The Big Eye (3 page)

 

David listened, fascinated. This air-line driver didn't know it, but he
was putting his finger on the reason why he, David Hughes, was in New
York right now with a locked and bulging brief case.

 

 

"And that ain't all, mister," said the man, leaning toward David
confidentially. "I'll tell you something else, and it's straight from
the horse's mouth. The Reds have found a way to stop our rockets and
jets the minute they're airborne."

 

 

David stared at him. "That's just rumor."

 

 

"Yeah." The driver almost snarled at him. "Listen, mister. I'll let you
in on a little secret. I drive this car for the air line. And naturally,
once in a while, I drive pilots and some of the crews in to town. I've
heard 'em talking in the back seat, and what they've said is enough to
make a guy's hair stand on end."

 

 

"What do you mean?"

 

 

"I mean that the instruments on the stratocruisers have been going
haywire, crazy. The radar, too. Some of the boys have had to navigate
as blind as a bat. You think those crashes you've been reading about
just happened? Nuts! The Reds made 'em happen. They've got some kind of
magnetic gimmick in the air, and they've been turning it on and off.
What do you think's going to happen to our jets and rockets if we let
'em go? They're all operated by instruments, aren't they? If we let a
few go and the Russians use this gimmick, our plane will land in Siberia
instead of in Moscow. Hell, maybe the Reds can make 'em turn right around
and come back!"

 

 

David listened, stunned by what he heard. His face was impassive, but
his mind was racing furiously. This air-line employee knew. He didn't
realize how much he knew. David hadn't known it himself until early
that evening. He had heard it from a source on a much higher level,
and he would hear more about it tomorrow morning, at a meeting place he
did not yet know.

 

 

He shuddered to think of the reaction, the panic, that would sweep the
country if the information volunteered by the garrulous driver suddenly
became widespread and public knowledge.

 

 

The man wheeled his limousine west, up Forty-second Street, and finally
brought the car to a stop in front of the air-line terminal. And as he
opened the door he growled:

 

 

"Those goddamn fools back there. Those diplomats. They should have kept
trying. They should have sat down on their striped pants and m,ade it
work! The goddamn stupid fools!"

 

 

David left the car and went into the terminal to check his return
reservations. One look was enough to discourage him. What he saw was a
repeat performance of the terminal at Idlewild. The same milling crowd,
the same weary clerks, the same babel of frightened voices:

 

 

"But I've got to get out! I've got to! You've got to get me a reservation,
clerk!"

 

 

"I've got Priority One. Right here. Doesn't that mean something?"

 

 

"Try the trains? What trains? Look through the window, clerk. They've
closed the gates across the street at Grand Central and shut down the
ticket windows!"

 

 

"Look, I've been down here two days, waiting for a cancellation. You can't
tell me no cancellation has come through! One must have come through!"

 

 

"Listen, clerk, I've got a wife and daughter. I've got to get them out,
I've got to! I'll take three seats on any plane, going anywhere, as long
as it's out of town!"

 

 

Yes, thought David, I've seen it before, heard it before.

 

 

The same voices, the same people with the same pale and frightened faces,
surging forward toward the counters until they were checked and pushed
back by grim, white-helmeted military police.

 

 

This was where the Fear was the most paralyzing, its hand the clammiest,
its clutch the tightest.

 

 

This was the city.

 

 

David hung onto his bag and brief case, elbowed his way through the crowd,
and rode down the escalator. He pushed the glass doors open and stepped
out into the dark, wind-blown night.

 

 

For a moment he stood irresolute and stared west, up Forty-second
Street. His skin prickled at what he saw. It was a sight that no man
could ever forget, a memory that could never really fade.

 

 

The towering buildings rose on either side, their dark windows, like
sightless eyes, looking down at the dimly lit canyon below. It was
quiet here -- strangely quiet -- a place brooding, barely whispering with
life, waiting to die. Not a vehicle was in sight, and the only sign of
movement in the street itself was a few old newspapers which the wind
had snatched from the gutter and propelled along the road. David could
hear them rustle as they drifted along.

 

 

Finally one or two civilians and soldiers came along, huddled deep into
their coats against the wind. The sharp click-clack of their heels on
the sidewalk echoed and re-echoed dismally.

 

 

David turned up his own coat collar and walked west, toward Times Square.

 

 

He passed the darkened Fifth Avenue Library and suddenly became
conscious that on his left there was a single dull red light hanging
high in the sky, like a displaced moon. It was the glowing top of the
Empire State Building. Finally, between Sixth and Broadway, he began to
see signs of life. A taxicab and then two Army cars, their headlights
slashing through the darkness. A few more people, a bar and grill open,
a restaurant. They were dimly illuminated inside, and what patrons there
were within seemed to be soldiers. Outside, the neon and electric signs,
the great spectaculars, were dark -- dead.

 

 

It's the biggest and the weirdest graveyard in the world, thought David.

 

 

David turned right at Times Square and walked up Broadway. He looked
for a cab but saw none. Carol lived up on Cathedral Parkway, West llOth
Street. And, as she had said, not even the subways were running.

 

 

There was nothing to do but walk.

 

 

This was the theater district. He could make out some of the darkened
marquee signs -- the hits that had been playing here not much longer than
a month ago. Stepping Along -- the big musical down the street on one
side of the deserted Astor Hotel. F.D.R. -- the biographical drama of a
President whom many people still remembered and whose great dream had now
gone up in smoke. There was a bit of grim irony, too, in a huge theater
ad that said: "The Narrow Alley ... A Great Tragedy . . . Coming Soon

 

 

"A Great Tragedy . . . Coming Soon . . ."

 

 

And then suddenly Times Square became suffused in an eerie glow -- a
bluish-white wash of light. Startled, David turned to look at the source.

 

 

It was a huge television screen, high up on the side of one of
the buildings. One of the networks operated it as an advertisement,
bringing the Broadway crowds athletic events, news, dramas, and political
speeches. It had been an instant and tremendous success. David remembered
reading, back in Palomar, that they had been forced to rope off the
entire Times Square area while two hundred thousand people jammed the
streets to watch the last world's heavyweight championship fight.

 

 

He blinked at the blinding light, and another memory stirred in him.
The television screen was located on the exact spot where the big Camel
cigarette sign once stood. As a boy he had been fascinated by the old
sign. There had been a smiling man blowing smoke rings across Broadway.
When the air was calm, the rings floated across like huge white
doughnuts. But when it was windy, the man in the sign kept smiling,
but all he could blow out were wispy puffs of smoke.

 

 

A small knot of pedestrians and soldiers stopped on a corner to stare
at the screen, and David paused with them. For a moment he wondered why
the television screen was working, since there were so few spectators.
Then he realized that the same images would be seen on a network system,
on millions of television sets from coast to coast, and that operating
the sign would make little difference in the over-all cost. His mind
slipped back to the observatory at Palomar for a moment. Francis,
the steward, who had been with the Old Man for twenty years, would no
doubt be taking in whatever this show was going to be on the set in the
reception room on the main floor. Francis was a great video and radio fan.

 

 

The glare softened into a dull silver background, and then a title in
red letters appeared;

 

NEWS OF THE WORLD

 

The background dissolved into a scene showing a green-colored globe
of the world spinning on its axis. Then came the voice of an invisible
announcer:

 

 

"News of the world! A five-minute documentary summary brought to you
every night at this time by the GENERAL TEXTILE CORPORATION, makers of
DOWNYSOFT blankets and DOWNYSOFT towels.

 

 

"And now, here is your telecaster -- Arthur Morrow!"

 

 

The spinning globe segued into a scene of a paneled study lined with
bookshelves. A gray-haired man sat at a desk. He smiled at David and
the others. Then the smile disappeared, and he looked professionally
grim. He stared straight into the eyes of his watchers and then spoke.

 

 

"Good evening. This is Arthur Morrow. Tonight the world waits and
wonders. The tension grows, becomes almost unbearable. And on the end
of everyone's tongue is the same terrible question: 'Will it come? Will
it really come at last?' "

 

 

The man on the screen leaned back in his leather chair, shook his head.

 

 

"No one knows. We can only hope and pray that in this last desperate
moment Man will come to his senses. Even now, at this very moment,
Mr. William Allison, our Secretary of State and special envoy of
the President, is on his way to the Kremlin to meet in extraordinary
session with Mr. Bakhanov, the Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union. In
a moment we hope to telecast this historic event for you direct from the
new Kremlin at Kirensk, in Asiatic Russia. Permission for this strange
raising of the censorship curtain comes from the Soviet government. It
is their claim that they are doing this to illustrate to us, and to the
world, that it, too, is willing to compromise. At any rate, they are
making much of it in their propaganda line. . . ."

 

 

Someone in the knot of spectators spoke up. It was a young soldier.

 

 

"So Allison's meeting Bakhanov. Geez, I hope they work out something!"

 

 

"I doubt it," said an older man. "Talk, talk, talk. Nothing but talk.
That's all we've heard for years. The way it's going to end up, we'll
talk ourselves into six feet under."

 

 

"Well, anyway," said the soldier, "nothing's gonna happen while they're
sitting around a table."

 

 

"Oh no?" The older man laughed harshly. "Listen, sonny, ever hear of a
man named Hull?"

 

 

"Hull?"

 

 

"Yeah. I guess you wouldn't remember, sonny. You were still pretty wet
behind the ears. But Hull was our Secretary of State then. Back in '41,
it was. He was sitting around a table with two Jap diplomats, and no
one thought anything would happen. Not right then, anyway. Then all of
a sudden -- wham! Right in the middle of everything, the Japs let us have
it at Pearl Harbor."

 

 

David listened and remembered. He'd been only eleven then. But he
remembered his father, white-faced and shaking in anger, turning off
the radio. He remembered the bewilderment, the surprise, the disbelief.
The Stab in the Back
, they had called it then.

 

 

David shivered a little as the gray-haired man on the screen went on:

 

 

"It seems incredible that the peoples of the earth stand on the brink
of holocaust tonight, that the lights have gone out in the great
cities of the world. Tonight, like a great colossus, the Soviet Union
stands astride Europe and Asia, while we have declared our defense
responsibility through the whole of the Western Hemisphere, from Canada,
through South Amer-ica. Tonight the Soviet Union, as well as ourselves,
has the bomb. And tonight the world waits for the zero hour -- the hour
that no one wants to come but everyone expects to come. . . ."

 

 

A soldier on David's left muttered, "Yeah, it's the waiting. It's the
waiting that's tough. It's the waiting that's driving everybody crazy."

 

 

"What I want to know is, Frank, what are we waiting for?" His companion
was emphatic. "Why don't we throw it first, before they do? Somebody's
going to throw it first, and it better be us. Or else . . . !"

 

 

"You can say that again." A sergeant was talking now. "Listen, you guys,
I heard something, and it ain't from the latrine either. The Reds are
supposed to have an atom cocktail planted in one of these here buildings,
or down in the subway somewhere. I dunno, there may be ten of 'em, or
a hundred, for all I know. They've got some kind of gadget where they
can set 'em ofE from Moscow without getting off their fannies."

 

 

There was silence for a moment. The faces of the men looked white and
set and unreal in the glare of the television screen. Then someone in
the rear said:

 

 

"Maybe they're touching off a few rockets right now, headed F.O.B. New
York. How the hell do we know? Why take a chance? Let's give it to
'em and get it over with!"