The Big Eye Read Free Page A

the slowly moving line of traffic on their left. David stared
at the residential sections of Queens on each side of the main artery.
They presented an eerie sight, a kind of macabre fantasy. They were like
vast stone-and-wooden graveyards, dark and empty.
     
     
But the houses were not really empty. The Fear was there, living in
every one of them. The only sign of movement was on the highway itself,
the solid line of cars crawling along, bumper to bumper, impatient of
delay, heading east -- east and away.
     
     
The limousine sped across the Fifty-ninth Street bridge, into the
silent and dark and dying city, and swung over to East River Drive.
David looked hard at the black buildings and towers etched against the
moon-washed sky. The few illuminated windows he could see were isolated,
far apart, conspicuous in their loneliness.
     
     
And the Fear was the only tenant in these darkened office buildings too.
     
     
And then, at last, they passed the great area between Forty-eighth and
Forty-second streets -- the permanent headquarters of the United Nations.
     
     
With a kind of morbid fascination, David watched it slip by. There it was,
the great international city within a city, the terraces, the auxiliary
buildings and apartments, and finally, the main UN skyscraper itself.
     
     
The building towered there now, dark and empty and silent, a great massive
mausoleum. It seemed to glower at them balefully as they went by. David
fancied that the grass on the terraces now grew rank, and the hedges
and foliage, once trim and clipped, would now be ragged and unkempt.
     
     
It was a symbol of failure now, a great empty House of the Dead, a house
of shattered hopes, of the blighted dreams of mankind.
     
     
Back in 1946, when David had been a boy of sixteen, the delegates of
the nations had first met on the site of the World's Fair and at Lake
Success to bring about the salvation of humanity and the security of the
world. There the giants of a decade and a half ago, Molotov, Byrnes, and
Bevin, as well as the Greats and the near Greats of the other countries,
had met to resolve what hitherto had been considered insoluble problems.
     
     
They had begun with fine words, and noble phrases, and good intentions.
But Byrnes and Molotov and Bevin had haggled and fought to begin with,
and so had their successors, down through the years, here in this
magnificent new setting on East River Drive. Marshall and Acheson,
Stalin and Vishinsky, Truman, and now the President and his aides and
advisers. They had all seen a vision in the beginning, but as time went
on the vision had grown blurred and finally died, and at last it was
gone. The cold war had grown colder with every passing day, and now it
was ready to burst through the bottom of the thermometer.
     
     
And finally, a month ago, they had closed the magnificent buildings.
The delegates had broken, pointing fingers at each other in recrimination,
accusing each other of greed, of imperialism, of stubbornness, of bad
faith. And they had broken irrevocably, and for good. The representatives
had melted away and gone home, and they had closed the buildings and
bolted the doors, and taken down the flags of the nations which had once
flown proudly in the great courtyard, and abandoned it.
     
     
Now the UN stood there, a series of stone ghosts on East River Drive,
seedy and unkempt, the symbol of a Great Failure.
     
     
And it had been the Great Failure that had brought about the Great Fear.
     
     
Now -- everyone had the bomb.
     
     
Yes, thought David, they have it, and we have it. And where do we go
from here? What now?
     
     
The driver turned and saw David staring back at the buildings. "Yeah,
look at the joint," he said. "Many's the time I hauled these striped-pants
diplomats from Idlewild to the UN. Big shots from all over the world. And
where are they now? Hiding in caves, maybe, I dunno. All I know is we've
got millions of dollars' worth of real estate back there, but it's