Counter-Clock World

16

These thoughts I revolved in my miserable heart, overcharged with most gnawing cares, lest I should die ere I had found the truth.

--St. Augustine

"A Mr. Arbuthnot to see you, sir," Doug Appleford's secretary said, over the intercom to his office.

He groaned. Well, here it was finally; the burden wished on him by perpetually enthusiastic Charise McFadden. "Send him in," Appleford said, and tipped his chair back, folded his hands and waited.

A large, imposing, nattily dressed older man appeared at the doorway of the office. "I'm Lance Arbuthnot," he mumbled; his eyes roamed in unease, like those of a trapped animal.

"Let's see it," Appleforcl said, with no preamble.

"Of course." Shakily, Arbuthnot seated himself in the chair before Doug Appleford's desk, handed him a bulky, dog-eared typescript manuscript. "The labor of a lifetime," he muttered.

"So you maintain," Doug Appleford said briskly, "that if a person is killed by a meteor it's because he hated his grandmother. Some theory. Anyhow you're realistic enough to want it eraded." He leafed cursorily through the manuscript, reading a line here and there, at random. Dull phrases, jargon, strained and inverted cliché sentences, claims of a fantastic nature... it had a familiar quality. The Library saw ten such trashy manuscripts of that sort a day. It constituted routine business for Section B.

"May I have it back a moment?" Arbuthnot asked hoarsely. "For one last look. Before I consign it to your office permanently."

Appleford dropped the bulky manuscript on his desk. Lance Arbuthnot picked it up, studied it, then turned pages. After a pause he stopped turning pages, read one particular page, his lips moving.

"What's the matter?" Appleford demanded.

"I--seem to have garbled an important passage on page 173," Lance Arbuthnot muttered. "It'll have to be set straight before you erad it."

Pressing the button of his intercom, Appleford said to his secretary Miss Tomsen, "Please show Mr. Arbuthnot to a reading room up on one of the restricted floors, where he can work without being interrupted." To Arbuthnot he said, "How soon will you get it back to me?"

"Fifteen, twenty minutes. Anyhow, under an hour." Arbuthnot rose, clutching his precious grubby manuscript. "You will accept it for eradication?"

"You're darn right. You go fix it up and I'll see you later." He, too, rose; Arbuthnot hesitated, then bumbled his way once more out of Appleford's office, into the outer waiting room.

And Appleford turned to other business; he forgot the crackpot inventor Lance Arbuthnot almost at once.

Alone in the reading room, Sebastian Hermes with trembling fingers got out his armband and fastened it on his sleeve. He dug into his coat pocket, got out his survival kit, and placed the capsule of LSD-antidote in his mouth, being careful not to bite down on it. The grenade he held in his left hand, clumsily, thinking, This isn't me. I don't know how to do this. Joe Tinbane could have. He was trained for this.

Virtually unable to make his hand and arm work, he injected himself with the small quantity of pale, saplike fluid. Well, he had begun; he was in it. And would be, for what--to him-- would seem hours.

Opening the door of the reading room he glanced down the hall. No one. He began to walk; he saw a sign reading STAIRS and headed for it.

There was no problem in climbing the stairs; still he saw no one. But when he opened the door at what he guessed to be the next to top floor, he found himself facing a cold-eyed uniformed Library guard.

The guard, in slow-motion, began to move toward him.

With no difficulty he eluded the guard; he ducked past him and hurried down the corridor.

Ann Fisher, from a side door, appeared with an armload of papers, moving in hazy slow-motion, like the guard. She saw him, turned gradually over a matter of what seemed to him minutes; her jaw, by retarded degrees, dropped until at last, at agonizing last, she registered amazement.

"What--are--you--doing--" she began to say. But he could not wait for the enormously prolonged sentence to be completed; he knew everything had gone wrong--he never should have run into her, and certainly not so soon--and he slipped by her and on down the corridor, realizing futilely that despite the time-difference between them he had stood still long enough for her to identify him. I should always have been in motion, he realized. Constant, accelerated motion. But too late now.

An alarm bell would ring; it would take her minutes, by his time-scale. But it would come. Inevitably.

Ahead, two uniformed guards, armed, stood rigidly before a doorway. He darted toward them, moving as swiftly as possible. The guards seemed to sense him feebly; their heads rotated, as if mechanical--but by then he had slid past them and turned the knob of the door.

The alarm bell rang. Din-din-din, with measurable intervals between each impact. Like a tape recorder, he thought, at the wrong speed. With the slower speed. He opened the office door.

Four Erads--he recognized them by their neo-togas--lounged about the office. On a chair in the center sat the Anarch Peak.

"I don't want you," Sebastian said, deciding instantly. "I want my wife; where's Lotta?" None of them understood him; to them it was a blur of noise. He ducked back out of the room, leaving the dry, wizened little figure of the Anarch; in the hail once more he passed two armed sentries, who by now had turned to follow him inside... he wiggled between them, tugged free as their arms came gradually up, and hurried toward the next office.

Nothing but an empty desk. File cabinets.

He tried a third office. Someone--unfamiliar--talking on the phone; he hurried on.

In the fourth room he found stored supplies. Dead and inertly cold.

The next floor, he said to himself; ahead he saw the sign STAIRS once more, and ran that way.

On the top floor he encountered a number of men and women in the corridor, and all, like him, wore the luminous blue armband. He darted among them, opened a door at random.

Behind him he heard someone, invisible to him, cock a weapon; he twisted around and saw the barrel of a rifle rise.

Clumsily, he threw the LSD hand grenade. And at the same time bit into the antidote capsule.

The barrel ceased rising. The gun, lugubriously, fell from the guard's hands; the guard settled to a heap on the floor, his hands up, warding off something assailing him. Hallucinations.

The LSD, like smoke, billowed up and spread throughout the corridor. He waded through it, past slow-motion figures, tried door after door. More Library officials at work; he saw, several times, the insignia of the Erad Council... he saw the hierarchy of the Library disintegrating because of his presence and what he had brought with him. But not Lotta.

He cornered at last, alone in her office, one frail, elderly, female Erad who regarded him wide-eyed. "Where," he said, slowing his speech to her time-phasing, "is--Mrs.--Hermes. On--what--floor." He moved toward her, menacingly.

However, the LSD had by now reached her; she had begun to fall into a groveling heap, an expression of awe on her face. Bending over her he grabbed her by the shoulder, repeated his question.

"On--the--basement--level," the reply, with agonizing slowness, came at last. And then the elderly Erád dissolved into a private world of colors; he left her to it and hurried on, once more out into the hail.

The hail resounded with people and noises. But everyone had devolved into a personal realm; there remained no interpersonal action, no coordinated effort. So he had no trouble making his way to the elevator; no one paid any attention to him.

He pressed the button, and after a fantastically long period, the elevator arrived.

Fully armed and ready Library guards filled the elevator. They wore gas masks; they eyed him as he-to them--flitted away, and one of them after a moment managed to fire his side arm.

The shot missed. But at least they had been able, at last, to shoot in his general direction. And the LSD gas would not affect these men.

I can't get Lotta, he realized. I can't get on the elevator, not when it's full. _Ray Roberts was right_; I should have lugged the Anarch out of here and forgotten about Lotta. The dead shall live, he thought ironically, the living die. And music shall untune the sky. I am untuned, he said to himself. They have me. I didn't get anyone out, as Joe Tinbane did. Even temporarily. It might have worked out differently if I hadn't run across Ann Fisher, he thought.

He had a strange impression of timelessness, now, from the drug with which he had injected himself. A sense, almost, of immortality. But not of strength, not of majestic power; he felt weak, tired and hopeless. So Ann Fisher gets all she wanted, he thought. Her prophecies are coming true, one by one; I am the last part, and I, like Joe Tinbane and the Anarch and Lotta, have come about.

I messed it up, he realized. In only a few minutes. If Joe Tinbane had been here it would be different; I know it would be.

He could not stop thinking that; his awareness of his own inferiority overwhelmed him. He versus Joe. His defects; Joe's prowess. And yet they got him, he reflected hopelessly. Joe is dead!

And I will be, he thought. Presently.

Maybe we could have done it working together, Joe and I, he reflected. The two of us in unison trying to get Lotta out; we both love her. And one by one, alone, we die. It just didn't work out. If he had gotten my warning, if he had called me from the motel, if--.

I'm old and I'm impotent, he thought. I should have been left in my grave; they dug up nothing. An emptiness: only the deadness; the chill, the mold of the tomb still clings to me and infects whatever I try. I feel myself dying again, he thought. Or rather, I never stopped being dead.

He thought: If they kill me it doesn't matter because it doesn't change me. But Lotta is different, just as Tinbane was different. Maybe, he thought, even if I can't get out of here, can't save anyone, including myself--maybe I can still kill Ann Fisher. That would be worth something. For Joe Tinbane's sake.