From now on, came the silent scream inside his head, anybody, any agency, with the right equipment can find out anything about ANYBODY! This planet is one huge, unblinking eye watching everything that moves on its surface. We’re all encased in glass, asphyxiating, like bugs dropped into an entomologist’s killing bottle.
The seconds crept, and he was conscious only of the sound of blood pulsing in his veins. And I…And I did it!
When Garrod stood up he lifted the incomprehensible weight of the planet with him. And he discovered, with infinite gratitude, that he could support it.
“Esther,” he said peacefully, “you asked me an important question a while ago.”
“Yes?” Her voice was wary, as though she could already sense a change in him.
“The answer is—no. I don’t love you, Esther, and I realize now that I never did.”
“Don’t be stupid,” she said, with a frightened harshness in her voice.
“I’m sorry, Esther. You asked me, and I told you how it is. I must go and find Jane now. I’ll send in your nurse.” He walked out of the room without hurrying, without needing to hurry, and went to Jane’s room on the floor below. The outer door was open and he could see she had begun to pack. She was bending over one of her cases in an unintentionally voluptuous pose which produced a slow and powerful hammering in his chest.
“You lied to me,” he said in mock severity. “You said you were taking the late plane.”
Jane turned to face him with transparent ribbons of tears on her cheeks. “Please let me get away from you, Al.”
Garrod said, “No. Not ever again.”
“Al, have you…?”
“Yes. I’ve ended one thing that should never have started, and I want your help while I do the same thing with something else.”
Jane was with him when he went to a newspaper office and told his story, and she was with him during the hard months which followed when a panic-stricken Government was forced by the people to create new legislation banning the production of slow glass. She was with him during the even harder years when it was realized that other countries were continuing with Retardite production, eventually adulterating the oceans with it, and the air itself—even up to the stratosphere. In later decades, men were to come to accept the universal presence of Retardite eyes, and they learned to live without subterfuge or shame as they had done in a distant past when it was known that the eyes of God could see everywhere.
Jane was with him through all that, and one of the ways in which he knew he loved her was that, no matter how hard he tried, he could not visualize her beautiful face ever growing older. To him she was ageless, eternal—like a lovely image enshrined forever in a prism of slow glass.