For a moment not a muscle of Gurney's face moved. Then he shrugged and glanced at his wrist watch. "I'll sit perfectly still for exactly fifteen minutes, Langford," he said. "That should give you sufficient time to clear the port."
His eyes narrowed to steely slits. "But heaven help you when I move!"
"Fair enough!" Langford said.
Ten minutes later the Patrol captain was climbing into a small jet plane at the edge of the spaceport. Far to the east the skyline of Mars City rose above the horizon like a glittering copper penny swimming in a nebulous haze. A penny flipped in desperation that had miraculously come heads.
Part of the wonder he felt was due to his knowledge that he would soon be flying straight through the penny toward a tall white building he would have braved the sun to scale.
2
A grave-faced physician met Langford at the end of the corridor and beckoned him into a small white-walled room. The physician was not talkative; he didn't need to be. The girl who sat under the bright lamps with her eyes swathed in bandages told Langford all he cared to know.
Her lips were smiling and she held out her arms as her husband came into the room. Langford went up to her, and kissed her tenderly on the cheek, his big, awkward hands caressing her hair that lay in a tumbled dark mass on her shoulders.
She had tried to keep back the tears, but they came now, so that her body quivered with the intensity of her emotion. "I'm going to see, darling!" she whispered; "I know I'm going to see again. I wouldn't let them remove the bandages until you came."