Eye in the Sky (1957) Read Online Free

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
Chevvycoupe, 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