Eye Contact

by Michael Craft

  “With a single magnificent gesture,” Cain told Buddy, “working with the CFC, we can rid our nation of this menace. The president himself and thousands of vocal sympathizers will all be silenced.”

  “Nathan, you’re mad,” replied Buddy, certain Cain was joking.

  But Cain’s threat to return the Nambu pistol proved he was in earnest, and Buddy, for the first time in his life both helpless and frightened, signed on. He committed untold resources, shrouded beneath the tightest levels of national security, to construct and install the laser hardware. In order to help prevent detection or tracing, however, he insisted that the final phase of Project Zarnik would have to be executed by hand. Nathan Cain was to pull the switch—two of them, in fact—an assignment he eagerly accepted.

  According to plan, tonight at six o’clock precisely, he flipped the green switch, which fired up the intricate network of computer power, linking the three projectors and running them through a lengthy warm-up cycle of checks and counterchecks.

  Now, at nine o’clock precisely, just as the president has finished his speech, Cain is ready to flip the pink switch, which will initiate the sky show while linking the whole system to laser weaponry that orbits silently overhead in the black void of space. As the spectacle of light progresses, it will gain power, climaxing in an “accident” of cataclysmic proportions. In a meeting late last night with Elder Buchman, Cain predicted, “When the firestorm explodes within the stadium, it will consume the president and everyone on the field.” While those in the stands may escape instant annihilation, thousands more will surely perish, trampled in the pandemonium.

  Now, at nine o’clock precisely, the words of the “Dies Irae” echo from Nathan Cain’s childhood: “Day of wrath and day of mourning. See fulfilled the prophets’ warning.” The next line of the ancient dirge has taken on new meaning and immediacy: “Heav’n and earth in ashes burning …”

  Now, at nine o’clock precisely, Nathan Cain knows that the moment has arrived to execute the final phase of a plan that has consumed him for nearly a year. Standing atop the Journal Building’s tower platform with his thumb poised above a pink switch, he wonders what Buddy is doing right now. What’s he thinking at this moment when his technical expertise is about to change the course of history? And Burlington Buchman—what’s going through his mind in this instant when his great crusade will enter its finest hour?

  Overhead, the sky glows purple with twilight. Below, the city glows orange with the light of countless sodium-vapor lamps. But the brightest lights down there—Cain sees them clearly—emanate from the new stadium where a hundred thousand citizens cheer their president. Cain is sure he can hear them through the constant winds that blow past the peak of the tower.

  These thoughts and perceptions, real and imagined, have coursed through Cain’s mind in a mere millisecond. With a decisive snap, his thumb engages the simple mechanism of the switch.

  With a jolt, the projector powers up and shoots dual beams from its long snout, aimed at the other two projection sites. Simultaneously, the other two projectors emit their own beams, forming a miles-wide triangle over the city. The perfectly straight beams of pink laser light look like giant tubes of neon in the sky, aglisten with the random passings of dust, insects, a bird here and there.

  Nathan Cain is awed by its beauty, though he detests what it represents. Be patient, he tells himself. This spectacle is far from over.

  At nine o’clock precisely, the banks of computers in Zarnik’s lab suddenly shift to a more active mode. Their hum, which Manning and Farber have ceased to notice, rises in pitch and settles into a steady, irritating whine.

  “Here we go,” says Manning, bracing himself in his chair, not sure what may happen next, expecting the worst. But nothing does happen, and after a minute has passed, he relaxes his grip on the edge of the desk. Then—just in case—he rises from the chair, crosses to the fire cabinet mounted near the door, and opens it. He tells Farber, “I may not know a lick about computers, but this stuff sounds like it’s working too hard. If something overheats, I want to be prepared.” He removes the ax and sets it on the floor. The water hose would be of no use for an electrical fire, so he leaves it stowed. Then he lifts an extinguisher from its hook and carries it back to the desk.

  “Hey,” says Farber, pointing to the TV screen, “check it out.”

  The crowds at the stadium coo as one, looking skyward as the lines of the huge pink triangle sparkle in the heavens. A camera cuts to the presidential party, seated onstage. They clap and smile, pointing to the laser display. Then the camera pans a bit of the crowd nearby, and once again Manning spots Neil seated between Roxanne and Claire. Neil’s head is thrown back to gaze at the light show; in his hand there’s a sheaf of folded papers. A collective gasp rises from the spectators, and the camera again aims at the night sky, where the triangle, which at first consisted of lines that stretched all the way from projector to projector, has begun to condense itself. As the triangle shrinks to the size of the stadium itself, it no longer appears merely in outline, but hovers overhead as a solid plane of glimmering, undulating pink light.

  The computers in the lab whine even louder now, and the clicking of relay switches intensifies to a racket. Farber’s glance darts about the room as he reaches for his glass and downs the last of his drink. Manning sits at the desk again, watching the spectacle on television, drumming his fingers on top of the fire extinguisher.

  At nine o’clock precisely, at her desk in Nathan Cain’s outer offices, Lucille Haring is navigating the deepest recesses of Cain’s personal directories when something happens to the computer—a network glitch perhaps, a momentary flash on the screen. Then she realizes that the computer is responding more slowly to her commands. It seems the whole system is bogged down.

  That’s strange. She wrings her brows. Backing out of Cain’s directories, she takes a look at the Journal’s mainframe, wondering if anything might catch her eye. And it does. The data flashing on her screen reveal sudden, intense activity on many of the Journal’s phone lines, which are being used to both transmit and receive complex digital signals—there’s a heap of numbers being crunched. Very strange.

  She sits back in her chair, locks both hands behind her head, and stares at the screen, watching the activity of the mainframe as a whole, which is dominated by all this phone stuff. Then a little stream of data prances past, which she can identify as editorial matter, a story, being sent to the newsroom. What was that?

  She hunkers over the keyboard again, intrigued, and tries to trace that errant bit of coding. It was sent to the editorial page, an opinion column, but who sent it? Manning? No, she sees his stories, queued up and blinking, right where she left them. So she traps the stream of data, stops it, and keyboards a code that will trace its source—and bang, she finds herself right back in Nathan Cain’s directories. A hidden subdirectory, “editorial buffer,” is now exposed. Cain had a story waiting there all along, coded to be sent to the newsroom at this hour. A few keystrokes later, the story, slugged “cataclysm,” appears on her screen.

  Lucille Haring reads the first couple of sentences, then stops with a loud gasp. She needs to catch her breath before she can read on.

  With his fingers still drumming the top of the fire extinguisher, Manning watches the pink triangle as it floats above the stadium. He wonders, with the crowd he sees on television, whether the spectacle has climaxed or if there is more to come. Their question is soon answered as the triangle shrinks tighter and grows brighter, descending slowly through the sky till it rests not far from the top row of bleachers. The spectators roar their approval.

  With the transition to this next phase of the laser show, the equipment in Zarnik’s lab revs to an even higher pitch. “This is all very nice,” Arlen Farber tells Manning, slurring, wagging his empty glass at the monitor, “but if someone isn’t careful, they’re going to blow a fuse.”

  Manning isn’t sure how many drinks Farber has swilled this evening, but they�
�ve been sufficient to dull his concern for any impending danger. He actually seems to be enjoying himself now, getting into the spirit of the festival. Manning, however, feels nothing but dread—an uncertain but intense uneasiness. He wishes there were some way to communicate with Neil and tell him to get out of there.

  The crowd whoops as the triangle, brighter still, levitates within the walls of the stadium and begins to rotate, majestically, like an alien mothership George Lucas might dream up. The flags around the perimeter of the stadium glow pink in the light of the spectacle. The banks of computers there in the lab churn all the louder. Farber applauds. The president watches with an awed smile.

  Then the television coverage switches to the scene of the Christian Family Crusade’s protest at their North Side hotel. They’ve been marching since early afternoon, and the troops are looking weary, though zealously determined. Elder Burlington Buchman has just stepped up to a microphone on a makeshift stage erected on the hotel grounds. His followers cheer wildly as his amplified words echo in the night. He speaks of abomination, of Sodom and Gomorrah, of fire and brimstone. He speaks of the dawning of a new age, a new millennium, freed from the forces of perversion and liberalism. He speaks of the will of Jesus. He speaks of God as a wrathful executioner.

  Manning has heard enough. He needs to return to his story, writing his impressions of the spectacle as it unfolds. Mentally, he tunes out Buchman’s ranting, tunes out Farber’s laughter, and begins to type—but then his cellular phone warbles, breaking his thought midsentence. He answers, “Mark Manning.”

  “Thank God I reached you, Mark.” It’s Lucille Haring, and her voice wavers with panic. “I don’t know where to begin …”

  Reacting to her tone, he says, “Calm down, Lucy. I’m listening. What is it?”

  “I’ve discovered that the Journal’s computer power is linked to other computers somewhere here in the city. …”

  “They’re here in this room, in Zarnik’s lab,” Manning explains to her. “It has something to do with the laser show, but I don’t know how they’re connected, and more important, I can’t figure out why.”

  “That’s what I’m about to tell you. They’re connected by phone lines—simple phone lines, lots of them. Tons of data are being exchanged at this very moment. That’s the ‘how.’ But it’s the ‘why’ that’s so stunningly evil.”

  Manning doesn’t speak. He’s not sure he’s ready to ask the question or hear the answer. On television, the coverage has switched from Buchman, returning to the spectacle at the stadium, where the laser triangle now spins and undulates. The camera catches the moment when one of the points of the triangle veers off-course and shears through one of the huge steel flagpoles. With a spray of sparks, it drops outside the stadium and clangs loudly as it hits the cement of the parking lot. The crowd goes silent, then spontaneously yelps its approval. There’s a close-up of the president, whose smile is now tainted with wariness. Manning views his face through the crosshairs on the screen, as if targeted in the sights of a weapon.

  “Good God,” Manning says into the phone. Ready to confirm his worst fears, he asks, “What did you find?”

  “An editorial,” Lucy tells him, “scheduled to run tomorrow morning.” Her voice trembles with the gravity of the words she is about to read. “Cain’s column is slugged ‘cataclysm.’ It begins: ‘The nation mourns the death of a president this morning, who died here as a visitor, a leader, and a messenger. The special grief of our city is magnified, of course, because the accident that claimed his life has also silenced the still-uncounted thousands of our own friends, neighbors, and loved ones. When last night’s laser spectacle went awry at twelve minutes past nine, precipitating this cataclysmic disaster, history was rewritten….’”

  Manning looks at his watch. It is eight minutes past nine—only four minutes remain until Nathan Cain’s dream of a cleansed nation is made real. As Lucy continues to read the editorial, Manning’s eyes are fixed on the television screen, where he sees the whirling triangle, no longer pink, but hottest red. Even Arlen Farber, who has been enjoying the show through an alcoholic haze, now looks concerned. The electronics in the lab click and whine even more frenetically.

  Manning searches through the clutter on the desk and finds his note. “Hold on, Lucy,” he says into his cell phone, “and stay on the line.” He sets down the cell phone and unplugs the modem from the desk phone. Lifting the receiver, he dials the number Jim gave him a few minutes ago. Manning waits, heart pounding, as the detective’s phone rings. At last he answers.

  “Jim, this is Manning again. Listen. Alert the feds to get the president out of the stadium. I’ll explain later, but it’s urgent. Act now—or he’ll be dead in three minutes.” Manning hangs up the phone and glances around the lab, feeling he should do something.

  Arlen Farber, who has heard Manning’s message to Jim, now stands with mouth agape, backing toward the door, quaking at what he has learned. His foot bumps the fire-ax that Manning leaned against the wall.

  “Arlen”—Manning thinks of something—“wait there!” He says to Lucy, still on the cell phone, “If we could shut down the computers here at the planetarium, we might hobble the whole system, right?”

  “Very likely,” she answers. “Give it a shot, and I’ll monitor the results on the Journal’s mainframe.”

  Manning turns to Farber. “Arlen, help me. Help them”—he points to the television screen—“and grab that ax. Chop through the main bundle of cables there on the floor.” Farber hesitates. Manning tells him, “The ax handle is wooden. You’ll be fine. Please, Arlen, now!”

  Farber bites his lip, nods, and grabs the ax. Positioning himself with a wide stance alongside the bundle of cables, he raises the ax over his head, jangling the keys and whistle that still hang from his neck. He flexes the muscles of both arms, then swings, hacking solidly into the cables. A few sparks spit from the heavy plastic tube, but there’s no danger—these cables apparently carry information, not raw power.

  Immediately, the computers in the room seem to belch, becoming much less active. They no longer churn in unison, but make random little noises, independent of each other. Farber beams with pride and continues to chop at the cable bundle till it is completely severed.

  Lucy’s voice says over the phone, “I don’t know what you did, Mark, but all the telephone activity between here and there has ceased. Well done!”

  And in fact, Manning notices on television that the sky show at the stadium appears to have powered-down—with two minutes to spare. The triangle is pink now, no longer red, and it rotates slowly above the crowd, much less menacingly. Farber tosses aside his ax and struts toward the desk, preparing to reward himself with another drink. As he lifts the jug of Jack Daniel’s, his police whistle clangs against it.

  “Uh-oh,” Lucy’s voice sounds a note of warning over the phone, “something’s happening.” Even as she speaks, Manning notices that the laser spectacle appears to have powered-up again—it’s brighter, redder, moving faster. Lucy explains, “When the Journal’s mainframe lost communication with the planetarium, it began establishing phone connections elsewhere. There’s now intense digital activity between the Journal and some other location that’s not in Chicago. I think—yes, I see area codes—the Journal’s mainframe is now linked to Washington.”

  Manning watches on television as a security force scurries about the president and begins leading him off the field. A camera near the stage shows him leaving. Faces in the crowd look confused, wondering about the abrupt departure. There’s Neil, turning quizzically from Claire to Roxanne.

  Manning asks Lucy, “This whole system is linked by phone lines, right? Can you identify the trunk line between the Journal and Washington, then patch me into it? I want to hear what the transmission actually sounds like.”

  “Uh …” Lucy stammers over the phone, “I think so, Mark. Sure. Here we go—you’ll lose my voice now.”

  Manning presses the phone closer to his ear and listens
to the secret digital chatter of computers plotting a massacre. The bleeps and tones shoot back and forth with dizzying speed, exchanging technical commands that are executed with instantaneous precision. Manning checks the time. Eleven minutes past nine—there’s less than one minute remaining.

  At the stadium, cameras follow the laser display. Fully energized, it spins cyclonically above the top bleachers, roiling with internal heat. Then it tips, darting with its points to slice cleanly through two more of the flagpoles. One of them falls outside the stadium, but the other drops within, trailing a burning American flag. The white-hot steel mast slides down one of the long aisles, narrowly missing row after row of horrified onlookers.

  Farber stands there fidgeting with his drink, trying to gulp from it, but unable to swallow. Manning watches the laser triangle condense itself further as it begins its descent to the field. He hears the electronic scenario of doom beeping in his ear. He sees Farber.

  Then inspiration strikes. Manning shouts, “Give me that!”

  Utterly dismayed, Farber tenders to Manning his cocktail.

  “No!” Manning reaches toward Farber’s chest, grabs the neck chain, and yanks it, sending keys clattering to the floor. But in Manning’s hand remains the big chrome police whistle.