by John Barth
I very much wanted to pursue the matter of the clock, my reason for being there, but I could not resist declaring to him that his position seemed to me not only circularly reasoned (which might indeed, as his analogies showed, be strictly a logical problem, not a practical one), but inconsistent with itself: he had deduced his Graduateship, on his own admission, by an operation of formal logic, and denied Croaker’s by the same procedure; yet when the logic led him into a bind he waved it away, freely interchanging conclusions and premises.
“Is that a fact, Geissbübchen!” he said indulgently. “Then please Grand-Tutor me while Croaker and I do our work. You still don’t think I’m a Graduate?”
Croaker all this while had been hanging by one hand from a steel rafter near the machinery of the clock, with a light attached to his forehead and what looked like a whetstone in his other hand. Before him rocked an anchor-shaped escapement several meters tall, which served in turn to actuate the great pendulum, or be actuated by it; its impulse- and locking-pallets engaged and released the teeth of the last gear in the train, and the escapement itself rocked on a knife-edged bright steel bar that ran through a ring in the top of its shaft. Between tick and tock Croaker dextrously would swipe one side of this bar’s edge with his stone, between tock and tick the other; then without ever touching the escapement itself he’d make some sort of measurement through a lens fixed onto the bar, and croak the reading down to Dr. Eierkopf. His noises were unintelligible to me, but Dr. Eierkopf would jot figures in a notebook, say “Ja ja” or “Pfui,” and return to measurements of his own, which he seemed to be taking with great delicacy from a white hen’s-egg mounted in a nest of elaborate apparatus.
“May I speak frankly, sir?” I asked. “Presumptuous as it may seem to you, I do have a suggestion to make, and then I’d like to ask your advice about repairing this clock …”
His pink eyes rolled behind the glasses. “You lost your mind, Goat-Boy?”
I showed him my Assignment and told him how I’d come by it. “If it says to fix the clock, then the clock must be broken, mustn’t it? I believe you told me WESCAC always reasons correctly.”
Very much concerned, Dr. Eierkopf affirmed that the computer was normally incapable of faulty reasoning; he pointed out, however, that in the absence of any actual malfunction in the works, to speak of Tower Clock’s being inaccurate was to speak unintelligibly, as who should accuse the Standard Meter of being too short.
“But you told me yourself last night that the clock needed working on,” I reminded him, adding that my own self-winding watch (by which term I meant, innocently, that I wound it myself) showed a different hour, whereto with his permission and Croaker’s help I’d thought to make Tower Clock conform.
“Don’t talk so!” Eierkopf cried. “You don’t touch anything! It’s bad enough Croaker, he’s such a clumsy!” He squinted at my Assignment-list again, this time through his lens, and suddenly clapped his hands. “I got it, Goat-Boy!” Croaker dropped from the rafter at once, mistaking the signal, and lifted Dr. Eierkopf onto his shoulders; the scientist was too pleased with his new idea to protest.
“It says Complete in no time, ja? So: the clock’s not kaput, it takes you no time to fix it! You’re done already.”
This reasoning, though I could not refute it, satisfied me less completely than it did Dr. Eierkopf, who declared it at once a fulfillment of my task, an explanation of the troublesome due-date of my Assignment, and a vindication of WESCAC’s “malistic” dependability. To my inquiry, Why was he himself tinkering with the clockworks if no repairs were needed? he replied that standards of reference were sometimes improvable though never logically subject to challenge; thus the University Standard Meter, for example, was originally one ten-millionth of the campus’s quadrant, later the distance at o° Centigrade between two particular scratches on a platinum-iridium bar in the Intercollegiate Department of Standards, and presently one million five hundred fifty-three thousand one hundred sixty-four and thirteen one-hundredths wave-lengths of red light from the element cadmium. In like manner the accuracy of Tower Clock was from time to time improved—though only by comparison to its own past accuracy, never (“… Q.E.D., Goat-Boy …”) by comparison to the accuracy of other timepieces. Current work in the field, I was told, centered around escapement-theory, and had led to opposing points of view. One group of researchers (whom Eierkopf referred to contemptuously as “Everlasting Now-niks”) would abolish all forms of escapement in favor of what they—or their detractors—called “tickless time”; the other, led by Dr. Eierkopf, hoped with the aid of special lenses and micromilling techniques to perfect the edge on which the present escapement pivoted—or the theory, I was not sure which.
“Here you got Tick, nicht wahr?” he said, and pointed to one pallet-point of the anchor-shaped escapement. “Over there you got Tock. So pretend all the Ticks is coming and the Tocks is already gone: what I want to do is measure the point exactly between, where Tick becomes Tock. Last term we got it down past millimicroseconds; pretty soon we lick it altogether.” His labor was complicated by several factors: the two schools of thought, though not politically based, happened to divide roughly along East-West lines, the “Everlasting Now-niks” being in general associated with Sakhyanist curricula; and the political connotations which escapement-theory thus unfortunately took on were compounded—and confused—by the fact that Tower Hall Tower was a reference-point for cartographic as well as temporal measurements: that keen-edged fulcrum which Croaker had been honing happened to run north and south on the meridian of longitude which, higher up towards Founder’s Hill, divided East from West Campus, and had been used as a coordinate in laying down the Power Line; moreover, the weathercock atop the Belfry marked the center of New Tammany’s Great Mall area—a point indicated by brass discs on every floor of Tower Hall: both North-South avenues and East-West streets were numbered from the shaft whence its four arms extended. In consequence of all this it was difficult even for Eierkopf as official Clockwatcher to get permission to move or modify any part of the works, the more so as his critics (some sincerely concerned, some merely venting their anti-Bonifacism) charged that his method was self-defeating.
“I’ve gone from ticks to milliseconds to microseconds to millimicroseconds,” he said, “and the dumbsticks say I just make bigger and bigger words for smaller and smaller things, but never get to the place between Tick and Tock.” What their ignorance left out of account—and mine too, which saw no reply to their objection—was a technical breakthrough he’d recently achieved and was about to put to use: a precision honing device he called the Infinite Divisor. Attached to one end of the fulcrum-bar, its two opposed milling-heads—tiny diamond-dust affairs—would dart along the upper knife-edge, honing it as they went; during their approach to the hole in the escapement-shaft (the point on which the whole assembly pivoted) automatic calibrators would halve and halve again, ad infinitum, the width of the edge, until theoretically it reached a perfect point at the center of the hole and the midpoint of the Tick-Tock swing—a point whose measurement would incidentally be recorded on the calibrator-gauges.
“One moment, sir!” I protested, dizzied by this conception. Croaker held his sweatshirt-front out from his scars and whimpered a little. “It seems to me—”
“Pretty smart, ja?” He may have been addressing Croaker, whose head he patted, or myself. I agreed that the idea was striking, but wondered about certain theoretical problems which I sensed more than saw articulably: a riddle Max had posed me once about Peleides and the Tortoise …
“Pfui,” Dr. Eierkopf said. “That’s why two grinding-heads instead of one: we tackle the problem from both sides. Better hold your ears now.”
He inserted a pinky in each of Croaker’s, and Croaker clapped a giant palm over each of his, just as a new set of whirrs and clackings shot through the works. I didn’t catch his meaning until the first clapper swung against its bell, big as the lift I’d ascended in, and shuddered me to the marrow. O
thers followed, a tooth-jarring sequence even with ears held, until a four-phrased melody signaling the hour had been chimed: then a series of bells ascended diatonically a scale-and-a-half. The eighth brought a little cry from Dr. Eierkopf, either despite Croaker’s pressing harder or because of it; the last shivered the egg in its calipered nest.
“Durchfall und Vertreibung!” Dr. Eierkopf squeaked, and pounded Croaker feebly on the pate. “You set the egg-clamp for high sol again! Put me down and clean up!” Croaker perched him obligingly back upon a stool and set to licking the apparatus.
“Didn’t I tell you, Goat-Boy? It’s the Schwarzer-work that flunks me, not the brainwork.” His oölogical researches, of which I’d seen other evidence in the Observatory, were, like his clock-work, designed to restore him to favor in the administrative and general-student eye: having been told many terms ago by WESCAC, in the course of his ill-fated eugenical investigations, that “Commencement commences ab ovo,” he had launched into a grand historico-chemico-mathematico-biologico-mythophysical treatise upon the egg in all its aspects (excepting the culinary, which he dismissed in a long footnote to the title as intellectually unpalatable); its fourteen volumes were complete, as well as their prefaces, plates, paste-ins, fold-outs, glossaries, indices, appendices, bibliographies, celebratory sonnets, statistical supplements, epistles dedicatory, tape-recorded musical accompaniment, and jacket-copy; all that stood in the way of its publication (and proof of the author’s own Commencement, if any was required) was a single little exercise in comparative oömetry which he’d planned to include as a footnote to zygote, the final index-entry. But so clumsy had been Croaker’s measurement of long and short oöic axes, and so irrepressible his appetite for the subject of their researches, they’d already missed the Spring-Carnival target-date for publication, selected by the press for its obvious promotional tie-ins.
“Same with my Infinite Divisor,” he lamented. “The blueprints are drawn, the computations are computed, but Croaker keeps dropping the pieces! What good’s a right-hand man that’s all thumbs?” And in a sudden access of dejection, as once before in the Observatory, he wondered aloud whether brutes like his roommate, altogether free of reason and discernment, were not after all the truly passèd.
“I’m not sure about that yet,” I replied, assuming he’d put the question to me. “But even if Bray’s citations for both of you are right—and like yourself I don’t see how they could both be—it doesn’t seem to me that either one of you has qualified for Candidacy yet on the grounds he cited.”
Dr. Eierkopf was turning a fresh egg sadly in his fingers. “If I told him once about high sol, I told him twenty times.” Now he brightened and tittered. “Did you know your friend Anastasia can break these with her levator ani? I had her do a dozen Grade-A Large with a stress-gauge on, for Volume Nine. I show you the readings …”
“Right there, sir,” I said, shaking my head at the invitation; “that kind of thing, and the night-glass and all …” My point, which I tried to make tactfully, was that if he believed passèdness to be the sort of rationality that WESCAC (at least in pre-“noctic” terms) exemplified, then he was by no means a Graduate, or even a Candidate, so long as he indulged even vicariously such Croakerish appetites as I had seen signs of. Nor could Croaker, on the other hand, be said to be passed by the standards of his Certification, it seemed to me: what beast of the woods would so obligingly fetch and carry, not to mention taking scientific measurements?
“He always gets them wrong,” Dr. Eierkopf said hopefully.
“But he gets them. And he cleans up messes—”
“His own.”
“What beast of the woods does that? Not even a goat can cook pablum, or chew designs on a stick, or focus lenses …”
Eierkopf sniffed. “He busts as many as he focuses.”
The point was, I insisted, that neither of them met strictly the terms of their Certifications, any more than Peter Greene or Max, in my estimation, met the terms of theirs; contrary as the roommates clearly were, there was still a flunking measure of Eierkopfishness in Croaker, and of Croakeriety in Eierkopf, which came no doubt from their close and constant association. And this was the more pointed failing in Dr. Eierkopf (I tried to suggest), because it went against his life’s activity and principle: the differentiation of this from that. Let him but perfect and add a mirror to his high-resolution lenses; apply to himself as it were his Infinite Divisor (of which I heartily approved): he would see how far he stood from Commencement Gate.
“You want me to turn loose Croaker, like before? You got a screw loose, Goat-Boy?”
I reminded him politely that I had no clear conviction that Graduation was what he believed it to be; only that if it was, it behooved him to discern and repudiate everything about him to the contrary. Not to seem disrespectful of his age and genius (but also to drive my point home), I declared myself in his debt for this position of mine: surely the blurring of distinctions, especially between contraries, was flunking—hence Maurice Stoker’s devotion to that activity. And just as the first step to Commencement Gate must be the differentiation of Passage and Failure, so (it seemed increasingly to me) the several steps thereafter—in the completion of my Assignment, for example—must depend upon corollary distinctions.
“I’ll need the lenses you gave me for my next chore,” I concluded as agreeably as possible; “I wish I could borrow your Divisor too.”
Dr. Eierkopf seemed neither angered, as I had feared, nor chastened, as I had hoped, by my advice. “You still believe you’re the Grand Tutor!” he marveled, and pensively gave Croaker instructions about the mounting of another egg. Then he repeated what he’d said the night before: “I half wish you were, to prove I was right about the GILES.”
I smiled. “If I have to be the GILES to be the Grand Tutor, then I must be the GILES, somehow: it’s a simple syllogism.” However, I added, I couldn’t very well be Virginia Hector’s child, inasmuch as I had it from Ira Hector’s own lips that Anastasia was.
Eierkopf turned up his palms. “Then you aren’t the Grand Tutor, any more than Bray. Look once, I prove it on WESCAC.” He gave a further string of undecipherable instructions to Croaker, who turned several switches on one of those consoles that seemed to be everywhere in the College. I watched with sharp attention.
“The child born from the GILES would be a Grand Tutor,” he declared. Croaker punched certain buttons. “Miss Anastasia Hector isn’t a Grand Tutor, we agree.” More buttons. “But no woman except Virginia Hector could have got in where WESCAC had the GILES. Since Anastasia is the one that got born, it couldn’t have been the GILES that Virginia got fertilized by, and you couldn’t be the Grand Tutor. Now WESCAC reads it out.” Croaker had pressed buttons after each of these propositions; he pulled a long lever now on the side of the console, things dinged and whirred, and from an opening down in the front a strip of paper began clicking out, which Dr. Eierkopf perused with satisfied nods and peeps. I would have objected that his initial premise, even if granted, seemed to me inadequate to the case—it was no GILES that had engendered Enos Enoch, or the original Sakhyan, nor need one have engendered me: if the GILES could be shown to have come to naught, that fact cost me nothing but a handy proof of my authenticity, which however was contingent on no such proofs. But Dr. Eierkopf, having said, “Ja … ja … just so … that’s that …” at points along the paper tape, suddenly pushed his eyeglasses up on his nose and whipped out the lens that bore his name.
“Unless!” he cried. He grinned at me slyly and winked his left eye. “Maybe you and Anastasia are twins, hey?”
Owing to the liberal circumstances of my kidship I was more interested in the relevance of this possibility to my claim of Grand-Tutorhood than appalled by its retroactive implications about the G. Herrold Memorial Service. But I was not ignorant of studentdom’s attitude towards incest; I chided Dr. Eierkopf for salivating at the idea that I’d serviced my sister, and firmly declined his offer to rerun the tape he’d made two
nights before on the Safety Surveillance monitor.
“That’s just what I meant a while ago,” I said. “You’ve got more of Croaker in you than you’ll admit.”
“When I find out you’re Stacey’s twin brother, I take your advice,” he promised merrily.
A little cross, I bade him goodbye and called the lift. My first chore, so far as I could see, was accomplished by forfeit, and I must get on with the second, at the same time foraging some lunch if I could; if Dr. Eierkopf would not heed my suggestions, it was his own flunkage.
“Don’t fuss, Zickelchen,” he said; “I just tease you a little.”
“It’s yourself you’re teasing, sir; I don’t care either way.” What I did care about, I declared, was Bray’s false Certifications, and I urged him to consider, for his own and Croaker’s sake, my suggestion. He promised to do so; and further to placate me (for I had no great faith in his pledge) he offered to run a similar logical-possibility test for me on my other chores.
“To me, for instance, there’s just three ways to end the Boundary Dispute,” he said. “We EAT them; they EAT us; or we all link arms and sing Wir wollen unsern alten Dekan Siegfried wiederhaben. But WESCAC maybe knows another way …”
“So do I,” I replied. The lift came. I assured Dr. Eierkopf I wasn’t angry, requested him at least to relay to Croaker, if possible, my sentiments and advice about Bray’s Certification, and thanked him for teaching me, intentionally or otherwise, the relevance to my Assignment of his lens-principle, which I’d already been applying unawares in my criticisms of Max, Peter Greene, himself, and even Maurice Stoker.
He waggled his head. “You’re a wonder, Goat-Boy! Maybe WESCAC tells me what to make of you. You don’t want me to ask it anything?”
I replied that while I no longer regarded WESCAC as essentially Trollish (on the contrary, I rather respected it now as the embodiment of Differentiation, which I’d come to think the very principle of Passage), nevertheless I trusted myself to find my own Answers. I wished him success with his great oölogical treatise, promised to consult it on the day of its appearance to find out whether chicken or egg had paleoontological priority, and pressed the Down-button.
