The Big Eye (18 page)

 

 

"I can't say," interrupted David sharply. "But he'll be here at ten
o'clock in the morning."

 

 

"All right," said Corey crisply. "We'll have a man up there then. Thank
you very much, Mr. Hughes."

 

 

David hung up. He felt a little ill. Corey had been no different from the
others. They had all been a little diflScult, the press and radio people
alike. Not so long ago, as Corey had implied, the mere announcement that
the Old Man would have something to say was enough to send a horde of
reporters scurrying up to Palomar.

 

 

Now, what happened in the heavens was small potatoes, compared to what
might happen on earth.

 

 

It was almost amusing, thought David, in a macabre sort of way. He had
actually been forced to "sell" the greatest story of all time.

 

 

He felt tired, very tired now. He snapped out his hooded desk light
and shuflfled out into the darkness of the observatory. It was quiet
in the great circular hall, a kind of brooding and unearthly quiet,
almost sinister in its overtones. He started for the light switch and
then changed his mind. Somehow he didn't feel like facing the glare of
lights now.

 

 

He walked noiselessly along the corridor, his feet making no sound on the
rubber-inlaid floor. He passed the cafeteria, the library, the auditorium
and lecture hall. Then he paused for a moment as he saw a crack of light
coming from under a door.

 

 

The Old Man was still up.

 

 

David hesitated, debated whether to knock on the Old Man's door and tell
him the press meeting was all set for the next morning. Then he decided
against it and went through the door and down the stairs to the ground
floor. The night light was on in the reception room, dull blue under
its shade, but Francis was gone.

 

 

David took his hat and coat from the foyer closet and stepped out into
the night.

 

 

The cold wind hit him broadside, making him gasp. He turned up his coat
collar and walked out of the yard and onto the road, heading for his room
at the Monastery a short distance down the road. It was a moonless night,
but the heavens, nevertheless, suffused the entire area with light. He
had never seen the constellations blaze so brightly. They tipped the
domes of the observatories with silver and similarly etched the various
buildings of the mountain colony -- the water-supply works, the electric
plant, the cottages down the road.

 

 

David's eye swept the heavens as he walked, glancing momentarily at each
illuminated island universe -- and then moving on. Yes, they were really
putting on a show tonight -- Hercules, the Kneeler; Pegasus, the Winged
Horse; Sagittarius, the Archer; Cassiopeia, the Lady in the Chair;
Canes Venatici, the Hunting Dogs.

 

 

And finally his roving eye caught and held the patch of sky where,
plummeting onward, cold and lifeless and remorseless.

 

 

Planet
Y
was moving on its inexorable and fatal arc, bent on cosmic
destruction.

 

 

Two years and one month . . .

 

 

How long was that? Figure it out. Two times fifty-two. One hundred and
four weeks. Plus four, more or less.

 

 

One hundred and eight weeks -- seven hundred and fifty-six days.

 

 

You could go on like that. You could break it down into hours, minutes,
and even seconds. But it all added up to the same thing.

 

 

Two years and one month. And then -- Merry Christmas.

 

 

How much life could you pack into two years and one month, even by living
desperately, with the ticking of the clock loud in your ears? In two
years and one month, he, David Hughes, would be thirty-two. A man in
his prime. Young enough to enjoy life vigorously, old enough to know
how precious it could be.

 

 

And even now, as he walked along Observatory Road, he was walking on
borrowed time. It was beginning to slip away from him already. These
minutes and seconds here on top of Palomar Mountain were now part of a
precious stack of chips.

 

 

And they were beginning to slip away, he was already beginning to lose.
And there was no way of winning them back.

 

 

He looked up again, fascinated, at the constellation in which the Old
Man had first sighted the killer planet. One night in the not-too-distant
future that empty patch would be punctured by a tiny silver pin point. The
pin point would get bigger until it became a disk, and then a bigger
disk, and then bigger and bigger as it came nearer and nearer, night
after night.

 

 

And it would have your name on it, and the precise time and date.

 

 

And that was the agonizing thing about it -- to know exactly when you were
going to die. Like the convict in the death house awaiting execution, you
would live with your eyes on the clock, cherishing every miserly minute.

 

 

But unlike the condemned man who awaited the chair or the hangman's noose,
you could not hope. You could not hope for a pardon, or clemency, or a
stay of execution, or even an escape.

 

 

For you there was no hope, no clemency, no escape.

 

 

David Hughes was suddenly afraid -- afraid to be out there in the open,
in the sharp night, alone. He had been all right back in the Old Man's
office, but now -- now it was beginning to get him. He began to hurry,
to walk faster and faster, like a boy hurrying past a graveyard, his
feet crunching on the graveled road.

 

 

A kind of panic swept through him as he hurried along, his head up,
staring at the sky. Somewhere back in the recesses of his memory he
recalled a Mother Goose story, something he had learned as a child in
first or second grade:

 

 

One day Henny-Penny was walking in the woods. An acorn fell from a tree
and hit her on the head. "My, my," said Henny-Penny, "the sky is falling,
and the world is coming to an end. I must go and tell the King."

 

 

Then Henny-Penny met Ducky-Lucky. "Where are you going in such a
hurry?" said Ducky-Lucky. "The sky is falling," said Henny-Penny,
"I must go and tell the King." "Wait for me" said Ducky-Lucky. "I will
go with you and tell the King."

 

 

Then Henny-Penny and Ducky-Lucky met Turkey-Lurkey. "Where are you going
in such a hurry?" asked Turkey-Lurkey. "The sky is falling and the world
is coming to an end," said Henny-Penny and Ducky-Lucky. "We are going
to tell the King. . . ."

 

 

The panic possessed him. It shook him, drove him on, so that now he was
half walking, half running past the rows of darkened cottages on each
side of the road. He envied the people who slept in them, the telescope
mechanics, the steward and the cook, the janitors, the chaufEeur, the
handy men, the power-plant and Diesel personnel, the others on the Old
Man's stajBE. They and their families slept peacefully now, with nothing
on their minds, not even tomorrow.

 

 

But tomorrow would be another day. Then they would know what he knew
now. And after that they would never again sleep soundly. . . .

 

 

He came to the small guest cottage where Carol was staying, and abruptly
he stopped.

 

 

The cottage was dark, like all the others. Carol was in there, and by
now she would be asleep.

 

 

Carol . . .

 

 

He remembered that night back in her apartment, back in New York. He
had been afraid then, although it was nothing like the awful Fear that
clutched him now. He had held Carol in his arms, close, very close,
and the Fear had gone away, it had ceased to possess him. He had lived
for the moment then, and the hell with tomorrow.

 

 

He needed Carol again, now. He needed her more than he had then. He
needed her more than anything on God's earth. His need of her was like
a crying hunger.

 

 

He turned and went up the walk and onto the porch. He knocked on the door,
softly at first, and then louder and louder, in an almost frantic tattoo.

 

 

The lights went on inside the cottage. A curtain parted in a window.
Then there was a sound of a key turning, and the door opened.

 

 

"David!"

 

 

She was standing there in the doorway, shivering in a thin robe, staring
at him.

 

 

He shut the door behind him and without a word swept her into his arms.

 

 

It was two minutes before ten o'clock in the morning.

 

 

The reporters, the radio and television men had already been shown into
the small auditorium by Francis, and the buzz of their conversation
filled the room. But the Old Man and the other astronomers hadn't come
in yet. They were holding a last-minute meeting in the study.

 

 

David stood in the glass-walled projection room of the auditorium,
fumbling with his slides, nervously tinkering with the projector.
Throwing sky images up there on the screen above the platform was nothing
new to him. He had gone through the routine a hundred times, not only for
Dr. Dawson and his colleagues, but for the tourists who visited Palomar.

 

 

But now he was jittery, and his hands were all thumbs. He wondered how
the Old Man would break the news to this press and radio crowd.

 

 

He wondered how they would take Planet
Y
.

 

 

How big did printers' type come, how black and bold? How loud could
headlines scream? And would there be any of those silly melodramatic
affairs you saw in the movies, those rapid-fire conversations between
the city editor and the foreman of the pressroom?

 

 

"Stop the presses, Joe. We'll need a first-page replate!"

 

 

"Make it the next edition, Mac. We're already rolling."

 

 

"I said stop the presses!"

 

 

"Okay. Okay. I suppose you got something big, Brisbane!" "Big? Listen,
Joe, this is terrific -- the greatest story of all time. The world is
coming to an end!"

 

 

At a time like this, thought David, you could think of the damnedest
things. You felt a little lightheaded; your mind played tricks on you,
with fanciful images. . . .

 

 

He looked at the clock. Five minutes after ten. He wished the Old Man
would come in and get it over with. He was getting more of the jitters
all the time. And he had a busy day ahead.

 

 

Late in the afternoon Carol and he were driving down to Dago to get
married.

 

 

It was wonderful the way she had taken it, the way she had taken the news
early that morning. He had made love to her first, savagely, as though
it were his last chance on earth, and she had responded wordlessly,
without questions, without asking an explanation.

 

 

She had sensed how much he had needed her, and that was enough.

 

 

Later, when he was spent and the Fear had gone and he was calm again,
he had told her. He had given her the whole story, simple and straight,
and he had expected hysterics afterward. But there were no hysterics. She
was funny, he told himself, she hadn't even cried. She was funny, and
wonderful. She had rested there in his arms, saying nothing for a long
time. And then finally:

 

 

"We'll still have two years together, David. We can make it a lifetime
together."

 

 

"Then you're not afraid, Carol?"

 

 

"No, David. I'm not afraid. Not like this. Not with you."

 

 

She was funny, and she was wonderful. She hadn't even cried.

 

 

He listened to the conversation of the newsmen as they waited for the
Old Man. They were frightened, you could see that. It was plain in their
taut faces, in the way they spoke.

 

 

They were, in a sense, beaten men, thought David as he watched them
through the glass-enclosed projection room. They had no hope in
themselves, saw no hope of anyone else averting the tragedy. They had
already accepted the war as a fait accompli, and now they looked backward
at what had gone before.

 

 

David listened to their chatter eddying up to the projection room:

 

 

"Look, Ed, we had a temporary monopoly of the bomb back in the forties.
Remember? And what did we do with it? We muffed it. We sat on it and
watched the Reds gobble up Europe and Asia, watched them like a hypnotized
bird watching a snake, gave them a chance to dream up a firecracker of
their own.

 

 

"The Baruch proposal, the Marshall Plan, the Atlantic Pact, the Eastern
bloc, and the rest. And the Reds playing it cagey all the way . . ."

 

 

"Christ, Frank, when you think of it, the whole thing's like a bad
movie. And now here it is, right around the corner -- A-Dayr

 

 

"In a way, I suppose it's partly our fault. Maybe we could have made it
one world. We had a world weapon, and we made a nationalistic gimmick
out of it. You know, we've got a gun and you ain't. Be good guys now.
Do it our way -- or else!"

 

 

"I could have sworn it was going to be all right, Fred. Roosevelt
and Truman, back a jew years ago -- they were trying. And all those
conferences later . . ."

 

 

"Talk, talk, talk, talk. Everybody talking about the international
control of atomic energy and nobody doing anything about it . . ."

 

 

"Funny how it all happened, Ed, when you look back at it now. For a while,
there, it looked swell. The Russians finally dropping the veto power in
the Security Council and even agreeing to international inspection . . ."