The Big Eye

by Max Ehrlich

  Here, although it was still personal, you could in some measure share the impact with thousands of other people. You could, like cattle huddling together flank to flank under a thunderstorm, find a certain amount of comfort in the nearness of others.

  However, David told himself, it was still daylight, and perhaps he had only the illusion of comfort, a temporary feeling of security, here in the bright sunlight.

  But the night was coming, and then the Big Eye would hang in the sky, low and leering.

  Then David heard Joe Morgan's awed voice.

  "I never saw anything like this. The mobs j amming up this sidewalk. Where do they all come from?"

  "From everywhere, mister," answered the man at the wheel. "From jerk towns, from the farms, from all over. This town is jammed to the ceiling. You're lucky if you can find a place to sleep. They're sleeping out in the parks, anywhere, no matter where it is. Every train, every plane, and every bus coming in are unloading 'em. I was reading in the paper they got ten million people right here in Manhattan right now, let alone the other boroughs."

  "Back a year ago November, this town looked like a morgue," said David.

  "Yeah. Now look at it!" Frank Leone shook his head. "It's murder just to drive a hack five blocks."

  "Why are they all coming to New York?" asked Morgan.

  "New York, Chicago, Detroit, it's all the same. People feel better when they're in crowds. The big cities are getting the play. They're all looking to escape, looking for entertainment, for a good time before they die, booze, shows, women. If you got nothing to do tonight, take a walk down Broadway and around Times Square. You'll see something there, mister."

  As they turned off Lexington and moved west on Forty-ninth toward Park Avenue, Joe Morgan got back to the subject of the crowds.

  "Seems to be a lot of foreigners on the streets," he remarked. "Asiatics and Europeans alike."

  "Yeah," said Frank Leone. "Only nobody calls 'em foreigners any more. Last summer, when they opened up this here world government over on East River Drive, they let down all the bars of immigration. So they all started to come in -- Chinese, Japs, Dutchmen, Russians, everybody. Guess they all figured the U.S. was dreamland, and they wanted to see it before the Big Eye got 'em." The driver grinned. "The first few days it felt kind of funny -- like this wasn't the U.S.A. any more."

  "And after that?" asked David.

  "I dunno," answered Leone. "It was funny, how you got used to it. Nobody gave a damn where anybody came from any more, I guess. Same way in Russia. Me and the wife took a trip over there in September. Blew all our insurance policies in on it."

  "How'd you like the Soviet?" asked Morgan.

  "It stinks. It's all right to visit, but not to live in. Give me New York any time. But the people are all right, once you get to know 'em. And they don't call it the Soviet any. more. Communism is a dead turkey over there. They tore off all the signs and painted over the walls, like they did here. But getting back to the U.S., it's funny how things change. Take the taxi business now."

  "Yes?" asked David. "What about it?"

  "We got a lot of guys driving hacks that used to be in the Red Army. The doughnut-and-coffee joints near the big hack stands are full of 'em. They drive like they're crazy, and I guess they are. When the big Irish cops around here argue with 'em, they go crazy." He grinned back at David and Morgan through the reflector. "Funny how times have changed. Before the Big Eye came I would have murdered any one of these Ivans if I could have got close enough. Now -- some of my best friends are Russians."

  "Look out, driver!" David yelled suddenly.

  Frank Leone jammed on his brakes. The cab came within a foot of hitting three children crossing against the light at Park. The youngsters, their faces white and frightened, scurried for safety to the opposite sidewalk.

  "Those goddamn kids," sweated Leone. "There ought to be a law to keep 'em off the downtown streets. Ten times a day I almost run 'em down."

  "Where do all these kids come from?" asked Morgan. "School out or something?"

  "Ain't you heard?" said the driver. "Every school in town closed the week after they found the Big Eye."

  "No schools open?" David was surprised.

  "Not a one."

  "Seems funny," remarked Morgan. "I don't get it."

  "Don't you?" The driver began to explain patiently: "Look. Take me, Frank Leone. I got five kids. In the old days, before that damned Big Eye came along, I worked nights, slept days. My kids got on my nerves when they came home from school; sometimes I used to swear at them. Now it's different. Now I can't see enough of 'em. A guy likes to get as much as he can out of his family at a time like this, wants to keep his kids home where he can be with 'em all the time."

  As they turned on Madison from Forty-ninth, David thought of Carol, heavy with child, back at Palomar.

  And he noted, as they turned, that a long line of people stood on Forty-ninth toward Fifth, waiting patiently to get into St. Patrick's Cathedral.

  The cab drew up in front of the New Weston.

  "What good is education for kids now?" Frank Leone concluded. "There ain't no future left for them to use it in."

  They told Leone to wait. Then David and Morgan went into the lobby of the hotel.

  The place was crowded with people looking for accommodations. David was grateful that Dr. Herrick had made reservations for them long in advance.

  As the bellboy took their luggage Morgan asked where he could find the nearest drugstore.

  "What's the matter, Joe?" David said.

  "I don't know. Feel a little under the weather, I guess. Maybe I'm a little airsick or something. I never could take planes."

  "Look," said David, "why don't you go upstairs and lie down awhile? I'll talk to Herrick alone and go over the routine for tomorrow morning."

  "You're sure you don't mind?"

  David shook his head. "No use in both of us going over to the Planetarium. I'll see you here at the hotel in a couple of hours,"

  At the Hayden Planetarium, David spent two hours with Dr. Herrick. They planned to present an illustrated lecture, with David doing the talking and Morgan showing the plates.

  Finally, when David rose to go, the director said:

  "David, you can't be very busy at Palomar now, under the circumstances."

  "No. Planet Y has made observation pretty difficult. Too much interference from its light. We'll probably close for good in a few months."

  As Dr. Herrick escorted David out of the office he said:

  "David, I wouldn't want to take you away from Dr. Dawson. But there's a position open to you on the staff here at the Planetarium any time you want it. Of course it'll be routine and unspectacular, but we expect to stay open here" -- Dr. Herrick hesitated -- "until a month or two before Christmas."

  David thanked him and left.

  When he got back to his room at the hotel Joe Morgan was just coming out of the shower and whistling.

  "Feel much better now, Dave. An hour's nap did it. By the way, what are you doing tonight?"

  David shrugged. "Nothing."

  "Look, Dave." Joe seemed a little apologetic. "I made a phone call. There's a girl I used to know here in New York. I had some ideas about her at one time, but they never came true. But when I talked to her on the phone she sounded a lot different. I think the planet's changed her, and I'm going to find out." He hesitated. "I can make it for two. Like to come along?"

  David shook his head. "Thanks just the same, Joe."

  "Okay." Morgan shrugged. "I don't want to corrupt you, or anything like that, and you know how much I think of your wife. But with Carol the way she is, and with just a few months leit, I thought you'd -- "

  "Sure, Joe," said David. "But right now I'm not in the mood. You go ahead. I'll just go out and wander around town."

  It was seven o'clock when David left the hotel.

  As he walked west down Fiftieth toward Broadway, he saw the Big Eye.

  It had taken up its post just
as dusk had come, and now it hung directly over the huge RCA sign atop the Rockefeller Plaza skyscraper.

  It was a little bilious now, its color washed and diluted by the great glare of light thrown up from the amusement district beyond.

  It followed David as he walked; it stared at him with a fixed and intent look, until mercifully the intervening buildings hid it.

  A wind was blowing, a sharp, raw, and incessant wind, and it moaned and wailed through the windowless rectangles in the Rocke -- « feller Center group.

  But if the upper floors of the buildings were dead, the streets swarmed with life.

  David had barely crossed Fifth Avenue when he ran into the crowds.

  They were lined along the sidewalks, waiting to get into the theaters.

  The small theater at the Plaza, once a newsreel house, had changed. Now it sported a giant marquee, and although the original sign still spelled "Newsreel Theater," the legend in lights on the blazing marquee told a different story:

  HOUSE OF LAUGHS ONE SOLID HOUR OF LAUGHS THREE CARTOONS, TWO FUNNY SHORT SUBJECTS

  The signs on the outside lobby indicated the theater ran a continuous performance, twenty-four hours a day. They offered the, balm that was box office:

  FORGET THE BIG EYE FOR AN HOUR COME IN AND LAUGH

  The crowd blocked the sidewalk; it lined up snakelike in a continuous line to the Radio City Music Hall just down the block; it spilled over into the street and on the other side of the street, where it was kept in check by ushers and police.

  The faces of the people looked chalk-white in the garish light; they chattered incessantly, their voices high-pitched and shrill; they complained bitterly about having to wait so long.

  The strange part of it was that David heard no one laugh.

  Between Sixth and Seventh, just short of Broadway itself, he noticed a new and unfamiliar group of establishments.

  On the second and third stories of the cheap hotels there were neoii signs just above discreetly curtained windows.

  They bore odd names like "The Careless Hour," "The Green Slipper," "The Mirror," "The Oasis," "Katie's," "Edna's."

  And under each sign was a single and discreet word: "Hostesses."

  David inched his way through the dense crowds until he came to Broadway.

  Broadway was obscene in its incandescent brilliance.

  Every marquee was blazing, every electric sign; the dense crowds moved in a great bath of white light. On the corner of Forty-sixth Street a huge spectacular showed an animated clown, laughing and dancing and jumping up and down, advertising a current comedy at one of the big movie houses.

  The clown laughed and chuckled; his roars came from his illmninated belly and rolled over the street.

  But only the clown laughed.

  On the huge television screen, the same one where the old Camel cigarette sign had once been located, a network comedian kept up a fire of running gags, which instantaneously poured into the living rooms of ten million homes, coast to coast.

  But on Broadway the gags fell flat.

  Nobody laughed.

  Yet the marquees indicated that every show was a comedy, every comedy a hit. The producers had learned early that a serious drama, no matter how artistic, would run no longer than a night.

  The legitimate theaters were offering performances around the clock instead of just matinee and evening. They accomplished this by the use of rotating stock companies. When one company finished on the stage, there was an hour intermission, and then another company took over.

  And everywhere the "Standing Room Only" sign was out.

  David managed to travel two blocks. He was mauled, propelled by the thick crowd, crushed, shoved along. He found the experience physically exhausting.

  Finally, almost in desperation, he decided on a movie and waited in line. And after a two-hour wait he entered the darkened movie house.

  A light domestic comedy, a farce, was on the screen, and once inside the theater, it was different.

  The people laughed in waves, they guffawed, they split their sides hysterically, shrilly.

  Within the theater they sat under a starry sky devoid of the Big Eye.

  The roof of the rococo interior was designed as a romantic heaven, splattered with tiny electric stars; it even sported a dull moon near the second balcony. This heaven was free, wonderfully free, of any foreign invader.

  And so the audience laughed, and David laughed with them.

  But when he finally came out on the sidewalk again he felt let down, depressed. The real sky was overhead again, and although the Big Eye was temporarily invisible in the wash of Broadway light, he knew it was there.

  It was there and coming, closer and closer. . . .

  It was midnight.

  David came back to his room at the New Weston and found that Joe Morgan had not yet returned.

  For a few minutes he puttered around the room aimlessly, restlessly, having no desire to go to bed.

  The movie had provided him with a three-hour anesthesia. But now he needed more, something different, something stronger, to take the pressure off.

  He thought of Carol and her swollen abdomen and the nights that his whole body had ached for want of her.

  It began to ache now. . . .

  He thought of the places with the neon signs, the curtained windows, the names, "The Careless Hour," "The Oasis," "Katie's," and the others, licensed and available, and the beckoning signs, "Hostesses" . . .

  The phone rang.

  The operator asked him to wait a moment, Palomar was calling.

  Then suddenly Carol's voice came over the wire. She was hysterical, sobbing.

  "David! David! You've got to come back right away!"

  "What is it, Carol? What's the matter?"

  "It -- it's Mrs. Dawson. She had an automobile accident just after you left -- died an hour ago. And Dr. Dawson's had a stroke!"

  For three agonizing hours David waited in the hotel room until Joe Morgan returned.

  Then they took a cab for the airport.

  13.

  At San Diego, while Joe Morgan was getting the car, David phoned Carol.

  "Mrs. Dawson was driving one of the station wagons, David," Carol explained tearfully. "The roads up here are slippery from the ice -- and, well, the car turned over. She lingered for hours, and Dr. Wilk did everything he could. But it was no use."

  At the moment David's mind couldn't concentrate on Mrs. Dawson. She was dead; that was gone and done with now. He was thinking of the Old Man.

  "How about Dr. Dawson, Carol? How's he taking it?"

  "I -- David, I'm afraid. When he heard the news he had a heart attack -- almost collapsed. Dr. Wilk ordered him to bed, but he wouldn't go. He insisted on staying at Mrs. Dawson's bedside -- till -- till "

  Carol's voice broke, and she was unable to finish.

  David told her that he and Morgan were just starting out in the car, and she said:

  "Better come right to Dr. Dawson's house, David. I'll be there -- everybody on the staff is there now. And, darling, be careful when you get upon the mountain. It's beginning to snow hard."

  The last few miles to Palomar were a nightmare of driving. The snow whipped in horizontally against the windshield, a relentless tattoo propelled by a screaming wind.

  Finally, however, they plowed through the observatory road, up the incline, and stopped in front of the "Residence" where the Daw-sons lived. The road and driveway were clogged with cars, and the house was brilliantly lit. As David and Joe Morgan slogged through the snow toward the door they saw that the rooms within were crowded with people, their shadows moving restlessly behind the snow-frozen windows.

  It was just getting dark before David had a chance to talk to Dr. Wilk.

  The colony physician had finally come out of the Old Man's room, and his face was grave as he answered David's anxious question.

  "Dr. Dawson's in fairly bad shape at the moment, David. The shock didn't do his heart any good. He'll have to st
ay in bed -- get a complete rest for a few weeks. That's the physical picture. But there's another one -- perhaps even more serious."

  "You mean -- his mind?"

  Dr. Wilk nodded. "We'll have to wait and see. He acted very strangely near the end."

  David gripped the physician by the lapels of his coat. "What do you mean. Dr. Wilk?"