The Miniature Menace
Copyright© 2024 by Frank Belknap Long
Chapter 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.”
“Sure you are!” Langford said, gruffly. “And you’ll have better sight than ever before! Both kinds of sight, just as you had before!”
“I was afraid you might be hurt, darling!” Joan Langford whispered, running her forefinger down his wet cheek as she held his head close. “I used the other sight that makes me so different, and terrifies people much more than it should!”
“You should not have done that!” Langford said, scowling; “I was in no real danger!”
“You were being hunted like a criminal!”
She turned her head toward Dr. Crendon as she spoke. The physician looked away, feeling her gaze on him through the bandages.
“The law of compensation, child,” he said, gently. “Mutants are clairvoyant; their vision is piercingly sharp where vision matters most. When nature confers a priceless gift she sometimes withdraws a lesser one; no one knows why, not even the biologists.” He smiled, “There I go, personifying the impersonal again. Perhaps ordinary sight will someday be vestigial in all of us.”
Langford glanced up. The physician was pressing his finger to his lips and gesturing toward the door. Langford got quickly to his feet. A chill wind seemed to blow into the room, driving all the warmth from his mind.
Just outside the door Dr. Crendon turned and spoke in a cautious whisper. “I haven’t given up hope!” he said. “But the chances are not too good, we don’t know why, but mutants have defective vision from birth even when their eyes are normal.”
Langford nodded, “I know that, doctor!”
The physician’s voice became gentler. “We know so little about mutants. Fifty thousand of them in the world, perhaps—born too early or too late! An inward vision that can pierce the barriers of sense and see to the heart of things. And an outward vision that’s defective, faltering, almost a blind man’s vision. Clairvoyance and failing sight—it just doesn’t make sense.”
“Joan makes sense,” Langford said. “If she were stone blind I’d still worship her.”
Dr. Crendon held his hands straight out before him and looked down at them. “I did my best,” he said, simply. “There were slight peculiarities of structure in the choroid but I’m sure that the new cornea will adjust. It’s the retina itself, the innermost nervous tunic of the eye, that I’m worried about.”
He paused, then went on quickly: “A mutant’s retina is hypersensitive. It responds to light in a peculiar way and has a tendency to distort images. But that distortion vanishes when the mind becomes really active.”
Langford looked at him. “Just what are you trying to tell me?”
“I’m not sure I know!” There were little puckers between Crendon’s eyes. “Put it this way. If she doesn’t brood too much, if she leads an active life and has complete confidence in her inner vision, her sight may improve. I think the failure of a mutant’s sight may be partly due to—well, a kind of fear. Mutants feel cut off from ‘normal’ humanity—whatever that may be—and are tempted to use their inner vision as a means of escape. And when they do that the outer vision dims to the vanishing point.”
“Then you think—”
“Make her feel that she can be of assistance to you in every moment of your waking life. Give her some important task to perform. Keep her with you, lad, as much as you can. She’s missed you these many months. Make her realize you can’t get along without her.”
Langford’s eyes held a dawning wonder; he seemed like a man from whom an immense weight had been lifted. “I was just about to tell you that I need her inward vision,” he said. “Not only the eyes you’ve done your best to restore, but her powers of clairvoyance.”
“You mean that?”
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