Counter-Clock World Read online

  The room exploded.

  The body of the Offspring over him, Sebastian felt himself lifted up, as by a wind; he crashed against the far wall of the room, as in his hands, the assassin writhed. Now smoke filled the room. He—and the assassin—lay against a broken door; shards of wood projected from the assassin’s back. The assassin had died.

  “Lotta,” Sebastian said, pulling himself free from the lolling, inert mass of body; now fire licked up the walls, consuming the drapes, the furniture. The floor itself burned. “Lotta,” he said, and groped about for her.

  He found her, still in the kitchen. Without picking her up he could see that she was dead. Fragments of the bomb had entered her brain and body. Had killed her more or less immediately.

  The fire crackled; the air, consumed by it, became opaque. He lifted his wife up, carried her from the apartment and out into the hall. Already, people filled the hall. Their voices yammered and he felt their hands plucking at him—he shoved them away, still carrying Lotta.

  Blood, he discovered, ran in trails down his face. Like tears. He did not wipe it away; instead he made his way toward the elevator. Someone, or several people, got the elevator for him; he found himself inside it.

  “Let us get her to the hospital,” voices—unfamiliar—said to him, voices accompanying the plucking hands. “And you’re badly hurt too; look at your shoulder.”

  With his left hand—his right seemed paralyzed—he found the control buttons of the elevator; he pressed the top one.

  Next, he wandered across the roof of the building, searching for his car. When he found it he placed Lotta inside, in the back, shut the doors, stood for a time and then, reopening a door, got in behind the wheel.

  He then reached the sky; the car flew through the evening twilight. Where? he wondered. He did not know; he merely kept driving. He drove on and on as the evening became darker; he felt the evening settle about him and the whole earth. An evening which would last forever.

  Flashlight in hand he searched among the trees; he saw grave stones and withered flowers and knew that he had come to a cemetery—which one he did not know. An old one, a little one. Why? he wondered. For Lotta? He looked around, but the car and Lotta had disappeared: he had gone too far from them. It didn’t matter. He continued on.

  The narrow, yellow beam of light carried him at last to a tall iron fence; he could go no farther. So he turned about and started back, still following the light, as if it were alive.

  An open grave. He halted. Mrs. Tilly M. Benton, he thought; she lay here, once. And, not far off, the ornate monument under which the Anarch Peak had once rested. This is Forest Knolls Cemetery, he realized. He wondered why he had come here; he seated himself on the damp grass, felt the cold of night, felt the utter cold deep inside him: much colder than the night itself. Cold, he thought, like the grave.

  Flashing the meager beam of his light on the Anarch’s monument he read the inscription. Sic igitur magni quoque circum moenia mundi expugnata dabunt labem putresque ruinas, he read, without comprehension. He wondered what it meant. He could not remember. Did it have any meaning? Perhaps not. He withdrew the yellow beam of light from the monument.

  For a time, a long time, he sat listening. He did not think; there was nothing to think about. He did nothing because there was nothing to do. Eventually, his flashlight gave out; the beam shrank to a spot and then dimmed away and vanished. He laid the tube of metal and glass down, touched his injured shoulder, felt the pain and wondered about that, too. It, like the Latin inscription, did not seem to mean anything.

  Silence.

  And then, as he sat, he heard voices. He heard them from many graves; he detected the growing into life of those below— some very close to it, some indistinct and far off. But all moving in that direction. He heard them coming closer; the voices became a babble.

  Under me, he thought. One very nearby. He could— almost—make out its words.

  “My name is Earl B. Quinn,” the voice crackled. “And I’m down here, shut in, and I want to get out.”

  He did not stir.

  “Can anybody up there hear me?” Earl B. Quinn called anxiously. “Please, somebody; hear me. I want to get out— I’m suffocating!”

  “I can’t get you out,” he said, then. Finally.

  Excitedly, the voice stammered, “C-can’t you dig? I know I’m near the top; I can hear you real clearly. Please start digging, or go tell everybody; I have relatives—they’ll dig me out. Please!”

  He moved over, away from the grave. Away from the insistent noise. Into the babble of all the many others.

  Much later the headlights of an aircar beamed down at him. The engine of the car roared as it set down in the parking lot of the cemetery. Then footsteps, and the illumination of a large-battery light, a vast sealed headlight beam. The path of illumination swung from side to side; like a visible pendulum, he thought; like part of a clock. He waited, not stirring, but at last the light reached him, touched him.

  “I figured I’d find you here,” Bob Lindy said.

  He said, “Lotta is—”

  “I found your car. I know.” Lindy crouched down, shone the heavy white beam on him. “And you’re seriously hurt; you’re covered with blood. Come on—I’ll take you to the hospital.”

  “No,” Sebastian said. “No; I don’t want to go.”

  “Why not? Even if she’s gone you still have to—”

  Sebastian said, “They want to get out. All of them.”

  “The deaders?” Lindy gripped him around the waist, lifted him to his feet. “Later,” he said. “Can you walk at all? You must have been walking; your shoes are covered with mud. And your clothes are torn, but maybe the blast did that.”

  “Let Earl Quinn out,” Sebastian said. “He’s the closest; he can’t breathe.” He pointed to the grave stone. “Under there.”

  “You’re going to die,” Lindy said. “Yourself. Unless I can get you to the hospital. Goddam it, walk as well as you can; I’ll try to support you. My car’s right over here.”

  “Call the police,” Sebastian said, “and have the cop who patrols this area sink an emergency air shaft down. Until we can get back here and start excavation.”

  “Okay, Sebastian. I’ll do that.” They had reached the car; Bob Lindy tugged the door open, grunting and perspiring, and got him inside.

  “They need help,” Sebastian said, as the car lifted and Bob Lindy put on the headlights. “It wasn’t just one I heard this time; I heard them all.” He had never heard anything like it before. Ever. So many at once—all of them together.

  “In time,” Lindy said. “We’ll get Quinn out first; I’ll call the police department now.” He quickly picked up the receiver of the car’s phone.

  The car flew on silently, in the direction of the city receiving hospital.

  PHILIP K. DICK

  COUNTER-CLOCK WORLD

  Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and lived most of his life in California. He briefly attended the University of California, but dropped out before completing any classes. In 1952, he began writing professionally and proceeded to write numerous novels and short-story collections. He won the Hugo Award for the best novel in 1962 for The Man in the High Castle and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year in 1974 for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Philip K. Dick died on March 2, 1982, in Santa Ana, California, of heart failure following a stroke.

  NOVELS BY PHILIP K. DICK

  Clans of the Alphane Moon

  Confessions of a Crap Artist

  The Cosmic Puppets

  Counter-Clock World

  The Crack in Space

  Deus Irae (with Roger Zelazny)

  The Divine Invasion

  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

  Dr. Bloodmoney

  Dr. Futurity

  Eye in the Sky

  Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

  Galactic Pot-Healer

  The Game-Players of Titan


  The Man in the High Castle

  The Man Who Japed

  Martian Time-Slip

  A Maze of Death

  Now Wait for Last Year

  Our Friends from Frolix 8

  The Penultimate Truth

  Radio Free Albemuth

  A Scanner Darkly

  The Simulacra

  Solar Lottery

  The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

  Time Out of Joint

  The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

  Ubik

  The Unteleported Man

  VALIS

  Vulcan’s Hammer

  We Can Build You

  The World Jones Made

  The Zap Gun

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, NOVEMBER 2002

  Copyright © 1967 by Philip K. Dick

  Copyright renewed 1995 by Laura Coelho, Christopher Dick, and Isa Hackett

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

  Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Counter-Clock World was originally

  published in the United States by Berkley Medallion Books, New York, in 1967.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

  www.vintagebooks.com

  www.randomhouse.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-42534-8

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