed to him that Esther had used a frightening power to look into his mind. “What makes you think…?”
“Do you think I’m a fool, Alban? Did you forget you were wearing my eye discs at the luncheon on the day you got here? Do you think I didn’t see the way John Mannheim’s girl looked at you?”
“I don’t remember her looking at me in any special way,” Garrod fenced.
“I’m blind,” Esther said bitterly, “but I’m not as blind as you pretend to be.”
Garrod stared at her and again his thoughts ricocheted away. Miller Pobjoy didn’t mention satellites. I was the one who thought up the satellite story, and all he did was let me go along with it! I’ve known this all along, and it’s been chewing me up, but I couldn’t face…
The door swung open and Jane Wason walked in. “I’ve just finished, Al, and…Oh!”
“It’s all right, Jane,” Garrod said. “Come in and meet my wife. Esther, this is Jane Wason. She does secretarial work for…John Mannheim.”
Esther smiled sweetly, but deliberately facing in the wrong direction to emphasise her blindness. “Yes, do come in, Jane. We’ve just been talking about you.”
“I think it would be better if I didn’t intrude.”
Esther’s voice hardened. “I think it would be better if you stayed. We’re trying to decide exactly who is the real intruder around here.”
Jane advanced into the room, her large eyes fixed on Garrod’s face, waiting for him to speak. He felt utterly incapable of dealing with the situation.
“Speak up, Alban. Let’s make it clean and sharp and final,” his wife said.
Garrod looked down into Esther’s face. Her age and tiredness were showing up in contrast to Jane’s lush youthfulness. She had just crossed a continent, blind, to face him. Of the three people in the room she was the only one at a crippling disadvantage, yet she was dominating the group. She was strong. She was brave, but sightless and helpless, waiting with her face turned up to his. All he had to do was take the verbal axe firmly in both hands—and swing on her…
He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them Jane was leaving the room. Garrod ran to her. “Jane,” he said desperately, “give me a chance to think.”
She shook her head. “Colonel Mannheim’s finished in Augusta now. I just came by to tell you I’ll be flying down to Macon with him on the late plane.”
He caught her wrist but she twisted free with unexpected strength. “Leave me alone, Al.”
“I can work this thing out.”
“Yes, Al. You can—just the way you worked it out about the…” The end of her sentence was lost in the slamming of the door, but Garrod did not need to hear it. He knew the last word had been, “satellites“.
His legs were rubbery as he turned back into the room and sat down. Esther found her way to him and rested her hands on his shoulders. “My poor dear Alban,” she whispered.
Garrod lowered his face into cupped hands. There are no satellites, he thought. No torpedoes carrying Retardite eyes down out of orbit. They don’t need them. Not when they’re dusting the whole world with slow glass!
A preternatural calm seemed to descend over his brain as he considered the mechanics of the proposition. The resolution of Retardite’s crystalline structure was so fine that a usable image could be obtained from a particle a few microns in diameter. Yet each speck would be invisible to the naked eye under normal conditions. They were using it in hundreds of tons—Retardite dust of mixed delays, swirling down over the entire continent from crop-sprayer aircraft. Such aircraft generally used electrically charged ejector nozzles, giving the particles an electromagnetic potential which caused it to be attracted on to the crops rather than drift straight on to the ground. Only in this case, the slow glass micro-eyes were being released from high up so that they would cling to everything—trees, buildings, telegraph poles, flowers, mountain slopes, birds, flying insects. It would be in people’s clothing, in their food, in the water they drank.