The Big Eye (4 page)

That was the popular opinion. Everyone said that when the pay-off came --
not if it came, but when it came -- New York would get it first.

 

 

It was the biggest city in the world, the prime target. It would make
the loudest noise, illustrate the power of the enemy in the most potent
manner, create the most dramatic devastation. Aside from Washington,
which was now a ghost capital by orders of the Army, the big city had
completed a state of evacuation much farther along than any other. It
was possible that the Soviet might pick Detroit, or Chicago, or St.
Louis, or Los Angeles, if they threw the first punch.

 

 

But everyone said, everyone whispered, New York. That was the one,
the big one; that was where it would come first.

 

 

The telecaster up in the illuminated screen was saying:

 

 

"In retrospect, the catastrophe that faces us now was not a matter of
science, of atomic fission, of research or manufacturing techniques.
It was a matter of the human mind, its ability to adjust itself to the
fact that it had unleashed a terrible and destructive power, and that
men must either live with it, or he destroyed by it. But two decades
were a pitifully short time to wipe away the accumulated mental debris,
the accumulated prejudices and suspicions which had been bred in men for
centuries. And we failed. For a while we thought we had succeeded. There
was the United Nations, the various conferences of the Foreign Ministers
at Washington, London, Paris, and Moscow. And after that the international
control commissions and the nations' agreement to disarm. But then came
the arguments over the veto power -- the differences over the extent
of inspection beyond national boundaries -- the finger-pointing, the
accusations of bad faith and subterfuge. And finally, the great blow --
the dissolution of the United Nations -- and separation.

 

 

"We might have succeeded, we could have succeeded with sincerity and
mutual trust, and an awareness of how much we had to succeed.

 

 

"But we failed. And now, the world faces the consequences."

 

 

A phone rang on the telecaster's desk. He picked up the receiver,
listened a moment, nodded, and hung up.

 

 

Then he looked directly at David and the other men on the Broadway street
corner and said simply:

 

 

"We take you now to the new Kremlin in Kirensk, Russia."

 

 

The television screen crackled, sputtered a little, faded, and finally
blacked out. The darkness smothered David and the others huddled with
him in an eerie, impenetrable blanket. They waited silently, shivering a
little, listening to the sharp wind whining up the deserted side streets.

 

 

And then the glow came to the screen again and a voice with a Russian
accent said:

 

 

"This is Kirensk, capital of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics."

 

 

The screen showed a street in the Soviet capital in bright daylight. A
crowd of people lined the curb, waiting impassively. They seemed quiet
and well disciplined, not surging forward like American crowds. But
perhaps the line of Red soldiers guarding the approach had something to
do with their good behavior.

 

 

The invisible telecaster spoke briefly again:

 

 

"The crowd outside the new Kremlin awaits the coming of the American
envoy, Mr. Allison, to confer with the Soviet Foreign Minister, Bakhanov."

 

 

"Well, I'll be damned," commented the soldier named Frank. "Look at the
people in that crowd. They look just like we do." He giggled nervously.
"I swear to Christ, that big guy on the left with the fur hat looks just
like my uncle Phil out in Detroit."

 

 

"Sure they look the same as we do," said the sergeant acidly. "What'd
you expect 'era to have -- horns?" He profferred a word of wisdom. "Hell,
what's so tough about them? We can take 'em any time we want to, if you
ask me. They put their legs in their pants legs one at a time just like
we do, don't they?"

 

 

"Geez," a civilian said. "Look at their faces. What do you know?
They're just as scared as we are!"

 

 

The voice of the Russian telecaster came again:

 

 

"Now the American envoy is arriving."

 

 

An armored car came into view, bristling with Red Army men. It was
followed by a huge black limousine, and another armored car followed
the limousine. The camera moved with the procession. It stopped at a
big gate in front of a building set back behind a wall. Soldiers pushed
the onlookers away. A gray-faced man got out of the limousine, carrying
a brief case. The gate opened, and he walked between two lines of grim
Russian soldiers standing at attention. The gate closed behind him.

 

 

The Russian telecaster concluded:

 

 

"Thus the envoys of two great powers meet to confer in this great crisis.
We of the Soviet Union want no war, and neither does America, nor any
of the other countries of the world. Let us hope that the envoy of your
great country and mine come to an understanding on this historic occasion"

 

 

That was the trouble, thought David. Everyone hoped the same thing, but
nobody did anything about it. The grim game of waiting, the tension,
could not go on forever. The fear of men for each other had been like
a progressive madness, a subtle and cumulative poison seeping into the
blood stream, and there was a limit to how much the patient could take,
a limit to human endurance.

 

 

The scene shifted back to the United States, back into the paneled
study again.

 

 

The gray-haired telecaster was at his desk, staring down at Times
Square. He began to speak again, when a young man came from the left of
the television screen and gave the man at the desk a note. He glanced
at it briefly and then looked grimly at the men on the street corner:

 

 

"I have a special bulletin here. Professor Albert Wholey, world-famous
authority on atomic fission, and one of the scientists who aided in the
preparation of the original Hiroshima bomb, committed suicide tonight.
He was seventy years oW

 

 

The telecaster paused for a moment. Then he nodded and smiled -- a wooden,
professional smile. You could see that his heart wasn't in it, that the
smile was merely a signature, a way of signing off.

 

 

"This is your telecaster, Arthur Morrow, speaking for the Downysoft
Corporation and bidding you all -- good night!"

 

 

The paneled study swung around on a turntable and disappeared, and the
commercial came onto the screen in colors. First there was a household
scene. A motherly-looking woman opened the door of a linen closet and took
a blue blanket from the top shelf. She examined the label and as she did,
the camera panned down to the label -- DOWNYSOFT! The woman nodded, smiled,
and shut the door.

 

 

An announcer crowed:

 

 

"Yes -- it's DOWNYSOFT -- DOWNYSOFT blankets!"

 

 

The camera followed the woman into a nursery. Tenderly she placed the
blanket on a tousle-haired child sleeping in a crib. Then she caressed
the blanket and smiled again.

 

 

The announcer said in an unctuous voice:

 

 

"For that soft and intimate touch -- it's DOWNYSOFT. DOWNYSOFT blankets
and DOWNYSOFT towels!"

 

 

The first scene whirled out of sight on the turntable, and a new
scene whirled in. This time it was the interior of an orchid-colored
bathroom. A tall, lissome blonde who looked like the third from the
left in a chorus line was standing in front of a glass-enclosed stall
shower. She was dressed in a bright orange silk robe, and from the way
it clung to her curvaceous body it was plain that she wore nothing else
underneath. She turned to a small towel shelf and took out two towels.
She hung them carefully on a rack, caressed them with her fingers,
and smiled. The camera panned down to a close-up of the labels again.

 

 

Then the blonde began to take off her robe in a kind of televised
strip tease. First there was a view of a smooth back, with the curved
suggestion of the girl's breasts barely showing. Then, just as she
dropped her robe, she opened the door of the stall shower and stepped
behind it. She stood there for a moment in a side view, every feature
of her body etched sharply in silhouette behind the translucent glass.
Then she reached up and turned on the shower.

 

 

The announcer crowed again:

 

 

"Yes! For that soft and intimate touch -- it's always -- DOWNYSOFT!
DOWNYSOFT blankets and DOWNYSOFT towels!"

 

 

The man on David's right spoke softly. "Soft and intimate touch is
right. Oh, brother!"

 

 

"Geez!" said his companion. "Geez, Joe! That blonde! How would you like
to have that little number?"

 

 

David felt a little sick in his stomach. He turned up his coat collar
and started to walk up Broadway, his feet echoing dismally on the empty
pavement, past the dull marquees, the empty boarded-up stores, the dead
neon signs. The wind whistled down the darkened canyon, and its cold
breath, too, smelled of the Fear.

 

 

At Columbus Circle, the traflfic lights, blinking sentinels on the
dark-shrouded, desolate streets, continued to operate stubbornly. As
they went red, green, red, green, the click of their mechanism as they
changed sounded abnormally loud in the brooding silence.

 

 

David Hughes watched the lights break into a long illuminated V, one
arm of lights extending up Central Park West, another up Broadway. They
changed in a kind of staggered beat and cadence, red and green, red
and green, winking glassily in a ghostly and grotesque stone-and-steel
fairyland.

 

 

It seemed fantastic to David that he was here now, in the city of New
York, a lone pedestrian walking through a wind-swept graveyard, committed
to the most dangerous and most important mission of his life.

 

 

Ten hours ago his day had started like any other day.

 

 

A rough hand shook David.

 

 

"Wake up, Dave."

 

 

Dave tried to push the hand away and draw the covers back over him. But
the shaking persisted, and finally he opened his eyes to look sleepily
at the grinning, freckled face of his roommate, Joe Morgan.

 

 

"Rise and shine, Reverend," said Morgan. "Time the priest was preparing
for the pulpit."

 

 

Morgan, a long string bean of a man with a constant grin under his
sandy hair, was the spectrograph expert at Palomar. He had worked with
David at the Harvard Observatory, later served a term at Yerkes, then
at Mount Wilson, and finally hooked onto the Big Eye under the Old Man.
Like David, he was a bachelor, and the two of them lived in the dormitory,
an ascetic, monklike place of soundproofed walls and doors and black
curtains, for men who slept all day and worked all night. They called
the place the "Monastery" and each other "priests."

 

 

As for Morgan's reference to the "pulpit," that was David's special
province. It was the nickname for the telescope control board, where
David flicked switches or pushed buttons to turn the dome, open it,
and swing the Big Eye onto a star, at the whim and direction of the Old
Man up in the capsule at the top of the tube.

 

 

"Just came back from the observatory," said Morgan as David began to
shave. "And the Old Man's acting mighty strange. Dave, what the hell is
going on, anyway?"

 

 

"I don't know."

 

 

"You're his assistant," said Morgan. "You ought to know."

 

 

David turned to Morgan. "I'm just as much in the dark as you are. He
hasn't told me a thing, and his own wife doesn't even know what he's up
to. He's found something, Joe, I'm sure he has. But you know the Old Man,
you know how he's acted about these things before. Until he gets it on the
line, photographs, calculations, and theory, with a solid conclusion to
go with it, everyone on the observatory stafi can just keep on whistling."

 

 

Morgan lit a cigarette and flung the match into the wastebasket.
"Maybe. But I think this is something big, Dave, much bigger than anything
that's happened before. I've never seen the Old Man act like this. Working
all night and all day, skipping meals, taking an hour or two of sleep when
he's almost dead of exhaustion. You can almost see his cheekbones popping
out from under his skin." He paused and threw away his cigarette. "You
know what happened to me a little while ago at the observatory?"

 

 

"What?"

 

 

"I'm supposed to be the spectrograph man here. But I tried to get into
the spectrograph room in the telescope girder, and it was locked. Had some
plates there I wanted to see. The Old Man was in there, and he told me to
go away. Go away, mind you! He sounded a little wild, like a jealous kid
guarding a toy. I don't know, I've never heard him talk like that before."

 

 

David was thoughtful. "It could be the times, Joe. The trouble with
Russia, everything. Everybody's snapping at each other these days. You
couldn't find a calmer, more even-tempered man than Dr. Dawson. But the
generals have been hounding him, running him ragged, for months."

 

 

"Yes, I know." Morgan spoke soberly now. "They've been taking the Old
Man off his mountain every now and then, and he doesn't like it. That
trip to New Mexico on the rocket-projectile thing -- that Maryland job.
He's kicked like a steer each time, but he's had to go. And those
security guards they've got posted around the place. You'd think the
Russians were going to drop paratroopers right through the dome."