Newman had passed the time usefully. Luckily, his cell faced south and sunlight traversed it for most of the day. He divided its arc into ten equal segments, the effective daylight hours, marking the intervals with a wedge of mortar prised from the window ledge. Each segment he further subdivided into twelve smaller units.
Immediately he had a working timepiece, accurate to within virtually a minute (the final subdivision into fifths he made mentally). The sweep of white notches, curving down one wall, across the floor and metal bedstead, and up the other wall, would have been recognizable to anyone who stood with his back to the window, but no one ever did. Anyway, the guards were too stupid to understand, and the sundial had given Newman a tremendous advantage over them. Most of the time, when he wasn’t recalibrating the dial, he would press against the grille, keeping an eye on the orderly room.
‘Brocken!’ he would shout out at 7.15, as the shadow line hit the first interval. ‘Morning inspection! On your feet, man!’ The sergeant would come stumbling out of his bunk in a sweat, cursing the other warders as the reveille bell split the air.
Later, Newman sang out the other events on the daily roster: roll-call, cell fatigues, breakfast, exercise and so on round to the evening roll just before dusk. Brocken regularly won the block merit for the best-run cell deck and he relied on Newman to programme the day for him, anticipate the next item on the roster and warn him if anything went on for too long – in some of the other blocks fatigues were usually over in three minutes while breakfast or exercise could go on for hours, none of the warders knowing when to stop, the prisoners insisting that they had only just begun.
Brocken never inquired how Newman organized everything so exactly; once or twice a week, when it rained or was overcast, Newman would be strangely silent, and the resulting confusion reminded the sergeant forcefully of the merits of co-operation. Newman was kept in cell privileges and all the cigarettes he needed. It was a shame that a date for the trial had finally been named.
Newman, too, was sorry. Most of his research so far had been inconclusive. Primarily his problem was that, given a northward-facing cell for the bulk of his sentence, the task of estimating the time might become impossible. The inclination of the shadows in the exercise yards or across the towers and walls provided too blunt a reading. Calibration would have to be visual; an optical instrument would soon be discovered.
What he needed was an internal timepiece, an unconsciously operating psychic mechanism regulated, say, by his pulse or respiratory rhythms. He had tried to train his time sense, running an elaborate series of tests to estimate its minimum in-built error, and this had been disappointingly large. The chances of conditioning an accurate reflex seemed slim.
However, unless he could tell the exact time at any given moment, he knew he would go mad.
His obsession, which now faced him with a charge of murder, had revealed itself innocently enough.
As a child, like all children, he had noticed the occasional ancient clock tower, bearing the same white circle with its twelve intervals. In the seedier areas of the city the round characteristic dials often hung over cheap jewelry stores, rusting and derelict.
‘Just signs,’ his mother explained. ‘They don’t mean anything, like stars or rings.’
Pointless embellishment, he had thought.
Once, in an old furniture shop, they had seen a clock with hands, upside down in a box full of fire-irons and miscellaneous rubbish.
‘Eleven and twelve,’ he had pointed out. ‘What does it mean?’
His mother had hurried him away, reminding herself never to visit that street again. Time Police were still supposed to be around, watching for any outbreak. ‘Nothing,’ she told him sharply. ‘It’s all finished.’ To herself she added experimentally: Five and twelve. Five to twelve. Yes.
Time unfolded at its usual sluggish, half-confused pace. They lived in a ramshackle house in one of the amorphous suburbs, a zone of endless afternoons. Sometimes he went to school, until he was ten spent most of his time with his mother queueing outside the closed food stores. In the evenings he would play with the neighbourhood gang around the abandoned railway station, punting a home-made flat car along the overgrown tracks, or break into one of the unoccupied houses and set up a temporary command post.
He was in no hurry to grow up; the adult world was unsynchronized and ambitionless. After his mother died he spent long days in the attic, going through her trunks and old clothes, playing with the bric-a`-brac of hats and beads, trying to recover something of her personality.
In the bottom compartment of her jewellery case he came across a small flat gold-cased object, equipped with a wrist strap. The dial had no hands but the twelve-numbered face intrigued him and he fastened it to his wrist.
His father choked over his soup when he saw it that evening.
‘Conrad, my God! Where in heaven did you get that?’
‘In Mamma’s bead box. Can’t I keep it?’
‘No. Conrad, give it to me! Sorry, son.’ Thoughtfully: ‘Let’s see, you’re fourteen. Look, Conrad, I’ll explain it all in a couple of years.’
With the impetus provided by this new taboo there was no need to wait for his father’s revelations. Full knowledge came soon. The older boys knew the whole story, but strangely enough it was disappointingly dull.
‘Is that all?’ he kept saying. ‘I don’t get it. Why worry so much about clocks? We have calendars, don’t we?’
Suspecting more, he scoured the streets, carefully inspecting every derelict clock for a clue to the real secret. Most of the faces had been mutilated, hands and numerals torn off, the circle of minute intervals stripped away, leaving a shadow of fading rust. Distributed apparently at random all over the city, above stores, banks and public buildings, their real purpose was hard to discover. Sure enough, they measured the progress of time through twelve arbitrary intervals, but this seemed barely adequate grounds for outlawing them. After all, a whole variety of timers were in general use: in kitchens, factories, hospitals, wherever a fixed period of time was needed. His father had one by his bed at night. Sealed into the standard small black box, and driven by miniature batteries, it emitted a high penetrating whistle shortly before breakfast the next morning, woke him if he overslept. A clock was no more than a calibrated timer, in many ways less useful, as it provided you with a steady stream of irrelevant information. What if it was half past three, as the old reckoning put it, if you weren’t planning to start or finish anything then?
Making his questions sound as naïve as possible, he conducted a long, careful poll. Under fifty no one appeared to know anything at all about the historical background, and even the older people were beginning to forget. He also noticed that the less educated they were the more they were willing to talk, indicating that manual and lower-class workers had played no part in the revolution and consequently had no guilt-charged memories to repress. Old Mr Crichton, the plumber who lived in the basement apartment; reminisced without any prompting, but nothing he said threw any light on the problem.
‘Sure, there were thousands of clocks then, millions of them, everybody had one. Watches we called them, strapped to the wrist, you had to screw them up every day.’
‘But what did you do with them, Mr Crichton?’ Conrad pressed.
‘Well, you just – looked at them, and you knew what time it was. One o’clock, or two, or half past seven – that was when I’d go off to work.’
‘But you go off to work now when you’ve had breakfast. And if you’re late the timer rings.’
Crichton shook his head. ‘I can’t explain it to you, lad. You ask your father.’
But Mr Newman was hardly more helpful. The explanation promised for Conrad’s sixteenth birthday never materialized. When his questions persisted Mr Newman tired of side-stepping, shut him up with an abrupt: ‘Just stop thinking about it, do you understand? You’ll get yourself and the rest of us into a lot of trouble.’
Stacey, the young English teacher
, had a wry sense of humour, liked to shock the boys by taking up unorthodox positions on marriage or economics. Conrad wrote an essay describing an imaginary society completely preoccupied with elaborate rituals revolving around a minute by minute observance of the passage of time.
Stacey refused to play, however, gave him a non-committal beta plus, after class quietly asked Conrad what had prompted the fantasy. At first Conrad tried to back away, then finally came out with the question that contained the central riddle.
‘Why is it against the law to have a clock?’
Stacey tossed a piece of chalk from one hand to the other.
‘Is it against the law?’
Conrad nodded. ‘There’s an old notice in the police station offering a bounty of one hundred pounds for every clock or wristwatch brought in. I saw it yesterday. The sergeant said it was still in force.’
Stacey raised his eyebrows mockingly. ‘You’ll make a million. Thinking of going into business?’
Conrad ignored this. ‘It’s against the law to have a gun because you might shoot someone. But how can you hurt anybody with a clock?’
‘Isn’t it obvious? You can time him, know exactly how long it takes him to do something.’
‘Well?’
‘Then you can make him do it faster.’
At seventeen, on a sudden impulse, he built his first clock. Already his preoccupation with time was giving him a marked lead over his class-mates. One or two were more intelligent, others more conscientious, but Conrad’s ability to organize his leisure and homework periods allowed him to make the most of his talents. When the others were lounging around the railway yard on their way home Conrad had already completed half his prep, allocating his time according to its various demands.
As soon as he finished he would go up to the attic playroom, now his workshop. Here, in the old wardrobes and trunks, he made his first experimental constructions: calibrated candles, crude sundials, sand-glasses, an elaborate clockwork contraption developing about half a horse power that drove its hands progressively faster and faster in an unintentional parody of Conrad’s obsession.
His first serious clock was water-powered, a slowly leaking tank holding a wooden float that drove the hands as it sank downwards. Simple but accurate, it satisfied Conrad for several months while he carried out his ever-widening search for a real clock mechanism. He soon discovered that although there were innumerable table clocks, gold pocket watches and timepieces of every variety rusting in junk shops and in the back drawers of most homes, none of them contained their mechanisms. These, together with the hands, and sometimes the digits, had always been removed. His own attempts to build an escapement that would regulate the motion of the ordinary clockwork motor met with no success; everything he had heard about clock movements confirmed that they were precision instruments of exact design and construction. To satisfy his secret ambition – a portable timepiece, if possible an actual wristwatch – he would have to find one, somewhere, in working order.
Finally, from an unexpected source, a watch came to him. One afternoon in a cinema an elderly man sitting next to Conrad had a sudden heart attack. Conrad and two members of the audience carried him out to the manager’s office. Holding one of his arms, Conrad noticed in the dim aisle light a glint of metal inside the sleeve. Quickly he felt the wrist with his fingers, identified the unmistakable lens-shaped disc of a wristwatch.
As he carried it home its tick seemed as loud as a death-knell. He clamped his hand around it, expecting everyone in the street to point accusingly at him, the Time Police to swoop down and seize him.
In the attic he took it out and examined it breathlessly, smothering it in a cushion whenever he heard his father shift about in the bedroom below. Later he realized that its noise was almost inaudible. The watch was of the same pattern as his mother’s, though with a yellow and not a red face. The gold case was scratched and peeling, but the movement seemed to be in perfect condition. He prised off the rear plate, watched the frenzied flickering world of miniature cogs and wheels for hours, spellbound. Frightened of breaking the main spring, he kept the watch only half wound, packed away carefully in cotton wool.
In taking the watch from its owner he had not, in fact, been motivated by theft; his first impulse had been to hide the watch before the doctor discovered it feeling for the man’s pulse. But once the watch was in his possession he abandoned any thought of tracing the owner and returning it.
That others were still wearing watches hardly surprised him. The water clock had demonstrated that a calibrated timepiece added another dimension to life, organized its energies, gave the countless activities of everyday existence a yardstick of significance. Conrad spent hours in the attic gazing at the small yellow dial, watching its minute hand revolve slowly, its hour hand press on imperceptibly, a compass charting his passage through the future. Without it he felt rudderless, adrift in a grey purposeless limbo of timeless events. His father began to seem idle and stupid, sitting around vacantly with no idea when anything was going to happen.
Soon he was wearing the watch all day. He stitched together a slim cotton sleeve, fitted with a narrow flap below which he could see the face. He timed everything – the length of classes, football games, meal breaks, the hours of daylight and darkness, sleep and waking. He amused himself endlessly by baffling his friends with demonstrations of this private sixth sense, anticipating the frequency of their heartbeats, the hourly newscasts on the radio, boiling a series of identically consistent eggs without the aid of a timer.
Then he gave himself away.
Stacey, shrewder than any of the others, discovered that he was wearing a watch. Conrad had noticed that Stacey’s English classes lasted exactly forty-five minutes, let himself slide into the habit of tidying his desk a minute before Stacey’s timer pipped up. Once or twice he noticed Stacey looking at him curiously, but he could not resist the temptation to impress Stacey by always being the first one to make for the door.
One day he had stacked his books and clipped away his pen when Stacey pointedly asked him to read out a précis he had done. Conrad knew the timer would pip out in less than ten seconds, and decided to sit tight and wait for the usual stampede to save him the trouble.
Stacey stepped down from the dais, waiting patiently. One or two boys turned around and frowned at Conrad, who was counting away the closing seconds.
Then, amazed, he realized that the timer had failed to sound! Panicking, he first thought his watch had broken, just restrained himself in time from looking at it.
‘In a hurry, Newman?’ Stacey asked dryly. He sauntered down the aisle to Conrad, smiling sardonically. Baffled, and face reddening with embarrassment, Conrad fumbled open his exercise book, read out the précis. A few minutes later, without waiting for the timer, Stacey dismissed the class.
‘Newman,’ he called out. ‘Here a moment.’
He rummaged behind the rostrum as Conrad approached. ‘What happened then?’ he asked. ‘Forget to wind up your watch this morning?’
Conrad said nothing. Stacey took out the timer, switched off the silencer and listened to the pip that buzzed out.
‘Where did you get it from? Your parents? Don’t worry, the Time Police were disbanded years ago.’
Conrad examined Stacey’s face carefully. ‘It was my mother’s,’ he lied. ‘I found it among her things.’ Stacey held out his hand and Conrad nervously unstrapped the watch and handed it to him.
Stacey slipped it half out of its sleeve, glanced briefly at the yellow face. ‘Your mother, you say? Hmh.’
‘Are you going to report me?’ Conrad asked.
‘What, and waste some over-worked psychiatrist’s time even further?’
‘Isn’t it breaking the law to wear a watch?’
‘Well, you’re not exactly the greatest living menace to public security.’ Stacey started for the door, gesturing Conrad with him. He handed the watch back. ‘Cancel whatever you’re doing on Saturday afternoon. You and I are taking
a trip.’
‘Where?’ Conrad asked.
‘Back into the past,’ Stacey said lightly. ‘To Chronopolis, the Time City.’
Stacey had hired a car, a huge battered mastodon of chromium and fins. He waved jauntily to Conrad as he picked him up outside the public library.
‘Climb into the turret,’ he called out. He pointed to the bulging briefcase Conrad slung on to the seat between them. ‘Have you had a look at those yet?’
Conrad nodded. As they moved off around the deserted square he opened the briefcase and pulled out a thick bundle of road maps. ‘I’ve just worked out that the city covers over 500 square miles. I’d never realized it was so big. Where is everybody?’
Stacey laughed. They crossed the main street, cut down into a long tree-lined avenue of semi-detached houses. Half of them were empty, windows wrecked and roofs sagging. Even the inhabited houses had a makeshift appearance, crude water towers on home-made scaffolding lashed to their chimneys, piles of logs dumped in over-grown front gardens.
‘Thirty million people once lived in this city,’ Stacey remarked. ‘Now the population is little more than two, and still declining. Those of us left hang on in what were once the distal suburbs, so that the city today is effectively an enormous ring, five miles in width, encircling a vast dead centre forty or fifty miles in diameter.’
They wove in and out of various back roads, past a small factory still running although work was supposed to end at noon, finally picked up a long, straight boulevard that carried them steadily westwards. Conrad traced their progress across successive maps. They were nearing the edge of the annulus Stacey had described. On the map it was overprinted in green so that the central interior appeared a flat, uncharted grey, a massive terra incognita.
They passed the last of the small shopping thoroughfares he remembered, a frontier post of mean terraced houses, dismal streets spanned by massive steel viaducts. Stacey pointed up at one as they drove below it. ‘Part of the elaborate railway system that once existed, an enormous network of stations and junctions that carried fifteen million people into a dozen great terminals every day.’
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Page 23
