Counter-Clock World

  The announcer at the TV station cut back in and said, “Briefly, while we’re waiting for Ray Roberts to reach Dodger Stadium, a review of other local news. A Los Angeles police officer, Joseph Tinbane, has been found slain at the Happy Holiday Motel in San Fernando, and the police are speculating that it might be the work of religious fanatics. Other guests at the motel reported seeing a woman in the company of Officer Tinbane at the nearby sogum palace, earlier this evening, but if she exists she has disappeared. More on this, including an interview with the motel owner, during the eleven o’clock news. Floods in the northern hills near—”

  Sebastian shut the TV set off. “Christ,” he said to the robot, once more Carl Junior. “They’ve got Lotta and they killed Tinbane.” His warning hadn’t reached him; it had been futile. Hopeless, he thought as he found a place to sit; he crouched with his head in his hands, staring down at the floor. There’s nothing I can do. If they could wipe out a professional like Tinbane they’d have no trouble with me.

  “It seems almost impossible,” the robot said, “to penetrate the Library. Our efforts to seed a nest of miniaturized robots in Section B dismally failed. We do not know what else to do. If we had someone sympathetic working there—” The robot pondered. “We hoped that Doug Appleford might cooperate; he appeared to be the most reasonable of the librarians. But in that we were disappointed: it was he who expelled our nest.” It added, “Turn the TV on again, please; I wish to watch the motorcade.”

  He gestured. “You turn it on.” He did not have the energy to get to his feet again.

  The robot turned the TV set back on, and once again Chic and Don held forth.

  “. . . and a good number of whites, too,” Don was saying. “So this has turned out to be, as His Mightiness promised, a bi-racial event, although, as we observed shortly ago, Negroes outnumber whites by a ratio of—I’d estimate five to one. What estimate would you give, Chic?”

  “I find that about right, Don,” Chic said. “Yes, five colored to each—”

  Giacometti said, “We must get someone sympathetic into the Library. On its staff.” He plucked, scowling, at his lower lip. “Otherwise the Anarch will never emerge again.”

  “Lotta,” Sebastian said. Her, too.

  “That is of considerably lesser importance,” the robot said. “Although to you subjectively, Mr. Hermes, it undoubtedly looms large.” To Giacometti it said, “Can the Rome party be of any use in forging credentials which would admit one of us to the Library? I understand your people are very good at that.”

  Sardonically, Giacometti said, “Our reputation is undeserved.”

  “Given time,” Carl Junior ruminated, “we could construct a simulacrum robot resembling, for example, Miss Ann Fisher. But that would take weeks. Perhaps, Mr. Giacometti, if we pool our resources, we can shoot our way into the Library.”

  “My principal does not operate on that basis,” Giacometti said. And that was that. His tone was flat and final.

  To the robot, Sebastian said, “Ask Ray Roberts what I can do. To get into the Library.”

  “At this moment His Mightiness—”

  “Ask him!”

  “All right.” The robot nodded and was silent for several minutes. Sebastian and Giacometti waited. At last the robot spoke up again, its tone now firm. “You are to go to Section B of the Library,” it said. “You are to ask to see Mr. Douglas Appleford. Would he know you on sight, Mr. Hermes?”

  “No,” Sebastian said.

  “You are to say,” the robot said, “that a Miss Charise McFadden has sent you. Your name will be Lance Arbuthnot and you have written a demented thesis on the psychogenic origins of death by meteor-strike. You are a crank, originally from the F.N.M., but expelled because of your peculiar views. Mr. Appleford is expecting you; Charise McFadden has already sounded him as regards you and your queer thesis. He will not be glad to see you, but in line with his job he must.”

  Sebastian said, “I don’t see that that gets me anywhere.”

  “It will provide a cover,” the robot said, “and a pretext. Your comings and goings, your presence in the Library, will be understandable. It is common for crank inventors to hang around Section B; Appleford is accustomed to their presence. Mr. Giacometti.” It turned its attentions toward the advocate of the Rome principal. “Will you and your people cooperate with Udi in preparing Mr. Hermes a survival kit for use within the Library? Our combined resources are required.”

  After a thoughtful pause Giacometti nodded. “I think we can assist. Providing nothing destructive to human life is involved.”

  “Mr. Hermes will only be operating defensively,” the robot said. “No aggressive program is envisioned. Offensive action on the part of one man against the Library is vainglorious. It could never succeed.”

  Sebastian said, “What if Lance Arbuthnot actually shows up?”

  “There is no ‘Lance Arbuthnot,’” the robot said succinctly. “Miss McFadden is one of the Uditi; her request to Mr. Appleford was a ploy on our part from the beginning. It stems, in fact, from the teeming, fertile mind of Ray Roberts himself. We even have prepared his hokey thesis on psychosomatic factors in death by meteor-strike; tomorrow it will be delivered, bright and early, to your conapt door. By special Udi messenger.” The robot beamed.

  On the TV screen Don was saying, “. . . at least. There has been a very substantial turnout here at Dodger Stadium considering the weather. Oh, we understand His Mightiness, Ray Roberts, is expected to put in his appearance any moment.” The crowd noises, muted until now, all at once surged up deafeningly. “Mr. Roberts is emerging from the visitors’ dugout,” Don’s voice could be heard saying. “Let’s have a close-up of him; I think we can catch him with our camera.” The camera zoomed in, and on the screen four figures, marching across the infield toward the improvised lectern, could be discerned.

  “I want absolute silence in this room,” the robot said, “while Mr. Roberts is speaking.”

  “Can you see what he’s doing now, Don?” Chic was asking.

  “He seems to be blessing those gathered at the lectern,” Don answered. “He’s waving his hands in the direction of their heads, as if shaking holy water at them. Yes, he is blessing them; they’re all kneeling, now.” The crowd continued to yell.

  Sebastian said to the robot, “Then there’s nothing we can do tonight. Toward getting into the Library.”

  “We must wait until it reopens tomorrow morning,” the robot confirmed. Now it raised its finger to its lip in a shushing motion.

  Standing before the microphones, Ray Roberts surveyed the crowd.

  His Mightiness was a slightly built man, Sebastian observed. Quite delicate, with a bird-cage chest, slender arms—and unusually large hands. His eyes cast a penetrating brilliance; they blazed intensely as he sized up the audience before which he now spoke. Roberts wore a simple dark robe and a skullcap, and, on his right hand, a ring. One ring to rule them all, he thought, remembering his Tolkien. One ring to find them. One ring to—how did it go?—bring them all and in the darkness bind them. In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. The ring of earthly power, he thought. Like that fashioned from the Rheingold, carrying a curse with it, to whoever put it on. Maybe the operation of the curse, he conjectured, is manifest in the Library’s seizing the Anarch.

  “Sum tu,” Ray Roberts said, raising his hands. “I am you and you are I. Distinctions between and among us are illusory. What doo dat mean?, as the old Negro janitor asks in the ancient joke. It means—” His voice rose booming and echoing; he stared upward, his gaze fixed on a point in the sky beyond Dodger Stadium. “The Negro cannot be inferior to the white man because he is the white man. When the white man, in former times, did violence to the Negro he destroyed himself. Today, when a citizen of the Free Negro Municipality injures and molests a white, he, too, is injuring and molesting himself. I say to you: strike not the ear of the Roman soldier off; it will fall, like a dead leaf, of its own accord.”

  The crowd roared
its cheers.

  Going into his kitchen, Sebastian lit a cigar butt, puffed some angry smoke into it, rapidly. It grew longer. Maybe Bob Lindy could get me into the Library tonight, he said to himself. Lindy has an ingenious mind; he can do anything mechanical, or electrical. Or R. C. Buckley; he can talk his way in anywhere, any time. My own staff, he thought. I ought to be depending on them, not on Udi. Even if Udi does possess a prearranged plan all ready to go into gear.

  “I am reminded,” Roberts was expostulating in the living room, “of the little old lady who had been recently old-born and whose greatest fear had been that, when they excavated her, they would find her improperly clothed.” The audience chuckled. “But neurotic fears,” Roberts continued, now somberly, “can destroy a person and a nation. The neurotic fear by Nazi Germany of a two-front war—” He droned on; Sebastian ceased listening.

  Maybe I’ll have to accept the robot’s method, he said to himself, and wait until tomorrow. Joe Tinbane shot his way in, got her, and shot his way out, and what good did it do? Tinbane is dead and Lotta is once more inside the Library; nothing got accomplished.

  The Library, he reflected, must be dealt with in a certain way—a way customary and familiar to them. Udi is right; I must be accepted voluntarily into the Library.

  But how, when I get in there, he asked himself, can I keep from running amuck? When I actually face them . . . the strain will be overwhelming. Enormous. And I will have to sit there chatting with Appleford, about a deranged pseudo-manuscript—

  He returned to the living room. Over the din of Ray Roberts’ tirade he yelled at the robot, “I can’t do it!”

  The robot, annoyed, cupped its ear.

  “I’m getting into the Library tonight,” Sebastian yelled, but the robot paid no attention to him; its head had swiveled back and once more it was drinking up the noise from the TV set.

  Giacometti rose, took him by the arm, and led him back to the kitchen. “In this case the Uditi are right. This must be done slowly, bit by bit; we—especially you yourself—must be patient. You’ll simply get yourself killed, like the police officer. It all must be—” He gestured. “Indirect. Even—tactfully. You see?” He studied Sebastian’s face.

  “Tonight,” Sebastian said. “I’m going there now.”

  “You will go, but you won’t come back.”

  Setting down his completed cigar, Sebastian said, “Hello. I’ll see you later; I’m leaving.”

  “Don’t try to approach the Library! Don’t—” Giacometti’s words blended with the howl of the TV set, and then Sebastian shut the conapt door after him; he was outside, in the hall, in welcome silence.

  For what seemed like hours he roamed the dark streets, hands deep in his trouser pockets, passing stores, passing houses that, as time progressed, became increasingly darkened until, at last, he glanced up at a block of residences which showed no light at all. Now no one passed him on the sidewalk; he was entirely alone.

  All at once he found himself confronted by three members of Udi, two men and one young woman. Each wore the sum tu button; the girl had placed hers at the farthest projection of her right breast, like an enlarged, winking metal nipple.

  They greeted him cheerfully. “Valé, amicus,” they chorused. “What did you think of His Mightiness’ speech tonight?”

  “Excellent,” Sebastian said. He tried to remember it; only one phrase came to mind. “I liked that about the Roman sentry’s ear,” he said. “That gripped me.”

  “We have some spirit-sogum,” the taller of the two Uditi men informed him. “Want to join us? Even if you’re not part of the brotherhood, you can celebrate with us.”

  He could not turn such an offer down. “Fine,” he said. It had been years since he had imbibed any spirit-sogum; roughly, it resembled the old-time alcoholic mixtures sold at liquor stores and in bars—this took him back years, to before the Hobart Phase.

  Presently they had all squeezed into a parked aircar and were passing the flask with its long pipe back and forth. The atmosphere became increasingly genial.

  “What are you doing out so late?” the Udi girl asked him. “Hunting for a woman?”

  “Yes,” Sebastian said. The spirit-sogum had relaxed his tongue; he felt himself among friends. And probably he was.

  “Well, if that’s what you want, we can go—”

  “No,” Sebastian said, interrupting her. “It’s not what you think. I’m looking for my wife. And I know where she is, only I can’t get her out.”

  “We’ll get her out,” the shorter of the Uditi men said happily. “Where is she?”

  “At the People’s Topical Library,” Sebastian said.

  “Feood,” all three Uditi said in enthusiastic unison, “let’s go.” One of them, at the wheel, started the motor of the car.

  “It’s closed right now,” Sebastian pointed out.

  That—temporarily—dimmed their enthusiasm. The three of them conferred and at last their spokesman presented their joint idea for his inspection. “The Library has an all-night slot, for books past their erad date. One of those no-questions-asked slots. Couldn’t you squeeze in through there?”

  “Too small,” Sebastian said.

  That, too, dampened their ever-renewing enthusiasm. “You gotta wait until tomorrow,” the girl informed him. “Unless you want to call the police. But feood; I understand they have a hands-off policy as regards the Library. A sort of live and let live.”

  “Except,” Sebastian said, “the Library killed a Los Angeles patrolman earlier tonight.” But he couldn’t prove it had been the Library; he had already heard the TV blame it on “religious fanatics.”

  “Maybe you could get Ray Roberts to include your wife in one of his prayers,” the Udi girl said at last. Hopefully.

  “I still think,” the taller of the two men said, “the four of us ought to go somewhere and have an orgy.”

  He thanked them, got out of the car, and wandered on.

  The car, however, followed after him. When it came abreast with him, one of the Uditi rolled down the window, leaned out and yelled to him, “If you want to bust in, we’ll give you a hand. We’re not scared of the People’s Topical Library.”

  “You’re goddam right we’re not,” the Udi girl chimed in warmly.

  “No,” Sebastian decided. He had to do this alone; the three Uditi, good-intentioned as they were, couldn’t really help him.

  “Go on home, fella,” their spokesman now implored him. “You can’t do nothing tonight; give it another try tomorrow.”

  They were right; he nodded. “Okay,” he said. He felt overwhelming fatigue, now, as soon as he recognized that fact: as soon as his mind gave up, his body readily followed suit. He waved hello—or rather salvé—to the three of them, and roamed on toward a lighted intersection ahead, searching for a cab.

  He had never felt as dejected before in all his life.

  15

  God’s knowledge also surpassing all motions of time, remaineth in the simplicity of His presence.

  —Boethius

  When he returned to his conapt, half an hour later, he found it mercifully deserted; Giacometti and the robot Carl Junior had at last departed. Full-length cigarets filled every ashtray; he wandered about, stuffing them into packages, then gave up in numb despair and got into bed. At least the air in the room smelled clean and fresh; the desmoking of so many cigarets had accomplished that.

  The next he knew, someone was rapping on the door. He rose from the bed groggily, found himself fully dressed, stumbled to the door. No one there; it had taken him too long. But there, at the door, a brilliant blue, carefully wrapped package. The spurious thesis of Lance Arbuthnot.

  Jesus, he said to himself in pain; his head ached and he felt ill in every part of his body. Nine o’clock, the clock told him, from its place on the kitchen wall. Morning. The Library was already open.

  Shakily, he seated himself in the living room, unwrapped the parcel. Hundreds of typescript pages, with painstaking pen ann
otations; an utterly convincing job . . . it impressed him, this handiwork of the Uditi. Wherever he dipped into it he found it making a sort of sense; it had its own outré logic— such anyhow as was required by the situation. Clearly it would pass Library inspection.

  Without having ingested any sogum or put on his morning pat of whiskers, he phoned the Library and asked for Douglas Appleford.

  The features of a pompous, dim little functionary formed. “This is Mr. Appleford.” He eyed Sebastian.

  “My name,” Sebastian said, “is Lance Arbuthnot. Miss McFadden talked to you about me.”

  “Oh yes.” Appleford nodded distastefully. “I’ve been expecting you to call. The meteor-deaths man.”

  Holding the typescript manuscript up before the screen Sebastian said, “May I bring my thesis over sometime this morning?”

  “I could squeeze you in—briefly—around ten o’clock.”

  “I’ll see you then,” Sebastian said, and rang off. I now possess access up through all the sections with the exception of the top-floor A Section, he realized. The Uditi are experienced operators . . . it made a difference, having them on his side.

  The vidphone rang; he answered it and found himself confronted by His Mightiness Ray Roberts. “Goodbye, Mr. Hermes,” Roberts said sententiously. “In view of the importance of your activity vis-à-vis the Library, I believe I should consult directly with you. To be certain there is no misunderstanding. You received the manuscript of Arbuthnot’s thesis.”

  “Yes,” Sebastian said. “And it looks good.”

  “You will be in the Library, as far as they are concerned, only a matter of minutes; Douglas Appleford will receive the manuscript, thank you, and file it away. Ten minutes in all, perhaps. That will not be enough, of course; what you must do is become lost in the confusing maze of offices and reading rooms and stacks for a good part of the day. To do that you will need a pretext.”

  “I can tell them—” Sebastian began, but His Mightiness interrupted him.

  “Listen, Mr. Hermes. Your excuse has been carefully prepared far, far in advance. This is a long-term plan. While you are sitting in Mr. Appleford’s office, with the manuscript still in your possession, you will glance through it and inadvertently notice page 173. You will thereon see an error of major magnitude, and you will ask Appleford for use of a restricted-area reading room in which you can make pen-and-ink alterations. After you have corrected the copy, you will tell him, it will be turned over to him; you compute the time required for the changes to lie between fifteen and forty-five minutes.”