by Max Ehrlich
There was nothing soft about it, like the set of the sun. It was harsh and brutal and direct and unfiltered.
David hunched his shoulders in his topcoat, put his head down, and got into his car at the curb.
At Eighty-third Street he stopped at a newspaper stand. The man in the small booth was smiling broadly under the peak of his frayed cap.
"Paper, mister?"
The owner of the newsstand drew a dirty finger across the headlines of the stacked newspapers.
"Good news for a change," he said. "Me -- I can't wait for tomorrow night."
The headlines were the same in all the evening newspapers -- the Journal-American, the Post, the World-Telegram, the Sun.
They were big and black and bold across the front page, and they said simply:
CLOUDY, RAIN TOMORROW NIGHT!
Cloudy and rain. That was big news, front-page news. Cloudy and rain meant that the Big Eye would be blotted out for a merciful evening. It meant that the nightly pressure would be off for a few precious hours, that they would not feel the direct visual and physical lash of its stare, even though they would still sense it.
Tomorrow night the streets would be crowded with people, drenched with rain, maybe, but laughing, exhilarated, buoyant in their relief.
Cloudy and rain. An eyelid closing over the Big Eye for just a little while, a little wonderful while, as it slowly revolved toward its full phase.
Cloudy and rain.
David grinned back at the man in the newsstand, bought a paper, and scanned the lead story. The weather forecasters were almost positive of overcast weather and even held out hope for an extra day of clouds or rain.
David reached his apartment building and walked into the lobby. Tom, the parchment-faced elevator man, greeted him with a grin as he opened the elevator door.
"You heard the news, Dr. Hughes?"
"Just a few minutes ago."
"I hope they're right," said Tom anxiously. "I sure hope they haven't made a mistake this time. They've been wrong before, Dr. Hughes, these weathermen."
"They'd better be right, Tom," answered David grimly. "They'd better be right."
When he came into the apartment Carol was in the kitchen, feeding the baby. Emily's curls were still wet from her bath; there was a smear of gelatin dessert on her mouth.
She gurgled and held up her arms to David.
He picked her up, swung her high in the air, and she laughed and squealed.
"Piggyback!" he said, grinning. "Piggyback!"
He held her arms around his neck, so that she hung like a sack of flour down his back, and ran into the living room. Then he lifted her clear over his head, and his daughter laughed delightedly, wriggling like a bug in his upstretched hands.
"Airplane," he told her next. "Airplane ride!"
He carried her through the living room, pressed her tiny nose against the cold windowpane, carried her into the bedroom, ran around the crib, flew her into the bathroom, dipped her deep toward the bathtub in mock ferocity.
"Dear," he heard Carol call from the kitchen, "please bring the baby back. She hasn't finished her supper."
Then as she laughed and squealed he carried her back into the kitchen. . . .
The same old wonderful ritual.
Later, when their daughter was ready for bed, he brought forth the piece de resistance.
He picked her up and swung her back and forth, back and forth, across the bed. There was a spark of fear in the baby's eyes as he dropped her on the soft bed so that she bounced.
And then the child laughed and laughed and held up her tiny arms to David to do it again.
Finally he kissed her good night and gave her to Carol to tuck in. And there were tears in his eyes.
The same old wonderful ritual, until Christmas.
Later David Hughes lay on his back, sleepless.
The Big Eye stared through the window like a great round Peeping Tom. It was like living with your own hangman, he thought, month after month. You saw your death before you; it followed you, peered over your shoulder, hung over your head, shone through your window, like this.
Men had been executed before, he thought, but the execution had been reasonable, civilized, merciful. The condemned man never saw the chair or the noose till he was ready for it.
David turned toward his wife.
"Carol," he whispered. "Awake?"
Her hand fumbled for his in the darkness. "What is it, darling?"
"I can't sleep."
"Neither can I."
"Carol, can't we do something about that damned window? The way that thing shines in here every night, it's enough to drive anyone crazy. It's like having a third party in our bedroom every night. Why can't we get those blackout curtains that everyone else seems to have?"
"I've already ordered them, David. But they're hard to get. There's been a run on them -- everybody wants them -- and there are so few stores open any more. I've almost finished making drapes."
He reached over on the night table, picked up a cigarette, lighted it. They shared drags for a minute and then he said:
"Carol, are you afraid of what's coming? Are you really afraid?"
She was silent for a moment. Then she answered:
"I don't know, David. I was for the longest time, but now I don't know. I've thought a lot about death, and I keep wondering what it'll be like. A flash of flame? A whirling in darkness? And after that, what? How long will death be?" She hesitated. "I don't know. I guess we're like children, David, asking how long the night will be when we go to bed, because we love the daylight in which we play." Her hand tightened about his. "Darling, I think if I feel anything at all now, it's regret. Not so much for you, not for me, but for the baby."
He said nothing, and Carol went on:
"I keep thinking, David, our baby sleeping there in the crib, she'll never have a birthday party of her own, or go to school or a movie, or eat a sundae, or wear an evening gown, or have a boy friend and fall in love, and have a husband and children of her own. She'll never even have a Christmas, David, not really."
The baby whimpered in the crib.
"Oh, David!" Carol began to cry.
He rose and padded over to the crib in his bare feet and picked up his daughter. She clung to him sleepily as he took her to the bathroom. Then he carried her over to the big bed and placed her between himself and Carol.
And so they finally slept, the three of them, close to each other.
But the Big Eye, looking at them through the window, was wide awake.
In the fall of the last year the Big Eye appeared nightly as a great flaming, coppery-red sphere in the sky.
The effects of the new planet's intrusion into the solar system were gradual and cumulative.
Japan suffered tremendous earthquakes, so that its entire remaining population was evacuated to the mainland of China. Much of California was abandoned for the most part, although the shocks were not as serious. Seismologists listed earthquakes in Alaska, Lisbon, Calabria, Chile, and many other places already susceptible to disturbances in the earth's surface.
The tides were erratic and no longer could be charted. There were tidal waves in the Philippines and in the Caribbean. Acapulco, Mexico, as well as Cape Lopatka, on the southern tip of Kamchatka Peninsula, were completely inundated. The sea level rose in some coastal areas, fell in others. In the islands of Polynesia and the Coral Sea there were spectacular volcanic eruptions.
Landslides were a daily occurrence in the Swiss Alps, in the Himalayas, the Rockies, and many other mountainous areas.
All over the world the temperature dropped progressively, degree by degree, and the Big Eye loomed bigger.
In New York there had been no summer. June, July, and August became early spring or late fall, thermometer-wise.
But the most significant changes were man-made.
In the last year, goaded by the driving and demanding leer of the Big Eye, men had made some long-time dreams come true.
The
y had stopped making atomic bombs and instead were making atomic bullets, as tracer detectives and interbody projectiles. From the Oak Ridge laboratories, which once gave the world the most painful problem of the age, came a steady stream of radioactive isotopes.
And in August of the last year they had discovered a cure for cancer.
This was only one of the many other great achievements in the field of medicine.
By using radioactive isotopes as a means of prying open the once bolted door to the inner processes of life itself, by probing deep into the inner mysteries of the human body, they had found quick and positive cures for most of the myriad diseases of the bones, heart, tissues, nerves, and other organs, diseases which once had taken a great toll of human life.
This, the golden age of atomic medicine, was not without irony.
In the last year the Journal of the American Medical Association calculated that the life span of man had increased twenty years and that new medical techniques had progressed to a point where man could normally expect to live a hundred years.
The article was interesting in a wistful kind of way.
The final year had also ushered in another golden age -- the age of practical atomic power.
At the Hanford laboratories in the state of Washington, which, in another era, had made plutonium for atomic bombs, the nuclear scientists had released a seething storm of neutrons from spontaneous fission in a huge atomic pile. Later they had applied this power to run ocean-going vessels, locomotives, and other great fuel-consuming machinery. The heat which was generated as a by-product from the pile was piped to great cities and used in huge central heating systems. Coal, gas, and oil became unwieldy and expensive, antique fuels to be laboriously torn from the earth. City planners drew up blueprints for generating plants whereby the householder would receive all the power he needed for a fraction of the cost he had heretofore borne.
The blueprints were pretty to look at and breath-taking in their concept. But no one thought of translating them into the practical phase. Under the circumstances, file and forget.
The Year Two was a year of peculiar phenomena in a hundred different ways.
The death rate hit a rock-bottom low.
To be sure, some people died by accident. Some were drowned, or killed by falls, or hit by vehicles, or struck by lightning. Some died in the now frequent earthquakes or tidal waves. And some still died of natural causes, despite the great advances of medicine.
But not a man, woman, or child died through war. And no man died in violence by the hand of his neighbor. Not a Jew was murdered, not a Negro lynched. Not a single person died of hunger, not even in India or China. Neither did any man, woman, or child suffer death because of exposure, or lack of medicine or medical attention.
There were no strangers left in the last year. No man held himself aloof from his neighbor on grounds of religion, caste, color, or environment. The Big Eye was blind to these differences; it was not socially selective; it was completely impartial.
Its clientele was not restricted.
In the fall of the final year, in the cities and towns and on the farms, men waited to die.
A special commission of the Federation of the World, called the World Conservation Commission, planned and enforced just enough productive activity to maintain economic life until midnight on Christmas.
Not a hammer or saw was heard anywhere, and only a few wheels turned, of necessity. The spindles and machine shafts of the factories became quiet gray forests of steel, and cobwebs grew in the gears and belting of drill presses, lathes, milling machines, and shapers.
Farmers sat on their porches at the time of the autumn harvest and looked idly across their weed-grown fields, unplanted in the spring.
There were no longer any profits to be calculated, any reserves to be accumulated, any investments to be made, any new business to anticipate. There were no bills to be sent, no debts to be collected nor credits advanced, no taxes to pay for next year, no accounts receivable.
There was simply one big Account Payable.
The world still spun on its axis, but the surface was almost motionless.
And the only sound heard upon it was the sound of prayer.
The Big Eye fattened to a great luminous globe and filled the heavens day and night and kept coming on and on. . . .
And at last Christmas came.
15.
For some deep and illogical reason people everywhere observed Christmas in the usual fashion.
It was the last day of their lives.
Yet they were stubborn, they were perverse, they insisted on following the traditional ritual step by step.
They played at life up to the very end, desperately going through the motions as though the future were forever, finding a kind of comfort in it, in these, their last few hours.
Everything in the apartment looked the same, as it might have on any other Christmas morning.
The wreaths were on the windows, the stockings hung over the fireplace. The tree was in the corner, glittering with many-colored lights, topped by a star, speckled with silver tinsel. And beneath the tree the gaily wrapped presents.
A silk robe for David, a new wallet, a solid-gold tie clasp, an initialed cigarette lighter, a half dozen ties, a pair of fleece-lined slippers, a new electric shaver.
A jeweled wrist watch for Carol, a new handbag, a Paul Revere sterling silver bowl for the whist table, three handmade nightgowns, a new fur coat. A huge fluffy rabbit for Emily, a pair of golden-haired twin dolls.
It was warm and cozy in the room, and the snow was falling outside and piling on the sills against the frost-fingered window-panes. The last Christmas was a white Christmas.
There was the opening of the presents, the warm kisses, the embraces, the tears. There was the last breakfast, and the last careful ritual of dressing, and the last walk to church. There were the last hymns, and the sober faces, and the heads bowed in prayer, and the last sonorous sermon, the last story of Bethlehem.
It was the final day of their lives, but it was still Christmas.
There was the last dinner, turkey and stuffing and mince pie and coffee and brandy and all the fixings.
They went through all the motions with a kind of hysterical intensity, even to the salutations of "Merry Christmas . . ."
But the other part of the traditional greeting, the rest of the salutation, the "Happy New Year," was conspicuously missing.
And the clock ticked on toward three, as on any other Christmas.
It was very much the same as it had always been, yet so very different: the carols they would never sing again, the sermon they would never hear again, the tree they would never adorn again, the stockings they would never hang again, the good wishes they would never give again, the presents they gave but would never use.
It was not a Merry Christmas, and there would be no Happy New Year.
It was a pathetic kind of Christmas. And yet it was comforting too.
At two o'clock the bells began to ring.
Slowly they rose in volume, opened their brassy mouths, swelled the cold night air with a somber and mournful symphony.
It was very near the end.
Carol stirred in David's arms.
"David."
"Yes?"
"It's time to go."
They had decided to go outside, out in the street, to die. They were going out into the open, under the sky, where they could watch the Big Eye. Already from their apartment they could hear the hum of a crowd below, like the buzz of a great swarm of bees far away.
It was easier to die outside, where they could see their executioner. Waiting for the end in the apartment was too much like dying alone. It was easier out in the street among other people, thousands of others, millions of others, packed close for warmth, for courage, for comfort, for anonymity.
It had always been easier to die en masse than alone.
They were silent for a moment there in the bedroom. They heard Emily whimper once in he
r nap, and then it was still again.
Still, except for the ticking of the clock on the dressing table.
And David thought: This is the last time, this is the last time I'll hold my wife in my arms like this. Soon, the last kiss, the last warm embrace, the last touch of her hand and the thrill of her skin, the last sound of her voice, the last scent of her hair, the last long look in her eyes. The last, the last of everything. This is how it is to wait to die. A poignant, rending, unbearable awareness of the last in everything, because it is the last. Funny, he thought, I have no fear. Only regret. Regret for what I have now, and what I shall soon lose. I haven't had enough of what I have. Yes, that's it. That's what I want and can't have. More daylight. More life, more living. More Carol, more Emily, not the last, the absolute, final last, but more, more, more. . . .