The Flying Eyes. J. Hunter Holly
looking out of the window here on top of the Garner Building, I can see one of them. It’s a great, blue Eye—just an Eye—and it hovers above the street and blinks its giant lids and stirs up papers on the street with the sweep of its lashes. There’s something ominous in it aside from its immensity—something that looks out of it, weird and foreign. It has no expression. It is just pure horror, and it—”
Linc snapped the set off angrily. “That guy should be horse-whipped for putting out a broadcast like that. He’s scaring hundreds of people to death who haven’t even seen the things.”
Wes’ tone was gentler. “He has one of the things staring him in the face and he’s letting out his fear in words.”
Linc turned in annoyance and strode to the window and looked out at the quiet street. Birds whistled and fluttered in the trees. The neighbor’s cat sat on the porch, washing its face with an orange paw, oblivious to anything out of the ordinary. It was impossible to believe what he had seen less than an hour ago when he viewed it from this vantage point. It was impossible, and the memory of it was so distorted with fear and frenzy that he welcomed the doubts that assailed him. Unanswered questions—mysteries—always infuriated him. The world was a sensible, ordered place with an answer for everything, if sane men would only search for it. There had to be an answer for this, too.
He swung from the window. “We’ve let ourselves be made fools of. We saw something unusual, and we panicked and built it all out of proportion. We were too blind with panic even to know what we saw.”
“I know what I saw,” Kelly said huskily. “A little girl—somebody stepped on her face.”
“Don’t focus on those things! They were the result, not the cause. I’m talking about those eyes. Our own panic made them grow, made them appear menacing.”
“We saw them before the panic started,” Wes argued.
“I wonder. Maybe the panic really started the first second you pointed them out. You know what terror can do. Light a match in a crowded theater—make a little smoke and smell—then yell ‘Fire!’ and people will stampede. They’ll run and crush each other, and later report that they saw flames jumping, when there was nothing there but a little smoke and somebody yelling.”
Wes was doubtful. “Then what do you think it was?”
“I don’t know.” Linc turned away. “But unless we suppose it was something perfectly normal, and examine it from that viewpoint, we’ll never get anywhere except deeper in fear. Eyes. What could they have been? Machines? A publicity stunt? Big balloons, sent over the stadium? Or what about mass hallucination?”
“No!” Kelly’s shout quavered with her voice. “Balloons or hallucinations don’t make people walk like zombies.”
“And the announcer on the radio?” Wes asked. “Hallucination is contagious—fear is contagious.”
“I can’t go along with you,” Wes answered. “Everything you say about the psychology of terror is true, I admit that, but this was something else again. This terror had a basis.”
“Look out the window!” Linc commanded. “Where’s the terror on Colt Street? It hasn’t spread here yet, and it won’t, if somebody has the sense to muzzle that announcer.”
“The Eyes haven’t spread here either. You’re reaching too hard, Linc. You want this thing explained, so you’re explaining it any way you can.”
“I’ll prove it to you,” Linc said. “I’m going to the lab. Iverson has probably started to figure it out already.”
“You can’t go outside!” Kelly stood up. “You’re not foolhardy enough to go out there with those Eyes?”
“You stay here—let Wes hold your hand. You’ll be safe here. I’ve got to move.”
He started for the door, but Wes was quickly beside him. “If you feel you have to go, then I’ll go with you.”
Linc looked at him, his dark eyes and well-planed face, and all he could manage was a nod of consent. He went through the door and toward the car, admitting that he was angry and argumentative because he was mad at himself. As for Kelly, he was sure she would be safe in the house, and just as sure that she wouldn’t venture out.
As he pulled open the car door, the neighbor’s orange cat suddenly darted from the porch, beneath the car, and out the other side, headed for the shelter of its hiding place tinder the back shed. Inside the house, Ichabod set up a howl. Wes looked at Linc over the roof of the car, his eyes questioning.
The question was swiftly answered. A stirring of the fall-colored leaves drew their attention upward, and there, sailing over Colt Street was the six-foot length of an Eye. The skin of the lids was a monstrous rubbery mass, the pores visible holes, and the lash-hairs were as big around as matchsticks at the roots.
“Do you want to go back?” Wes asked in a low voice.
The Eye had passed their house, and now the back of it was visible. Linc’s heart sank as all of his speculations were ruled out. The Eye wasn’t a fake. The back of it was horror enough to make him clutch his stomach in an effort to hold it down. It was the back of an eye: bloody membrane and nerves—skinless, unprotected, horror.
“We’ve got to go,” he told Wes. “Now we’ve got to go!”
Wes’ answer was simply to get into the car. “Take the side streets,” he said, “and don’t go through the campus.”
“I’ll go the country way,” Linc agreed, and sped down Colt Street, away from the thing that was drifting off behind them.
* * * *
The clustered buildings of the Space Research Lab sat alone on a poorly landscaped piece of property out beyond the campus. The biggest building housed the reactor and the artificial gravity research room. Smaller buildings beside it were offices and specialized labs. It looked innocuous sitting there behind its chain-link fence. There was nothing in its appearance to generate the suspicion the townspeople held toward the place. But they still held it.
The parking lot was full, but there was no activity around the buildings.
“Everybody’s probably in Iverson’s office,” Wes said.
Jan Iverson’s office was in the administration building, and their heels jarred loudly on the concrete floor as they entered. Linc respected Iverson. As the project’s head, he had a frustrating job. He was pure scientist—the artificial gravity project was his life, and all he wanted was to work on it, but he was saddled with the headaches of administration besides. He had to listen, to judge, to approve or disapprove the grumblings and snap ideas of fifty men. Wes was his human bulldozer, Linc his Maginot Linc against crisis. Whatever peace and chance to work he had came from them.
As they entered his office, Iverson rose, a relief on his face that was gratifying. He said, “I was sure you’d come.” Linc glanced over the assembly. There were only three others present: Bennet, Myers and Tony Collins. Collins he could do without. A wiry, hawk-faced man, Collins hated Linc’s guts and wanted Linc’s job. Everybody knew it. But “assistant” Collins stayed.
“Have you seen ‘them’ firsthand?” Iverson asked.
“We were at the game,” Linc explained.
“Then you had the best chance of any of us to observe. What conclusions have you reached?”
Wes laughed sourly. “We came out here to see if you had reached any conclusions.”
“Oh.” Iverson’s hope fell. “In other words, you two know just as much as we do—which is nothing.”
“Not even a guess?” Linc asked Iverson. “You must have been getting reports.”
“Reports we’ve got by the dozen,” Collins said. “The things are all over the place. They’ve even sailed over here a couple of times. Wherever people are gathered,