The Big Eye

by Max Ehrlich

  "Darling, listen, I'm calling from San Diego. I'll take the first plane I can get for home. How are the kids? Yes, yes, I'll be home just as soon as I can make it. I don't feel like being alone, either, at a time like this. Please, please, Helen, dont cry. Don't cry like that. Try not to think of it. Try to get some sleep now. Please, Helen, don't cry. Remember what we've always said? If we had to go, we wanted to go together. . . ."

  "Listen, Frank, it isn't just dying that's hard to take. Everybody's got to die sooner or later. But it's knowing the exact date -- that's what's hard, that's what's driving me out of my mind. Christmas Day, 1962, Christmas, 1962. That's all I can think of. Watching the calendar, counting the hours. Frank, for Christ's sake, how are we going to stand it, how are we going to stand it? And watching that Planet Y, that thing up there in the sky, getting bigger and bigger, closer and closer, like an ax coming down on top of your head, and knowing you can't do a thing about it -- except let it come. Frank, for God's sake, there isn't any more liquor left. Order up another bottle. I need a drink -- I need it bad."

  Finally the voices which had crawled through the blinds became a confused and distant murmur, without meaning and without identity.

  And they were alone, the two of them, on their wedding night, clinging and blending, drunk with the desperate having of each other, living a moment of priceless time.

  Afterward they lay exhausted, apart, and David thought, God, she was wonderful, wonderful, this wonderful girl who was his wife.

  He could never get enough of her, there would never be enough of her, never. There never would be enough time.

  From now on Carol and he would live in moments, in desperate moments, each more urgent than the other as the deadline came nearer, each hungrier, each more hopeless. They didn't have long, they didn't have much, only each other. And there would never be the easy anesthesia so mercifully provided by a benevolent Nature, the hope of a natural lifetime, the slowing down by time of youth itself, of passion cooling imperceptibly and painlessly, of "growing old gracefully."

  Then finally David whispered:

  "Carol."

  "Yes, darling?"

  "We've got to be careful, very careful. We can't have any children -- not now."

  She began to cry then, and he took her in his arms and tried to comfort her.

  9.

  It was early evening, and the Year One was just two weeks old.

  David Hughes sat in his own easy chair, in his own home on Palomar Mountain. There was a scotch and soda at his elbow, and the newspaper he always read was in his lap. He was a bridegroom of two weeks, and upstairs his bride was under the shower, and in a little while they would leave for the Dawsons' house, where they had been invited for dinner. After that the Old Man and himself would go to the observatory, leaving Carol and Emily Dawson and perhaps some of the other staff wives to talk about the little things that women talked about.

  It was all very usual and very commonplace, or had been -- once.

  Now the commonplace was a little dreamlike.

  He glanced out of the window and stared at the landscape and thought, in a detached kind of way, that the snow was just as white and cold as it always was, it drifted in the same old way, it stuck to the trees in the same patterns. The sun was red on the horizon with its customary redness, and in its customary place, in that gap in the mountains, just to the left of the crimson-tinted dome housing the forty-eight-inch telescope. The kids near the place where the road curved were building a snow man, and it looked as all snow men usually looked, graceless and lumpy, with the same black coals for eyes, the same twig for a nose, the same wide gash for the mouth, the same resigned and patient look.

  This was your own personal little picture, he reflected, your own miniature, drawn to accustomed scale, with the same strokes of the brush and the same colors.

  Up close, nothing had changed.

  But when you backed away from the picture and then looked at it, everything suddenly changed. You saw with a kind of numb horror that the perspective was all wrong, that the colors clashed and shrieked, that everything in it was monstrous and distorted and unbelievable, and that its theme of the commonplace was suddenly hideous.

  The sun was too big and, although faceless, it seemed to leer and lean with oppressive weight over the horizon, like a round and overhanging and threatening stone. Its red had now darkened and deepened to the color of blood. The snow suddenly became pock-marked and old and dirty, and the trees, their branches and twigs loaded down with snow, no longer looked like delicate figurines of some frosted fairyland, but rather like white skeletons swaying and rattling hollowly in the wind. The dome of the forty-eight-inch, over the ridge, was no longer round and squat, but long and cylindrical, and its glistening tip was a shining fingernail on the end of a finger pointing straight up to a fiery spot which had suddenly materialized in the clear sky.

  Even the kids playing and dancing around the snow man had changed. The red in their cheeks had dissolved away into ashen gray, and their chubby faces had suddenly become wasted and gaunt, and their laughing and yelling became a kind of dismal wailing. The snow man, too, had changed; his lumpy head suddenly seemed to tilt upward, watching the fiery spot in the sky, and there was a leering and malicious smirk on his face.

  You'd been too close before to see it. But now that you were a little farther back, you saw that the picture had a black frame around it.

  And as you watched, you could almost see the black frame contract and creep inward from all four sides, left and right and top and bottom, and begin to encroach upon the picture. You could almost see it blot out the picture little by little, first the sun, and then the landscape and the trees and the observatory on the ridge, and the snow man and the children playing around it, and the room in which you sat.

  And the black frame kept spreading inward, until the picture became a miniature, and finally a tiny square cameo, and finally a pin point of fiery light -- the light in the sky. It was like peering through a long black tunnel and seeing nothing at the other end but this blazing bit of light.

  And then finally the black closed over the light and there was nothing left.

  "David, did you see my nail file?"

  Carol's voice came to him from upstairs. He stirred and shook his head, as though to clear it.

  "It's in the drawer of the end table, I think," he called back.

  It was a little amusing, this, Carol calling for her nail file with the world about to end. It was a little amusing, in a sardonic kind of way. You went through the motions, clung to the commonplace, kept your sanity that way. To go on with the traditional amenities, to hew to the regular routine, was the best defense against the planet, the only real defense. Work eight hours, play eight hours, eat three meals, a drink before dinner, wear blue ties with blue socks, white tie with tails, never trump your partner's ace, kiss your wife when you go out, and kiss her when you come in, remember her birthday and anniversary, and of course Mother's Day, if you had a mother, and see your dentist twice a year.

  Otherwise the planet would get you ahead of its ordained time, as it had already gotten a lot of other people. They were running out in the streets, or going mad, or cutting their throats, or jumping off high buildings, or drinking themselves to death.

  Already the earth was a kind of revolving madhouse, a spinning apple swarming with maddened ants racing in every direction. It was hard to see close up, but the newspaper on David's knee told him the story. He swallowed the last of his highball, picked up the paper, and let his eye rove over the glaring black headlines.

  RUSSIAN DICTATOR ARRIVES IN WASHINGTON

  Goes into Immediate Conference with President at White House

  That was something for the book. Two weeks ago a visit from the King of the Martians would have caused a lesser sensation.

  When the big Soviet plane with the red stars painted on its wings finally taxied to a stop at National Airport, the President and the entire Cabinet were there to meet the
Generalissimo, and the United States Marine Band played the "Internationale."

  The photographs of the meeting in the newspapers were not flattering. Both the President and the Soviet dictator looked like everyone else, like frightened little men. Their faces were haggard; they seemed dazed as they shook hands . . .

  ARMIES DEMOBILIZED ATOM PLANTS CLOSE DOWN Experts Mull Problem Of Bomb Disposal

  The existence of the bombs was almost humorously embarrassing now.

  You couldn't just dump them in some junk yard, or store them in some dusty warehouse somewhere, like obsolete merchandise.

  You couldn't just bury them in the earth somewhere, or drop them deep on the ocean bed.

  The astronomers had pointed out that the other bodies in the solar system had made a slight change in position to compensate for the onrushing planet. Luckily the earth would be spared any violent internal dislocations, but there would still be dangerous stresses and strains on the dry crust and the ocean beds -- too dangerous for the deposit of bombs.

  Maybe, thought David cynically, they ought to run a contest open to all comers -- a million dollars for the best thousand-word statement on what to do with a non-producing atom bomb. Too bad it wasn't a missile like the old-time artillery shells they used a few decades ago. You could always polish up the casings and fill them with dirt and plant flowers in them. Or you could stand them on end and use them as floor ash trays. Whether they held geraniums or cigarette butts, you could get some use out of them, your money wasn't entirely wasted.

  But there was nothing more useless than an atom bomb which wasn't working at its trade.

  David's eye caught a headline:

  MILITARY DISEASE DEPARTMENTS DISBANDED Reveal Plans for Bacteriological Warfare To Supplement A-Bombs

  Yes, thought David grimly, it would have been a nice little war all around. He read through a list of attack diseases at the bottom of the story:

  Botulism, anthrax, pneumatic plague, measles and mumps, glanders, rabbit fever, undulant fever, yellow fever, dengue fever, tick-borne relapsing fever, spotted and "Q" fever, fowl plague, foot and mouth disease, melioidosis, hog cholera, rinderpest.

  David shuddered and turned the page.

  RAILS AND AIR LINES JAMMED AS THOUSANDS RETURN HOME TO CITIES TRAVELERS ON MOVE TO REJOIN FAMILIES Food and Utilities Situation Critical in Urban Centers

  It was like a funeral in the family.

  The planet brought everybody home, even relatives who hadn't seen each other in twenty years or who were bitter and quarreling enemies. There was nothing like a tragedy to bring people together in a kind of morbid brotherhood.

  But this time it wasn't just somebody else's funeral.

  WAVE OF SUICIDES AS THOUSANDS BREAK UNDER STRAIN MANY TAKE LIVES BY HANGING, POISON, SLEEPING PILLS Heart Attacks Take Toll Insane Asylums Filled to Overflowing

  Ever since the first night it had been like that. The planet pressed down hard on the brain, and its shadow, although still invisible to the eye, already darkened the mind.

  Many died before they were born. Thousands of women in the early stages of pregnancy arranged deliberate miscarriages.

  GREAT RELIGIOUS REVIVAL AS CHURCHES JAMMED TO OVERFLOWING Planet Y the Millennium

  In houses of worship all over the world, masses and services were continuous, day and night. People fought to get into churches as they once fought to get into a Hollywood premiere. The people of radio, the hucksters of Boxtop Boulevard in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, looked at their listener-rating reports and stared.

  Religious programs, programs of church services and sermons, hit the highest Hooper rating of all time, far above the big-name orchestras and comedians and variety shows.

  Right now, radio-wise, prayer was commercial, very commercial indeed.

  Give the public what they want. And what the public wanted was comfort, and divine intervention, and deliverance.

  What the public suddenly wanted, David concluded, was God.

  GOVERNORS PARDON CONDEMNED MEN LIFERS RIOT FOR FREEDOM Let Us Live Last Two Years, They Cry INDUSTRIES PARALYZED AS WORKERS STAY HOME Stores, Offices, Schools Close Wheels Grind to Stop as World Staggers under Shock RUN ON BANKS AS DEPOSITORS RUSH TO WITHDRAW LIFE SAVINGS Orgy of Spending, Black Markets, Inflation Already a Threat DAWSON DISCOVERY DISPUTED BY SELF-STYLED HOLY MAN OF HOGBACK MOUNTAIN, ARKANSAS I Saw Planet First, Claims Ozark Prophet, and I Didn't Need No Telescope Neither Saw It in a Vision from the Lord Swears Lord Promised World an Extra Two Years for Extra Prayer And Repentance

  David threw the newspaper on the couch and went upstairs. Carol, a vision of loveliness in a long black evening dress, was combing her hair before the mirror.

  "Hurry, darling," she said, "or we'll be late for dinner."

  It was almost a technique now.

  You deliberately and desperately stuck to the commonplace, and it was a kind of pathetic game. You insulated yourself, never mentioned the planet if you could help it -- tried not to think of it.

  In order to stay sane, you had to make believe that it wasn't up there in the heavens and rushing onward.

  But it was there.

  That was the fact, the inescapable fact, and there was no privacy from it, no escape. Not even in sleep was there any escape any more, for the planet appeared in dreams, everybody's dreams, large and round and menacing and murderous.

  As David unbuttoned his shirt he turned on the small television set on the night table.

  The video screen focused on a crowd of people, and the camera panned over to a floodlighted entrance to the White House.

  An announcer said something about a momentous meeting, and before he finished, the doors swung open and the President appeared with a bushy-haired man in a tight uniform and wearing the star of the Soviet Union.

  They posed before the camera. Then, in an unrehearsed impulse, they threw their arms around each other's shoulders.

  You had to hand it to the planet, David reflected.

  Whatever it did, it was changing things -- and changing them in a hell of a hurry.

  10.

  In April of the Year One, a dramatic announcement came from Palomar.

  Dr. Charles Dawson was preparing to photograph the face of Planet Y.

  He had hooked up a complicated photographic setup, using sensitive infra-red plates, and the apparatus had a special talent. It could ignore what it did not want to see. By scanning the face of Planet Y a hundred thousand times and delivering to the camera only the features which appeared on a majority of the pictures it saw, it could eliminate all distortions due to poor seeing or other temporary causes, thus taking full advantage of the light-gathering power of the Big Eye.

  Already astronomers knew certain basic facts about the onrushing planet. It had a mass hundreds of times greater than that of the earth, and its period of rotation was eight months. They knew that it was a cold and inert body, surfaced by a frozen layer of methane and carbon dioxide, and that its reflective power was approximately that of sandstone.

  It would become visible to the naked eye in September, a mere pin point in the sky, and thereafter would rapidly grow larger. And the catastrophe, the collision, would occur on the far side of the sun in relation to the earth's orbit.

  But now the Old Man of Palomar was going to look straight into the face of Death itself. He was getting ready to give the world an advance showing on how the Killer would look when finally it hung in the heavens, clearly visible to the naked eye.

  The news from Palomar was an immediate sensation. People all over the world showed a morbid and almost unbearable curiosity to look upon the face of their executioner. Newspapermen, astronomers, and other observers converged on Palomar.

  This was the preview.

  But whatever face Death wore, it would soon become as familiar to every man, woman, and child as the face of the man in the moon.

  The night of the photographing was clear and cold.

  David and Carol walked up the road toward the observator
y. Carol had been in San Diego all day on a shopping trip, and she had insisted on coming along.

  "Everyone's going crazy tonight, David," she had said. "You can cut the excitement with a knife. I've never seen so many newspapermen in one place before -- not only from the American papers, but from the foreign ones too. They've been coming in all day. And I want to be in on the fun too."

  He had noticed that she seemed pale, nervous, after her return from San Diego.

  "It was the ride up," she had explained. "The roads, David, they were terribly icy. I thought we were going to skid right over a precipice a couple of times. And anyway, I kept thinking about tonight and worrying about the seeing. But they've already measured it, and I understand it's going to be good."