as a miracle worker. He wanted them to face reality with courage, for healing depended on many things and was often a matter of blind, fanatical trust.

"Now then!" he said.

As he spoke he raised the last fold of the bandage, and carefully removed the small, moist pads beneath, one from each eye. He straightened, his back to the light.

Langford looked away quickly. As though from a great distance he heard Crendon say: "Now you may open your eyes. Remember, you may not see at all for five full minutes!"

Mentally he added: Or ever! I shouldn't be discouraged. A man does what he can. Ten years of it, ten years of trying to save human sight. And every day I learn something. And every day I envy men who endure merely the loneliness of space. Why pretend? I have never felt compassion for humanity in the abstract. It is only when I look into eyes that I have failed to heal and realize that I can do nothing at all.

"Dr. Crendon, I can see! Everything—clearly."

And so it was that Dr. Crendon—moody, skeptical Dr. Crendon—received the greatest shock of his life. He had anticipated an agonized outcry—or a joyous one. But Joan had spoken hardly above a whisper, in a tone of quiet assurance, as if she had known all along that she would see.

And suddenly Crendon realized that she had known! For mutants could see into the most probable future! Not too clearly, but clearly enough! How could he have been so blind?

As Crendon turned he saw that Langford had fallen to his knees beside his wife and was sobbing convulsively, his head cradled in her arms. He tiptoed softly out of the room. He felt curiously hollow inside, as though all capacity for emotion had been burned out of him by the corroding acid of his own skepticism.

3

Five minutes later Langford was replacing the bandages on Joan's eyes. He felt like a man who was playing a game with a deadly, unseen antagonist in a room full of crouching shadows. No—not a room. As he bent above his wife, his hand on her tumbled hair, the space about him seemed to fall away into darkness. And now he was gazing straight down the interplanetary deeps at a green world swimming in a nebulous haze. The haze dissolved, drifted away, and he saw the green hills of his native land.

He saw the earth, and crouching 

 Prev. P 11/23 next