The Big Eye (29 page)

 

 

He yelled at Francis to hurry, but Francis was unable to hear him over the
banshee yell of the wind. The steward was gasping for breath, staggering
through the snow like a drunken man, exhausted. David released his arm
and stumbled forward, fighting the drifts. Like feathery straight jackets,
they tried to hold him, they clung and wrapped themselves around his legs,
they tried to trip him and tie him down.

 

 

And then David was in the observatory yard. The squat building loomed
suddenly in front of him, like a fat gray ghost leaping up from the
drifts. He scraped his hands against the rough wall, moving slowly,
trying to find the door. He cursed as his fingers encountered nothing
but wall. Finally, after a long minute of exploration, he found the door
just as Francis came up.

 

 

The door was open. They went in, slammed the door shut against the storm,
and stood gasping in the foyer, swaying in their exhaustion.

 

 

The lights were on in the foyer,

 

 

"Come on, Francis!"

 

 

David plunged ahead up the wide, curving staircase, out into the
circular corridor, raced past staff quarters, the computing rooms, the
darkrooms. The breath sobbed from his tortured lungs as he ran up the
stairs to the mezzanine.

 

 

Finally a last short flight of rubber-covered steps and he plunged out
into the main rotunda of the observatory.

 

 

Then he stopped short and stared.

 

 

The dome was open!

 

 

Stupefied, he pointed upward as Francis came panting up the steps. The
wind was howling down through the open dome in an icy blast. The snow
was coming in; it was snowing inside the observatory itself. The white
particles slammed down gustily, as though propelled by a high-powered gun,
filtering down on the floor itself, and feathering the upper part of the
telescope so that a faint lace of white on the shell was already visible.

 

 

"He's here!" yelled David to Francis. "The Old Man's here, somewhere.
He's opened the dome to the blizzard. It couldn't have been anyone
else. He's mad, Francis, stark raving mad. But even so, he wouldn't do
that unless "

 

 

The echo of David's voice ricocheted through the dome for a moment and
then clipped short. Numbly he stared into Francis's chalk-white face,
and in the steward's eyes saw the same dawning suspicion, the same
awful horror.

 

 

With a single accord they broke and ran for the automatic elevator
leading to the upper deck and the loading bridge.

 

 

The elevator seemed to whine up and up forever. Finally it stopped,
its door slid noiselessly open, and they burst through and onto the wide
ring-shaped deck.

 

 

The aerial platform running to the top of the telescope was gone!

 

 

That could mean only one thing.

 

 

The Old Man was up there.

 

 

He was up there at the top of the telescope, perched in the cistern of
the observer's cage, exposed to the icy blast of the blizzard slamming
down through the open dome.

 

 

Somewhere in the shock-twisted depths of the Old Man's mind he had chosen
this fantastic way to commit suicide. Fantastic to everyone else, perhaps,
but quite logical to Dr. Dawson. He had built the telescope, it was his
life. He had spent many years of his life up there in that dizzy place,
bundled in heavy furs. He knew how cold it could get up there.

 

 

David ran over to the panel where the push-button control for the aerial
platform was located. As he yanked open the metal door the thought
throbbed through his mind, How long?

 

 

How long had the Old Man been sitting up there, waiting to die?

 

 

He pressed the control button, peered up at the four slender rails arching
up and curving into the darkness of the dome. But nothing happened. The
monel-metal platform stayed at the top of the telescope.

 

 

The Old Man had locked the controls at the top.

 

 

David slammed the panel door shut, went back to where Francis was
standing.

 

 

"What are we going to do now, sir?"

 

 

"You'd better go down and phone Dr. Wilk, Francis."

 

 

"Yes. But you "

 

 

"I'm going up to the top by way of the handrails and get Dr. Dawson."

 

 

The steward paled. "Be careful, sir. It's dangerous now. Those rails
might be slippery and -- "

 

 

"I'll make it all right, Francis. You go ahead."

 

 

Outside of the flying platform, this was the only method of getting to
the top of the big reflector. The handrails and narrow steps went straight
up, like the ladders in the engine room of an oceangoing vessel. Finally
they led to a steep iron platform on the back of the girder carrying
the flying platform. It was a dizzy ascent, and with the rails wet,
as they were now, it was dangerous.

 

 

David gripped the handrails, climbed gingerly, carefully, conscious of
the hazard. As he went up, higher and higher, he found that he could
not raise his face upward toward the dome. The storm coming straight
down through the dome blinded him by its fury, slashed his face in a
pin-point attack,,forced him to lower his head.

 

 

He remembered stupidly, now, that neither he nor Francis in their
excitement had thought of the obvious thing -- to close the dome before
he began his climb. The blizzard came straight down, sucking through
the open dome in a powerful downdraft, and once or twice he swayed under
its force and hung on desperately.

 

 

But finally the precarious steps began to level off. He was high up in
the soaring steelwork now, running over the abyss, almost blinded by
flying snow.

 

 

Then David was looking down into the cistern of the observer's cage.

 

 

The Old Man was sitting there in his usual place, in the little revolving
seat before the instrument board.

 

 

He was sitting there, stiff and rigid, like a grotesque snow man.

 

 

The snow whipping down upon him from the open dome had covered his
bowed head with a white fez. It stuck to his face, powdered his robe
and pajamas, and had already drifted up above his slippered feet on the
steel floor.

 

 

Looking down from his dizzy, wind-swept perch above, David Hughes knew
that he had come too late.

 

 

The Old Man of the Mountain was dead.

 

 

Two weeks later, California Tech, the university administering Palomar,
closed the observatory.

 

 

David wired Dr. Herrick at the Hayden Planetarium, accepting his offer
to work in New York. And then Carol's baby was born. It was a girl,
and they named her Emily.

 

 

 

 

14.

 

 

In the last four months the Big Eye was visible both by day and night.

 

 

It did not seem to get any larger now; its approach seemed to slow. It
seemed simply to hang in the sky, waiting. Now the planet was pursuing
the earth, moving in the same direction, as the earth swung around its
orbit to the other side of the sun.

 

 

In September the astronomers, after extensive calculations, announced
that the catastrophe would occur at exactly 8 p.m., Greenwich time.

 

 

In New York and on the Atlantic seaboard, zero hour would be 3 o'clock
in the afternoon.

 

 

The Eye would be in full glare upon the earth, and the end would come
out of a daytime sky.

 

 

On the first of October, the Hayden Planetarium closed for the duration.

 

 

At dusk David closed his desk and gathered together the few personal
effects he wanted to take back to the apartment.

 

 

He found it difficult to concentrate on what he was doing; his eye kept
straying toward the window.

 

 

The Big Eye swam in a red bath high over an apartment building across
the park. It would stay that way until the sun sank deep enough behind
the western horizon so that the first stars would just begin to twinkle.

 

 

Then it would emerge from its bath, huge and heavy and frightening,
and dominate the sky, and the stars would disappear.

 

 

For a full minute David stared at the Big Eye, unable to turn his head
away.

 

 

It looked particularly malevolent at the moment. Its leer was confident
and assured; its message to David was familiar and personal and intimate.

 

 

"Damn you," David suddenly blurted out hysterically. "You big red bastard,
you'd like to end it right now, wouldn't you? If you had your way,
you wouldn't wait until Christmas!"

 

 

He went to the window and viciously yanked down the blinds. The room
darkened in semi-gloom, and for a moment he experienced overwhelming
relief, the throbbing cleared in his head.

 

 

But then he fancied that even now, with the blinds shut, the Big Eye
was still looking into his office. The reddish light was seeping in
through the blinds, through the cracks and crevices, through the solid
wall itself. And now the office was tinged with a weird reddish light;
it reflected from the glass top of his desk, from the framed pictures,
from the paneled walls.

 

 

In a kind of feverish desperation he took his hat from the rack, flung
open his office door, and hurried down the corridor, through the adjaqent
Museum of Natural History, and finally out of the door and onto Central
Park West.

 

 

The Big Eye hit down on him like a blow of a hammer. Now, in the dying
light, it was beginning to take shape. He could already see the familiar
leer pushing through the reddish haze.

 

 

It etched the sky line of the east side in sharp relief, and the trees in
the park stood black and stark against the light. It slanted down on the
road and sidewalk and ricocheted up into the eyes of the pedestrians. It
glinted from automobile windshields and the glistening chrome on the
radiators.

 

 

There was nothing soft about it, like the set of the sun. It was harsh
and brutal and direct and unfiltered.

 

 

David hunched his shoulders in his topcoat, put his head down, and got
into his car at the curb.

 

 

At Eighty-third Street he stopped at a newspaper stand. The man in the
small booth was smiling broadly under the peak of his frayed cap.

 

 

"Paper, mister?"

 

 

The owner of the newsstand drew a dirty finger across the headlines of
the stacked newspapers.

 

 

"Good news for a change," he said. "Me -- I can't wait for tomorrow night."

 

 

The headlines were the same in all the evening newspapers --
the Journal-American, the Post, the World-Telegram, the Sun.

 

 

They were big and black and bold across the front page, and they said
simply:

 

 

CLOUDY, RAIN TOMORROW NIGHT!

 

 

Cloudy and rain. That was big news, front-page news. Cloudy and rain
meant that the Big Eye would be blotted out for a merciful evening. It
meant that the nightly pressure would be off for a few precious hours,
that they would not feel the direct visual and physical lash of its stare,
even though they would still sense it.

 

 

Tomorrow night the streets would be crowded with people, drenched with
rain, maybe, but laughing, exhilarated, buoyant in their relief.

 

 

Cloudy and rain. An eyelid closing over the Big Eye for just a little
while, a little wonderful while, as it slowly revolved toward its
full phase.

 

 

Cloudy and rain.

 

 

David grinned back at the man in the newsstand, bought a paper, and
scanned the lead story. The weather forecasters were almost positive
of overcast weather and even held out hope for an extra day of clouds
or rain.

 

 

David reached his apartment building and walked into the lobby. Tom,
the parchment-faced elevator man, greeted him with a grin as he opened
the elevator door.

 

 

"You heard the news, Dr. Hughes?"

 

 

"Just a few minutes ago."

 

 

"I hope they're right," said Tom anxiously. "I sure hope they haven't
made a mistake this time. They've been wrong before, Dr. Hughes, these
weathermen."

 

 

"They'd better be right, Tom," answered David grimly. "They'd better
be right."

 

 

When he came into the apartment Carol was in the kitchen, feeding the
baby. Emily's curls were still wet from her bath; there was a smear of
gelatin dessert on her mouth.

 

 

She gurgled and held up her arms to David.

 

 

He picked her up, swung her high in the air, and she laughed and squealed.

 

 

"Piggyback!" he said, grinning. "Piggyback!"

 

 

He held her arms around his neck, so that she hung like a sack of flour
down his back, and ran into the living room. Then he lifted her clear
over his head, and his daughter laughed delightedly, wriggling like a
bug in his upstretched hands.

 

 

"Airplane," he told her next. "Airplane ride!"

 

 

He carried her through the living room, pressed her tiny nose against
the cold windowpane, carried her into the bedroom, ran around the crib,
flew her into the bathroom, dipped her deep toward the bathtub in mock
ferocity.