by Max Ehrlich
David had smiled a little at that. Already Carol was talking like an astronomer's wife. They never asked, like ordinary wives, how things were down at the office. They always asked anxiously how the seeing was. If it was one, that was excellent, the best. Two was good. Three was fair, and so on down the line.
The wind, as they moved up the hill, was like the edge of an ax, cutting deep into the bone, and they half walked, half slithered up the slippery road, huddling close to each other for both support and mutual warmth. The crunch-crunch of their feet as they passed the lighted cottages on each side of the road seemed abnormally loud, the only sound in the night.
Night and silence.
This was the normal state of the universe, thought David. Up there in the night of the sky, the stars and planets, like tiny illuminated vessels, moved slowly and silently across a dark and limpid sea. There were billions of them, pitiful suns lost in eternity, shining by their own light, driven by the breath of God. They were like specks of dust seen in a beam of light, or in the slanting rays of sunshine through a window, worlds and universes, lost in space, gliding, turning, spinning, whirling, drifting, vibrating.
Yet, thought David, so perfectly balanced were these bodies in the universe, so delicate and dependent were they in their rhythm upon each other, that a man, by the mere stretching forth of his hand, could theoretically change the moon on its course.
He thought of the planet, of Planet Y, and he thought of the death it would bring. And he recalled Dr. Dawson discussing death one morning after the dome had closed and the work night was over.
"After all, David," the Old Man had said, "what is fourscore and ten years compared to the life of the stars and the planets? A lightning flash on a summer day? A drop of rain in a cloudburst?"
David had admitted the comparison, had agreed that it was no more than that when you stood away from a man's life and looked at it in proper perspective.
"But in a sense," he had said to the Old Man, "the whole concept of a man's life is in his own mind. To him a lifetime is forever, the beginning and end of all things."
"True," Dr. Dawson had replied. "But it is pure ego, David, for man to believe that all creation began and ended in his personal segment of infinity. In the heavens an eternity has already passed, and an eternity is yet to come. Up there some stars are being born, some are adolescent, some aged and dying, some dead. In the history of creation, a billion years, a hundred billion years, passes like a day."
But, David reflected, men didn't see it that way. They lived their pitiful era in astronomical time, as though the era would never come to an end. They lived, famously or humbly, making money or dreaming dreams, living in glory and living in sorrow, loving, fighting, sleeping, dying, goaded on by self-indulgence or ambition, believing with an incredible belief that their careers, their lives, their futures were the most serious, the most important, the most weighty in the universe.
Yet if there had been no Planet Y, the earth, dependent upon the sun for life, would have died a short time later, a mere hundred million years later. The sun would finally lose its warmth and light and roll along through space, a dark and invisible and forgotten star, an icy graveyard.
And when Planet Y and the earth finally clashed, there would not be the sound of it in the void, nor even an echo, nor a ripple, to mar the still serenity of the universe.
David suddenly felt Carol tug on his arm, and they stopped walking for a moment.
"David," she said quietly, looking up into the cold and crackling sky, "where will we finally see the planet -- up there?"
He bordered the constellation for her, pointed out a star. "That's where it is now, Carol. But when it finally becomes visible its position will have changed."
"Oh." Carol's face was rapt and dreamy. "It's funny, darling. Up to tonight I was afraid of it, of death. But now -- now I'm not afraid any more. I keep thinking of life." She turned to him, and her eyes were suddenly wet with tears. "And do you know why?"
He shook his head.
"I was in San Diego today," she said. "But I lied to you, David. It wasn't because I wanted to do any shopping. I -- I had to see Dr. Ramsey."
He stared at her. "Dr. Ramsey?"
"You see, David," she said simply, "I'm going to have a baby."
Up ahead on the summit, in the squat, curved white building, in Palomar Observatory, men were feverishly preparing to look at the face of their executioner; they had contrived instruments to do so, trembling in their anticipation.
But David had forgotten it now.
The affair of the heavens had for the moment become relatively unimportant. His mind was confused and whirling with an earthy problem.
His child would be a year old when the end came.
It was wrong, he thought savagely, wrong. When you brought a child into the world, you owed it a lifetime.
But he knew that his concern was partly selfish.
Carol was pregnant, and for the better part of a year she would be denied to him.
God damn it, he thought furiously, helplessly, he was human, as human as anybody. Why did this have to happen?
Why?
"Everything set, David?" asked Dr. Dawson.
"Yes, sir." David answered mechanically, almost absently, still preoccupied with his own intimate problem. "I've checked all the apparatus. Wallace had some trouble with the Bowen image-slicer. There was some variance in the temperature of the coude room, and we were afraid it would distort the image delivered into the high-dispersion spectrograph. But everything's all right now."
"Good." The Old Man crushed his cigar in an ash tray and rose. "You've instructed the newspaper and radio people to stay in the auditorium until the experiment is over?"
"Yes, Doctor. Francis will be there to see that no one wanders out into the observatory."
"Well, David, I guess we're ready to go." The Old Man lifted his phone, dialed two numbers, and said: "All right, Fred, we're ready. You can bring the roof down now."
The Old Man's voice was almost dry in his calm. But David knew he was excited, excited inside. It was a big night, and the world was waiting. It was the biggest night they would ever have from here on in. The face of the planet was something you could not predict or calculate in advance, or even guess at.
Whatever the big telescope showed would be brand new, and it would be just as exciting to astronomers as to laymen.
They walked out into the observatory itself. It was silent now, bathed in the weird glow of soft red and green lights hidden in the cornice. The two men were alone, walking noiselessly on the rubber parquet as they headed toward the elevator.
David forgot his own troubles for the moment. The observatory still affected him, still awed him a little. Walking through it alone, he had always felt a little like an intruder. There was something about it, its hushed and reverent silence, its dim lighting, its echoing and arching vault, that reminded him of a cathedral. He had seen boisterous tourists enter it, and suddenly their voices had dropped to whispers, and they had taken off their hats and walked softly on tiptoes.
Being a little nearer to the stars here at Palomar was, in a sense, being a little nearer to God. The observatory was the last way station to the heavens.
Yet walking through the observatory now with Dr. Dawson, David felt somehow that they and the building itself were already in a kind of celestial motion. It was of course an illusion, you knew it was an illusion, you knew that this building was anchored firmly to the granite body of Palomar Mountain.
Still, here in this place, in the ghostly light and the complete silence, a kind of hypnotic spell stole over you, and already you were moving, soaring through space, as though the great round building had somehow burst from its earthy moorings and was carrying you along with it, a pygmylike passenger, through the starry vault overhead.
As they came out of the elevator on the mezzanine, a motor purred suddenly somewhere deep below. It began to throb and beat, throb and beat, like a great heart. The dome b
egan to open, like an orange slowly unfolding into two perfect halves, and a cold blast of air came straight downward.
After the main floor, the transition to the mezzanine was almost startling. Men of the observatory staff were swarming about the place, running up and down stairways, carrying photographic plates, sheets of calculations, and bound on other errands. They seemed to be moving almost feverishly against a deadline, as though the onrushing planet overhead might decide to veer off and run away before they could catch it in their instruments.
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.