Counter-Clock World

6

Only in a perfect flight from nothingness is Being to be found in all its purity.

--St. Bonaventura

Forest Knolls, Sebastian thought. The cemetery abandoned by everyone, obviously picked with great care by those who had buried the Anarch. They must have believed Alex Hobart and his theorum that time was about to reverse itself; they--those who loved the Anarch--must have anticipated this exact situation.

He wondered how long and how hard Ray Roberts' crack corps had hunted for the grave. Not long nor hard enough, evidently.

The cemetery, a brief flickering quad of green, sped by below; Sebastian reversed the flight of his aircar, coasted back down and came to rest in what had once been a gravel parking area of the cemetery but which now had become overgrown, like the graves, with rank and frightening weeds.

Even in daytime it was a forbidding place. Despite the nascent life beneath the ground potentially crying out for aid. Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, he thought in quotation from some vaguely remembered portion of the Bible. And the tongues of the dead unstopped. A lovely passage; and now so factually, accurately true. Who would have thought? All those centuries, regarded as a pretty and comforting fable by the world's intellectuals, something to lull people into accepting Their fate. The understanding that, as predicted, it would one day be literally true, that it was not a myth--.

Making his way past the less impressive gravestones he came at last to the ornate granite monument for Thomas Peak, 1921-1971.

The grave--thank god--remained as he had last seen it. Untouched. No one in sight, no one to witness this illegal act.

Just to be sure, however, he knelt at the grave, clicked on the bullhorn which he used on such occasions, and said into it, "Can you hear me, sir? If so, make a sound." His voice boomed and echoed; he hoped it would not attract persons passing by the cemetery. Getting out the phones he clamped them to his head, placed the sound-sensitive cup against the earth. Listened.

No response from below. A dismal wind stirred the wild, irregular tufts of grass, the wilderness of this little peripheral cemetery... He moved the listening cup about, here and there over the grave, straining to pick up something, some response. None.

From several yards off, from a different grave entirely, he heard a weak voice issuing from beneath the sod. "I can hear you, mister; I'm alive and I'm shut up down here; it's all dark. Where am I?" Panic in the dim, lonely voice. Sebastian sighed; he had awakened, by use of the bullhorn, some other deader. Well, that would have to be attended to, too; he owed it to the trapped old-born person suffocating in the coffin. He walked over to the active grave, knelt there, placed the listening cup to the ground, although really it was unnecessary.

"Don't be frightened, sir," Sebastian said into the bullhorn. "I am up here and aware of your plight. We'll get you out, soon."

"But--" the voice quavered, ebbing arid fading. "Where am I? What is this place?"

"You have been buried," Sebastian explained; he was accustomed to this: each job his firm handled called for this odd little interval between the time the deader awakened and the time they had him up and out... and yet he had never gotten used to it. "You died," he explained, "and were buried, and now time has reversed itself, and you're alive again."

"Time?" the voice echoed. "Pardon? I--don't understand; time for what? Can't I get out of here? I don't like it here; I want to go back to my bed, in my room at La Honda General."

The last memories. Of hospitalization, which had proved terminal. Sebastian said into the bullhorn, "Listen to me, sir. Very shortly we will have equipment and men here to get you out; try to breathe as little of the air as possible; try not to use it up. Can you relax? Try."

"My name," the voice called up quaveringly, "is Harold Newkom, and I'm a war vet; I get preference. I don't think you ought to treat a war vet like this."

"Believe me," Sebastian said, "it's not my fault." I had to undergo it, too, he thought somberly; I remember how it felt. Waking up in darkness, in the Tiny Place, as it's called. And some of them, he reflected, bleating without getting any response... because the system is all tied up by the goddam bureaucratic laws passed in Sacramento, laws that bind and hamper us, obsolete laws, damn them.

He rose stiffly to his feet--he was not becoming young fast enough--and made his way back to the Anarch's tomb.

When Bob Lindy and Dr. Sign and Father Faine arrived, he said to them, "We've got a live one we have to handle first." He showed them the grave, and Bob Lindy at once sent his drill driving furiously into the hard-packed soil, bringing down essential air. So that was that; the rest would be routine.

Standing beside him, Dr. Sign said sardonically, "This is lucky. You now have an excuse for being here if the cops come by. You were visiting the cemeteries in your usual rounds and you heard this man... correct?" He returned to the grave; now dirt was flying in all directions as Lindy operated the autononiic diggers. Turning again toward Sebastian Hermes he called, over the noise of the diggers, "I think you're making a big mistake, from a medical standpoint, digging Peak up now while he's still dead. It's risky; it interferes with the natural process of reconstitution of the biochemical entity. We've been told all about that; if the body comes up too soon he ceases to mend; it's got to be _down there_, in the dark, cold, away from the light."

"Like yoghurt," Bob Linday said.

Dr. Sign continued, "And in addition it's bad luck."

"'Bad luck,'" Sebastian echoed, amused.

"He's right," Bob Lindy said. "There's supposed to be a release of the forces of death, when you dig up a deader prematurely. The forces get loose in the world when they shouldn't, and they always come to rest on one person."

"Who?" Sebastian said. But he knew the superstition; he had heard this all before. The curse fell on the person who had dug the deader up.

"It'll be on you," Bob Lindy said; he grimaced and grinned.

"We'll bury him again," Sebastian said. The diggers had stopped now; Lindy hung over the shallow pit, groping for the rim of the coffin. "In the basement. Under the Flask of Hermes Vitarium." He came over; he and Dr. Sign and Father Faine helped Lindy drag up the damp, moldering coffin.

"From a religious standpoint," Father Faine said to Sebastian, as Lindy expertly unscrewed the lid of the coffin, "it's a violation of God's moral law. Rebirth must come in its own time; you, of all of us, ought to know that--since you underwent this yourself." He opened his prayer book, to begin his recitation over Mr. Harold Newkom. "My text for today," he declared, "is from _Ecclesiastes_. 'Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.'" He gave Sebastian a severe look and then continued.

Leaving the others at their various subdivisions of the job, Sebastian Hermes wandered about the graveyard, in his usual fashion, yearning, reaching out, listening... but this time as before he found himself drawn toward one grave, to the one place which mattered. Back to the ornate granite monument of Anarch Thomas Peak; he could not keep away from it.

They're right, he thought. Doc Sign and Father Faine; it's a hell of a medical risk and an outright breaking of the law: not just God's law but the civil code. I know all that, he thought; they don't have to tell me. My own crew, he thought gloomily, and they're not backing me up.

Lotta will, he realized. That, he could always count on: her support. She would understand; he couldn't risk not digging the Anarch up. To leave him here was to invite Ray Roberts' Offspring of Might in for a murder. A good excuse, he thought wryly. I can rationalize it: it's for the Anarch's safety.

Just how dangerous, he wondered once more, is Ray Roberts? We still don't know; we're still going on 'pape articles.

Returning to his parked aircar he dialed his home phone number.

"Hello," Lotta's small-girl voice sounded, intimidated by the phone; then she saw him and smiled. "Another job?" She could see the graveyard behind him. "I hope this is a valuable one."

Sebastian said, "Listen, honey--I hate to do this to you, but I don't have the time to do it myself; we're all tied up here with this job, and after him--" He hesitated. "Then we've got another waiting," he said, not telling her who it would be.

"What would you like?" She listened attentively.

"Another research assignment at the Library."

"Oh." She managed--nearly--not to show her dismay. "Yes, I'd be glad to."

"This time we want to know the story on Ray Roberts."

"I'll do it," Lotta said, "if I can."

"How do you mean, if you can?"

Lotta said, "I get--an anxiety attack there."

"I know," he said, and felt the fullness of his injury to her.

"But I guess I can do it one more time." She nodded, drably.

"Remember, absolutely remember," he said, "to stay away from that monster Mavis McGuire." If you can, he thought.

All at onde Lotta brightened. "Joe Tinbane just now did a research of Ray Roberts. Maybe I can get it from him." Her face showed utter, blissful relief. "I won't have to go there, then."

"Agreed," Sebastian said. Why not? It made sense, the Los Angeles police researching Roberts; after all, the man was about to show up in their jurisdictional area. Tinbane probably had everything there was; to be harsh about it, he had probably done--God forbid, but it was undoubtedly true--he had done a better job at the Library than Lotta could ever do.

As he rang off he thought, I hope to hell she can get hold of Joe Tinbane. But he doubted it; the police were undoubtedly extremely busy right now; Tinbane was probably tied up for the rest of the day.

He had a feeling that Lotta was in for bad luck; very soon and in large measure. And, thinking that, he ffinched; he felt it for her.

And felt even more guilty.

Walking back to his crew of employees at the open grave he said, "Let's try to get this one wrapped up fast. So we can get on to the important one." He had definitely made up his mind; they would exhume the body of the Anarch, now, on this trip.

He hoped he would not live to regret it. But he had a deep and abiding hunch that he would.

And yet still--to him, at least--it seemed like the best thing to do. He could not shake that conviction.