The Big Eye

by Max Ehrlich

  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.

  Poverty began to disappear. At the end of the first few months of the Year One, not a beggar was seen on the streets of any metropolis in the world, not even in Shanghai, Bombay, Cairo, and other cities which had once swarmed with hungry supplicants. The various governments surprisingly discovered that they had all the resources it took to feed and clothe and otherwise take care of its people. It was only a question, to coin an old, old phrase, of proper distribution. Governments had no future to worry about, no more armies and navies to support. The national debt became a figure of speech. And although death was still certain, taxes were canceled.

  Everywhere, in business and industry, the wheels began to slow to a stop.

  But Government was active, and changing fast.

  Politicians, having no re-election to worry about, suddenly became representatives of the people. In Washington the Democrats and Republicans almost immediately merged into a single party. The ordinary issues that had brought forth oratory and filibusters suddenly became obsolete. The Big Eye stared down impartially upon the sunny shores of California as well as the rock-bound coasts of Maine.

  And this was only the beginning.

  In July a world government came into being.

  The Federation of the World, as it was called, took over the old United Nations setup on East River Drive in New York City as its headquarters.

  The Secretariat skyscraper bordering Forty-second Street, the Library, the General Assembly Building, the giant office building on Forty-eighth Street once again blazed with light. The hedges on the terrace were clipped, the grass trimmed, the broken windows replaced, and the corridors scrubbed.

  There was a tremendous dedication, with hundreds of thousands jamming the area. Batteries of huge searchlights blazed from surrounding skyscrapers, bathing the area in brilliant white light. The East River sparkled with many-colored reflections as one gigantic fireworks display after another boomed in the summer sky and exploded in glittering cascades.

  A Supreme Council of the World was elected by the assembled delegates of every nation on earth.

  The ex-President of the United States and the ex-dictator of the Soviet Union were elected to serve in alternating chairmanships.

  There was no problem as to tenure, and the bylaws of the World Constitution held no provision for any re-election.

  On the following morning the New York Times devoted its entire editorial page to the event. The lead editorial said in part:

  Today a wistful dream nurtured by mankind for centuries has come true.

  World government is a fact.

  It is both wonderful and pitiful. It is wonderful in that we have lived to see it come. It is pitiful that we shall have it for such a short duration.

  Under the glare of the Big Eye, world government had to come. It was inevitable, and natural, and practical. The mO' ment the dramatic announcement broke from Palomar, it was on its way. In the past months we have watched the two great conflicting systems, capitalism and Communism, crumble, disintegrate. We have seen nationalism, isolationism, and all the other isms that separated state from state, man from man, go down into ashes.

  And out of the ashes has risen one great universal system -- worldism.

  After a million years of ignorant infancy, man has finally shed his swaddling clothes. If the Big Eye is a tragic miracle, so, too, is the speed with which it has changed the pattern of our lives. As it swiftly began to shorten the celestial abyss between the earth and itself, it became a powerful catalyst, pushing the reaction forward with dramatic speed. In a few months it did what man in all the centuries of his history had failed to do.

  Under the lash of fear, under the baleful glare of the Big Eye, men and nations both suddenly stopped being afraid of each other in their one common fear.

  Now they are coming together in universal b
rotherhood.

  The Big Eye will one day bring total darkness, but in the interim it has brought its own light. It has broken up, at one powerful stroke, the false gods invented by man -- the legends, the superstitions, the errors and lies and prejudices and hypocrisies accumulated in the human mind for thousands of years.

  The overwhelming tragecy is that the new idea has such a short time to live. But there is still another tragedy we cannot fail to note here.

  The real tragedy is that we did not begin to create this new world back some fifteen years ago, when the first bomb fell on Hiroshima. The tragedy is that all through the late forties and fifties, as the world broke asunder into two worlds, we failed to understand that the bomb was a kind of Planet Y itself, in its devastating threat to mankind.

  Had we recognized the fact then, that the bomb was simply a man-made Big Eye, we might have begun our new Federation of the World in 1945 instead of today.

  How could we have been so blind?

  Why did we, beginning from the end of the last war, through the late forties and the early fifties, move apart into hostile and nationalistic and suspicious segments, instead of coming together as we have now?

  Why did it take a celestial manifestation to bring us to our senses?

  Why?

  On the third of September, in the Year One, the Big Eye became visible to the human eye.

  It appeared as a tiny pin point high in the heavens, shortly after dusk.

  As time went by the pin point thickened into a dime, a penny, a quarter, then a half dollar, varying in color, like the moon. Finally it was a rotting, overripe tangerine hanging in the sky, and the Eye emerged from a shadowy outline to become sharp and clear.

  And, like the human eye, it seemed to reflect mood and intent to the viewer.

  Sometimes it was dead and expressionless and indifferent. At other times it was bloated and swollen and puffy, as though suffering from some kind of heavenly hang-over. It was capricious, too. It was sly; it flirted and beckoned. It smirked cynically; it leered triumphantly. Sometimes it was hard and threatening, malicious and mischievous, smug and angry.

  It was never a shifty eye. It knew what it was about; it was a knowing eye; its purpose was plain and understood.

  And the times when it was visible in the day or night sky, whether you saw it in America, or Siberia, or Australia, or Arabia, it never looked at other people elsewhere.

  It always looked directly at you.

  It was impossible to stare the Big Eye down. It followed you everywhere, like a conscience. And as it grew bigger and bigger it became heavier and heavier, so that your back and shoulders and head seemed to ache with its oppressive weight, and your feet dragged more slowly.

  It was particularly vivid when the moon was invisible. Stray dogs howled and bayed at it in the night when it shone alone in the sky. But when the moon appeared with it and the two competed for supremacy, the dogs seemed confused and uncertain. They merely whimpered a little or stopped barking entirely.

  At the end of the Year One the moon paled into a sickly white, and the Big Eye dominated the night sky.

  It hung high overhead, tinting the night, so that it was never really night at all, but a kind of murky and oppressive sunset from dusk until dawn.

  And it kept coming on, hurtling down, nearer and nearer, leering malignantly as it came.

  As the calendar shortened, the Big Eye became bigger, bigger, and bigger, rounder and rounder, cruder and cruder, brighter and brighter, redder and redder. . . .

  David Hughes and Joe Morgan, the Palomar spectrograph man, came out of the air-line terminal on Forty-second Street.

  "Taxi!" yelled Morgan. "Hey, taxi!"

  A Yellow Cab stopped short, its brakes squealing. David and his former roommate threw in their luggage, slammed the door, and settled back.

  "First the New Weston Hotel on Madison," David told the driver. "We'll check in there -- it'll only take a minute. Then you can take us to the Hayden Planetarium on Central Park West."

  The driver nodded, and they hegan to move through a dense wedge of confused traffic.

  It was late afternoon in December, and David's first trip to New York since the previous November.

  A week ago the Old Man had received an invitation from Dr. Herrick, director of the Planetarium, to lecture on the Big Eye before a Science Council seminar of the world government.

  Dr. Dawson had politely declined, for reasons of health, and had offered to send his first assistant and his spectrograph man to substitute for him. Herrick had accepted, and David and Morgan were on their way to confer with the director before lecturing the next morning.

  The cabdriver was a small, bull-necked, bald-headed man. His picture framed in the rear of the taxi said he was Frank Leone. And although in the grimy photograph he glared villainously at them from beneath a sinister-looking cap, he turned out to be quite friendly and garrulous.

  As he waited for the light at Lexington and Forty-second he turned and asked:

  "Been out of town long, gents?"

  "About a year," answered David.

  "How's the big town look now?"

  "Different. It's changed."

  "You said it, mister. It's changed plenty."

  David noticed that the driver was wearing an expensive overcoat and hand-stitched gloves. He looked more like a prosperous businessman than a taxi driver. A sign of the times, thought David. Only a year to go, what was the use of saving money? Buy the best, live high, eat, drink, and be merry.

  Spend every dime, cash in the insurance, go to town, live.

  He was willing to bet that Frank Leone's wife had a mink coat. He looked out of the window, and as the cab lurched forward with the light he saw that the streets were jammed with what seemed to be hundreds of thousands of people on the Lexington block between Forty-second and Forty-third.

  And David noticed that practically every woman in the crowd wore a mink coat.

  He turned to Joe Morgan, but Morgan was looking up through the glass roof of the taxi, staring at the towering height of the Chrysler Building. There was awe on his face.

  "Look at that, Dave," he said. "Look at that. Not a pane of glass in a window above the first floor."

  David had noticed the same thing when they had come out of the terminal. The upper stories of the surrounding skyscrapers were all geometrically lined with open, gaping, rectangular holes. Occasionally the sun glinted on a jagged fragment of glass which still clung to a window frame. They hadn't bothered to replace the windows after the tremor of last November.

  "Sure," said the driver, Leone. "All these office buildings are ghost buildings. Most of 'em are shut off above the first floors; the elevators ain't even running. The business sections all over the city are ghost towns."

  "Well," said Morgan, "it makes sense. These empty offices, I mean. Accountants, businessmen, they haven't anything to do any more. And take lawyers. No use in lawyers coming down to the office. No one's making any more wills, under the circumstances. There's no more building going on and no titles to work out. And as for contracts "

  "Yeah," interrupted Frank Leone, "who needs a contract now? You make a deal with a guy these days, you don't sign any paper. He takes your word, you take his word, you trust each other. Who wants to kill the other guy, when this damned thing up there in the sky is going to come down and blow us all to hell?" The driver threw on his brakes, bumped a big limousine in front of him. "That's why there ain't a courthouse open today in New York, from Brooklyn to the Bronx. The lawyers and the judges didn't have nothing to do, so they went home."

  They inched ahead in the crush of traffic, and David noted that the insurance companies and the banks, too, were closed. The hedges against the future had been clipped at the roots.

  But it was the crowd jamming up the sidewalks, barely moving in either direction, that fascinated both David and Morgan. This was a boom town, and the people had a boom look, the look of free spenders. They seemed to be on a holiday. David coul
d see no one hurrying, hustling ahead, as they did in the old days, before the Year One.

  But there was more to the crowd than numbers. It was a crowd with a mood.

  In the old days, before the Big Eye, the people in a New York crowd looked sullen; they hungered for privacy; they fought and elbowed and resented each other.

  Now the faces on the sidewalk looked different.

  They looked almost happy, in a taut kind of way. They seemed to say, "Sure, the Big Eye is looking down at me, but it's watching you, buddy, and you, lady, and you and you, and everyone else in this crowd. We're all in the same boat."

  David found that he was more relaxed himself, just being here. The tension of the thing in the sky was loosened a little. Palomar was lonely compared to this, and the Big Eye, when its gaze was full, had a trick of picking out its personal target more readily. It was more intimate because you were few in number.