Eye in the Sky (1957) Read Online Free PDF Page A

for a time he sank
into somber re flections
about his situation.
    Accident or no accident, it hadn’t changed. Unless, while he lay unconscious, Colonel T.
E. Edwards had died of a
heart attack. It didn’t seem likely.
    When the doctor and nurse had been persuaded to leave, Hamilton said to his wife,
“Well, now we have an excuse.
Something we can tell the neighbors, to explain why I’m not at work.”
    Forlornly, Marsha nodded. “I forgot about that.”
    “I’m
going to have to find something that doesn’t involve classified material.
Something that doesn’t bring in national
defense.” Somberly, he reflected, “Like Ein stein said, back
in ‘54. Maybe I’ll be a plumber. Or a TV
repairman; that’s more along my line.”
    “Remember what you always wanted to do?” Perched on the edge of the bed, Marsha sat soberly examining her
shortened, somewhat ragged hair. “You wanted to design new tape recorder
circuits. And FM circuits. You wanted to be
a big name in high fidelity, like Bogen and Thorens and Scott.”
    “That’s
right,” he agreed, with as much conviction as possible. “The Hamilton
Trinaural Sound System. Re member the night
we dreamed that up? Three cartridges, needles, amplifiers, speakers.
Mounted in three rooms. A man in each room, listening to each rig. Each rig is playing a different composition.”
    “One plays the Brahms double concerto,” Marsha put in, with feeble enthusiasm. “I
remember that.”
    “One
plays the Stravinsky Wedding. And one plays Dowland music for the lute.
Then the brains of the three men are removed and wired together by the core of
the Hamilton Trinaural Sound System, the Hamilton Musiphonic Ortho-Circuit. The
sensations of the three brains are mingled
in a strict mathematical relationship, b ased on Planck’s Constant.”
His arm had begun to throb; harshly, he finished: “The resultant combination is fed into a tape recorder and played back
at 3:14 times the original
speed.”
    “And listened to on a crystal set.” Marsha bent quickly down and hugged him. “Darling, when I came around I thought you were a corpse. So help me—you
looked like a corpse, all white and silent and not moving. I thought my heart would break.”
    “I’m insured,” he said gravely. “You’d be rich.”
    “I
don’t want to be rich.” Rocking miserably back and forth, still hugging him, Marsha whispered: “Look what
I’ve done to you. Because I’m bored and curious and fooling around with
political freaks, you’ve lost your job and
your future. I could kick myself. I should have known I couldn’t sign the
Stockholm Peace thing with you working on guided missiles. But whenever anybody hands me a petition, I always get carried
away. The poor, downtrodden
masses.”
    “Don’t
worry about it,” he told her shortly. “If this were back in 1943, you’d be normal and McFeyffe
would be out of a job. As a
dangerous fascist.”
    “He
is,” Marsha said fervently. “He is a dangerous fascist”
    Hamilton shoved the woman away from him. “McFeyffe is a rabid
patriot and a reactionary. But that doesn’t
make him a fascist. Unless you believe that any body who isn’t—”
    “Let’s not talk about it,” Marsha broke in. “You’re not supposed to thrash around—right?”
Intensely, feverishly, she
kissed him on the mouth. “Wait until you’re home.”
    As she
moved away, he grabbed hold of her by the shoulder. “What is it? What’s gone wrong?”
    Numbly,
she shook her head. “I can’t tell. I can’t figure it out. Since I came
around, it always seems to be just behind me. I’ve felt it. As if—” She
gestured. “I expect to turn around and
see—I don’t know what. Some thing hiding. Something awful” She
shivered appre hensively. “It scares
me.”
    “It scares me too.”
    “Maybe
well find out,” Marsha said faintly. “Maybe it isn’t anything …
just the shock and the sedatives, like the doctor said.”
    Hamilton didn’t
believe it. And neither