CHAPTER IISynthetic Optics
For six weeks and more Douglas Ashfield had little real awareness of what was going on around him. People came and went like so many phantoms in the midst of chaotic dreams. It was only by degrees that he realized the truth—that he was in a nursing home, that three of his ribs, an arm, and a leg were broken, that he had had concussion and complications. But the powers of modern surgery had saved him. He was commencing to mend.
Then at last the clouds of his illness began to evaporate. Weak but rational he was permitted his first visitor—Mason Brooks. The scientist looked unusually harassed as he drew up a chair to the bedside.
“To say that I owe you an apology sounds idiotic,” he commented, as Douglas fixed his eyes on him. “I should have had more sense. I’d w
