“A pity he didn’t get me,” Gresham said. He tossed the cigarette away. “No use. If I can’t see the smoke, I can’t enjoy it.”
The neurologist studied his patient.
“We don’t know that you’re permanently blinded, after all. This is so new.”
“I was looking straight at it,” Gresham said bitterly. “It must have been miles and miles away, but I could feel it burning my eyes out in one flash. Don’t tell me!”
“All right. I won’t. But this is a completely new type of atomic blast. It isn’t uranium. It’s a controlled chain reaction based on an artificial element—there must be new types of radiation involved.”
“Fine. The next time there’s a war, we can blind everybody.” Gresham laughed grimly. “I’ll be sorry for myself for a few months, probably. Then I’ll get a Seeing-Eye dog and become a useful member of society again. Huh!” He paused. When he spoke again his voice was different, doubtful, as if he didn’t quite realize he spoke aloud. “Or maybe not,” he said. “Maybe I’ll never be—useful—any more. Maybe I’m not just imagining. …”
“Imagining?” Black said, interested. “What?”
Gresham jerked his bandaged face away.
“Nothing!” he declared sharply. “Forget it.”
Black shrugged. “Tell me about yourself, Gresham,” he suggested. “We haven’t had much time yet to get acquainted. How did you happen to be out here just now?”
Gresham shook his head irritably. “Just at the wrong spot and the wrong time? Maybe it was meant that way from the start. Predestination—how do I know? Oh, I had enough after the war. I bummed around the islands. I—like the sea.” His voice softened. “Like isn’t strong enough. I love the sea. I can’t stay away from it. There’s a fascination—I signed on here and there as a deckhand, a stevedore—I didn’t care what. I just wanted to soak myself in the big things. Sun and sea and sky. Well, I can still feel the sun and the wind, and I can hear the water. But I can’t see it.”
There was no real conviction in the way he finished that last sentence. He turned his bandaged eyes a little to Black’s left and his face grew strained, as if he were looking at something far out at sea.
“You know about the radar sonics, don’t you?” the neurologist said.
“Oh, sure. I’ll learn to bounce a radar beam around me and keep from walking into walls. But—” Gresham’s voice died. He seemed to be staring as if through the bandages and his own blindness at something far away. In spite of himself Black turned to follow that blinded stare. And at a great distance off he saw, or thought he saw something in the glare of the sun-track splash water and dive. …
“Dr. Black,” Gresham was saying in that strained, doubtful voice. “Dr. Black, how are you on psychiatry?”
“Why, fair.” Black kept the surprise out of his tone with an effort. “Why?”
“Have you noticed any symptoms of—aberration in me?”
“Nothing unusual. Nervous shock, of course. That atomic blast catching you certainly would have caused a strain.”
Gresham said, “After the blast went off I floated for I don’t know how long before you picked me up. I—started to imagine things. Delirium, you could say. But I don’t know. I—forget it, will you? Maybe later I’ll feel like talking. Just forget I said anything, Dr. Black.”
After all, there was nothing to talk about, to put into coherent words. For what had happened was inexplicable. It was part of the terra incognita that the key of nuclear energy had unlocked.
Even Daniel Gresham, drowsing the years away in his tropical lotuslands, could not help hearing about the new atomic experiments. He had stopped keeping track of time back in , because around the archipelagoes time was a variable, and hours could last for seconds or months, depending on whether you were at a kava-kava festival with the golden-skinned Melanesians or simply stretched flat on the warm deck, while white canvas billowed overhead and waves splashed quietly along the keel.
But the radio wouldn’t stop talking. It talked about the uranium piles constructed for experiments, and the new lithium hydride methods, and the technicians who were endlessly charting, testing, studying—and finding fresh mysteries always beyond. And this latest test—a completely new type of atomic blast, one that had never existed before on earth, except, perhaps, so long ago that the planet was a white-hot, molten mass.
Briefly, the holocaust had blazed out and vanished. But it had left traces in the instruments planted in the path of the fury, and it had left its trace, too, in an intricate, sensitive instrument cage inside Daniel Gresham’s skull.
Thoughts can be measured; they are electric energy. The machine that transmits them can be functionally altered. And, adrift on his raft, Gresham had found a very strange substitute for his lost vision. …
The Albacore’s boat came back with recording instruments from a floating buoy, and Black paced slowly up and down the deck, studying a coil of paper and trying to ignore the piping of seabirds that flapped overhead, and the look of strained attention on Gresham’s face. It didn’t belong there, on a blind man’s face. Gresham sat as he had sat yesterday, bandaged eyes turned toward the sea beyond the boat as if he could see something out there invisible to ordinary eyes.
“Doctor, what does that look like out there?” he asked suddenly.
Startled, Black followed the direction of his pointing finger.
“Why, a porpoise, I think. It—no, now it’s gone.” He stared at his patient in amazement. “Gresham, are you still blind?”
Gresham laughed softly. “There’s a bandage over my eyes, isn’t there? Of course I’m blind.”
“Then how did you know about the porpoise?”
“It isn’t a porpoise.”
Black took a long breath. “What the devil’s the matter with you, Gresham?” he said.
“I wish I knew. I—” Gresham’s voice hesitated. Then he said with a sudden rush, “You could call it hallucination. I can see things. But not with my own eyes.”
“Yes?” Black’s tone was hushed. He was terribly afraid of
