Page:Amazing Stories Volume 16 Number 06.djvu/254

got something there," he admitted.

And then he got going like a house on fire. I never saw the top hat move so fast and didn't think it was in him. He just about dragged me with him as he made a bee line for the hospital. And there he had the whole staff running around like maniacs in no time at all.

They wheeled more apparatus into Wally's room than is in the central automatic relay room of a space liner. Doctors began arriving from all over the map. And they soon had Doc Goodspeed on the etherphone. He didn't look so bad to me; the drylands were doing him a lot of good, you could see that.

Wally got kind of excited at all the commotion and was worse when they began shining lights into his sightless eyes. Told them they were burning out his lamps. So they gave him a shot in the arm that put him sleepy-bye.

Well, to make a long story short, this Goodspeed examined his eyes inside out—through forty million miles of space—deciding the job could be done by using a special technique of his own. A Dr. Holcomb, who, the nurses told me was the best eye man outside of Goodspeed himself in the solar system, was picked to do the actual work. And an appointment was made for a full hour etherphone connection at ten that same night. They'd operate then, long distance. Which made me wonder if Elsa Vaughn would be at Central to clear the important connection. I'd give her a ring anyway and give her the good news.

So I had to go away from there to a phone booth and let myself in for a lot more grief.

ELSA was home all right and cried some more when I told her what was going on. But she'd made up her mind to leave Terra and just go out of Wally's life for keeps. She was happy as the devil over what the doctors had said but more than ever sure she had no chance at all with Wally. The ailment she had was more a disgrace than anything else and a disfigurement besides. The doctors couldn't do anything for her. No one could do anything. So she had quit her job and was packing. Yes, she'd stay around until she heard the result of the operation but there was no use of me trying to see her or to persuade her to remain and try again. I knew she meant it, too, when she finally hung up.

How do you like that? I was so upset and muddled I didn't know what to do with the hours that were left until ten that night. So I went down to the shore and looked up the old Martian quarter where I knew I could get a couple of shots of good old dryland chulco. I needed them.

When I get a couple of hookers of that triple-powered redeye under my belt it always calls for a couple hundred. So I wound up with a roaring but dignified skin-full by ten-thirty. I hadn't forgotten the operation, not for a minute, so I laid off the stuff and hung on the phone until it was over.

The operation was a success. Wally'd see again! And that called for still more chulco.

So, feeling so good about my buddy and so bad about Elsa Vaughn, I eventually graduated to the stage of a crying jag. And I found myself crying on the shoulders, first one and then the other, of a dignified litle Mercurian who wasn't squiffed at all—or hardly at all. He would be, though, if he tried to keep up with me.

"What is thees trouble you so greatly deplore?" he inquired politely. "Perhaps it is that I could be of assistance."

Since Terra cleaned up the planet of those little babies they'd been like that