The Big Eye (26 page)

 

 

Poverty began to disappear. At the end of the first few months of the Year
One, not a beggar was seen on the streets of any metropolis in the world,
not even in Shanghai, Bombay, Cairo, and other cities which had once
swarmed with hungry supplicants. The various governments surprisingly
discovered that they had all the resources it took to feed and clothe
and otherwise take care of its people. It was only a question, to coin
an old, old phrase, of proper distribution. Governments had no future
to worry about, no more armies and navies to support. The national debt
became a figure of speech. And although death was still certain, taxes
were canceled.

 

 

Everywhere, in business and industry, the wheels began to slow to a stop.

 

 

But Government was active, and changing fast.

 

 

Politicians, having no re-election to worry about, suddenly became
representatives of the people. In Washington the Democrats and Republicans
almost immediately merged into a single party. The ordinary issues that
had brought forth oratory and filibusters suddenly became obsolete. The
Big Eye stared down impartially upon the sunny shores of California as
well as the rock-bound coasts of Maine.

 

 

And this was only the beginning.

 

 

In July a world government came into being.

 

 

The Federation of the World, as it was called, took over the old United
Nations setup on East River Drive in New York City as its headquarters.

 

 

The Secretariat skyscraper bordering Forty-second Street, the Library,
the General Assembly Building, the giant office building on Forty-eighth
Street once again blazed with light. The hedges on the terrace were
clipped, the grass trimmed, the broken windows replaced, and the
corridors scrubbed.

 

 

There was a tremendous dedication, with hundreds of thousands jamming the
area. Batteries of huge searchlights blazed from surrounding skyscrapers,
bathing the area in brilliant white light. The East River sparkled with
many-colored reflections as one gigantic fireworks display after another
boomed in the summer sky and exploded in glittering cascades.

 

 

A Supreme Council of the World was elected by the assembled delegates
of every nation on earth.

 

 

The ex-President of the United States and the ex-dictator of the Soviet
Union were elected to serve in alternating chairmanships.

 

 

There was no problem as to tenure, and the bylaws of the World
Constitution held no provision for any re-election.

 

 

On the following morning the New York Times devoted its entire editorial
page to the event. The lead editorial said in part:

 

 

Today a wistful dream nurtured by mankind for centuries has come true.

 

 

World government is a fact.

 

 

It is both wonderful and pitiful. It is wonderful in that we have lived
to see it come. It is pitiful that we shall have it for such a short
duration.

 

 

Under the glare of the Big Eye, world government had to come. It
was inevitable, and natural, and practical. The mO' ment the dramatic
announcement broke from Palomar, it was on its way. In the past months we
have watched the two great conflicting systems, capitalism and Communism,
crumble, disintegrate. We have seen nationalism, isolationism, and all
the other isms that separated state from state, man from man, go down
into ashes.

 

 

And out of the ashes has risen one great universal system -- worldism.

 

 

After a million years of ignorant infancy, man has finally shed his
swaddling clothes. If the Big Eye is a tragic miracle, so, too, is the
speed with which it has changed the pattern of our lives. As it swiftly
began to shorten the celestial abyss between the earth and itself, it
became a powerful catalyst, pushing the reaction forward with dramatic
speed. In a few months it did what man in all the centuries of his
history had failed to do.

 

 

Under the lash of fear, under the baleful glare of the Big Eye, men and
nations both suddenly stopped being afraid of each other in their one
common fear.

 

 

Now they are coming together in universal brotherhood.

 

 

The Big Eye will one day bring total darkness, but in the interim it
has brought its own light. It has broken up, at one powerful stroke,
the false gods invented by man -- the legends, the superstitions, the
errors and lies and prejudices and hypocrisies accumulated in the human
mind for thousands of years.

 

 

The overwhelming tragecy is that the new idea has such a short time to
live. But there is still another tragedy we cannot fail to note here.

 

 

The real tragedy is that we did not begin to create this new world
back some fifteen years ago, when the first bomb fell on Hiroshima. The
tragedy is that all through the late forties and fifties, as the world
broke asunder into two worlds, we failed to understand that the bomb
was a kind of Planet
Y
itself, in its devastating threat to mankind.

 

 

Had we recognized the fact then, that the bomb was simply a man-made
Big Eye, we might have begun our new Federation of the World in 1945
instead of today.

 

 

How could we have been so blind?

 

 

Why did we, beginning from the end of the last war, through the late
forties and the early fifties, move apart into hostile and nationalistic
and suspicious segments, instead of coming together as we have now?

 

 

Why did it take a celestial manifestation to bring us to our senses?

 

 

Why?

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the third of September, in the Year One, the Big Eye became visible
to the human eye.

 

 

It appeared as a tiny pin point high in the heavens, shortly after dusk.

 

 

As time went by the pin point thickened into a dime, a penny, a quarter,
then a half dollar, varying in color, like the moon. Finally it was a
rotting, overripe tangerine hanging in the sky, and the Eye emerged from
a shadowy outline to become sharp and clear.

 

 

And, like the human eye, it seemed to reflect mood and intent to the
viewer.

 

 

Sometimes it was dead and expressionless and indifferent. At other times
it was bloated and swollen and puffy, as though suffering from some kind
of heavenly hang-over. It was capricious, too. It was sly; it flirted
and beckoned. It smirked cynically; it leered triumphantly. Sometimes it
was hard and threatening, malicious and mischievous, smug and angry.

 

 

It was never a shifty eye. It knew what it was about; it was a knowing
eye; its purpose was plain and understood.

 

 

And the times when it was visible in the day or night sky, whether you
saw it in America, or Siberia, or Australia, or Arabia, it never looked
at other people elsewhere.

 

 

It always looked directly at you.

 

 

It was impossible to stare the Big Eye down. It followed you everywhere,
like a conscience. And as it grew bigger and bigger it became heavier
and heavier, so that your back and shoulders and head seemed to ache
with its oppressive weight, and your feet dragged more slowly.

 

 

It was particularly vivid when the moon was invisible. Stray dogs howled
and bayed at it in the night when it shone alone in the sky. But when
the moon appeared with it and the two competed for supremacy, the dogs
seemed confused and uncertain. They merely whimpered a little or stopped
barking entirely.

 

 

At the end of the Year One the moon paled into a sickly white, and the
Big Eye dominated the night sky.

 

 

It hung high overhead, tinting the night, so that it was never really
night at all, but a kind of murky and oppressive sunset from dusk
until dawn.

 

 

And it kept coming on, hurtling down, nearer and nearer, leering
malignantly as it came.

 

 

As the calendar shortened, the Big Eye became bigger, bigger, and bigger,
rounder and rounder, cruder and cruder, brighter and brighter, redder
and redder. . . .

 

 

David Hughes and Joe Morgan, the Palomar spectrograph man, came out of
the air-line terminal on Forty-second Street.

 

 

"Taxi!" yelled Morgan. "Hey, taxi!"

 

 

A Yellow Cab stopped short, its brakes squealing. David and his former
roommate threw in their luggage, slammed the door, and settled back.

 

 

"First the New Weston Hotel on Madison," David told the driver. "We'll
check in there -- it'll only take a minute. Then you can take us to the
Hayden Planetarium on Central Park West."

 

 

The driver nodded, and they hegan to move through a dense wedge of
confused traffic.

 

 

It was late afternoon in December, and David's first trip to New York
since the previous November.

 

 

A week ago the Old Man had received an invitation from Dr. Herrick,
director of the Planetarium, to lecture on the Big Eye before a Science
Council seminar of the world government.

 

 

Dr. Dawson had politely declined, for reasons of health, and had offered
to send his first assistant and his spectrograph man to substitute for
him. Herrick had accepted, and David and Morgan were on their way to
confer with the director before lecturing the next morning.

 

 

The cabdriver was a small, bull-necked, bald-headed man. His picture
framed in the rear of the taxi said he was Frank Leone. And although
in the grimy photograph he glared villainously at them from beneath a
sinister-looking cap, he turned out to be quite friendly and garrulous.

 

 

As he waited for the light at Lexington and Forty-second he turned
and asked:

 

 

"Been out of town long, gents?"

 

 

"About a year," answered David.

 

 

"How's the big town look now?"

 

 

"Different. It's changed."

 

 

"You said it, mister. It's changed plenty."

 

 

David noticed that the driver was wearing an expensive overcoat and
hand-stitched gloves. He looked more like a prosperous businessman than
a taxi driver. A sign of the times, thought David. Only a year to go,
what was the use of saving money? Buy the best, live high, eat, drink,
and be merry.

 

 

Spend every dime, cash in the insurance, go to town, live.

 

 

He was willing to bet that Frank Leone's wife had a mink coat. He looked
out of the window, and as the cab lurched forward with the light he saw
that the streets were jammed with what seemed to be hundreds of thousands
of people on the Lexington block between Forty-second and Forty-third.

 

 

And David noticed that practically every woman in the crowd wore a
mink coat.

 

 

He turned to Joe Morgan, but Morgan was looking up through the glass
roof of the taxi, staring at the towering height of the Chrysler
Building. There was awe on his face.

 

 

"Look at that, Dave," he said. "Look at that. Not a pane of glass in a
window above the first floor."

 

 

David had noticed the same thing when they had come out of the
terminal. The upper stories of the surrounding skyscrapers were all
geometrically lined with open, gaping, rectangular holes. Occasionally
the sun glinted on a jagged fragment of glass which still clung to a
window frame. They hadn't bothered to replace the windows after the
tremor of last November.

 

 

"Sure," said the driver, Leone. "All these office buildings are ghost
buildings. Most of 'em are shut off above the first floors; the elevators
ain't even running. The business sections all over the city are ghost
towns."

 

 

"Well," said Morgan, "it makes sense. These empty offices, I mean.
Accountants, businessmen, they haven't anything to do any more. And take
lawyers. No use in lawyers coming down to the office. No one's making
any more wills, under the circumstances. There's no more building going
on and no titles to work out. And as for contracts "

 

 

"Yeah," interrupted Frank Leone, "who needs a contract now? You make a
deal with a guy these days, you don't sign any paper. He takes your word,
you take his word, you trust each other. Who wants to kill the other guy,
when this damned thing up there in the sky is going to come down and blow
us all to hell?" The driver threw on his brakes, bumped a big limousine
in front of him. "That's why there ain't a courthouse open today in New
York, from Brooklyn to the Bronx. The lawyers and the judges didn't have
nothing to do, so they went home."

 

 

They inched ahead in the crush of traffic, and David noted that the
insurance companies and the banks, too, were closed. The hedges against
the future had been clipped at the roots.

 

 

But it was the crowd jamming up the sidewalks, barely moving in either
direction, that fascinated both David and Morgan. This was a boom town,
and the people had a boom look, the look of free spenders. They seemed
to be on a holiday. David could see no one hurrying, hustling ahead,
as they did in the old days, before the Year One.

 

 

But there was more to the crowd than numbers. It was a crowd with a mood.

 

 

In the old days, before the Big Eye, the people in a New York crowd
looked sullen; they hungered for privacy; they fought and elbowed and
resented each other.