And so it was that Dr. Crendon—moody, skeptical Dr. Crendon—received the greatest shock of his life. He had anticipated an agonized outcry—or a joyous one. But Joan had spoken hardly above a whisper, in a tone of quiet assurance, as if she had known all along that she would see.
And suddenly Crendon realized that she had known! For mutants could see into the most probable future! Not too clearly, but clearly enough! How could he have been so blind?
As Crendon turned he saw that Langford had fallen to his knees beside his wife and was sobbing convulsively, his head cradled in her arms. He tiptoed softly out of the room. He felt curiously hollow inside, as though all capacity for emotion had been burned out of him by the corroding acid of his own skepticism.
3
Five minutes later Langford was replacing the bandages on Joan's eyes. He felt like a man who was playing a game with a deadly, unseen antagonist in a room full of crouching shadows. No—not a room. As he bent above his wife, his hand on her tumbled hair, the space about him seemed to fall away into darkness. And now he was gazing straight down the interplanetary deeps at a green world swimming in a nebulous haze. The haze dissolved, drifted away, and he saw the green hills of his native land.
He saw the earth, and crouching shadows covered the face of the land.
The crouching shadows of enormous insects. He could not escape from them because they were everywhere; when he broke into a run the mantis shapes followed him. They towered above him, sinister, horrible. He felt like a man caught in an invisible trap, the sky hemming him in, the ground beneath his feet a dissolving quagmire.
He shook the illusion off, for he did not want Joan to see the shadows as he saw them. What was it Crendon had said? She must be made to feel that you need her. Well, he did; he knew now that more than his own honor was at stake. If the alien ship could not be located his fears would not remain subjective. The fate of humanity hung in the balance.
His imagination had been stimulated abnormally by the events of the past few days; now it was leaping ahead of developments. For all he knew to the contrary the alien ship had foundered in the void or crashed on one of the inner planets in a red swirl of destruction.