The Big Eye (23 page)

Y
, that
thing up there in the sky, getting bigger and bigger, closer and closer,
like an ax coming down on top of your head, and knowing you can't do a
thing about it -- except let it come. Frank, for God's sake, there isn't
any more liquor left. Order up another bottle. I need a drink -- I need
it bad."

 

 

Finally the voices which had crawled through the blinds became a confused
and distant murmur, without meaning and without identity.

 

 

And they were alone, the two of them, on their wedding night, clinging
and blending, drunk with the desperate having of each other, living a
moment of priceless time.

 

 

Afterward they lay exhausted, apart, and David thought, God, she was
wonderful, wonderful, this wonderful girl who was his wife.

 

 

He could never get enough of her, there would never be enough of her,
never. There never would be enough time.

 

 

From now on Carol and he would live in moments, in desperate moments, each
more urgent than the other as the deadline came nearer, each hungrier,
each more hopeless. They didn't have long, they didn't have much, only
each other. And there would never be the easy anesthesia so mercifully
provided by a benevolent Nature, the hope of a natural lifetime, the
slowing down by time of youth itself, of passion cooling imperceptibly
and painlessly, of "growing old gracefully."

 

 

Then finally David whispered:

 

 

"Carol."

 

 

"Yes, darling?"

 

 

"We've got to be careful, very careful. We can't have any children -- not
now."

 

 

She began to cry then, and he took her in his arms and tried to comfort
her.

 

 

 

 

9.

 

 

It was early evening, and the Year One was just two weeks old.

 

 

David Hughes sat in his own easy chair, in his own home on Palomar
Mountain. There was a scotch and soda at his elbow, and the newspaper
he always read was in his lap. He was a bridegroom of two weeks, and
upstairs his bride was under the shower, and in a little while they
would leave for the Dawsons' house, where they had been invited for
dinner. After that the Old Man and himself would go to the observatory,
leaving Carol and Emily Dawson and perhaps some of the other staff wives
to talk about the little things that women talked about.

 

 

It was all very usual and very commonplace, or had been -- once.

 

 

Now the commonplace was a little dreamlike.

 

 

He glanced out of the window and stared at the landscape and thought,
in a detached kind of way, that the snow was just as white and cold as
it always was, it drifted in the same old way, it stuck to the trees
in the same patterns. The sun was red on the horizon with its customary
redness, and in its customary place, in that gap in the mountains, just
to the left of the crimson-tinted dome housing the forty-eight-inch
telescope. The kids near the place where the road curved were building
a snow man, and it looked as all snow men usually looked, graceless and
lumpy, with the same black coals for eyes, the same twig for a nose,
the same wide gash for the mouth, the same resigned and patient look.

 

 

This was your own personal little picture, he reflected, your own
miniature, drawn to accustomed scale, with the same strokes of the brush
and the same colors.

 

 

Up close, nothing had changed.

 

 

But when you backed away from the picture and then looked at it,
everything suddenly changed. You saw with a kind of numb horror that
the perspective was all wrong, that the colors clashed and shrieked,
that everything in it was monstrous and distorted and unbelievable,
and that its theme of the commonplace was suddenly hideous.

 

 

The sun was too big and, although faceless, it seemed to leer and lean
with oppressive weight over the horizon, like a round and overhanging
and threatening stone. Its red had now darkened and deepened to the
color of blood. The snow suddenly became pock-marked and old and dirty,
and the trees, their branches and twigs loaded down with snow, no longer
looked like delicate figurines of some frosted fairyland, but rather like
white skeletons swaying and rattling hollowly in the wind. The dome of
the forty-eight-inch, over the ridge, was no longer round and squat, but
long and cylindrical, and its glistening tip was a shining fingernail
on the end of a finger pointing straight up to a fiery spot which had
suddenly materialized in the clear sky.

 

 

Even the kids playing and dancing around the snow man had changed.
The red in their cheeks had dissolved away into ashen gray, and their
chubby faces had suddenly become wasted and gaunt, and their laughing and
yelling became a kind of dismal wailing. The snow man, too, had changed;
his lumpy head suddenly seemed to tilt upward, watching the fiery spot
in the sky, and there was a leering and malicious smirk on his face.

 

 

You'd been too close before to see it. But now that you were a little
farther back, you saw that the picture had a black frame around it.

 

 

And as you watched, you could almost see the black frame contract and
creep inward from all four sides, left and right and top and bottom,
and begin to encroach upon the picture. You could almost see it blot out
the picture little by little, first the sun, and then the landscape and
the trees and the observatory on the ridge, and the snow man and the
children playing around it, and the room in which you sat.

 

 

And the black frame kept spreading inward, until the picture became a
miniature, and finally a tiny square cameo, and finally a pin point of
fiery light -- the light in the sky. It was like peering through a long
black tunnel and seeing nothing at the other end but this blazing bit
of light.

 

 

And then finally the black closed over the light and there was nothing
left.

 

 

"David, did you see my nail file?"

 

 

Carol's voice came to him from upstairs. He stirred and shook his head,
as though to clear it.

 

 

"It's in the drawer of the end table, I think," he called back.

 

 

It was a little amusing, this, Carol calling for her nail file with
the world about to end. It was a little amusing, in a sardonic kind of
way. You went through the motions, clung to the commonplace, kept your
sanity that way. To go on with the traditional amenities, to hew to the
regular routine, was the best defense against the planet, the only real
defense. Work eight hours, play eight hours, eat three meals, a drink
before dinner, wear blue ties with blue socks, white tie with tails,
never trump your partner's ace, kiss your wife when you go out, and kiss
her when you come in, remember her birthday and anniversary, and of course
Mother's Day, if you had a mother, and see your dentist twice a year.

 

 

Otherwise the planet would get you ahead of its ordained time, as it
had already gotten a lot of other people. They were running out in the
streets, or going mad, or cutting their throats, or jumping off high
buildings, or drinking themselves to death.

 

 

Already the earth was a kind of revolving madhouse, a spinning apple
swarming with maddened ants racing in every direction. It was hard to
see close up, but the newspaper on David's knee told him the story. He
swallowed the last of his highball, picked up the paper, and let his
eye rove over the glaring black headlines.

 

 

RUSSIAN DICTATOR ARRIVES IN WASHINGTON

 

 

Goes into Immediate Conference with President at White House

 

 

That was something for the book. Two weeks ago a visit from the King of
the Martians would have caused a lesser sensation.

 

 

When the big Soviet plane with the red stars painted on its wings finally
taxied to a stop at National Airport, the President and the entire Cabinet
were there to meet the Generalissimo, and the United States Marine Band
played the "Internationale."

 

 

The photographs of the meeting in the newspapers were not flattering.
Both the President and the Soviet dictator looked like everyone else,
like frightened little men. Their faces were haggard; they seemed dazed
as they shook hands . . .

 

ARMIES DEMOBILIZED ATOM PLANTS CLOSE DOWN
Experts Mull Problem Of Bomb Disposal

 

The existence of the bombs was almost humorously embarrassing now.

 

 

You couldn't just dump them in some junk yard, or store them in some
dusty warehouse somewhere, like obsolete merchandise.

 

 

You couldn't just bury them in the earth somewhere, or drop them deep
on the ocean bed.

 

 

The astronomers had pointed out that the other bodies in the solar
system had made a slight change in position to compensate for the
onrushing planet. Luckily the earth would be spared any violent internal
dislocations, but there would still be dangerous stresses and strains on
the dry crust and the ocean beds -- too dangerous for the deposit of bombs.

 

 

Maybe, thought David cynically, they ought to run a contest open to
all comers -- a million dollars for the best thousand-word statement on
what to do with a non-producing atom bomb. Too bad it wasn't a missile
like the old-time artillery shells they used a few decades ago. You
could always polish up the casings and fill them with dirt and plant
flowers in them. Or you could stand them on end and use them as floor
ash trays. Whether they held geraniums or cigarette butts, you could
get some use out of them, your money wasn't entirely wasted.

 

 

But there was nothing more useless than an atom bomb which wasn't working
at its trade.

 

 

David's eye caught a headline:

 

MILITARY DISEASE DEPARTMENTS DISBANDED
Reveal Plans for Bacteriological Warfare To Supplement A-Bombs

 

Yes, thought David grimly, it would have been a nice little war all
around. He read through a list of attack diseases at the bottom of
the story:

 

 

Botulism, anthrax, pneumatic plague, measles and mumps, glanders, rabbit
fever, undulant fever, yellow fever, dengue fever, tick-borne relapsing
fever, spotted and "Q" fever, fowl plague, foot and mouth disease,
melioidosis, hog cholera, rinderpest.

 

 

David shuddered and turned the page.

 

RAILS AND AIR LINES JAMMED AS THOUSANDS RETURN HOME TO CITIES
TRAVELERS ON MOVE TO REJOIN FAMILIES
Food and Utilities Situation Critical in Urban Centers

 

It was like a funeral in the family.

 

 

The planet brought everybody home, even relatives who hadn't seen each
other in twenty years or who were bitter and quarreling enemies. There
was nothing like a tragedy to bring people together in a kind of morbid
brotherhood.

 

 

But this time it wasn't just somebody else's funeral.

 

WAVE OF SUICIDES AS THOUSANDS BREAK UNDER STRAIN
MANY TAKE LIVES BY HANGING, POISON, SLEEPING PILLS
Heart Attacks Take Toll
Insane Asylums Filled to Overflowing

 

Ever since the first night it had been like that. The planet pressed down
hard on the brain, and its shadow, although still invisible to the eye,
already darkened the mind.

 

 

Many died before they were born. Thousands of women in the early stages
of pregnancy arranged deliberate miscarriages.

 

GREAT RELIGIOUS REVIVAL AS CHURCHES JAMMED TO OVERFLOWING
Planet Y the Millennium

 

In houses of worship all over the world, masses and services were
continuous, day and night. People fought to get into churches as they
once fought to get into a Hollywood premiere. The people of radio, the
hucksters of Boxtop Boulevard in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles,
looked at their listener-rating reports and stared.

 

 

Religious programs, programs of church services and sermons, hit the
highest Hooper rating of all time, far above the big-name orchestras
and comedians and variety shows.

 

 

Right now, radio-wise, prayer was commercial, very commercial indeed.

 

 

Give the public what they want. And what the public wanted was comfort,
and divine intervention, and deliverance.

 

 

What the public suddenly wanted, David concluded, was God.

 

GOVERNORS PARDON CONDEMNED MEN
LIFERS RIOT FOR FREEDOM
Let Us Live Last Two Years, They Cry
INDUSTRIES PARALYZED AS WORKERS STAY HOME
Stores, Offices, Schools Close
Wheels Grind to Stop as World Staggers under Shock
RUN ON BANKS AS DEPOSITORS RUSH TO WITHDRAW LIFE SAVINGS
Orgy of Spending, Black Markets, Inflation Already a Threat
DAWSON DISCOVERY DISPUTED BY SELF-STYLED HOLY MAN OF HOGBACK MOUNTAIN,
ARKANSAS
I Saw Planet First, Claims Ozark Prophet, and I Didn't Need No
Telescope Neither
Saw It in a Vision from the Lord
Swears Lord Promised World an Extra Two Years for Extra Prayer And
Repentance

 

David threw the newspaper on the couch and went upstairs. Carol, a vision
of loveliness in a long black evening dress, was combing her hair before
the mirror.

 

 

"Hurry, darling," she said, "or we'll be late for dinner."

 

 

It was almost a technique now.

 

 

You deliberately and desperately stuck to the commonplace, and it was
a kind of pathetic game. You insulated yourself, never mentioned the
planet if you could help it -- tried not to think of it.