'You'll have to lean over,' Landy said, 'and put your pretty face right above the eye. He'll see you then, and you can smile at him and blow him a kiss. If I were you I'd say a few nice things as well. He won't actually hear them, but I'm sure he'll get the general idea.'
'He hates people blowing kisses at him,' Mrs Pearl said. 'I'll do it my own way if you don't mind.' She stepped up to the edge of the table, leaned forward until her face was directly over the basin, and looked straight down in William's eye.
'Hallo, dear,' she whispered. 'It's me Mary.'
The eye, bright as ever, stared back at her with a peculiar, fixed intensity.
'How are you, dear?' she said.
The plastic capsule was transparent all the way round so that the whole of the eyeball was visible. The optic nerve connecting the underside of it to the brain looked a short length of grey spaghetti.
'Are you feeling all right, William?'
It was a queer sensation peering into her husband's eye when there was no face to go with it. All she had to look at was the eye, and she kept staring at it, and gradually it grew bigger and bigger, and in the end it was the only thing that she could see-a sort of face in itself. There was a network of tiny red veins running over the white surface of the eyeball, and in the ice-blue of the iris there were three or four rather pretty darkish streaks radiating from the pupil in the centre. The pupil was large and black, with a little spark of light reflecting from one side of it.
'I got your letter, dear, and came over at once to see how you were. Dr Landy says you are doing wonderfully well. Perhaps if I talk slowly you can understand a little of what I am saying by reading my lips.'
There was no doubt that the eye was watching her.
'They are doing everything possible to take care of you, dear. This marvellous machine thing here is pumping away all the time and I'm sure it's a lot better than those silly old hearts all the rest of us have. Ours are liable to break down at any moment, but yours will go on for ever.'
She was studying the eye closely, trying to discover what there was about it that gave it such an unusual appearance.
'You seem fine, dear, simply fine. Really you do.'
It looked ever so much nicer, this eye, than either of his eyes used to look, she told herself. There was a softness about it somewhere, a calm, kindly quality that she had never seen before. Maybe it had to do with the dot in the very centre, the pupil. William's pupils used always to be tiny black pinheads. They used to glint at you, stabbing into your brain, seeing right through you, and they always knew at once what you were up to and even what you were thinking. But this one she was looking at now was large and soft and gentle, almost cow-like.
'Are you quite sure he's conscious?' she asked, not looking up.
'Oh yes, completely,' Landy said.
'And he can see me?'
'Perfectly.'
'Isn't that marvellous? I expect he's wondering what happened.'
'Not at all. He knows perfectly well where he is and why he's there. He can't possibly have forgotten that.'
'You mean he knows he's in this basin?'
'Of course. And if only he had the power of speech, he would probably be able to carry on a perfectly normal conversation with you this very minute. So far as I can see, there should be absolutely no difference mentally between this William here and the one you used to know back home.'
'Good gracious me,' Mrs Pearl said, and she paused to consider this intriguing aspect.
You know what, she told herself, looking behind the eye now and staring hard at the great grey pulpy walnut that lay so placidly under the water, I'm not at all sure that I don't prefer him as he is at present. In fact, I believe that I could live very comfortably with this kind of a William. I could cope with this one.
'Quiet, isn't he?' she said.
'Naturally he's quiet.'
No arguments and criticisms, she thought, no constant admonitions, no rules to obey, no ban on smoking cigarettes, no pair of cold disapproving eyes watching me over the top of a book in the evenings, no shirts to wash and iron, no meals to cook nothing but the throb of the heart machine, which was rather a soothing sound anyway and certainly not loud enough to interfere with television.
'Doctor,' she said. 'I do believe I'm suddenly getting to feel the most enormous affection for him. Does that sound queer?'
'I think it's quite understandable.'
'He looks so helpless and silent lying there under the water in his little basin.'
'Yes, I know.
'He's like a baby, that's what he's like. He's exactly like a little baby.'
Landy stood still behind her, watching.
'There,' she said softly, peering into the basin. 'From now on Mary's going to look after you all by herself and you've nothing to worry about in the world. When can I have him back home, Doctor?'
'I beg your pardon?'
'I said when can I have him back-back in my own house?'
'You're joking,' Landy said.
She turned her head slowly around and looked directly at him. 'Why should I joke?' she asked. Her face was bright, her eyes round and bright as two diamonds.
'He couldn't possibly be moved.'
'I don't see why not.'
'This is an experiment, Mrs Pearl.'
'It's my husband, Dr Landy.'
A funny little nervous half-smile appeared on Landy's mouth. 'Well… ' he said.
'It is my husband, you know.' There was no anger in her voice. She spoke quietly, as though merely reminding him of a simple fact.
'That's rather a tricky point,' Landy said, wetting his lips. 'You're a widow now, Mrs Pearl. I think you must resign yourself to that fact.'
She turned away suddenly from the table and crossed over to the window. 'I mean it,' she said, fishing in her bag for a cigarette. 'I want him back.'
Landy watched her as she put the cigarette between her lips and lit it. Unless he were very much mistaken, there was something a bit odd about this woman, he thought. She seemed almost pleased to have her husband over there in the basin.
He tried to imagine what his own feelings would be if it were his wife's brain lying there and her eye staring at him out of that capsule.
He wouldn't like it.
'Shall we go back to my room now?' he said.
She was standing by the window, apparently quite calm and relaxed, puffing her cigarette.
'Yes, all right.'
On her way past the table she stopped and leaned over the basin once more. 'Mary's leaving now, sweetheart,' she said. 'And don't you worry about a single thing, you understand? We're going to get you right back home where we can look after you properly just as soon as we possibly can. And listen dear… ' At this point she paused and carried the cigarette to her lips, intending to take a puff.
Instantly the eye flashed.
She was looking straight into it at the time and right in the centre of it she saw a tiny but brilliant flash of light, and the pupil contracted into a minute black pinpoint of absolute fury.
At first she didn't move. She stood bending over the basin, holding the cigarette up to her mouth, watching the eye.
Then very slowly, deliberately, she put the cigarette between her lips and took a long suck. She inhaled deeply, and she held the smoke inside her lungs for three or four seconds; then suddenly, whoosh, out it came through her nostrils in two thin jets which struck the water in the basin, and billowed out over the surface in a thick
