The Big Eye (24 page)

 

In order to stay sane, you had to make believe that it wasn't up there
in the heavens and rushing onward.

 

 

But it was there.

 

 

That was the fact, the inescapable fact, and there was no privacy from
it, no escape. Not even in sleep was there any escape any more, for
the planet appeared in dreams, everybody's dreams, large and round and
menacing and murderous.

 

 

As David unbuttoned his shirt he turned on the small television set on
the night table.

 

 

The video screen focused on a crowd of people, and the camera panned
over to a floodlighted entrance to the White House.

 

 

An announcer said something about a momentous meeting, and before
he finished, the doors swung open and the President appeared with a
bushy-haired man in a tight uniform and wearing the star of the Soviet
Union.

 

 

They posed before the camera. Then, in an unrehearsed impulse, they
threw their arms around each other's shoulders.

 

 

You had to hand it to the planet, David reflected.

 

 

Whatever it did, it was changing things -- and changing them in a hell of
a hurry.

 

 

 

 

10.

 

 

In April of the Year One, a dramatic announcement came from Palomar.

 

 

Dr. Charles Dawson was preparing to photograph the face of Planet
Y
.

 

 

He had hooked up a complicated photographic setup, using sensitive
infra-red plates, and the apparatus had a special talent. It could ignore
what it did not want to see. By scanning the face of Planet
Y
a hundred thousand times and delivering to the camera only the features
which appeared on a majority of the pictures it saw, it could eliminate
all distortions due to poor seeing or other temporary causes, thus taking
full advantage of the light-gathering power of the Big Eye.

 

 

Already astronomers knew certain basic facts about the onrushing
planet. It had a mass hundreds of times greater than that of the earth,
and its period of rotation was eight months. They knew that it was a cold
and inert body, surfaced by a frozen layer of methane and carbon dioxide,
and that its reflective power was approximately that of sandstone.

 

 

It would become visible to the naked eye in September, a mere pin point in
the sky, and thereafter would rapidly grow larger. And the catastrophe,
the collision, would occur on the far side of the sun in relation to
the earth's orbit.

 

 

But now the Old Man of Palomar was going to look straight into the
face of Death itself. He was getting ready to give the world an advance
showing on how the Killer would look when finally it hung in the heavens,
clearly visible to the naked eye.

 

 

The news from Palomar was an immediate sensation. People all over the
world showed a morbid and almost unbearable curiosity to look upon the
face of their executioner. Newspapermen, astronomers, and other observers
converged on Palomar.

 

 

This was the preview.

 

 

But whatever face Death wore, it would soon become as familiar to every
man, woman, and child as the face of the man in the moon.

 

 

The night of the photographing was clear and cold.

 

 

David and Carol walked up the road toward the observatory. Carol had
been in San Diego all day on a shopping trip, and she had insisted on
coming along.

 

 

"Everyone's going crazy tonight, David," she had said. "You can cut
the excitement with a knife. I've never seen so many newspapermen in one
place before -- not only from the American papers, but from the foreign ones
too. They've been coming in all day. And I want to be in on the fun too."

 

 

He had noticed that she seemed pale, nervous, after her return from
San Diego.

 

 

"It was the ride up," she had explained. "The roads, David, they were
terribly icy. I thought we were going to skid right over a precipice a
couple of times. And anyway, I kept thinking about tonight and worrying
about the seeing. But they've already measured it, and I understand it's
going to be good."

 

 

David had smiled a little at that. Already Carol was talking like an
astronomer's wife. They never asked, like ordinary wives, how things were
down at the office. They always asked anxiously how the seeing was. If
it was one, that was excellent, the best. Two was good. Three was fair,
and so on down the line.

 

 

The wind, as they moved up the hill, was like the edge of an ax, cutting
deep into the bone, and they half walked, half slithered up the slippery
road, huddling close to each other for both support and mutual warmth. The
crunch-crunch of their feet as they passed the lighted cottages on each
side of the road seemed abnormally loud, the only sound in the night.

 

 

Night and silence.

 

 

This was the normal state of the universe, thought David. Up there
in the night of the sky, the stars and planets, like tiny illuminated
vessels, moved slowly and silently across a dark and limpid sea. There
were billions of them, pitiful suns lost in eternity, shining by their
own light, driven by the breath of God. They were like specks of dust
seen in a beam of light, or in the slanting rays of sunshine through a
window, worlds and universes, lost in space, gliding, turning, spinning,
whirling, drifting, vibrating.

 

 

Yet, thought David, so perfectly balanced were these bodies in the
universe, so delicate and dependent were they in their rhythm upon
each other, that a man, by the mere stretching forth of his hand, could
theoretically change the moon on its course.

 

 

He thought of the planet, of Planet
Y
, and he thought of the death
it would bring. And he recalled Dr. Dawson discussing death one morning
after the dome had closed and the work night was over.

 

 

"After all, David," the Old Man had said, "what is fourscore and ten
years compared to the life of the stars and the planets? A lightning
flash on a summer day? A drop of rain in a cloudburst?"

 

 

David had admitted the comparison, had agreed that it was no more than
that when you stood away from a man's life and looked at it in proper
perspective.

 

 

"But in a sense," he had said to the Old Man, "the whole concept of
a man's life is in his own mind. To him a lifetime is forever, the
beginning and end of all things."

 

 

"True," Dr. Dawson had replied. "But it is pure ego, David, for man to
believe that all creation began and ended in his personal segment of
infinity. In the heavens an eternity has already passed, and an eternity
is yet to come. Up there some stars are being born, some are adolescent,
some aged and dying, some dead. In the history of creation, a billion
years, a hundred billion years, passes like a day."

 

 

But, David reflected, men didn't see it that way. They lived their
pitiful era in astronomical time, as though the era would never come to
an end. They lived, famously or humbly, making money or dreaming dreams,
living in glory and living in sorrow, loving, fighting, sleeping, dying,
goaded on by self-indulgence or ambition, believing with an incredible
belief that their careers, their lives, their futures were the most
serious, the most important, the most weighty in the universe.

 

 

Yet if there had been no Planet
Y
, the earth, dependent upon the sun for
life, would have died a short time later, a mere hundred million years
later. The sun would finally lose its warmth and light and roll along
through space, a dark and invisible and forgotten star, an icy graveyard.

 

 

And when Planet
Y
and the earth finally clashed, there would not be
the sound of it in the void, nor even an echo, nor a ripple, to mar the
still serenity of the universe.

 

 

David suddenly felt Carol tug on his arm, and they stopped walking for
a moment.

 

 

"David," she said quietly, looking up into the cold and crackling sky,
"where will we finally see the planet -- up there?"

 

 

He bordered the constellation for her, pointed out a star. "That's where
it is now, Carol. But when it finally becomes visible its position will
have changed."

 

 

"Oh." Carol's face was rapt and dreamy. "It's funny, darling. Up to
tonight I was afraid of it, of death. But now -- now I'm not afraid any
more. I keep thinking of life." She turned to him, and her eyes were
suddenly wet with tears. "And do you know why?"

 

 

He shook his head.

 

 

"I was in San Diego today," she said. "But I lied to you, David. It
wasn't because I wanted to do any shopping. I -- I had to see Dr. Ramsey."

 

 

He stared at her. "Dr. Ramsey?"

 

 

"You see, David," she said simply, "I'm going to have a baby."

 

 

Up ahead on the summit, in the squat, curved white building, in Palomar
Observatory, men were feverishly preparing to look at the face of their
executioner; they had contrived instruments to do so, trembling in
their anticipation.

 

 

But David had forgotten it now.

 

 

The affair of the heavens had for the moment become relatively
unimportant. His mind was confused and whirling with an earthy problem.

 

 

His child would be a year old when the end came.

 

 

It was wrong, he thought savagely, wrong. When you brought a child into
the world, you owed it a lifetime.

 

 

But he knew that his concern was partly selfish.

 

 

Carol was pregnant, and for the better part of a year she would be denied
to him.

 

 

God damn it, he thought furiously, helplessly, he was human, as human
as anybody. Why did this have to happen?

 

 

Why?

 

 

"Everything set, David?" asked Dr. Dawson.

 

 

"Yes, sir." David answered mechanically, almost absently, still
preoccupied with his own intimate problem. "I've checked all the
apparatus. Wallace had some trouble with the Bowen image-slicer. There
was some variance in the temperature of the coude room, and we were
afraid it would distort the image delivered into the high-dispersion
spectrograph. But everything's all right now."

 

 

"Good." The Old Man crushed his cigar in an ash tray and rose. "You've
instructed the newspaper and radio people to stay in the auditorium
until the experiment is over?"

 

 

"Yes, Doctor. Francis will be there to see that no one wanders out into
the observatory."

 

 

"Well, David, I guess we're ready to go." The Old Man lifted his phone,
dialed two numbers, and said: "All right, Fred, we're ready. You can
bring the roof down now."

 

 

The Old Man's voice was almost dry in his calm. But David knew he was
excited, excited inside. It was a big night, and the world was waiting.
It was the biggest night they would ever have from here on in. The face
of the planet was something you could not predict or calculate in advance,
or even guess at.

 

 

Whatever the big telescope showed would be brand new, and it would be
just as exciting to astronomers as to laymen.

 

 

They walked out into the observatory itself. It was silent now, bathed
in the weird glow of soft red and green lights hidden in the cornice.
The two men were alone, walking noiselessly on the rubber parquet as
they headed toward the elevator.

 

 

David forgot his own troubles for the moment. The observatory still
affected him, still awed him a little. Walking through it alone, he
had always felt a little like an intruder. There was something about
it, its hushed and reverent silence, its dim lighting, its echoing and
arching vault, that reminded him of a cathedral. He had seen boisterous
tourists enter it, and suddenly their voices had dropped to whispers,
and they had taken off their hats and walked softly on tiptoes.

 

 

Being a little nearer to the stars here at Palomar was, in a sense,
being a little nearer to God. The observatory was the last way station
to the heavens.

 

 

Yet walking through the observatory now with Dr. Dawson, David felt
somehow that they and the building itself were already in a kind of
celestial motion. It was of course an illusion, you knew it was an
illusion, you knew that this building was anchored firmly to the granite
body of Palomar Mountain.

 

 

Still, here in this place, in the ghostly light and the complete silence,
a kind of hypnotic spell stole over you, and already you were moving,
soaring through space, as though the great round building had somehow
burst from its earthy moorings and was carrying you along with it,
a pygmylike passenger, through the starry vault overhead.

 

 

As they came out of the elevator on the mezzanine, a motor purred suddenly
somewhere deep below. It began to throb and beat, throb and beat, like
a great heart. The dome began to open, like an orange slowly unfolding
into two perfect halves, and a cold blast of air came straight downward.

 

 

After the main floor, the transition to the mezzanine was almost
startling. Men of the observatory staff were swarming about the place,
running up and down stairways, carrying photographic plates, sheets
of calculations, and bound on other errands. They seemed to be moving
almost feverishly against a deadline, as though the onrushing planet
overhead might decide to veer off and run away before they could catch
it in their instruments.