The Big Eye (25 page)

 

 

The Old Man smiled. "It's a little like a railroad station around here
tonight, isn't it, David?"

 

 

"Yes, sir."

 

 

"Tell you a little secret," whispered the Old Man. "I'm more excited than
anyone else around here. Thank heaven there's only one setting I'll have
to take. And I hope I don't fumble it."

 

 

The Old Man sounded as though he meant it. He went to his locker,
pulled a fur hat fitted with ear muffs down firmly over his head,
bundled himself up in a fur coat, and drew on a pair of heavy mittens.

 

 

"Well, David," he said, "let's go. And in a short time -- if we're lucky
-- we'll have the answer."

 

 

David signaled for lights out and walked toward his desk control
station. The lights died, except for one tiny hooded reddish lamp high
in the dome. As the members of the staff scurried toward their separate
posts, a kind of hush came over the place. But it was a hush that was
alive, ecstatic with excitement, and yet filled with dread.

 

 

They watched the Old Man silently as he walked with measured stride along
the balcony, and then, climbed the short iron stairway to the loading
bridge. He looked up into the dome for a moment, as though savoring
the drama of what lay in wait up there, far beyond the roof and the
earth itself.

 

 

Then he pushed a button, and the flying platform swept down from the
shadows of the dome, swung in on its curved track, and stopped. He
closed the gate, the clang of the steel safety bar shattering the silence
like a steely echo. The Old Man pressed another control button, and the
platform, with its tiny figure clutching the rail, swept up the track
and disappeared.

 

 

David stood quietly at his station and waited. His eye swept his
control panels, the various switches, the indicators for right ascension
and declination, the telescope's zenith angle, wind-screen position,
sidereal and standard time clocks, the selsyn transmitters. They were
as familiar to him as the dashboard of an automobile is to its driver.

 

 

But tonight their phosphorescent faces glowing sickly in the darkness
seemed to take on a special and magic and almost human look, as though
they, too, were aware that the drama was about to begin.

 

 

This was the night. This was the night they had waited for at Palomar
for weeks.

 

 

Now they were ready, they were all ready to go. And in a few minutes
their aching curiosity would be satisfied, theirs and the curiosity of
millions of others in every corner of the earth.

 

 

The Old Man seemed to he taking a long time getting his call through,
thought David. Maybe it was no longer than usual on the clock, but it
seemed like an eternity. He pictured Dr. Dawson high in the cage, in
the top of the telescope, checking the banks of three selsyn dials for
right ascension and declination, as he had so many hundreds of times.
The dials indicated rough, intermediate, and fine settings.

 

 

The phone buzzed suddenly. David picked up the receiver.

 

 

"All right, David," came the voice of the Old Man quietly. "Give me
the setting."

 

 

David hung up and pressed the "execute" button.

 

 

And now the precise mechanical miracle that moved the 200-inch telescope
to its appointed place went into action.

 

 

The human brain stopped functioning, and an electric brain took over.
It was contained in a box twenty feet square, its brain cells were
electronic tubes, and it could memorize, add, multiply, and divide
billions in a fraction of a second. The name of it was EDVAC -- Electronic
Discrete Variable Computer -- and in an hour it could work out a problem
that it would take one human and expert mathematician fifty years
to solve.

 

 

Now, through its motors, gears, electric circuits, and electronic tubes,
it instantly calculated where the big telescope had to point in order
to find Planet
Y
. In effect, it solved the problem of holding the
giant telescope with an accuracy of a single second of arc -- a miracle
of accuracy comparable to hitting a moving dime two miles away with a
high-powered rifle.

 

 

It compensated for variable factors all at once -- the change in object
position caused by atmospheric refraction; the change in refraction owing
to the temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, errors in the driving
gears, the error owing to the deformation of the telescope itself under
its own huge weight.

 

 

Then, through a system of cams, clocks, differential gears, and governors,
the impulse was passed on to the great telescope drive system. And finally
the huge tube swung into position, and the tracking motors took over and
kept it aligned -- a machine as heavy and as complicated as a locomotive,
and yet a delicate instrument as precise as the finest microscope.

 

 

And up in a cage a man sat hunched over his instnunents, photographing
the face of Death itself.

 

 

Every seat in the auditorium was filled, and now it buzzed with excited
conversation.

 

 

The first five rows of seats were taken by members of the Palo-mar staff,
the rest by reporters and radiomen. In the rear a "remote" was set
up, and two network men waited with earphones clamped to their heads,
with microphones ready to broadcast the news to the world, while the
television crews busied themselves with their cameras.

 

 

They were waiting for the Old Man now to come out of the photographic lab.

 

 

David stood at the projector and watched the faces of the men, listened
to what they were saying. He remembered another occasion -- the morning the
Old Man had broken the news of the planet here in this same auditorium.

 

 

It seemed as though it were only the day before yesterday. But actually
it was five months ago.

 

 

Time moved on wings now, it slipped by fast, it was desperately
precious. It was no longer leisurely. Before the planet came, a man could
watch the hands of a clock, and they would seem to stand still or barely
crawl around the face.

 

 

But now you could see them move, you could watch them voraciously eat
up the time.

 

 

Less than two years more. One, two.

 

 

And then the end.

 

 

The door opened, and Dr. Dawson came in.

 

 

He was holding a slide in his hand. The hum of conversation died
suddenly. There was a rustling as the crowd turned to look at the Old Man.

 

 

He came in slowly, walking with dragging steps. He looked stunned. His
face was blanched; he moved like an automaton.

 

 

David stiffened. Something was wrong, he thought. Something had hit the
Old Man hard.

 

 

But what was it? What had the Old Man seen? What was on that slide?

 

 

The men in the room stared at the astronomer stupidly. They sat rigid,
fixed in their seats, like men in a trance.

 

 

They, too, sensed that the Old Man was suffering from some kind of shock.

 

 

Instead of walking down the aisle and going up on the platform to explain
what he had seen, he walked straight to David and wordlessly handed him
the slide.

 

 

With shaking fingers David turned on the projector. Francis turned out the
lights, and a funnel of blank white light hit the screen on the platform.

 

 

David inserted the slide.

 

 

And then they saw the face of Planet
Y
.

 

 

But it was not really a face at all.

 

 

It was a leering, malevolent, staring EYE!

 

 

As the months went by the world robbed the big telescope of its nickname
and gave it to Planet
Y
. After that they called it THE BIG EYE.

 

 

 

 

12.

 

 

Long before it became visible the Big Eye leered malignantly from
every rotogravure page and every magazine cover in the country and in
the world.

 

 

It was a dead kind of eye, with a baleful stare, and it was bloodshot
under a puffy eyelid.

 

 

And finally, in the late summer of the Year One, it became visible
through small telescopes.

 

 

In cities all over the world sidewalk entrepreneurs did a bonanza
business by mounting telescopes on street corners for a preview of the
killer planet. The Big Eye became the biggest show in town.

 

 

It was still far off in the void, still remote, but getting nearer and
bigger every day. Through the telescope it was about the size of a pea,
but remarkably distinct.

 

 

And as the planet made its half rotation every four months the Big Eye
became distorted and finally turned and looked away, presenting the back
of its "eyeball," a nondescript pattern of shadowed ridges and mountains.

 

 

But it always reappeared, turning slowly on its revolving eyeball,
till it again glared down with a fixed and fishy and knowing stare.

 

 

When it was full it always seemed to look directly at you, but, unlike
the human eye, it never blinked.

 

 

When your turn came for the telescope and you looked through the lens,
you saw the Big Eye and you were alone with it.

 

 

And when the man who owned the telescope finally touched your arm
and said, "Next," it was as though you were coming out of a hypnotic
trance. You felt weak and gone inside, and your hands and knees shook,
and your clothes were wet with perspiration.

 

 

It was all very well for the astronomers to be dryly scientific about
it. It was all very well to say that the blood-red color was only the
reflection of the sun below the horizon, that the black eyebrow was a
huge, curved volcanic mountain range, that the eyeball was a great round
crater, that the iris was a darker depression within the crater.

 

 

They spoke of the topography of the Big Eye in terms of mountains,
craters, rays, rills, crevices, ridges, furrows, walled plains, and
shadows. They blandly made comparisons to the friendly and benevolent
face of the moon, matched the elevations and contours of the Big Eye
with the lunar craters of Tycho, Copernicus, Kepler, Clavius, Grimaldi,
Archimedes, and the lunar Apennines.

 

 

The astronomers said that what you saw through the sidewalk telescopes
was simply a dead planet.

 

 

But to you the Big Eye was very much alive.

 

 

And it did not deviate. It was right on schedule; it had a date to keep
at an appointed time.

 

 

The Big Eye, although yet invisible to the naked eye, already had
profound effects.

 

 

As it plummeted through the solar system it brought about certain
natural phenomena. There were high winds, freakish changes of
temperature; the tides became erratic; navigation instruments were
becoming unreliable. Minor tidal waves were reported, and the number of
earthquakes increased, although for the most part they were isolated to
those countries already susceptible to subterranean shocks.

 

 

Seismologists assured the people who had returned to New York that there
was no further danger. What had happened in November was a minor series of
tremors, called foreshocks. There had been a small fracture in the bedrock
under the city and a subsequent readjustment to a secure and stable base.

 

 

But the impact of the new planet was strongest upon the minds of those
who lived under it.

 

 

In the first few months of the Year One there had been a wave of suicides,
an interval of violence and lawlessness, a kind of mass madness. The
crime rate had soared; rape and robbery were rampant. Statistics showed,
however, that the number of homicides was almost negligible. Under the
circumstances, life suddenly became a very precious commodity, and even
hardened criminals and murderers showed a certain reluctance to take it.

 

 

Alcoholism soared, the demand for liquor far exceeded the supply, and
the governments of the various nations all installed rationing systems.
The streets swarmed with staggering drunkards and prostitutes. Respectable
men and women of sound, churchgoing families, slept in strange beds and
each other's beds.

 

 

There was so little time.

 

 

Yet as time went on the hysteria tapered off. People settled back and
accepted the fact that they had to live under the planet, and there was
nothing they could do to avert it.

 

 

Millions became ardent church- and temple-goers. Some were merely mending
their fences for the next world just around the corner. But the vast
majority found real comfort and peace in religion. Money became a drug
on this kind of temporary market, there were no futures, and rich men
gave their wealth away.

 

 

There was nothing the Lord loved so much as openhanded charity. It was
a good hedge against the hereafter.

 

 

In the field of agriculture there was a little trouble at first. Farmers,
who were now interested in enjoying the leisure which was the farmers'
special dream, saw no reason why they should work from dawn to dusk to
supply the needs of others. But the granaries were bulging, and experts
calculated that, with only a minor effort on the part of farmers, there
would be enough to last through the appointed time. The government
buttressed this with emergency edicts, establishing harvest quotas by law.