The Big Eye (30 page)

 

 

"Dear," he heard Carol call from the kitchen, "please bring the baby
back. She hasn't finished her supper."

 

 

Then as she laughed and squealed he carried her back into the kitchen.
. . .

 

 

The same old wonderful ritual.

 

 

Later, when their daughter was ready for bed, he brought forth the piece
de resistance.

 

 

He picked her up and swung her back and forth, back and forth, across
the bed. There was a spark of fear in the baby's eyes as he dropped her
on the soft bed so that she bounced.

 

 

And then the child laughed and laughed and held up her tiny arms to
David to do it again.

 

 

Finally he kissed her good night and gave her to Carol to tuck in.
And there were tears in his eyes.

 

 

The same old wonderful ritual, until Christmas.

 

 

Later David Hughes lay on his back, sleepless.

 

 

The Big Eye stared through the window like a great round Peeping Tom.
It was like living with your own hangman, he thought, month after
month. You saw your death before you; it followed you, peered over your
shoulder, hung over your head, shone through your window, like this.

 

 

Men had been executed before, he thought, but the execution had been
reasonable, civilized, merciful. The condemned man never saw the chair
or the noose till he was ready for it.

 

 

David turned toward his wife.

 

 

"Carol," he whispered. "Awake?"

 

 

Her hand fumbled for his in the darkness. "What is it, darling?"

 

 

"I can't sleep."

 

 

"Neither can I."

 

 

"Carol, can't we do something about that damned window? The way that
thing shines in here every night, it's enough to drive anyone crazy.
It's like having a third party in our bedroom every night. Why can't we
get those blackout curtains that everyone else seems to have?"

 

 

"I've already ordered them, David. But they're hard to get. There's been
a run on them -- everybody wants them -- and there are so few stores open
any more. I've almost finished making drapes."

 

 

He reached over on the night table, picked up a cigarette, lighted it.
They shared drags for a minute and then he said:

 

 

"Carol, are you afraid of what's coming? Are you really afraid?"

 

 

She was silent for a moment. Then she answered:

 

 

"I don't know, David. I was for the longest time, but now I don't know.
I've thought a lot about death, and I keep wondering what it'll be like.
A flash of flame? A whirling in darkness? And after that, what?
How long will death be?" She hesitated. "I don't know. I guess we're like
children, David, asking how long the night will be when we go to bed,
because we love the daylight in which we play." Her hand tightened about
his. "Darling, I think if I feel anything at all now, it's regret. Not
so much for you, not for me, but for the baby."

 

 

He said nothing, and Carol went on:

 

 

"I keep thinking, David, our baby sleeping there in the crib, she'll
never have a birthday party of her own, or go to school or a movie,
or eat a sundae, or wear an evening gown, or have a boy friend and fall
in love, and have a husband and children of her own. She'll never even
have a Christmas, David, not really."

 

 

The baby whimpered in the crib.

 

 

"Oh, David!" Carol began to cry.

 

 

He rose and padded over to the crib in his bare feet and picked up his
daughter. She clung to him sleepily as he took her to the bathroom.
Then he carried her over to the big bed and placed her between himself
and Carol.

 

 

And so they finally slept, the three of them, close to each other.

 

 

But the Big Eye, looking at them through the window, was wide awake.

 

 

In the fall of the last year the Big Eye appeared nightly as a great
flaming, coppery-red sphere in the sky.

 

 

The effects of the new planet's intrusion into the solar system were
gradual and cumulative.

 

 

Japan suffered tremendous earthquakes, so that its entire remaining
population was evacuated to the mainland of China. Much of California
was abandoned for the most part, although the shocks were not as
serious. Seismologists listed earthquakes in Alaska, Lisbon, Calabria,
Chile, and many other places already susceptible to disturbances in the
earth's surface.

 

 

The tides were erratic and no longer could be charted. There were
tidal waves in the Philippines and in the Caribbean. Acapulco, Mexico,
as well as Cape Lopatka, on the southern tip of Kamchatka Peninsula,
were completely inundated. The sea level rose in some coastal areas,
fell in others. In the islands of Polynesia and the Coral Sea there were
spectacular volcanic eruptions.

 

 

Landslides were a daily occurrence in the Swiss Alps, in the Himalayas,
the Rockies, and many other mountainous areas.

 

 

All over the world the temperature dropped progressively, degree by
degree, and the Big Eye loomed bigger.

 

 

In New York there had been no summer. June, July, and August became
early spring or late fall, thermometer-wise.

 

 

But the most significant changes were man-made.

 

 

In the last year, goaded by the driving and demanding leer of the Big Eye,
men had made some long-time dreams come true.

 

 

They had stopped making atomic bombs and instead were making atomic
bullets, as tracer detectives and interbody projectiles. From the Oak
Ridge laboratories, which once gave the world the most painful problem
of the age, came a steady stream of radioactive isotopes.

 

 

And in August of the last year they had discovered a cure for cancer.

 

 

This was only one of the many other great achievements in the field
of medicine.

 

 

By using radioactive isotopes as a means of prying open the once bolted
door to the inner processes of life itself, by probing deep into the inner
mysteries of the human body, they had found quick and positive cures for
most of the myriad diseases of the bones, heart, tissues, nerves, and
other organs, diseases which once had taken a great toll of human life.

 

 

This, the golden age of atomic medicine, was not without irony.

 

 

In the last year the Journal of the American Medical Association
calculated that the life span of man had increased twenty years and
that new medical techniques had progressed to a point where man could
normally expect to live a hundred years.

 

 

The article was interesting in a wistful kind of way.

 

 

The final year had also ushered in another golden age -- the age of
practical atomic power.

 

 

At the Hanford laboratories in the state of Washington, which, in another
era, had made plutonium for atomic bombs, the nuclear scientists had
released a seething storm of neutrons from spontaneous fission in a huge
atomic pile. Later they had applied this power to run ocean-going vessels,
locomotives, and other great fuel-consuming machinery. The heat which
was generated as a by-product from the pile was piped to great cities
and used in huge central heating systems. Coal, gas, and oil became
unwieldy and expensive, antique fuels to be laboriously torn from the
earth. City planners drew up blueprints for generating plants whereby
the householder would receive all the power he needed for a fraction of
the cost he had heretofore borne.

 

 

The blueprints were pretty to look at and breath-taking in their
concept. But no one thought of translating them into the practical
phase. Under the circumstances, file and forget.

 

 

The Year Two was a year of peculiar phenomena in a hundred different ways.

 

 

The death rate hit a rock-bottom low.

 

 

To be sure, some people died by accident. Some were drowned, or killed
by falls, or hit by vehicles, or struck by lightning. Some died in the
now frequent earthquakes or tidal waves. And some still died of natural
causes, despite the great advances of medicine.

 

 

But not a man, woman, or child died through war. And no man died in
violence by the hand of his neighbor. Not a Jew was murdered, not a
Negro lynched. Not a single person died of hunger, not even in India
or China. Neither did any man, woman, or child suffer death because of
exposure, or lack of medicine or medical attention.

 

 

There were no strangers left in the last year. No man held himself
aloof from his neighbor on grounds of religion, caste, color, or
environment. The Big Eye was blind to these differences; it was not
socially selective; it was completely impartial.

 

 

Its clientele was not restricted.

 

 

In the fall of the final year, in the cities and towns and on the farms,
men waited to die.

 

 

A special commission of the Federation of the World, called the World
Conservation Commission, planned and enforced just enough productive
activity to maintain economic life until midnight on Christmas.

 

 

Not a hammer or saw was heard anywhere, and only a few wheels turned,
of necessity. The spindles and machine shafts of the factories became
quiet gray forests of steel, and cobwebs grew in the gears and belting
of drill presses, lathes, milling machines, and shapers.

 

 

Farmers sat on their porches at the time of the autumn harvest and looked
idly across their weed-grown fields, unplanted in the spring.

 

 

There were no longer any profits to be calculated, any reserves
to be accumulated, any investments to be made, any new business to
anticipate. There were no bills to be sent, no debts to be collected nor
credits advanced, no taxes to pay for next year, no accounts receivable.

 

 

There was simply one big Account Payable.

 

 

The world still spun on its axis, but the surface was almost motionless.

 

 

And the only sound heard upon it was the sound of prayer.

 

 

The Big Eye fattened to a great luminous globe and filled the heavens
day and night and kept coming on and on. . . .

 

 

And at last Christmas came.

 

 

 

 

15.

 

 

For some deep and illogical reason people everywhere observed Christmas
in the usual fashion.

 

 

It was the last day of their lives.

 

 

Yet they were stubborn, they were perverse, they insisted on following
the traditional ritual step by step.

 

 

They played at life up to the very end, desperately going through the
motions as though the future were forever, finding a kind of comfort in
it, in these, their last few hours.

 

 

Everything in the apartment looked the same, as it might have on any other
Christmas morning.

 

 

The wreaths were on the windows, the stockings hung over the fireplace.
The tree was in the corner, glittering with many-colored lights, topped
by a star, speckled with silver tinsel. And beneath the tree the gaily
wrapped presents.

 

 

A silk robe for David, a new wallet, a solid-gold tie clasp, an initialed
cigarette lighter, a half dozen ties, a pair of fleece-lined slippers,
a new electric shaver.

 

 

A jeweled wrist watch for Carol, a new handbag, a Paul Revere sterling
silver bowl for the whist table, three handmade nightgowns, a new fur
coat. A huge fluffy rabbit for Emily, a pair of golden-haired twin dolls.

 

 

It was warm and cozy in the room, and the snow was falling outside and
piling on the sills against the frost-fingered window-panes. The last
Christmas was a white Christmas.

 

 

There was the opening of the presents, the warm kisses, the embraces,
the tears. There was the last breakfast, and the last careful ritual of
dressing, and the last walk to church. There were the last hymns, and
the sober faces, and the heads bowed in prayer, and the last sonorous
sermon, the last story of Bethlehem.

 

 

It was the final day of their lives, but it was still Christmas.

 

 

There was the last dinner, turkey and stuffing and mince pie and coffee
and brandy and all the fixings.

 

 

They went through all the motions with a kind of hysterical intensity,
even to the salutations of "Merry Christmas . . ."

 

 

But the other part of the traditional greeting, the rest of the
salutation, the "Happy New Year," was conspicuously missing.

 

 

And the clock ticked on toward three, as on any other Christmas.

 

 

It was very much the same as it had always been, yet so very different:
the carols they would never sing again, the sermon they would never
hear again, the tree they would never adorn again, the stockings they
would never hang again, the good wishes they would never give again,
the presents they gave but would never use.

 

 

It was not a Merry Christmas, and there would be no Happy New Year.

 

 

It was a pathetic kind of Christmas. And yet it was comforting too.

 

 

At two o'clock the bells began to ring.

 

 

Slowly they rose in volume, opened their brassy mouths, swelled the cold
night air with a somber and mournful symphony.