Eye in the Sky (1957) (3 page)

More
to
him,
he
realized, than anyone or anything.
More to
him than
his
job.
His
own
loyalty
was
to her,
and that
was a strange
thing
to realize.
It was
not
really the loyalty business that bothered him; it
was
the idea that he and Marsha were cut off from each
other, separated by what had happened.

“Yes,” he
said
to McFeyffe. “I’m
sore as
hell.”

“You can get another job. With
your experience—”

“My wife,” Hamilton said. “I’m talking about her.
You think
I’ll have a chance to get back at you? I’d like
one.” But, he
thought, it sounded childish when he said
it
“You’re sick,” he said to McFeyffe, going on anyhow,
partly
because he wanted to get it said and partly be
cause
he did not know what else to do. “You’re destroying innocent people.
Paranoiac delusions—”

“Knock
it off,” McFeyffe said tightly. “You’ve had your
chance, Jack. Years of it. Too many years.”

While
Hamilton was framing his retort, Marsha reap
peared. “They’re
letting in a group of regular sightseers. The big shots have already had their
look.” She
was a little more composed,
now. “That thing—that new
deflector—is
supposed to be in operation.”

Reluctantly, Hamilton turned away
from the heavy-
set security policeman.
“Let’s go, then.”

McFeyffe
followed along. This should be interesting,”
he said to nobody in particular.

That’s right,” Hamilton said distantly, aware that he was trembling. Taking a deep breath he entered the
elevator after Marsha and turned automatically to face
the front. McFeyffe did the same; as the elevator ascend
ed, Hamilton was treated to the sight of the
man’s fiery
red neck. McFeyffe, too,
was upset

On the second floor they found a
young Negro, with a broad arm band on his sleeve, assembling a group of
sightseers. They joined the group. Behind them, other visitors waited patiently
for their turn. It was three-fifty; the Wilcox Jones Deflection System had
already
been brought into focus and
activated.

“Here
we are, now,” the young Negro guide was say
ing, in a thin,
experienced voice, as he led them from
the
hall toward the observation platform. “We want to
move quickly so
others will have their chance. As you know, the Belmont Bevatron was
constructed by the
Atomic Energy Commission
for the purpose of advanced
research
into cosmic ray phenomena artificially gener
ated within controlled
conditions. The central element
of the
Bevatron is the giant magnet whose field acceler
ates the beam of protons and provides them with increas
ing
ionization. The positively charged protons are introduced into the linear
chamber from the Cockroft-
Walton
acceleration tube.”

According
to their dispositions, the sightseers smiled
vaguely or ignored him. One
tall, slim, stern, elderly
gentleman stood
like a hardwood pole, arms folded, ra
diating detached contempt for
science in general. A soldier, Hamilton observed: the man wore a tarnished
wedge of metal on his cotton jacket. The hell
with him,
he thought bitterly. The
hell with patriotism in general.
In
the specific and the abstract. Birds of a feather, sol
diers and cops.
Anti-intellectual and anti-Negro. Anti-
everything
except beer, dogs, cars and guns.

“Is
there a pamphlet?” a
plump, expensively dressed middle-aged mother
was inquiring softly, but penetrat
ingly.
“We would like something we can read and take
home, please. For school use.”

“How many volts down
there?” her boy shouted at the guide. “Is it over a billion
volts?”

“Slightly over six
billion,” the Negro explained patiently, “is the electron volt push
the protons will have
received before they
are deflected from their orbit and
out
of the circular chamber. Each time the beam makes a revolution, its charge and
velocity are increased.”

“How
fast do they go?” a slender, competent woman in her early thirties asked.
She wore severe glasses and
a
rough-woven, businesslike suit.

“At slightly under the velocity
of light”

“How many times do they circle
the chamber?”

“Four
million times,” the guide answered. Their as
tronomical distance is
three hundred thousand miles.
That distance
is covered in 1.85 seconds.”

“Incredible,”
the expensively dressed mother gushed,
in
an awed, fatuous voice.

“When the protons leave the
linear accelerator,” the guide continued, “they have an energy of ten
million volts, or, as we say, ten Mev. The next problem is to
guide them into a circular orbit in exactly the
right position and at exactly the right angle, so they can be picked
up
by the field of the big magnet”

“Can’t the magnet do
that?” the boy demanded.

“No, I’m afraid not. An
inflector is utilized for this. Highly charged protons very easily leave a
given path and wander in all directions. A complicated system of frequency
modulation is required to keep them from
entering
a widening spiral. And, once the beam has at
tained its required charge,
the fundamental problem of getting it out of the circular chamber
remains.”

Pointing
down, below the railing of the platform, the
guide indicated the magnet
that lay beneath them. The
magnet, vast and
imposing, roughly resembled a dough
nut.
It hummed mightily.

“The accelerating chamber is
inside the magnet. It is four hundred feet in length. You can’t see it from here,
I’m afraid.”

I wonder,” the white-haired war
veteran reflected,
“whether the
builders of this spectacular machine real
ize that one of God’s ordinary hurricanes far exceeds the
total of all man-made power, this and all other
machines
included?”

“I’m
sure they realize it,” the severe young woman told
him archly.
“They could probably tell you to a foot
pound
what the power of a hurricane is.”

The
veteran surveyed her with aloof dignity. “Are you
a scientist,
madame?” he inquired mildly.
The guide
had now induced most of his party out onto
the platform. “After
you,” McFeyffe said to Hamilton,
stepping
aside. Marsha moved blankly forward, and her husband followed. McFeyffe, drably
pretending interest
in the informational charts plastered on the wall
overlooking the platform, brought up the rear.

Taking hold of his wife’s hand, Hamilton squeezed hard and said in her ear, “You think I’d renounce you?
We’re not living in Nazi Germany.”

“Not yet,” Marsha said
despondently. She was still
pale and
subdued; she had wiped off most of her makeup, and her lips were thin and
bloodless. “Darling, when
I
think of those men getting you in there and confront
ing you with me and my activities, as if I was
some sort
of a—as if I was a prostitute or something, or maybe having
secret relations with horses
…
I
could just kill them. And Charley—I thought he was our friend. I
though we could count on him. How many times has
he
been over to dinner?”

“We’re not living in Arabia,
either,” Hamilton reminded her. “Just because we feed him doesn’t
mean he’s a blood brother.”

“That’s
the last time I ever bake a lemon meringue pie.
And everything else he
likes. Him and his orange garters. Promise me you’ll never wear garters.”

“Elastic socks and nothing else.”
Pulling her close to him, he told her: “Let’s push the bastard into the
mag
net”

“You
think it’d digest him?” Wanly, Marsha smiled a
little.
“Probably it would spit him back out. Too indi
gestible.”

Behind them, the mother and her boy
loitered. Mc
Feyffe was trailing far
behind, hands stuck in his pock
ets, beefy face sagging with dejection.

“He doesn’t look very
happy,” Marsha observed. “In a way, I feel sorry for him. It’s not
his fault”

“Whose fault is it?”
Lightly, as if he were making a joke, Hamilton asked, “The bloodsucking,
capitalistic
beasts of Wall Street?”

“That’s
a funny way of putting it,” Marsha said, trou
bled. “I never
heard you use words like that” Suddenly she clutched at him. “You
don’t really think there—”
Breaking
off, she jerked violently away from him. “You do. You think maybe it’s
true.”

“Maybe what’s true? That you
used to belong to the Progressive Party? I used to drive you to meetings in my
Chevvy
coupe, remember? I’ve known that
for ten
years.”

“Not that. Not what I did. What
it
means
—what they
say it means. You
do think so, don’t you?”

“Well,” he said awkwardly,
“you don’t have a shortwave transmitter down in the basement. None that
I’ve
noticed, at least.”

“Have
you looked?” Her voice was cold and accusing.
“Maybe I have;
don’t be so sure. Maybe I’m here to
sabotage
this Bevatron, or whatever the hell it is.”

“Keep your voice down,” Hamilton said warningly.

“Don’t
give me orders.” Furious, wretched, she backed
away from him
directly into the thin, stern old soldier.

“Be careful, young lady,”
the soldier warned her, firmly guiding her from the railing. “You don’t
want to
fall overboard.”

“The
greatest problem in construction,” the guide was saying, “lay in the
deflection unit used to bring the pro
ton beam out of the circular
chamber and into impact with its target Several methods have been employed.
Originally, the oscillator was turned off at a
critical mo
ment; this allowed the protons to spiral outward. But
such deflection was too imperfect.”

“Isn’t it true,” Hamilton said harshly, “that up in the
old Berkeley cyclotron a beam got completely away, one
day?”

The guide eyed him with interest.
“That’s what they
say, yes.”

“I heard it burned through an
office. That you can
still see the scorch
marks. And at night, when the lights are off, the radiation is still
visible.”

“It’s supposed to hang around
in a blue cloud,” the
guide agreed.
“Are you a physicist, mister?”

“An electronics man,”
Hamilton informed him. “I’m interested in the Deflector; I know Leo Wilcox
very
slightly.”

“This is Leo’s big day,”
the guide observed. They’ve just put his unit to work down there.”

“Which
is it?” Hamilton asked.

Pointing
down, the guide indicated a complicated ap
paratus at one side of the
magnet. A series of shielded slabs supported a thick pipe of dark gray, over
which an intricate series of liquid-filled tubes was mounted. “That’s your
friend’s work. He’s around somewhere,
watching.”

“How does it seem to be?”

“They can’t tell yet”

Behind
Hamilton, Marsha had retreated to the rear of
the platform. He
followed after her. “Try to act like an
adult,”
he said in a low, angry whisper. “As long as we’re
here, I want to see what’s going on.”

“You
and your science. Wires and tubes—this stuff is more important to you than my
life.”

“I came here to see this and
I’m going to. Don’t spoil it for me; don’t make a scene.”

“You’re
the one who’s making a scene.”

“Haven’t you done enough harm
already?” Moodily
turning his back to
her, Hamilton pushed past the compe
tent business woman, past McFeyffe,
to the ramp that led from the observation platform back into the hallway. He
was fumbling in his pockets for his pack of
cigarettes
when the first ominous wail of the emergency
sirens shrieked up above
the quiet hum of the magnet.

“Back!”
the guide shouted, his lean,
dark arms raised
and flailing.
“The radiation screen—”

A
furious buzzing roar burst over the platform. Clouds
of incandescent particles flamed up, exploded, and
rained
down on the terrified people. The ugly stench of burn
ing stung their noses; wildly, they struggled and
shoved
toward the rear of the platform.

A crack appeared. A metal strut,
burned through by
the play of hard
radiation, melted, sagged, and gave way.
The middle-aged mother opened
her mouth and
screeched loudly and
piercingly. In a frenzied scramble, McFeyffe struggled to get away from the
corroded platform and the blinding display of hard radiation that siz
zled
everywhere. He collided with Hamilton; shoving
the panic-stricken cop aside, Hamilton jumped past him and reached
desperately for Marsha.