“We sure do, Buster,” the wife said. “The bedroom clock only runs when the alarm is sounding, and it gets on my nerves with that thing shrilling all day long.”
That isn't the way it begins either, but we're getting closer. This time we'll hit it right in the middle.
III
“Carrock, Carrock,” Said Barney's clock.
—Anonymous
“Man, have I got me a clock!” Barnaby Sheen was saying, coming into the room and rubbing his hands with glee.
“Man, do you ever need one!” Cris Benedetti gruffed. “You're forty-five minutes late. Luckily you never lock your doors or we'd be waiting in the swelter all this time.”
“Why, it's eight o'clock exactly,” Barnaby checked it, “and eight was our meeting.”
“It's eight forty-five,” Cris also checked it, and sourly.
“Have I been angry?” Barnaby asked himself out loud. “Have I been angry for forty-five minutes?”
“Carrock, carrock,” came a peculiar cry from the next room. It seemed as if we had been hearing it before.
“What has angry to do with it, Barney?” Harry O'Donovan wanted to know.
“Ah, my personal timepiece, my wristwatch, will not run when I am angry or when I am feeling bad,” Barnaby explained. “It will not run on bad time. It's always been like that.”
“Why not get another watch?” Doctor George Drakos suggested.
“It's been like that with every watch I've ever had,” Barnaby said. “But, man, have I got me a clock!”
Five of us were met together there in Barnaby Sheen's house: Barnaby himself, Cris Benedetti, Harry O'Donovan, and Doctor George Drakos, the four men who knew everything; and myself who did not. “Carrock, carrock,” again came the sound from the next room. Which next room? It seemed to be newly partitioned off from the room where we were gathered, and it was closed.
“What have you got in there, Barney, a dog?” Harry O'Donovan asked in his high voice.
“No, of course I don't have a dog in there,” Barnaby answered. “Who ever heard of a dog that says ‘carrock, carrock’? What's the matter with you anyhow, Harry? Man, have I ever got a clock!”
“Curse your clock. What's the thing in the other room?” Cris asked.
“You wouldn't believe if I told you: you wouldn't believe if I showed you. Therefore I'll do neither one this night. It's a new pet of mine, or a servant, or a companion, or a friend, something such.”
“Is it an animal?” Doctor Drakos asked, puzzled.
“A little more animal than you are, George. Not much more, but a little. You've a strong animal streak in yourself, you know. To the clock though: it will give the exact age of any person, creature, thing, contraption, artifact, fossil, formation, pattern, or syndrome. It cannot be fooled. Ah, there is something about really positive science that I love. Three stories chock-full of circuitry are ‘the brains of it.’ ”
“You have claimed those three stories full of circuitry to be the brains of many a magic machine, Barnaby,” George Drakos chided him, “but the magic has rubbed off of every one of them before it got well started.”
“Yes, that's right,” Sheen agreed. “Actually, I have had this clock for a number of years and didn't know what I had. Any machine that can solve for eight simultaneous unknowns could be used for such a clock, assuming (there is the catch) an operator as smart as myself.”
“It cannot tell how old I am, except roughly,” Cris Benedetti said. “It cannot tell what season I was born in.”
“Cris, it can,” Barnaby insisted. “Nothing is easier than to count the yearly varves of the human person. The reading would begin, of course, with conception. It is only the primitive mentality that considers birth as an important episode. Let's say that the clock could read conception within an hour, birth within a day.”
“How about death?” Doctor George Drakos asked.
“Nothing easier,” Barnaby said. “The death line is often prominent in the clock readings, though it is not often the most prominent line. Death does represent a real change of some sort in the human person, even if it is not one of the major changes. Humans seem a special case to the clock, though, and there is much that I haven't learned to interpret. With the lesser species of plants and animals, death seems to be somewhat terminal, a completing of the shape.”
“Are you saying that the clock will read the hour of my death?” Harry O'Donovan asked.
“Oh, certainly. It would be a grisly business, though, and I'd rather avoid it.”
“But if I die by accident?” O'Donovan asked.
“There are such things as accidents from a human viewpoint,” Barnaby explained, “but there are not any accidents that will leave no footprints ahead of themselves. If you are to die by accident, it will always have been the case that you were to die by accident. The accident, and the time it is to happen, will be part of your shape from the beginning. Certainly my clock (even in its present rough shape) could predict when you were to die, whether by accident or not; and it could predict it quite accurately. And just as certainly I will not permit it to do so.”
“Could we see this clock, Barnaby?” Cris Benedetti asked.
“Look around you,” Barney said happily. “You're in the middle of it.”
Really we were in the middle of that multi-purpose room which Barnaby called his study. This room seemed to change over the months and years, becoming sometimes smaller and sometimes larger. It really did have moveable walls and it really did change in size.
In this room was still the taboo sofa on which was the life-size sawdust-filled doll which Barnaby always insisted was the body of his daughter Loretta Sheen. None of us remembered Barnaby ever being married or ever having a daughter Loretta, or any daughter at all; and we had all known Barnaby since school days.
(In the room also was a spirit named Mary Mondo. She was seldom apparent, even as a spirit. But she did show up on the spirit-anagnostes, a sophisticated instrument.)
And tonight, there was not in the room the bar that was usually there. “Carrock,” came again the voice or sound from the next room, from what seemed a newly partitioned room off from the study. And the bar would have to be in that closed-off place.
“It's that we could soon do with drinks, Barney,” Harry O'Donovan said. “Should a fine host like yourself have to be reminded of the fact? Open up the bar, man. Why have you set it off with those trick walls of yours?”
“Ah, it cannot be opened tonight, men,” Barnaby said with a touch of apprehension. “It—ah—he isn't sufficiently trained yet, and he does have his pride. Those fellows are deprived in so many ways, you see, and they would almost have to be classed as slow learners. Well, I'll get you something.”
What was Barnaby talking about? Who were they who would have to be classified as slow learners, and why did Barnaby speak with such irony as if they were the very opposite of slow learners?
Barnaby slipped into the little partitioned-off room. “Carrock, carrock, carrock,” came a voice from within. It was not one word repeated three times: it was three different and distinct words, if only one should understand them.
“Splendid, splendid!” came the voice of Barnaby in there. “Almost perfect, almost perfect. Tomorrow you should have it all absolutely right.”
“Carrock,” said the other voice with deep feeling.
Barnaby came out with four glasses with a little ice in each, and with a half-filled bottle of medium bourbon and a less-than-half-filled bottle of medium gin.
“Fix yourself a little something, men,” he said. “I'm sorry we're not fully open, but I want it to be right when I show him.”
There was the sound of breaking glass in the little room.
“Damn,” said Barnaby. “He feels so bad when he breaks something.”
“Carrock,” sadly said the voice in there.
Well, what was going on? Mary Mondo told me what it was: “The wooly wonder, the sunshine kid has arrived.” Because of my coarser sensi
bilities, I could often hear Mary Mondo when the others could not. A while back, by illicit means, I had tried to get answers out of Mary Mondo; it hadn't worked. But then, after evading my clumsy traps, she had given me part of the information of her own will. “He is coming with his message,” she told me. “The message will be wisdom masquerading as comedy, and drawn and written on stone. And he will be the one the latchet of whose scuff-duffs I am not worthy to—Hey, watch that talk, me! A spoiled demiurge is what we don't want. But he will be the wooly wonder. He will be the sunshine kid. And he will counteract some of the evil tediousness that has imprisoned us.” What kind of talk was that? I got along better before I began to receive such communications from Mary Mondo. But now she said that the wooly wonder, the sunshine kid, had indeed arrived.
“Shape is very important in time readings,” Barnaby took up his thread again. “My own clock has Carbon-Fourteen readers built into it, of course, and the Potassium-Argon detector. There aren't many tricks that it doesn't contain. But the clock isn't a magic box, not all in one piece, not self-contained, not rigid. It uses data from a dozen other machines. I've had to have tests made by machines all over the country, all over the world, simply to get primary data into useable form. “But it will work, after the questions have been properly phrased, after the readings have been taken and fitted. My scattered thing really uses all the other machines in the world as menials and it is a little bit arrogant in its expertise.”
“So, we have noticed, are you, Barnaby,” Cris Benedetti jibed. “Tell us in simple and illuminating words just how it works.”
“It analyzes shape and texture and so arrives at essence, Cris,” Barnaby said with the sudden seriousness of a prophet or con-man. “The texture of anything in the world or out of it must depend on the size and shape and total age of that thing. This applies to a physical thing, to a social-group thing, to a tenuous syndrome or behaviorism, to an historical complex, to emotional storm cycles, to persons and kindreds, to culture and ecology combinations, to the lively arts and sciences (but the deadly of either have inferior texture and shape and so are rejected unread by the clock as being ‘bad time’), to the mechanosphere, to all natural creatures both bodied and unbodied, to me, to all of you, and to the rather odd beings (electrostatic in their composition, I believe) which represent our intersections.”
(“Nobody can give a spiel like my papa,” said the life-sized, sawdust-filled doll which Barnaby said was the body of his daughter Loretta. How Barnaby brought off this effect, if he did, is unknown: this time, he didn't even appear to hear the doll, and we others made believe not to.)
“But there is one difficulty with the clock,” Barnaby continued.
“Unsurmountable, I suppose, Barney,” said Doctor George Drakos.
“Not entirely, George,” Barnaby told him. “We can't climb the main mountain by the sheer north face that fascinates all climbers. But we can mount pretty high on that mountain by working our way up through the broken scarble hills of its southeast flank. This not quite insurmountable difficulty or mountain in our road is that the clock has trouble recognizing the present time in the shape or context of a thing it reads. If the present time is not an important aspect of a thing, then the clock will not consider it important enough to notice. If the programmer insists, then the clock will comply and pick out some reference and call it the present; but it may or may not be so. We can come to fair terms with our difficulty, though. It isn't really a mountain standing in our road: it's more like the mouse that ran up the clock. And it's an illusion that the mouse gave birth to a mountain.”
(“The mouse giving birth to a mountain is my bit,” said the spirit named Mary Mondo. “I gave that one to old papa Barnaby.” Barnaby Sheen didn't seem to hear her, though.)
“But we will solve it, we will solve it,” Barnaby was saying. “We will have the hide of that mouse and we will nail it up on the barn door.”
“When, Barney?” Harry O'Donovan asked. He didn't mean, “When will we have the hide of that mouse?” — these men who knew everything understood each other better than that. Harry meant, “When is the big show?”
“Tomorrow night, Harry,” Barnaby answered him. “We'll have in some of those eminent scientists to throw questions and samples at the clock. We'll have a few other folks in, and we'll see what we will see.”
“Will Willy McGilly be one of those eminent scientists?” Cris asked.
“Am I a fool? No, he won't be,” Barnaby said. “I waited till he was out of town before I scheduled this thing.”
We fooled around with the talk and the machines for quite a while.
“Your machine can say how old a thing will be in its totality, but it can't say how old a thing is right now?” Harry O'Donovan asked, still bugged by that aspect.
“Mostly it can do both,” Barnaby told him. “The present orientation can nearly always be coaxed out of it, though the clock considers the present of little importance. This is no gadgetry, people. It is positive science and it is wonderful.”
(“My papa always was strong on that positive science stuff,” said the sawdust-filled doll on the sofa, but Barnaby didn't hear her.)
We examined everything we could find to examine. Barnaby Sheen had either a great invention or a great hoax going there.
“We've got to be going, droll man,” George Drakos said finally, and we began to leave.
“Carrock,” came the voice from the next room in friendly good-bye.
“Barney, is that an ape in there?” Drakos asked.
“A little more apish than you are, George, but not much,” Barnaby laughed. “You've got more ape in you than any of us, George. You know that.”
IV
“You be a fraud,” Investigators said.
“Tie lantern to a tail and paint you red!”
“Mistaken!” cried the clock. “The truth's with us.”
“Carrock,” confirmed Australopithecus.
—Anonymous
The magic clock of Barnaby Sheen advanced the present time of the world by twenty hours. Thus it became the following evening, and there was another gathering in the study of Barnaby Sheen.
Besides myself and the men who knew everything, there were three eminent scientists: Velikov Vonk, Ergodic Eimer, and August Angstrom. But the eminence of that group was a little suspect. Willy McGilly was out of town. Arpad Arkarbaranan was dead, drowned in that unfortunate episode at Boomer Flats. Velikov Vonk was the only member of the original group there, the only one of the bunch we mean when we say ‘Eminent Scientists’ in our town.
There was a newspaper person there, too, and a few nondescript folks of both sexes.
“People, do I have a clock!” Barnaby Sheen cried, and he seemed to be cupping something precious in his two hands. “It's the clock that the world runs by,” he said.
“That is a statement that we intend to test,” August Angstrom spat in a cranky manner. “We know, Sheen, that you are ninety percent fraud. We also know that occasionally, very occasionally, you come up with something of value; and we know that you are a long ways overdue with it. Don't disappoint us tonight. Where is the clock?”
“It's about you and around you, August,” Barnaby said. “Anything that you want to submit to it, drop into that wide slot there. Anything you want to ask it, ask it at the automatic typewriter.”
“Ask it how, Sheen? By voice?”
“Certainly. Or by Indian Sign Language if you prefer. It understands that too.”
“This man Sheen here, how old is he?” August Angstrom asked the mechanical complex. And his words were typed out by it just as he had spoken them: “This man Sheen, how old is he?” appeared in the typescript; then the machine swallowed the question.
“What, what, how was that done?” August asked. Barnaby Sheen was laughing. His hands were steepled together as though he were cupping something precious in them. A nervous gesture, we suppose. And his fingers diddled and skipped about.
Nervous gesture, your father
's chronometer! Barnaby was pulling one of the oldest tricks right out in the open. No wonder he waited till Willy McGilly was out of town before he set up the show. He diddled his fingers. Meanwhile, across the room, the typer was typing.
“Barnaby Sheen is in the absolute prime of life. He is thirty-seven years, twenty-eight days, fourteen hours, nine minutes, and rapidly changing seconds old,” the clock typed it out.
“All right, Sheen, how is it done?” August growled. “I know it's a trick.”
“No trick at all, August,” Barnaby laughed. “Many weeks ago I programmed it with the birth moments of the nine most outstanding men in the world. Naturally I couldn't leave myself out.”
August pulled something from his wallet, unwrapped it, and dropped it into the slot. It was a disc, probably a coin. And Barnaby smiled and worked his fingers nervously.
“Well, fat man, what do you want me to tell you about that thing?” the typer typed.
“Ah, clock, it is a coin. Tell me the date on it,” Angstrom spoke in a tone of near apology, and the typer typed, “Ah, clock, it is a coin. Tell me…” and so on. Barnaby Sheen was wandering around the room examining his own collection of gimcracks. Ah, there was a display case, but the case lifted up. It had a false bottom; it had a conveyor belt under the false bottom; even I could see that much. Barnaby Sheen took the coin from the conveyor belt, examined it a moment, and replaced it. He resumed his nervous striding about the room and his nervous drumming of his fingers. But the attention of all was on the clock and not on Barnaby Sheen.
“The coin bore the date 1848,” the typer typed. “It was a middling valuable coin. I dissolved it to get at the data, and I will be unable to give it back.”
“Sheen,” Angstrom said dangerously, “that coin was quite valuable.”
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 150
