The Big Eye

by Max Ehrlich

  "It's a little early to say anything definite as yet. But I am quite positive, David, that Dr. Dawson has been out of his mind for the past few hours. Just after Mrs. Dawson died he said something very strange."

  "Yes? What was it. Dr. Wilk?"

  "He kept moaning that he had to stand there and watch his wife die, that he could have saved her, but there was nothing he could do."

  He could have saved her, but there was nothing he could do. . . .

  David tried to analyze that, but it didn't make sense.

  "What about Mrs. Dawson? Was she unconscious at the end?"

  The physician nodded.

  "And she never had a chance?"

  "On the contrary, David, she did. She was suffering from shock, severe contusions, and internal injuries. But at the beginning she had a fairly good chance. The trouble was that she gave up -- she didn't have any will to fight."

  "You mean she didn't want to live?"

  "I'm sure that was the case," said Dr. Wilk. "It's a phenomenon that we in the medical profession have noted recently in an increasing number of borderline cases similar to hers. We've always said that it's instinctive for a human being to fight for his life, to want to live." The physician hesitated. "But now I don't know "

  "You think the planet affected her somehow. Doctor?"

  "Yes. My theory is that Mrs. Dawson knew, deep in her subconscious mind, that she had little time left, even if she did recover. And this militated against her fight to survive, broke her will to resist. Perhaps it's wrong to rationalize, but it's the only explanation I can offer. And as I said, our medical associations have several reports of the same thing happening elsewhere in the country. Patients who could have won through simply gave up."

  "And you explained this theory to Dr. Dawson, sir?"

  The physician nodded, then put on his hat and coat. "It's a great loss to Palomar, David. Emily Dawson was a fine woman. I don't know how Dr. Dawson is going to get along without her -- for the remainder of the time we have left."

  "Perhaps I'd better stay here with him tonight," said David mechanically.

  "No," answered the physician. "That won't be necessary. I've already asked Francis to sit up with Dr. Dawson for the rest of the night. And in the morning I'll arrange for a day and night nurse."

  When David and Carol went out they found it impossible to move the car in the deepening and drifting snow. And so, with heads down against the fierce, battering smash of the snow-needled wind, they plodded through the snow toward their cottage.

  As he stumbled along, David thought bitterly, Why did Emily Dawson, why did anyone have to die now? Why wasn't there a moratorium on death under the Big Eye ? To die now was a tragedy far deeper, more profound, than ever before.

  Emily Dawson was near sixty; she was an old woman by calendar years. Under normal standards she was almost ready to go. But there were no longer any normal standards, and the calendar was different and brand new.

  By the new calendar, in this, the Year Two, Emily Dawson had died a young woman, with almost half a lifetime left to live.

  "David! David!"

  David woke suddenly out of an uneasy slumber to find Carol shaking him. He opened his eyes to look up uncomprehendingly into her frightened face. Then, half drugged with sleep, he realized that the doorbell was ringing insistently.

  "Someone's at the door, David," Carol whispered. "The doorbell's been ringing for over a minute. I can't imagine who it could be out in this storm now. It's almost one o'clock."

  David, lying warm in bed, lingered a moment, hoping the ringing would stop. But it continued, became more insistent, more urgent than ever. Finally he cursed softly, got out of bed, put on a robe, and went downstairs. The storm literally shook the house, and he could hear the windowpanes rattle.

  He wondered savagely what damned fool was out there in the blizzard at this time of night, pumping his doorbell.

  He fumbled with the latch, flung open the door. The cold wind blasted a barrage of snow into the living room. David blinked at the impact, tried to make out the snow-coated face of the muflBed figure in the doorway.

  "Dr. Hughes! Dr. Hughes, sir!"

  It was Francis, the steward. He came in, and David slammed the door behind him.

  "Francis, for God's sake, what are you doing out in -- "

  "Dr. Hughes, it's Dr. Dawson. He's -- disappeared!"

  "What?"

  Francis began to slammer piteously. "Dr. Hughes, it's my fault -- it's all my fault. I'm afraid I dozed ofE for a little while in Dr. Dawson's library. When I awoke I went upstairs and looked into his room. He -- he was gone!"

  David seized the steward by the shoulders, shook him savagely. "Francis, are you sure?"

  "Yes, sir. I went all through the house. I looked into -- I looked into Mrs. Dawson's room -- in the attic -- in the cellar -- everywhere. He's out in this blizzard somewhere. Dr. Hughes. My God, he's out in this terrible storm."

  "Where? Where'd he go?"

  "I don't know, sir. I don't know. But his clothes are still in his room. He must be in his pajamas -- his robe. He's unprotected, Dr. Hughes. He'll freeze to death unless we find him. Lord, lord, he'll freeze to death! I didn't know what to do -- where to look. I came straight here -- straight to you. I was so upset -- I even forgot to phone. Dr. Hughes, he's out in this blizzard. He must have gone out the back way. I don't know, I didn't hear a thing!" The tears began running down Francis's cheeks; he was on the verge of hysteria. "It's my fault, sir. I'm to blame. If we can't find him before -- "

  "Stop it, Francis!" yelled David. "For God's sake, stop it!" He went to a decanter, poured out a stiff shot of whisky. "Here, drink this!"

  The steward took the glass with a shaking hand, spilled half the drink, managed to swallow the rest.

  "Now wait for me here," David said to him. "I'll get some clothes on and be right with you."

  He drew on his trousers over his pajamas, then shoes and a mackinaw, rapidly telling Carol what had happened as he dressed.

  "David," said Carol, "where on earth could he have gone -- in this snow?"

  "Not very far," grunted David. "But I've got a hunch he's gone to the observatory."

  "The observatory? On a night like this? Why?"

  "Don't ask me why. I don't know. It's just a hunch, and I may be wrong."

  He raced downstairs, and together with Francis he plunged out into the storm.

  The wind slashed at them, hammered them as they floundered through the drifts. They could see nothing before them; the murky white wall slanted in at them, blotted out their vision ten feet ahead. They saw no tracks in the snow, but that proved nothing. If Dr. Dawson had come this way ten minutes before, the snow would have already buried his footprints.

  As David plowed along, his head bent against the screaming wind and his arm interlocked with Francis's, a nagging doubt began to seep through him. Perhaps the Old Man hadn't gone to the observatory at all. There would be no one there now, no work in progress, not on a night like this. Maybe he'd gone the other way, thought David desperately, down the road. There was no way of telling. They were just guessing.

  The Old Man didn't know what he was doing; the loss of his wife, as Dr. Wilk had pointed out, must have driven him out of his mind. It was suicide to walk out in this damned blizzard with just pajamas and a robe. Even through his heavy mackinaw and mittens David could feel the numbing cut of the wind. If the Old Man had walked out just before Francis had awakened, if he had gone to the observatory, there was still a chance. If not . . .

  He yelled at Francis to hurry, but Francis was unable to hear him over the banshee yell of the wind. The steward was gasping for breath, staggering through the snow like a drunken man, exhausted. David released his arm and stumbled forward, fighting the drifts. Like feathery straight jackets, they tried to hold him, they clung and wrapped themselves around his legs, they tried to trip him and tie him down.

  And then David was in the observatory yard. The squat building loomed suddenl
y in front of him, like a fat gray ghost leaping up from the drifts. He scraped his hands against the rough wall, moving slowly, trying to find the door. He cursed as his fingers encountered nothing but wall. Finally, after a long minute of exploration, he found the door just as Francis came up.

  The door was open. They went in, slammed the door shut against the storm, and stood gasping in the foyer, swaying in their exhaustion.

  The lights were on in the foyer,

  "Come on, Francis!"

  David plunged ahead up the wide, curving staircase, out into the circular corridor, raced past staff quarters, the computing rooms, the darkrooms. The breath sobbed from his tortured lungs as he ran up the stairs to the mezzanine.

  Finally a last short flight of rubber-covered steps and he plunged out into the main rotunda of the observatory.

  Then he stopped short and stared.

  The dome was open!

  Stupefied, he pointed upward as Francis came panting up the steps. The wind was howling down through the open dome in an icy blast. The snow was coming in; it was snowing inside the observatory itself. The white particles slammed down gustily, as though propelled by a high-powered gun, filtering down on the floor itself, and feathering the upper part of the telescope so that a faint lace of white on the shell was already visible.

  "He's here!" yelled David to Francis. "The Old Man's here, somewhere. He's opened the dome to the blizzard. It couldn't have been anyone else. He's mad, Francis, stark raving mad. But even so, he wouldn't do that unless "

  The echo of David's voice ricocheted through the dome for a moment and then clipped short. Numbly he stared into Francis's chalk-white face, and in the steward's eyes saw the same dawning suspicion, the same awful horror.

  With a single accord they broke and ran for the automatic elevator leading to the upper deck and the loading bridge.

  The elevator seemed to whine up and up forever. Finally it stopped, its door slid noiselessly open, and they burst through and onto the wide ring-shaped deck.

  The aerial platform running to the top of the telescope was gone!

  That could mean only one thing.

  The Old Man was up there.

  He was up there at the top of the telescope, perched in the cistern of the observer's cage, exposed to the icy blast of the blizzard slamming down through the open dome.

  Somewhere in the shock-twisted depths of the Old Man's mind he had chosen this fantastic way to commit suicide. Fantastic to everyone else, perhaps, but quite logical to Dr. Dawson. He had built the telescope, it was his life. He had spent many years of his life up there in that dizzy place, bundled in heavy furs. He knew how cold it could get up there.

  David ran over to the panel where the push-button control for the aerial platform was located. As he yanked open the metal door the thought throbbed through his mind, How long?

  How long had the Old Man been sitting up there, waiting to die?

  He pressed the control button, peered up at the four slender rails arching up and curving into the darkness of the dome. But nothing happened. The monel-metal platform stayed at the top of the telescope.

  The Old Man had locked the controls at the top.

  David slammed the panel door shut, went back to where Francis was standing.

  "What are we going to do now, sir?"

  "You'd better go down and phone Dr. Wilk, Francis."

  "Yes. But you "

  "I'm going up to the top by way of the handrails and get Dr. Dawson."

  The steward paled. "Be careful, sir. It's dangerous now. Those rails might be slippery and -- "

  "I'll make it all right, Francis. You go ahead."

  Outside of the flying platform, this was the only method of getting to the top of the big reflector. The handrails and narrow steps went straight up, like the ladders in the engine room of an oceangoing vessel. Finally they led to a steep iron platform on the back of the girder carrying the flying platform. It was a dizzy ascent, and with the rails wet, as they were now, it was dangerous.

  David gripped the handrails, climbed gingerly, carefully, conscious of the hazard. As he went up, higher and higher, he found that he could not raise his face upward toward the dome. The storm coming straight down through the dome blinded him by its fury, slashed his face in a pin-point attack,,forced him to lower his head.

  He remembered stupidly, now, that neither he nor Francis in their excitement had thought of the obvious thing -- to close the dome before he began his climb. The blizzard came straight down, sucking through the open dome in a powerful downdraft, and once or twice he swayed under its force and hung on desperately.

  But finally the precarious steps began to level off. He was high up in the soaring steelwork now, running over the abyss, almost blinded by flying snow.

  Then David was looking down into the cistern of the observer's cage.

  The Old Man was sitting there in his usual place, in the little revolving seat before the instrument board.

  He was sitting there, stiff and rigid, like a grotesque snow man.

  The snow whipping down upon him from the open dome had covered his bowed head with a white fez. It stuck to his face, powdered his robe and pajamas, and had already drifted up above his slippered feet on the steel floor.

  Looking down from his dizzy, wind-swept perch above, David Hughes knew that he had come too late.

  The Old Man of the Mountain was dead.

  Two weeks later, California Tech, the university administering Palomar, closed the observatory.

  David wired Dr. Herrick at the Hayden Planetarium, accepting his offer to work in New York. And then Carol's baby was born. It was a girl, and they named her Emily.

  14.

  In the last four months the Big Eye was visible both by day and night.

  It did not seem to get any larger now; its approach seemed to slow. It seemed simply to hang in the sky, waiting. Now the planet was pursuing the earth, moving in the same direction, as the earth swung around its orbit to the other side of the sun.

  In September the astronomers, after extensive calculations, announced that the catastrophe would occur at exactly 8 p.m., Greenwich time.

  In New York and on the Atlantic seaboard, zero hour would be 3 o'clock in the afternoon.

  The Eye would be in full glare upon the earth, and the end would come out of a daytime sky.

  On the first of October, the Hayden Planetarium closed for the duration.

  At dusk David closed his desk and gathered together the few personal effects he wanted to take back to the apartment.

  He found it difficult to concentrate on what he was doing; his eye kept straying toward the window.

  The Big Eye swam in a red bath high over an apartment building across the park. It would stay that way until the sun sank deep enough behind the western horizon so that the first stars would just begin to twinkle.

  Then it would emerge from its bath, huge and heavy and frightening, and dominate the sky, and the stars would disappear.

  For a full minute David stared at the Big Eye, unable to turn his head away.

  It looked particularly malevolent at the moment. Its leer was confident and assured; its message to David was familiar and personal and intimate.

  "Damn you," David suddenly blurted out hysterically. "You big red bastard, you'd like to end it right now, wouldn't you? If you had your way, you wouldn't wait until Christmas!"

  He went to the window and viciously yanked down the blinds. The room darkened in semi-gloom, and for a moment he experienced overwhelming relief, the throbbing cleared in his head.

  But then he fancied that even now, with the blinds shut, the Big Eye was still looking into his office. The reddish light was seeping in through the blinds, through the cracks and crevices, through the solid wall itself. And now the office was tinged with a weird reddish light; it reflected from the glass top of his desk, from the framed pictures, from the paneled walls.

  In a kind of feverish desperation he took his hat from the rack, flung
open his office door, and hurried down the corridor, through the adjaqent Museum of Natural History, and finally out of the door and onto Central Park West.

  The Big Eye hit down on him like a blow of a hammer. Now, in the dying light, it was beginning to take shape. He could already see the familiar leer pushing through the reddish haze.

  It etched the sky line of the east side in sharp relief, and the trees in the park stood black and stark against the light. It slanted down on the road and sidewalk and ricocheted up into the eyes of the pedestrians. It glinted from automobile windshields and the glistening chrome on the radiators.