The Big Eye

by Max Ehrlich

  Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock . . .

  And Carol thought: In an hour it'll be over. And I'm not afraid, I'm not afraid, I'm not afraid. As long as David is close to me, and the baby is in my arms, I'm not afraid. I don't know. Maybe it's just because I don't believe it. In an hour I'm going to die, and I don't believe it. Maybe death is unbelievable, even to the dying. Something that happens to everyone else but not to you. Funny, about the way it feels, about going out to die. It's like leaving on a long trip. Yesterday I cleaned and scrubbed the apartment from top to bottom. Crazy-clean for the hereafter. Can't die with an untidy house. And this morning I made the beds. Can't die with the beds unmade. And I washed the dishes. Can't die with dirty dishes in the sink, even if there'll be no one around to eat from the clean ones. And I drew the blinds and fluffed the cushions in the living room and turned off the electric stove and defrosted the refrigerator. Just as though I were going away on a long trip with David and the baby and would return someday. Everything but pack the bags. But we'll never be back, we'll never be back again. I won't be back, and David won't be back, and the baby won't. The baby. Emily. I hope she sleeps in my arms, that she's asleep when it comes, when the Big Eye comes, in an hour. I wonder what she would have been like, what she would have grown up to be? Would she have grown to be sweet, and generous, and lovely, and beautiful? And the husband she'd never have, who would he have been, and what? Rich and handsome and intelligent? And the children she might have had, the grandchildren I might have had, David and I. What would they have been like? I'll never know, we'll never know. Still, I'm lucky, I'm lucky. I've had something out of life. Daughter, lover, wife, and mother. But I want more, more, more. This is the last, the very last, the last hour. And I want more, more, more. . . .

  Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock . . .

  "It's time to go," she whispered to David. "It's time to go out there with the others. David, David, David, it's time to go."

  "All right, darling."

  They kissed, and embraced, and wept. Then they rose and went into the other room, where Emily was sleeping.

  She was lying there, her face buried in her own curls, resting on her elbows and her knees, her buttocks arched up, as she had lain in the womb. The blankets were half off, and she clutched a doll in her two tiny fists, and the huge bunny rabbit was at the foot of the crib.

  For a long time the two of them stood by the crib, looking down, watching their sleeping child by the reddish light of the Big Eye filtering through the blinds.

  And then David said: "Carol, let her stay here. Let her sleep."

  "No, David." Carol's eyes were wet, and the tears were in her throat. "No, David, no, no!"

  "She'll never know," he whispered. "She'll be sleeping and she'll never know. Maybe it'd be better for her that way."

  "No, David, no. Not alone. Not like this. Not away from me. I'll hold her close in my arms. She'll sleep. She'll go with us, David. All together. You couldn't leave her here alone. You know you couldn't."

  "No," he said. "I guess I couldn't. It was -- just that she looks so warm and happy and wonderful now -- here -- in the crib." He spoke brokenly now. "I -- you're right, Carol. If we walked out of the door without her I'd have come back for her."

  They watched her for a moment more. And the clock sounded loud in the silence:

  Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock . . .

  Hurry-hurry, hurry-hurry, hurry-hurry, hurry-hurry . . .

  "Wake her up, David," whispered Carol. "Wake her up now."

  He reached out his hand, touched the child's cheek. She whimpered and then turned on her back and lifted her arms toward David. He snatched her up and pressed her close, so that she was warm and sweet against him, so that his tears stained her sleep-blushed cheek.

  Carol dressed the baby warmly in a long-sleeved shirt, sweater, overalls, and snow suit.

  Finally they were ready. As they opened the door they heard the insistent sound of the clock:

  Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock . . .

  David hesitated on the threshold, stopped, and gave the baby to Carol.

  Then he walked into the bedroom, and the clock stopped ticking.

  After that he returned and closed the door behind him, and they went down into the red afternoon.

  It had stopped snowing, and now the Big Eye shone down bale-fully upon the frozen city.

  It was low and directly overhead, and it seemed to hang like a heavy stone on an invisible thread, filling the winter sky.

  It reddened the snow and the faces of the people as they turned upward, and glared back at itself in the waters of the rivers and the sea and in the darkened windows of the cold skyscrapers.

  It had a gaunt and hungry look as it waited voraciously to spring upon and devour its prey.

  It was fifteen minutes to three and almost time.

  There was no sound but the mournful, funereal ringing of the bells.

  No vehicles moved, no horns blew, no trains roared in the paralyzed city.

  There were the bells and the people, thousands upon thousands of them, thronging the sidewalks, jamming the streets, choking the park in a solid mass of silent and waiting humanity.

  From the churches and temples, illuminated by the pale flicker of candles, came the wail and lamentation of prayer.

  Every face was turned upward toward the Big Eye, the faces of men, women, and children, and the stamp of death was upon every one of them. There was no fear, no hysteria, only silence and resignation.

  The glow became redder, the Big Eye bigger, the bells louder.

  And then it was three o'clock.

  The people, with a single accord, dropped to their knees in the snow and bowed their heads and prayed and waited.

  The bells stopped ringing, and it was still.

  A minute passed.

  The Big Eye hung suspended in the sky and looked down, as though delaying a little to savor the moment.

  Five minutes passed -- and then ten -- and fifteen.

  And still the Big Eye hung in the sky.

  At last a great sigh spread through the kneeling crowd, a kind of convulsive shudder. Heads that were bowed turned upward with a kind of wild, unbelieving hope.

  The people started to whisper, and the whisper spread and rustled through the mob and went from one to the other, like a rippling electric shock.

  Then someone shouted hysterically:

  "Look at it! Look at the Big Eye!"

  The shout traveled like wildfire; it was contagious, almost instantaneous; it became a wild roar, a bedlam; it possessed the crowd and gripped them and shook them, and a sea of faces turned up to look into the sky.

  It seemed to them, and they swore to it afterward, that the Big Eye had stopped leering, that it had for the moment smiled.

  The people knew that it would not strike, that God had stayed His hand and deflected the Big Eye and given them life again. And the people cried and wept and shouted:

  "A miracle! A miracle!"

  It was Christmas, and they had been given a miracle.

  They stayed on their knees and prayed.

  An hour later the flash came from the Harvard Observatory, the official clearing center for all astronomical data.

  The planet. Planet Y, the Big Eye, was passing on into the eternity of space, away from the earth. The astronomers professed bewilderment. They could not account for it: the Big Eye had betrayed their calculations and their charts. In time, perhaps, they might have a logical explanation for this extraordinary phenomenon.

  But the people knew that it was Christmas and that God had given them a miracle.

  They knew He had been pleased with what they had wrought in the last two years, the new and better world they had made.

  As the crowds began to dissolve and move homeward, as the bells rang in deafening clamor, as the people laughed and shouted and prayed and wept and embraced each other, amid the roar and clamor and the wild hysteria, David Hughes heard
the calm voice of Dr. Dawson on that night in the Old Man's study, when he had first known about the Big Eye:

  "I can only say this, try to console you with this, David. You must have faith -- faith in a miracle -- another miracle -- a miracle of redemption."

  The world had been caught short by the miracle. It had not expected any future and had not prepared for it. Only by the most drastic measures and by strict rationing of food supplies was it able narrowly to avert a global famine.

  As the months passed into the year 1963 the Big Eye grew smaller and smaller.

  As it spun off into the void its circumference shrank, and the Eye itself began to blur in its outline.

  It no longer hovered directly overhead and followed people about, bowing them down with its weight and paralyzing them with its baleful stare.

  Yet people knew that it was still watching them, that it would be watching them long after it had disappeared into the sky.

  They had seen the miracle, and they knew that the Big Eye, wherever it was or would be, would always be watching them.

  And the effect of this knowledge upon them was profound.

  There were pessimists who predicted a return to the old patterns, the old folkways and mores, the old way of life. It was all over now, they said; the predatory instincts of men would come to the surface again; they would rebound from their idealistic stupor and be themselves again.

  It was bound to come again, they said. The world government would slowly disintegrate, and nations would build up the fences they had torn down. There was profit to gain now, and power, and prestige. Men would go back to the luxury of hating each other again, indulging in their pet prejudices, reviving their favorite whipping boys again.

  A Jew would become a dirty Jew again, and different-from-us; a Negro, a lousy nigger again, and different-from-us; a capitalist, a fat, blood-sucking son of a bitch again, and different-from-us; a Communist, a goddamn atheistic Red, and different-from-us. There would be wops and spicks and greaseballs and squareheads and Chinks, and all of them different-from-us.

  It had to happen that way, the pessimists said. The Big Eye was going away, and now the sky was the limit again.

  There'd be customs again, and passports, and tariffs and identification cards, and classifications, race, color, creed. There'd be restricted areas and selected clienteles, and they'd build new railroad tracks where they had torn up the old ones, with a right side and a wrong side. There'd be cliques and cartels and monopolies and black marketeers and labor racketeers and profiteers all over again. The rich would get richer and the poor poorer, as they did in the good old days.

  The instincts of men ran pretty deep, and they were very tenacious, the pessimists said. In time they would again rise and assert themselves. And one day, they even predicted, men would contrive to go to war again.

  But somehow the people did not listen to the pessimists.

  They had seen the miracle, and they remembered, and they were grateful.

  And they started up the machinery again and went right on living in the same old new world they had fashioned, after the Big Eye had first been seen at Palomar.

  16.

  It was October of 1963, and David sat in the Old Man's study at Palomar.

  Three months before, California Tech had reopened the Observatory. They began negotiations for a new director and in the interim offered David the post of chief research astronomer until the permanent appointment was made.

  David had accepted the offer and moved back to Palomar with his family.

  Now he turned to the task of sifting through Dr. Dawson's voluminous papers and personal memoranda.

  David had spent a few hours each day opening the bulky manila envelopes in the files, sifting out the notes and correspondence, and segregating material for the observatory library.

  He went through folder after folder, reading, fascinated. The correspondence was, in effect, a biography of the Old Man's life. His student life at Harvard, then as a young professor, his career on the Astrophysical Journal, his invasion of the National Academy of Science when still a young man, a brilliant child in a learned and aged society.

  There was much of his trips abroad and his awe at viewing Galileo's telescope in the museum at Florence. He had written in a letter to his wife how he had wanted to look through Galileo's little telescope, and the authorities had flatly refused him the privilege. Then an Italian astronomer, Abetti, had interceded and persuaded the museum people to go along. An so the Old Man had carried the telescope, like a priceless diamond, to the Arcetri Observatory. And there he had fixed it to the equatorial mount.

  "I waited for the night to come, Emily," wrote the Old Man. "It seemed years -- centuries -- before the sun went down. But then at last the stars came out one by one. If I ever lived for any moment, my dear, this was the moment. I cannot describe my sensations when I grasped the same tube that Galileo had grasped. My hands rested where his hands had rested -- my eye was against his eyepiece, where his eye had been. And then I saw what he had seen -- three hundred years ago.

  "There it was, Emily, high in the south, the same Jupiter the old master had seen on that first voyage of man through the void of astronomical space. And the four moons, a string of bright diamonds, hugging the mother planet close, just as Galileo had seen them. Clear -- and wondrous -- and beautiful -- and mystic. I have seen Jupiter a hundred times, Emily darling, through every kind of telescope, but just then I felt the same awe that Galileo must have felt. I felt that I had seen Jupiter for the first time. I felt uplifted and humble at the same time, and I think I even wept."

  There was more. The Old Man's battle with industrial tycoons and wealthy patrons of the sciences to put up money for Palomar. The skeptics, the critics, the men who said the 200-inch reflector couldn't be done and called it a crazy dream. The faith that turned the dream into the biggest telescope in the world. The heart-breaking technical problems -- the eternal grinding of the great lens, interrupted by the war in the forties; the problems of the mount and the supports.

  And finally the dedication in 1948.

  As David took up the last big folder, marked Current, a slip of paper fell from it and dropped on the floor of the office.

  He leaned over, picked it up, and was about to insert it back into the folder. But something about it caught his eye. It was a piece of scrap paper, and on it were rough drawings and notations.

  Probably something the Old Man forgot to throw away, thought David. It didn't seem to belong with these letters, these documents.

  Then he stared at it, and his mouth dropped open and the room began to spin around.

  He read it again and again.

  The discovery began like a whisper, then swelled up and burgeoned out through his brain and mushroomed through his nerve centers and grew and grew, louder and louder, until it was like the beat of a hammer inside his skull, until he trembled uncontrollably.

  After a long time, in the haze of his reeling mind, he thought of Dr. Ellender. Ellender, his old professor, Ellender at the Harvard Observatory, he would know!

  Ellender had been one of the astronomers the Old Man had called in on that fateful conference before they had announced the coming of the Big Eye.

  Ellender would know the truth.

  He stuffed the scrap of paper into his pocket, got Carol on the phone.

  "Pack my bag, Carol," he said. "I've got to take a pleme to Boston right away!"

  Dr. Ellender looked at the scrap of paper on his desk for a long time.

  It was a diagram in pencil of the Big Eye -- of Planet Y -- and the earth.

  And underneath the Old Man had written in crooked lines, almost as though he had been doodling:

  Planet Y and earth. Closest Christmas, 1962. Cosmic clash close -- close, but not quite. Lie -- hoax -- hoax -- will it work? Must work -- world at stake -- must work -- must. . . .

  Ellender sank heavily back in his chair.

  "Then you know, David," he said finally. "Then you know." />
  David nodded.

  "Where did you find this piece of paper?"

  "In a file of Dr. Dawson's correspondence, sir. It must have been put there by mistake."

  "Yes," said Ellender slowly. "We were sure we destroyed all data. In fact, we burned all our notations and diagrams -- the true ones -- that night."