Page:Amazing Stories Volume 16 Number 06.djvu/253

see?—it's my chance. I'll marry him and love him and be his eyes. I'll see for him and do for him and he'll never know about my—about how I look."

There was a girl. She bounced into Wally's room and spilled the good news to him, laughing and crying in turn. Baring her heart and soul to the guy and him turning his head away from her caresses and words. It was no good.

Why? Because Wally wouldn't listen to making himself a burden to anyone, especially a beautiful young girl. No, he'd spend the rest of his useless life in a veteran's hospital dreaming of what might have been. Go away, Elsa—forget. Beat it, Yoost. His bitterness got to me, what I mean.

The girl just stood there with a look in her eyes like a kicked dog. Her chin quivered.

"I suppose I was a fool," she whispered, "to hope even that." She bent down swiftly then and kissed the poor guy on the corner of his mouth you could see.

"Go, please," he choked, "before I go completely nuts. Both of you."

With a tearing little sob, the girl turned and reeled blindly out of the door as if she hardly had strength to make it.

I stood there like a dumb ox for a minute and even the pretty nurse's melting looks didn't register with me at all.

"Scram, Yoost," said Wally. "I know you're there and I want to be alone. I mean it, boy."

So there was nothing to do but beat it.

THEN was when I started going haywire. I was disgusted with life and suddenly mad clear through. Why in hell did things like this have to happen to prefectly swell folks like Wally and Elsa, to two kids who were so much in love and who could have been so damn happy together if things had been different? I was going to do something about it, so help me.

My first stop was G.H.Q. and I barged into Tompkins' office, knocking over chairs and things like a bull in a china shop. The top hat stiffened when he saw me but I didn't even salute, I was so riled up.

"Has any other doc examined Wally's eyes?" I demanded.

Tompkins forgot to be sore at me. "Eyes?" he asked.

"Don't you know the guy's blind?" I yowled. "They saved him from a badly scarred mug but let him lose his sight. My buddy!"

Tompkins actually paled. "Why, I didn't know," he sort of apologized. And he reached for the phone. "Get me the hospital," he told his secretary.

In a minute he was shooting rapid-fire questions at the doc and was look- ing graver and graver at the answers he was getting. When he hung up he was as gloomy as the doc himself.

"There's no chance for him," he sighed heavily. His beefy face was still white and his jowls twitched with emotion. "The only man in the solar system who could possibly restore his sight isn't available."

"Who's that?" I demanded. "And why isn't he available?"

They may have called me Eustace but that didn't keep me from inheriting the nerve of a Mercurian fire-lizard.

"The only man is Dr. Goodspeed, the famous eye surgeon, and he's in the Martian drylands, dying of T.B."

I do get an idea once in a while. "Hell," I said, "what's to hinder one of his associates here doing it under in- structions by etherphone? It's been done before—other kinds of operations."

Tompkins' color returned and his heels clattered to the floor, giving me the jumps. "By George, maybe you've