Eye in the Sky (1957) (4 page)

His own clothes were on fire. Around
him,
flaming
people struggled and fought to clamber off, as slowly,
ponderously, the platform spilled forward, hung for an
instant, and then dissolved.

All over the Bevatron building,
automatic warning bells squealed. Human and mechanical screams of terror mixed
together in a cacophony of noise. The floor under Hamilton majestically
collapsed. Ceasing to be solid, the steel and concrete and plastic and wiring
became random particles. Instinctively, he threw up his
hands; he was tumbling face-forward into the
vague blur
of machinery below. A sickening
whoosh
as the air
rushed from his lungs; plaster rained down on him,
scorched particles of ash that flickered and seared. Then,
briefly,
he was ripping through the tangled metal mesh that protected the magnet. The
shriek of tearing ma
terial and the furious
presence of hard radiation sweep
ing over him …

He struck violently. Pain became
visible: a luminous
ingot that grew soft
and absorbing, like radioactive steel-
wool. It undulated, expanded, and
quietly absorbed
him. He was, in his agony,
a spot of moist organic mat
ter,
being soundlessly sopped up by the unlimited sheet
of dense metallic fiber.

Then,
even that ebbed out. Conscious of the grotesque
brokenness of his body,
he lay in an inert heap, trying
aimlessly,
reflexively, to get up. And realizing at the same
time, that there would be no getting up for any
of them.
Not for a while.

III

in the darkness,
something
stirred.

For
a long time he lay listening. Eyes shut, body limp,
he refrained from motion, and became, as much as
pos
sible, a single giant ear. The sound was a rhythmic
tap-
tap
, as
if
something had gotten into the darkness and was blindly feeling around. For an
endless time he as
giant ear examined it,
and then he as giant brain realized
foolishly that it was a Venetian
bund tapping against a window, and that he was in a hospital ward.

As ordinary eye, optic nerve, and human brain, he per
ceived the dim shape of his wife, wavering and receding, a
few feet from the bed. Thankfulness enveloped
him.
Marsha hadn’t been incinerated by the hard radia
tion; thank God for
that. A mute prayer of thanks clouded his brain; he relaxed and enjoyed the
sheer joy of it

“He’s
coming around,” a doctor’s deep, authoritative
voice observed.

I guess
so.” Marsha was talking. Her voice seemed to come from a considerable
distance. “When will we
be sure?”

I’m fine,” Hamilton managed gruffly.
Instantly, the shape detached itself and fluttered
over. “Darting,” Marsha was gasping, tugging and pressing at
him fondly. “Nobody was killed—everybody’s
all right.
Even you.” Like a great moon,
she beamed ecstatically down at him. “McFeyffe sprained his ankle, but
it’ll
mend. They think that boy has a brain
concussion.”
“What about
you?” Hamilton asked weakly.
“I’m fine, too.” She
displayed herself, turning so he could see all of her. Instead of her chic
little coat and dress, she had on a plain white hospital smock. “The
radiation singed away most of my clothes—they gave
me
this.” Embarrassed, she
patted her brown hair. “And look
—this
is shorter. I clipped off the burned part. It’ll grow
back.”

“Can
I get up?” Hamilton demanded, trying to climb to a sitting position. His
head swam dizzily; all at once
he was prone
again, and gasping for breath. Bits of dark
ness danced and swirled around him; closing his eyes he
waited
apprehensively for them to pass.

“You’ll be weak for a time,” the doctor informed him.
“Shock, and loss of blood.” He touched Hamilton’s arm.
“You were pretty badly cut Torn metal, but we got the
pieces out.”

“Who’s the worst off?” Hamilton asked, eyes shut.

“Arthur
Silvester, the old soldier. He never lost con
sciousness,
but I wish he had. Broken back, apparently. He’s down in surgery.”

“Brittle, I suppose,” Hamilton said, exploring his arm.
It was done up in a vast
white-plastic bandage.

“I
was the least hurt,” Marsha said haltingly. “But I was knocked cold.
I mean, the radiation did it. I fell right into the main beam; all I saw were
sparks and
lightning. They cut it right
off, of course. It didn’t really last over a fraction of a second.”
Plaintively, she added,
“It seemed like a million years.”

The
doctor, a neat-appearing young man, pushed the covers back and took Hamilton’s pulse. At the edge of
the bed, a tall nurse
hovered efficiently. Equipment was
pulled up at Hamilton’s elbow. Things
seemed to be
under control.

Seemed . .
. but something was wrong. He could feel it. Deep inside him, there was a
nagging sense that
something basic was out
of phase.

“Marsha,”
he said suddenly, “you feel it?”

Hesitantly, Marsha came over beside him. “Feel what,
darling?”

“I
don’t know. But it’s there.”

After an
anxious, undecided moment, Marsha turned to the doctor. “I told you
something’s the matter. Didn’t
I say that
when I came back?”

“Everybody
coming out of shock has a sense of un
reality,”
the doctor informed her. “It’s a common feeling.
After a day or so it should fade. Remember, both
of you
have been given sedative injections. And you’ve had a terrible
ordeal; that was highly charged stuff that hit
you.”

Neither
Hamilton nor his wife spoke. They gazed at each other, each trying to read the
expression on the
other’s face.

“I
guess we were lucky,” Hamilton said tentatively. His prayer of joy had
faded to a doubtful uncertainty.
What was
it?
The awareness was not
rational; he couldn’t pin it down. Glancing around the room he saw noth
ing
odd, nothing out of place.

“Very
lucky,” the nurse put in. Proudly, as if she had
been personally responsible.

“How
long do I have to stay here?”

The doctor
meditated. “You can go home tonight, I think. But you should be in bed a
day or so. Both of you are going to need a lot of rest, the next week or so.
I suggest a trained nurse.”

Hamilton
said
thoughtfully, “We can’t afford it”

“You’ll
be covered, of course.” The doctor sounded offended. “The Federal
Government manages this. If I
were you, I’d
spend my time worrying about getting back
on my feet”

“Maybe I like it better this way,” Hamilton said tartly.
He didn’t amplify; for a time he sank
into somber re
flections
about his situation.

Accident or no accident, it hadn’t changed. Unless,
while he lay unconscious, Colonel T.
E. Edwards had
died of a
heart attack. It didn’t seem likely.

When the doctor and nurse had been persuaded to
leave, Hamilton said to his wife,
“Well, now we have an
excuse.
Something we can tell the neighbors, to explain
why I’m not at work.”

Forlornly, Marsha nodded. “I forgot about that.”

“I’m
going to have to find something that doesn’t involve classified material.
Something that doesn’t bring
in national
defense.” Somberly, he reflected, “Like Ein
stein said, back
in ‘54. Maybe I’ll be a plumber. Or a
TV
repairman; that’s more along my line.”

“Remember what you always wanted to do?” Perched
on the edge of the bed, Marsha sat soberly examining her
shortened, somewhat ragged hair. “You wanted to design new tape recorder
circuits. And FM circuits.
You wanted to be
a big name in high fidelity, like Bogen and Thorens and Scott.”

“That’s
right,” he agreed, with as much conviction as possible. “The Hamilton
Trinaural Sound System. Re
member the night
we dreamed that up? Three cartridges,
needles, amplifiers, speakers.
Mounted in three rooms. A man in each room, listening to each rig. Each rig is
playing a different composition.”

“One plays the Brahms double concerto,” Marsha put
in, with feeble enthusiasm. “I
remember that.”

“One
plays the Stravinsky
Wedding.
And one plays Dowland music for the lute.
Then the brains of the three men are removed and wired together by the core of
the Hamilton Trinaural Sound System, the Hamilton Musiphonic Ortho-Circuit. The
sensations of the three
brains are mingled
in a strict mathematical relationship, b
ased on Planck’s Constant.”
His arm had begun to throb; harshly, he finished: “The resultant combination
is fed into a tape recorder and played back
at 3:14 times
the original
speed.”

“And listened to on a crystal set.” Marsha bent quickly
down and hugged him. “Darling, when I came around
I thought you were a corpse. So help me—you
looked
like a corpse, all white and silent and not moving. I
thought my heart would break.”

“I’m insured,” he said gravely. “You’d be rich.”

“I
don’t want to be rich.” Rocking miserably back
and forth, still hugging him, Marsha whispered: “Look
what
I’ve done to you. Because I’m bored and curious and fooling around with
political freaks, you’ve lost
your job and
your future. I could kick myself. I should have known I couldn’t sign the
Stockholm Peace thing
with you working on guided missiles. But whenever
anybody hands me a petition, I
always get
carried
away.
The poor, downtrodden
masses.”

“Don’t
worry about it,” he told her shortly. “If this
were back in 1943, you’d be normal and McFeyffe
would
be out of a job. As a
dangerous fascist.”

“He
is,” Marsha said fervently. “He
is
a dangerous
fascist”

Hamilton
shoved the woman away from him. “McFeyffe is a rabid
patriot and a reactionary. But that
doesn’t
make him a fascist. Unless you believe that any
body who isn’t—”

“Let’s not talk about it,” Marsha broke in. “You’re not
supposed to thrash around—right?”
Intensely, feverishly,
she
kissed him on the mouth. “Wait until you’re home.”

As she
moved away, he grabbed hold of her by the
shoulder.
“What is it? What’s gone wrong?”

Numbly,
she shook her head. “I can’t tell. I can’t figure it out. Since I came
around, it always seems to be just behind me. I’ve felt it. As if—” She
gestured. “I
expect to turn around and
see—I don’t know what. Some
thing hiding. Something awful” She
shivered appre
hensively. “It scares
me.”

“It scares me too.”

“Maybe
well find out,” Marsha said faintly. “Maybe it isn’t anything …
just the shock and the sedatives, like the doctor said.”

Hamilton
didn’t
believe it. And neither did she.

* * * * *

They were
driven home by a staff physician, along
with
the severe young businesswoman. She, too, wore a
plain hospital smock.
The three of them sat quietly in the back seat, as the Packard jitney made its
way along
the dark streets of Belmont.

“They
think I’ve got a couple of cracked ribs,” the
woman told them dispassionately. Presently, she added, “My name’s
Joan Reiss. I’ve seen both of you before …
you’ve been in my
store.”

“What
store is that?” Hamilton asked, after he had
sketchily introduced himself and his wife.

“The
book and art supply shop on El Camino. Last
August
you bought a Skira folio of Chagall.”

“That’s
so,” Marsha admitted. “It was Jack’s birthday … we put them up
on the wall. Downstairs, in the
audiophile
room.”

“The cellar,” Hamilton explained.

“There
was one thing,” Marsha said suddenly, her fingers digging convulsively
into her purse. “Did you
notice the
doctor?”

“Notice?”
He was puzzled. “No, not particularly.”

“That’s what I mean. He was just sort of—well, a blob.
Like doctors you see in toothpaste ads.”

Joan Reiss was listening intently. “What’s this?”

“Nothing,” Hamilton told her shortly. “A private con
versation.”