Counter-Clock World Read online

  Five minutes later his car vidphone light flashed on; he lifted the receiver. “I got the janitor,” Sebastian said miserably.

  “And he said what.”

  “That he was alone in the building; everyone else, the staff, everybody, had gone home.”

  Tinbane said, “There are seven living people below me. Okay, I’ll go down and take a look. I’ll call you back as soon as I have anything definite.”

  “Should I call the police?” Sebastian asked.

  “I am the police,” Tinbane said, and rang off.

  He set the warning circuit of the cephalic-wave detector to activate itself when someone was within five feet of him, and then, lugging the detector in one hand, his service revolver in the other, he hurried awkwardly to the unlocked entrance door of the Library.

  A moment later, by the stairs, he had reached the top floor.

  Closed doors. Darkness and silence; he fumbled with his infrared flashlight, switched it on. A study of the screen of the cephalic-wave detector showed the seven dots arranged on a horizontal plane vertically distant from him by over five feet; the warning circuit had not triggered. The next floor down, he decided. He tried, as he again descended the stairs, to recall on which floor Mavis McGuire maintained her private suite of offices. On floor three, as I recall, he said to himself.

  The warning circuit lit up, blinked on and off at the vertical side of the two-filament bulb. He was on the right floor, distant now only horizontally. Floor six, he noted. The level which the Erad Council is said to occupy. And the overhead lights, on this floor, had not been shut off; bathed in yellow, the corridor of closed doors lay ahead of him.

  He walked slowly, glancing intermittently up and then back at the cephalic-wave detector’s screen. The seven dots advanced toward him on the horizontal axis. All in one spot, more or less; grouped together in one suite of offices.

  I wonder what I’ll get out of this, Tinbane asked himself. Probably Library pressure will cost me my job; they reach pretty far up in city government. So the hell with it, he said to himself; it wasn’t much of a job anyhow. And, if he could prove that the Erads had forcibly detained Lotta Hermes— anyhow a semblance of a case could be made, if she was willing to back him up. But, he reflected, that might mean Lotta would have to appear in court, or at least sign a complaint, and she would shrink from that; to her it might appear as terrible as the Library. Well, too late to worry about that; he could only hope that, if it came to it, Lotta would vindicate what he—out of uniform but with police equipment—was doing.

  The horizontal side of the bulb lit, now, and stayed lit. He was less than five feet from someone. Ahead, a closed office door; he sensed the persons on the far side, the seven of them, but, listening, he could hear nothing. Rats, he said to himself.

  Muttering, he hurried all the way back up to the roof, to his prowl car, and, from the trunk, got a monitoring tool, which he laboriously lugged along with the other equipment: his gun, flashlight, cephalic-wave detector, back to floor six and the inhabited, closed office door.

  There, working with speed and deft precision, he set the monitoring tool into motion; programmed, it stretched its plastic self thin enough to pass under the door, and then, on the far side, it—presumably—reformed in some neutral shape, and set its aud and vid receptors going.

  In his hand he held the vid receiver of the monitoring tool; in his ear he had, squeezed tightly in, the aud outlet.

  The aud outlet squeaked into his ear a man’s voice. An Erad, he decided. And the vid portion; he peered at the postage-stamp-sized tube surface, gray and vaguely illuminated. The monitoring machinery had not focused; it was still sweeping out a random scan.

  “—also,” the Erad was saying in his gloomy, sententious Erad voice, “we are concerned as to the matter of public safety. It is an axiom of this Library that public safety ranks foremost in value; our eradication of dangerous, disturbing written material—” It pontificated on. Tinbane inspected the tube surface. Three figures grouped together, a man and two women; he screwed the pan-lens knob clockwise, and the face of one woman grew until it filled the meager screen. It appeared to be Lotta Hermes, but the image was distorted and indistinct, and he could not be sure. He operated the sweep-scanner until it came to rest on the other woman’s features. This, he decided, was certainly Mavis McGuire. His identification of her was certain.

  And now, in his ear plug, he heard her voice.

  “Can’t you see how harmful this man is?” Mavis was ranting. “How pandering to the proles, as he’ll try to do, will bring about more riots, more civil disobedience, not only in the Free Negro Municipality, but here among Negroes and white pro-Negroes on the West Coast. Don’t forget Watts and Oakland and Detroit; don’t forget what you learned in school.”

  A harsh, penetrating Erad voice said, “We might as well all become a part of the Free Negro Municipality, when that happens.”

  “We’ve virtually done a complete erad job on God In a Box,” Mavis McGuire said. “His major tract, or whatever you want to call it, is almost gone. Forever. It was God In a Box, which, thirty years ago, before you were born, helped inflame mass sentiment which brought about the creation of the F.N.M. The Anarch was personally responsible; if he hadn’t made speeches and sermons and written tracts, the F.N.M. would never have been formed, and a whole United States, undivided, would still exist; our country wouldn’t have been chopped into three pieces. Four, if you count Hawaii and Alaska; they wouldn’t have become separate nations.”

  The other woman, presumably Lotta Hermes, cried quietly, her hand over her face, a huddled shape overshadowed by Mavis McGuire and the Erad. And, Tinbane reflected, four more Erads loitered somewhere in the vicinity, probably in the next chamber of the office. Waiting to take turns at her, he thought; he knew the procedure of interrogation, the shifts which spelled each other at regular intervals; the police department worked in this fashion also.

  “Now, as to Ray Roberts,” the Erad said. “He probably knows more about the Anarch than does anyone else alive. What do you suppose his sentiments toward the Anarch’s rebirth are? Would you say Roberts is probably profoundly disturbed? Or would you say that he’s overjoyed?”

  “Do the Council member the courtesy of answering,” Mrs. McGuire said to the huddled girl. “He asked you a reasonable question. You know that Roberts is out here, making his pilg here to the West Coast, because he’s distressed. He doesn’t want to see this happen. And Roberts is a Negro. And from the F.N.M. And head of Udi.”

  The Erad said, “Don’t you think that tells us what to expect from the old-born Anarch? If Roberts, a fellow Negro and head of Udi and—”

  Tinbane removed the aud plug from his ear, set down the visual portion of the gear, freed himself from all his equipment except for his service revolver. I wonder if Erads go about armed, he asked himself. In the light of the overhead hallway fixtures he carefully set the instruction-complex of his service revolver. He calculated distance, how many of them there were to take out, how best to protect Lotta Hermes. And how finally, after the havoc cleared, to make sure that he and Lotta got out of the Library and up to the roof and in his prowl car.

  I have about one chance in ten, he decided, of making this work. What will probably happen will be that both Lotta and I will have disappeared into the Library and never reemerged. Never seen again.

  But just maybe, he thought, I owe this to her.

  Once more he adjusted the controls of his weapon. Not kill any of them, he realized; I can’t conceivably get away with that—even if Lotta and I did get out, they’d hunt us, hound us, for the rest of our lives. Until we were back in the womb. And, he thought, I don’t think they’ll go for killing either of us . . . at least not now, not without some Council discussion; a formal decision, if what I know about the Erads is accurate, will have to be arrived at.

  Okay, he said to himself. Here goes.

  He opened the door and said, “Mrs. Hermes? You’re coming home.”


  Soundlessly, without moving, the three of them, Lotta and Mavis McGuire and the tall, straw-like Erad with his ugly elongated face, stared at him.

  The far door of the office had been left open, and from within four more Erads also peered. Everything had come to a stop. He had frozen the seven of them, suspended them and their activities out of time, just by his presence. By the big gray gun he held; the regulation police-issue mammoth revolver. He was a man with a gun, not a police officer, but he knew how to talk from behind his gun; he knew how to use it without using it.

  Beckoning to the hunched-up little shape of Lotta Hermes he said, “Come over here.” She continued to stare blankly. “Come over here,” he repeated in exactly the same tone; he made it unvarying. “I want you,” he told her, “to come and stand over by me.”

  He waited and then, all at once, she rose and made her way over to him, to stand by him. No one interfered; no one even spoke.

  The knowledge of wrong-doing—and the recognition of being caught at it—had on most people a paralyzing effect. As long, he thought, as I can keep about me the archetype of authority. Even Erads, he thought, are not exempt. Maybe.

  “I’ve seen you before,” Mavis McGuire said. “You’re a police officer.”

  “No,” he said. “You’ve never seen me before.” He took hold of Lotta’s wrist and said to her, “Go upstairs to the roof field and wait in my aircar. Make sure you get the right one; it’s parked over to the left as you come out of the stairwell.” As she started obediently off he said, “Feel the hood; the motor’s warm. You can tell by that.”

  One of the Erads within the inner office fired at him with what he recognized as an illegal pelfrag pistol, very small, with one single fragmenting shot.

  The slug, without fragmenting, hit him in the foot. Evidently the ammunition was old, and the pistol probably had never been used; its owner, the Erad, probably did not know how to clean and maintain a gun, and the rim-fire hammer had missed the inner charge.

  Tinbane swiftly fired nine random shots, sweeping both offices. He squeezed the trigger of his service revolver until the rooms had become opaque with ricocheting pellets, all of them traveling at a velocity which would stun or inflict a minor injury or blind—he fired once more as he limped into the hall and then, as best he could, he hopped and hobbled up the hall to the stairs, cursing the wound in his foot, feeling the pain and the malfunctioning; he could hardly make any time at all and he felt them behind him, doing something—food, he thought savagely; what a place to be hit. As the stair door swung shut behind him a pelfrag slug detonated in the hall behind him; the glass window of the door shattered and shards slashed at his neck and back and arms. But he continued on, up the stairs. At the top of the stairs, at roof level, he fired his remaining shot back down the stairs, filling the well with rebounding pellets, enough to stop anyone, unless the person was willing to risk blindness, and then he dragged himself and his injured foot to his prowl car.

  Beside the car, not inside it, he found Lotta Hermes; she looked up into his face speechlessly and he opened the car door for her and got her inside. “Lock your door,” he said, and limped to the driver’s side, also getting in, also locking his door. Now a group of Erads had come out onto the roof, but they milled in confusion, some evidently wanting to try one good, planned shot at the prowl car, some wanting to follow in their own cars, some possibly willing to give up.

  He took off, gained altitude, accelerated as rapidly as the beefed-up engine which the police department used could manage, and then lifted his microphone and said to the dispatching officer at his substation, “I’m on my way to Peralta General and I’d like another car waiting for me in the parking lot, just in case.”

  “Okay, 403,” the dispatcher acknowledged. “301,” he instructed, “join 403 at Peralta General.” To Tinbane he said, “Aren’t you off duty, 403?”

  Tinbane said, “I ran into some trouble on my way home.” His foot throbbed and he felt fatigue, general and all-embracing. I’ll be laid up for a week, he said to himself as he reached gingerly down to unlace the shoe on his injured foot. Well, there goes the assignment regarding being a bodyguard for Ray Roberts.

  Seeing him fussing with his shoe, Lotta said, “Are you hurt?”

  “We’re lucky,” he said. “They were armed after all. But they’re not used to a showdown.” Handing her the vidphone receiver, he said, “Dial your husband at the vitarium; I told him I’d let him know when I had you out of there.”

  “No,” Lotta said.

  “Why not?”

  Lotta said, “He sent me there.”

  Shrugging, Tinbane said, “I guess that’s true enough.” He felt too foolish from his injury to argue; anyhow it was so. “But I could have given you the info,” he said. “That’s what’s rotten about me, about what I did. You might as well blame me as him.”

  “But you got me out,” Lotta said.

  That, too, was true; he had to agree.

  Reaching, Lotta hesitantly touched his cheek, his ear; she examined his face with her fingers, as if she were blind.

  “What’s that mean?” he said.

  Lotta said, “I’m grateful. I always will be. I don’t think they would ever have let me go. It was as if they enjoyed it, as if my knowing about the Anarch was just a—pretext.”

  “Very probably,” he murmured.

  “I love you,” Lotta said.

  Startled, he turned to look at her; the girl’s expression was calm, almost peaceful. As if she had resolved some major indecision.

  He thought he knew what it was. And his gladness knew no bounds; he was thoroughly elated—more so than in his whole life.

  As they drove on toward Peralta General she continued to touch him, as if never intending to let go. He at last took hold of her hand, squeezed. “Cheer up,” he said. “You won’t have to go back there.”

  “Maybe I will,” she said. “Maybe Seb will tell me to.”

  “Tell him to go to hell,” Tinbane said.

  Lotta said, “I want you to tell him for me; I want you to talk for me. You talked to those Erads and Mrs. McGuire, you made them do what you ordered them to do. Nobody else has ever stood up for me. Not in my whole life. Not like that, the way you did it.”

  Putting his arm around her he held her against him. She seemed, now, very happy. And relieved. My god, he thought, this is a big thing she’s done, bigger than what I did; she’s transferred her dependency from Sebastian Hermes to me. Because of a single incident.

  I’ve got her, he realized. Entirely away from him; I swung it!

  10

  Thus God, considered not in Himself but as the cause of all things, has three aspects: He is, He is wise, and He lives.

  —Erigena

  The vidphone at the Flask of Hermes Vitarium rang; expecting the call-back from Officer Joe Tinbane, Sebastian answered it.

  On the screen Lotta’s, not Tinbane’s, face appeared. “How are you?” she asked wanly, with a peculiar mechanical listlessness which he had never heard in her voice before.

  “I’m fine,” he said, violently relieved to see her. “But that’s not important; how are you? Did he get you away from the Library? I guess he did. Were they actually trying to keep you there?”

  “They were,” she said, still listlessly. “How’s the Anarch?” she asked. “Did he come back to life yet?”

  Sebastian started to say, We dug him up. We revived him. But instead he took pause; he remembered the call from Italy. “Whom, specifically, did you tell about the Anarch?” he asked. “I want you to remember everyone you told.”

  “I’m sorry you’re mad at me,” Lotta said, still listlessly, as if reading the words from a piece of paper held in front of her. “I told Joe Tinbane and I told Mr. Appleford at the Library and that’s all I told. What I called for is to tell you that I’m okay; I got out of the Library . . . Joe Tinbane got me out. We’re at the hospital; they’re removing a bullet from his foot. It isn’t serious but he says it hurts. And h
e’ll undoubtedly be laid up for a few weeks. Sebastian?”

  “Yes?” He wondered if she, like Tinbane, had been hurt; he felt his heart speed up in agitation; he felt, now, as concerned as before—actually more so. There was a subtle, unverbalized ominousness in her voice. “Tell me!” he said, urgently.

  Lotta said, “Sebastian, you didn’t come and get me out of there. Even after I didn’t meet you at the store as we planned. You must have been too busy; I guess you have the Anarch to think of.” Tears, abruptly, filled her eyes; as usual, she made no effort to wipe them away; she cried soundlessly, like a child. Without hiding her face.

  “Goddam it,” he said, in a frenzy. “What is it?”

  “I can’t,” she wept.

  “Can’t what? Can’t you tell me? I’ll get over to the hospital; which hospital is it? Where are you, Lotta? Goddam it; stop crying and say.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “Yes!”

  Lotta said, “I still love you, Seb. But I have to leave you. For a while at least. Until I feel better.”

  “Leave me and go where?” he demanded.

  Her crying had ceased; her swimming eyes confronted him with unusual defiance. “I’m not going to say. I’ll write to you; I’ll figure out exactly how to tell you and I’ll put it all in a letter.” She added, “I can’t talk over the phone; I feel so conspicuous. Hello.”

  “Oh my god,” he said, unbelievingly.

  “Hello, Sebastian,” Lotta said, and hung up; the image of her pinched small face vanished.

  Beside Sebastian, R.C. Buckley appeared, apologetically. “Sorry to bother you at a time like this,” he mumbled, “but there’s someone asking for you. At the front door.”

  “We’re closed!” Sebastian said savagely.