The Big Eye Read Online Free PDF Page B

stubbornly. As
they went red, green, red, green, the click of their mechanism as they
changed sounded abnormally loud in the brooding silence.
     
     
David Hughes watched the lights break into a long illuminated V, one
arm of lights extending up Central Park West, another up Broadway. They
changed in a kind of staggered beat and cadence, red and green, red
and green, winking glassily in a ghostly and grotesque stone-and-steel
fairyland.
     
     
It seemed fantastic to David that he was here now, in the city of New
York, a lone pedestrian walking through a wind-swept graveyard, committed
to the most dangerous and most important mission of his life.
     
     
Ten hours ago his day had started like any other day.
     
     
A rough hand shook David.
     
     
"Wake up, Dave."
     
     
Dave tried to push the hand away and draw the covers back over him. But
the shaking persisted, and finally he opened his eyes to look sleepily
at the grinning, freckled face of his roommate, Joe Morgan.
     
     
"Rise and shine, Reverend," said Morgan. "Time the priest was preparing
for the pulpit."
     
     
Morgan, a long string bean of a man with a constant grin under his
sandy hair, was the spectrograph expert at Palomar. He had worked with
David at the Harvard Observatory, later served a term at Yerkes, then
at Mount Wilson, and finally hooked onto the Big Eye under the Old Man.
Like David, he was a bachelor, and the two of them lived in the dormitory,
an ascetic, monklike place of soundproofed walls and doors and black
curtains, for men who slept all day and worked all night. They called
the place the "Monastery" and each other "priests."
     
     
As for Morgan's reference to the "pulpit," that was David's special
province. It was the nickname for the telescope control board, where
David flicked switches or pushed buttons to turn the dome, open it,
and swing the Big Eye onto a star, at the whim and direction of the Old
Man up in the capsule at the top of the tube.
     
     
"Just came back from the observatory," said Morgan as David began to
shave. "And the Old Man's acting mighty strange. Dave, what the hell is
going on, anyway?"
     
     
"I don't know."
     
     
"You're his assistant," said Morgan. "You ought to know."
     
     
David turned to Morgan. "I'm just as much in the dark as you are. He
hasn't told me a thing, and his own wife doesn't even know what he's up
to. He's found something, Joe, I'm sure he has. But you know the Old Man,
you know how he's acted about these things before. Until he gets it on the
line, photographs, calculations, and theory, with a solid conclusion to
go with it, everyone on the observatory stafi can just keep on whistling."
     
     
Morgan lit a cigarette and flung the match into the wastebasket.
"Maybe. But I think this is something big, Dave, much bigger than anything
that's happened before. I've never seen the Old Man act like this. Working
all night and all day, skipping meals, taking an hour or two of sleep when
he's almost dead of exhaustion. You can almost see his cheekbones popping
out from under his skin." He paused and threw away his cigarette. "You
know what happened to me a little while ago at the observatory?"
     
     
"What?"
     
     
"I'm supposed to be the spectrograph man here. But I tried to get into
the spectrograph room in the telescope girder, and it was locked. Had some
plates there I wanted to see. The Old Man was in there, and he told me to
go away. Go away, mind you! He sounded a little wild, like a jealous kid
guarding a toy. I don't know, I've never heard him talk like that before."
     
     
David was thoughtful. "It could be the times, Joe. The trouble with
Russia, everything. Everybody's snapping at each other these days. You
couldn't find a calmer, more even-tempered man than Dr. Dawson. But the
generals have been hounding him, running him ragged, for months."
     
     
"Yes, I know." Morgan spoke soberly now. "They've been taking the Old
Man off his mountain every now and then, and he doesn't like it.