Counter-Clock World Read online

  Bob Lindy rapidly unscrewed the lid of the coffin; it was cheap synthetic pine, lightweight, and the lid came right off. Instantly Dr. Sign moved forward, bent over the old lady with his stethoscope, listening, talking to her in a low voice. Bob Lindy started up the hot fan, keeping a stream of constant heat on Mrs. Tilly M. Benton; this was vital, this transfer of heat: the old-born were always terribly cold; had, in fact, an inevitable phobia about cold which, as in Sebastian’s case, often lasted for years after their rebirth.

  His part of the job temporarily over, Sebastian once again moved about the cemetery, among the graves, listening. Lotta this time tagged after him and insisted on talking. “Isn’t it mystical?” she said breathlessly, in her little girl’s awed voice. “I want to paint it; I wish I could get that expression they have when they first see, when the lid of the coffin is opened. That look. Not joy, not relief; no one particular thing, but a deeper and more—”

  “Listen,” he said, interrupting her.

  “To what?” She obligingly listened, obviously hearing nothing. Not sensing what he sensed: the enormous presence nearby.

  Sebastian said, “We’re going to have to keep a watch on this strange little place. And I want a complete list— absolutely complete—of everyone buried here.” Sometimes, studying the inventory list, he could fathom which it was; he had a virtually psionic gift, this ability to sense in advance a forthcoming old-birth. “Remind me,” he said to his wife, “to call the authorities who operate this place and find out exactly who they have.” This invaluably rich storehouse of life, he thought. This onetime graveyard which has become instead a reservoir of reawakening souls.

  One grave—and one alone—had an especially ornate monument placed above it; he shone his flashlight on the monument, found the name.

  THOMAS PEAK

  1921–1971

  Sic igitur magni quoque circum

  moenia mundi expugnata dabunt

  labem putresque ruinas.

  His Latin was not good enough for him to translate the epitaph; he could only guess. A statement about the great things of the earth, all of which fell eventually into corruption and ruin. Well, he thought, that is no longer true, that epitaph. Not about the great things with souls; them especially. I have a hunch, he said to himself, that Thomas Peak—and he evidently had been somebody, to judge by the size and stone-quality of the monument—is the person I sense to be about to return, the person we should watch for.

  “Peak,” he said aloud, to Lotta.

  “I’ve read about him,” she said. “In a course I took on Oriental Philosophy. You know who he is—was?”

  He said, “Was he related to the Anarch by that name?”

  “Udi,” Lotta said.

  “That Negro cult? That’s overrun the Free Negro Municipality? Run by that demagogue Raymond Roberts? The Uditi? This Thomas Peak buried here?”

  She examined the dates, nodded. “But it wasn’t a racket, in those days, my teacher told us. There really is a Udi experience, I believe. Anyhow, so we were taught at San Jose State. Everyone merges; there’s no you and no—”

  “I know what Udi is,” he said testily. “God, now that I know who he is I’m not so sure I want to help bring this one back.”

  “But when the Anarch Peak comes back,” Lotta said, “he’ll resume his position as head of Udi and it’ll stop being a racket.”

  Behind them Bob Lindy said, “You could probably make a fortune by not bringing him back to an unwilling, unwaiting world.” He explained, “I’m now done with your job-call, here; Sign is inserting one of those hand-me-down electric kidneys and getting her on a stretcher and into his car.” He lit a cigaret butt, stood smoking and shivering and meditating. “You think this fella Peak’s about to return, Seb?”

  “Yes,” he said. “You know my intimations.” Our firm operates at a profit because of them, he meditated; they’re what keep us ahead of the big outfits, make it possible in fact to get any business at all . . . anything, anyhow, above and beyond what the city police throw at us.

  Lindy said somberly, “Wait’ll R.C. Buckley hears about this. He’ll really go into action on this one; in fact, I suggest you call him right now. The sooner he knows, the sooner he can formulate one of those wild rizzle-drizzle promotion campaigns he concocts.” He laughed sharply. “Our man in the graveyard,” he said.

  “I’m going to plant a bug here on Peak’s grave,” Sebastian said after a thoughtful pause. “One that’ll both pick up cardiac activity and will transmit a notifying coded signal to us.”

  “You’re that sure,” Lindy said, nervously. “I mean, it’s illegal; if the L.A. police find it, you know—maybe a suspension of our license to operate.” His innate Swedish caution emerged, now, and his dubiousness regarding Sebastian’s psionic intimations. “Forget it,” he said. “You’re getting as bad as Lotta.” He plomped her friendlily on the back, meaning well. “I always say, I’m not going to let the atmosphere of these places get to me; it’s a technical job having to do with exact location, adequate air supply, digging accurately so you don’t saw it in half, then raising it up, getting Dr. Sign to patch its busted parts together.” To Lotta he said, “You’re too metaphysical about this, kid. Forget it.”

  Lotta said, “I’m married to a man who lay dead down below, once. When I was born, Sebastian was dead, and he remained dead until I was twelve years old.” Her voice—odd for her—was unyielding.

  “So?” Lindy demanded.

  “This process,” she said, “has given me the only man in the world or on Mars or on Venus that I love or could love. It has been the greatest force in my life.” She put her arm around Sebastian, then, and hugged him, hugged his big bulk against her.

  “Tomorrow,” Sebastian said to her, “I want you to pay a visit to Section B of the People’s Topical Library. Get all the information you can about the Anarch Thomas Peak. Most of it has probably gone into erad by now, but they may have a few terminal typescript manuscripts.”

  “Was he really that important?” Bob Lindy asked.

  Lotta said, “Yes. But—” She hesitated. “I’m scared of the Library, Seb; I really am. You know I am. It’s so—oh the hell with it. I’ll go.” Her voice sank.

  “There I agree with you,” Bob Lindy said. “I don’t like that place. And I’ve been there exactly once.”

  “It’s the Hobart Phase,” Sebastian said. “The same force at work that operates here.” He turned to Lotta again. “Avoid the Head Librarian, Mavis McGuire.” He had run into her several times in the past, and he had been repelled; she had struck him as bitchy, hostile, and mean. “Go right to Section B,” he said.

  God help Lotta, he thought, if she gets fouled up and runs into that McGuire woman. Maybe I should go . . . No, he decided; she can ask for someone else; it’ll work out all right. I’ll just have to take the chance.

  2

  Man is most correctly defined as a certain intellectual notion eternally made in the divine mind.

  —Erigena

  Sunlight ascended and a penetrating mechanical voice declared, “All right, Appleford. Time to get up and show ’em who you are and what you can do. Big man, that Douglas Appleford; everybody acknowledges it—I hear them talking. Big man, big talent, big job. Much admired by the public at large.” It paused. “You awake, now?”

  Appleford, from his bed, said, “Yes.” He sat up, batted the sharp-voiced alarm clock at his bedside into nullification. “Good morning,” he said to the silent apartment. “Slept well; I hope you did, too.”

  A press of problems tumbled about his disordered mind as he got grouchily from the bed, wandered to the closet for clothing adequately dirty. Supposed to nail down Ludwig Eng, he said to himself. The tasks of tomorrow become the worst tasks of today. Reveal to Eng that only one copy of his great-selling book is left in all the world; the time is coming soon for him to act, to do the job only he can do. How would Eng feel? After all, sometimes inventors refused to sit down and do their job. Well, he dec
ided, that actually consisted of an Erad Council problem; theirs, not his. He found a stained, rumpled red shirt; removing his pajama top he got into it. The trousers were not so easy; he had to root through the hamper.

  And then the packet of whiskers.

  My ambition, Appleford mused as he padded to the bathroom with the whisker packet, is to cross the W.U.S. by streetcar. Whee. At the bowl he washed his face, then lathered on foam-glue, opened the packet and with adroit slappings managed to convey the whiskers evenly to his chin, jowls, neck; in a moment he had expertly gotten the whiskers to adhere. I’m fit now, he decided as he reviewed his countenance in the mirror, to take the streetcar ride; at least as soon as I process my share of sogum.

  Switching on the automatic sogum pipe—very modern— he accepted a good masculine bundle, sighed contentedly as he glanced over the sports section of the Los Angeles Times. Then at last walked to the kitchen and began to lay out soiled dishes. In no time at all he faced a bowl of soup, lamb chops, green peas, Martian blue moss with egg sauce, and a cup of hot coffee. These he gathered up, slid the dishes from beneath and around them—of course first checking the windows of the room to be sure no one saw him—and briskly placed the assorted foods in their proper receptacles, which he placed on shelves of the cupboard and in the refrigerator. The time was eight-thirty; he still had fifteen minutes in which to get to work. No need to dwindle himself hurrying; the People’s Topical Library Section B would be there when he arrived.

  It had taken him years to work up to B. And now, as a reward, he had to deal tête-à-tête with a bewildering variety of surly, boorish inventors who balked at their assigned—and, according to the Erads, mandatory—final cleaning of the sole remaining typescript copy of whatever work their name had become associated with—linked by a process which neither he nor the assortment of inventors completely understood. The Council presumably understood why a particular given inventor got stuck with a particular assignment and not some other assignment entirely. For instance, Eng and HOW I MADE MY OWN SWABBLE OUT OF CONVENTIONAL HOUSEHOLD OBJECTS IN MY BASEMENT DURING MY SPARE TIME. Appleford reflected as he glanced over the remainder of the ’pape. Think of the responsibility. After Eng finished, no more swabbles in all the world, unless those untrustworthy rogues in the F.N.M. had a couple illicitly tucked away. In fact, even though the ter-cop, the terminal copy, of Eng’s book still remained, he already found it difficult to recall what a swabble did and what it looked like. Square? Small? Or round and huge? Hmm. He put down the ’pape and rubbed his forehead while he attempted to recall—tried to conjure up an accurate mental image of the device while it was still theoretically possible to do so. Because as soon as Eng reduced the ter-cop to a heavily inked silk ribbon, half a ream of bond paper, and a folio of fresh carbon paper there existed no chance for him or for anyone else to recall either the book or the mechanism—up to now quite useful—which the book described.

  That task, however, would probably occupy Eng the rest of the year. Cleaning of the ter-cop had to progress line by line, word by word; it could not be handled as were the assembled heaps of printed copies. So easy, up until the terminal typescript copy and then . . . well, to make it worth it to Eng, a really huge salary would be paid him, plus—

  By his elbow on the small kitchen table the receiver of the vidphone hopped from its mooring onto the table, and from it came a distant tiny shrill voice. “Goodbye, Doug.” A woman’s voice.

  Lifting the receiver to his ear he said, “Goodbye.”

  “I love you, Doug,” Charise McFadden stated in her breathless, emotion-saturated voice. “Do you love me?”

  “Yes, I love you, too,” he said. “When have I seen you last? I hope it won’t be long. Tell me it won’t be long.”

  “Most probably tonight,” Charise said. “After work. There’s someone I want you to meet, a virtually unknown inventor who’s desperately eager to get official eradication for his thesis on, ahem, the psychogenic origins of death by meteor strike. I said that because you’re in Section B—”

  “Tell him to eradicate his thesis himself. At his own expense.”

  “There’s no prestige in that.” Her face on the vidscreen earnest, Charise pleaded, “It’s really a dreadful piece of theorizing, Doug; it’s as nutty as the day is long. This oaf, this Lance Arbuthnot—”

  “That’s his name?” It almost persuaded him. But not quite. In the course of a single day he received many such requests, and every one, without exception, came represented as a socially dangerous piece by a crank inventor with a goofy name. He had held his chair at Section B too long to be easily snared. But still—he had to investigate this; his ethical structure, his responsibility to society, insisted on it. He sighed.

  “I hear you groaning,” Charise said brightly.

  Appleford said, “As long as he’s not from the F.N.M.” “Well—he is.” She looked—and sounded—guilty. “I think they threw him out, though. That’s why he’s here in Los Angeles and not there.”

  Rising to his feet, Douglas Appleford said stiffly, “Hello, Charise. I must leave now for work; I will not and cannot discuss this trivial matter further.” And that, as far as he was concerned, ended that.

  He hoped.

  Arriving home to his conapt at the end of his shift, Officer Joe Tinbane found his wife sitting at the breakfast table. Embarrassed, he averted his gaze until she noticed him and rapidly finished filling her cup with hot, dark coffee.

  “Shame,” Bethel said reprovingly. “You should have knocked on the kitchen door.” With haughty dignity she carefully placed the orange-juice bottle in the refrigerator, carried the now nearly full box of Happy-Oats to its concealment in the cupboard. “I’ll be out of your way in a minute. My victual momentum is now just about complete.” However, she took her time.

  “I’m tired,” he said, at last seating himself.

  Bethel placed empty bowls, a glass, a cup, and a plate before him. “Guess what the ’pape says this morning,” she said as she retired discreetly to the living room so that he, too, could disgorge. “That thug fanatic is coming here, that Raymond Roberts person. On a pilg.”

  “Hmm,” he said, enjoying the hot, liquid taste of coffee as he ruminated it up into his weary mouth.

  “The Los Angeles chief of police estimates that four million people will turn out to see him; he’s performing the sacrament of Divine Unification in Dodger Stadium, and of course it’ll all be on TV until we’re ready to go clear out of our minds. All day long—that’s what the ’pape says; I’m not making it up.”

  “Four million,” Tinbane echoed, thinking, professionally, how many peace officers it would take to handle crowd control when the crowd consisted of that many. Everybody on the force, including Skyway Patrol and special deputies. What a job. He groaned inwardly.

  “They use those drugs,” Bethel said, “for that unification they practice; there’s a long article on it, here. The drug’s a derivative from DNT; it’s illegal here, but when he goes to perform the sacrament they’ll let him—them all—use it that one time. Because the California law states—”

  “I know what it states,” Tinbane said. “It states that a psychedelic drug can be used in a bona fide religious ceremony.” God knew he had had this drummed into him by his superiors.

  Bethel said, “I have half a mind to go there. And participate. It’s the only time, unless we want to fly to, ugh, the F.N.M. And I frankly don’t feel much like doing that.”

  “You do that,” he said, happily disgorging cereal, sliced peaches and milk and sugar, in that order.

  “Want to come? It’ll be exciting. Just think: thousands of people unified into one entity. The Udi, he calls it. Which is everyone and no one. Possessing absolute knowledge because it has no single, limiting viewpoint.” She came to the kitchen door, eyes shut. “Well?”

  “No thanks,” Tinbane said, his mouth embarrassingly full. “And don’t watch me; you know how I can’t stand to have anyone around when I’m having victual mom
entum, even if they can’t see me. They might hear me—chewing.”

  He could feel her there; he sensed her resentment.

  “You never take me anywhere,” Bethel said presently.

  “Okay,” he agreed, “I never take you anywhere.” He added, “And if I did, it wouldn’t be there, to hear about religion.” We have enough religious nuts in Los Angeles anyhow, he thought. I wonder why Roberts didn’t think of making a pilg here a long time ago. I wonder why just now . . . of all possible times.

  Earnestly, Bethel said, “Do you think he’s a fake? That there’s no such state as Udi?”

  He shrugged. “DNT is a potent drug.” Maybe it was so. In any case it didn’t matter; not to him, anyhow. “Another unexpected rebirth,” he said to his wife. “At Forest Knolls, naturally. They’re never watching those minor cemeteries; they know we’ll handle it—with city equipment.” Anyhow, Tilly M. Benton was safely at the L.A. receiving hospital, thanks to Seb Hermes. Within a week she would be disgorging like the rest of them.

  “Eerie,” Bethel said, still at the doorway to the kitchen.

  “How do you know? You never saw it happen.”

  “You and your damn job,” Bethel said. “Don’t take it out on me, just because you can’t stand it. If it’s so awful, quit. Fish or cut bait, as the Romans said.”