He got a chance to show her; for six months after his graduation, while he was being trained at Station No. 18, he insisted that she should come to visit his new post. Marillyn never had ridden a rocket because she was afraid of them, but she recognized the honor he was conferring on her, for very few persons but employees had ever set foot on a sun-station. She agreed to go. Dale arranged passage. Then she was severely injured in the take-off.
Dale was devastated. He called in specialists, consultants, diagnosticians.
"Don't worry about it," he said. "I'll take care of everything. You'll be all right in no time."
But she wasn't. She was badly crippled, paralyzed from the waist down, and she became pitifully thin.
Dale spent most of his salary on her. Doctors told him it was useless, nothing could help, that a part of her brain cells had been destroyed and could not be rebuilt, that she might live fifty years but she would always be helpless.
Dale refused to believe it. "She's got to get well," he said. "It isn't right—after all the things she did for me. When she was just a kid and should have been skating and dancing and going with boys, she was working to keep me from going to a home. She's entitled to some fun now."
But she didn't have a chance. Her recovery would have been contrary to all medical experience.
Dale's salary grew until he was getting twenty-five hundred a month, but most of it he spent on Marillyn—largely against her wishes.
"Dale, I wish you wouldn't insist on trying every new-fangled cure that comes along. I know what the situation is. I can read. I know I won't get well. I can't. When that brain-tissue is destroyed, it's gone forever. You go out and have some fun. Please."