"Give me your hand."
He held it for a time in both his own. It was a firm, capable hand with long, tapering fingers. "Believe that I am grateful," Wellesley said, "even though I must be grateful to a benefactor whom I have yet to see for the first time. Let me look at you. I cannot command you to tell me who you are, as an officer of the Rift constabulary, but I ask it as your friend."
"You ask the impossible," she said. "The worst is over for you, but there may be still another shock to come. You must stay here until you are stronger, and then I will help you escape. Now I had better go, before—before I am missed."
He heard her retreating footsteps and the closing of the door.
Escape from what? he wondered vaguely. The poison, or the antidote seemed to have brought about some curious psychological change in him. He could not think with the old, clear incisiveness. The drive was gone, the purposefulness of his mission to Ophir. He was like Samson shorn—or a man taken with void amentia whose mind becomes as a child's.
And it was so dark. A horrible suspicion arose in his mind. He searched for, and found the torch that was in his kit. He turned it on. Nothing happened. No beam of light shot out to illuminate the ceiling. He clicked the switch several times, then held the lens against his cheek. It was warm, all right.
He was stone blind.
Wellesley was not unlearned in the physiological sciences. He guessed that the blindness might be temporary—a result of neural shock, but that was scant consolation.
Now it seemed to him that since his arrival an invisible pattern of ill-will had been forming up around him. An ugly something lurking beneath the sullen surface of this strange village. A malignant force, beyond doubt, that well knew his true mission on Ophir.