by Anthology
As the lift arrived at the top of its shaft, the Clock ticked, the sound of it jangling afterwards in his ears, contrasting with the sounds of the Pendulum Well. Here, the noises were all about him again; the grinding of the cogs, the humming of the Fast Wheel; the oil smells and the sharp tang of metal were in his nostrils again. His trolley was there, as he had left it. He began to walk across the floor, dust rising in clouds about him as he moved. He reached the trolley and grasped his hammer, ready for sounding the next wheel, and he used a small hammer that could comfortably be held in one hand. He swung the hammer and struck the wheel.
The whistle screamed, drowning all other sounds. He groaned out loud. The whistle stopped, and he stood there, hammer in hand, wanting to strike the wheel again. Why could not the whistle have blown one second later? At least he would have been able to hear this wheel. He almost swung at the wheel again, but he could not; it was time for the Winding. He felt tears springing to his eyes at the unfairness of it all. He was old, and tired . . . He walked across to the Posterior Wall and slid open the panel that led to the Winding Room.
The Clock ticked.
This was only a small room and it was lined with planks like the others. It was completely featureless save for the Winding Handle which was set into the far wall and projected out into the room. He stepped inside and grasped the Handle. He put his weight on to it and it gradually moved downward, a ratchet clicking rapidly somewhere behind the wall. When the Handle was at its lowest extent, he slightly released the pressure and it rose up under his hands to its original position. He pressed down again. He would wind until the whistle blew again, a period he estimated to be about an hour, but a very long hour indeed. After the Winding he would be allowed a short time from his labor for lunch. Perhaps he could sound the remaining wheels in his lunch time?
The Clock ticked.
This would mean that he would miss his mash. He didn’t mind about that too much; what really worried him was that he would miss his valuable rest period. The handle rose under his hands to its highest position. He was worried about the afternoon; how could he work if he missed his rest? He was weak enough now. He pressed down the handle. Sweat was beginning to run down his forehead; he felt terrible. Surely, at one time he had not felt so weak and tired. At one time?
At what time? For a second he was distracted from his task.
He slipped.
His foot went from under him and he fell forward, toward the handle. His hands slid from it and it swung up, catching him under the chin and throwing him backward on to the floor.
Lights flashed under his eyelids and his head buzzed, cutting out all other sound. When he came to he found that he was standing in the Great Chamber, swaying slightly.
Where was he?
For the first time his routine had been upset. The blow had jogged his mind from its well-worn paths. He realized that all the events of this day had conspired to open his senses to this apocalypse.
He looked about himself in amazement.
All was as it had been; the Fast Wheel hummed to itself and the cogs moved round at their various speeds.
But now the Clock mechanism looked alien and frightening to him as he regarded it with eyes unclouded by time.
How had he got here?
The stench of his own excrement arose from the corner of the Great Chamber, mixed with the acrid tang of the metal that surrounded him.
His head moved from side to side as he tried to see everything at once.
The Clock ticked, unexpectedly, causing him to clap his hands to his ears.
He had been so frightened; what had forced him to carry out these awful duties that had wasted so much of his life? He walked across to the far end of the Great Chamber and looked at the bones in the corner. He could see about four complete skeletons among the crumbling fragments of many others. They were all supported on a billowing pile of dust that came from innumerable others. Were these the bones of the others, who, before him, had tended the Clock? Did they, one day, suddenly know that their time was up, and did they, obeying a dim and contrived instinct, slowly, painfully drag themselves over to the pile and quietly lie upon it? And then did the next person come here and immediately settle into his ritual of duties, ignoring the twitching bundle in the corner, and later the odor of its corruption?
He walked back to his pallet and sat on it, burying his face in his hands. When he came to the Clock, was there a body in the corner? Did he sit in the Small Chamber eating his mash whilst the air was full of the taint of death?
What was his life before he came here?
Who was he?
He could not remember. Nor could he remember how long he had been here. He felt round the back of his head; his hair was hanging down almost to his shoulders. He estimated from this that he had been inside the Clock for a whole year of his life. He remembered something else. His age. He was twenty-five years old.
Twenty-five?
Then why was he so weak and tired?
Something wrong made a shudder crawl its way down his back. His hands had been registering something for some time, and now he consciously accepted their message. His hands told him that the skin hung loose and wrinkled round his face. His hands told him that his features were covered by wrinkled and flaccid parchment.
He sat up on the pallet in fear. He suddenly pulled out a little clump of hair, bringing tears to his eyes. But the tears did not obscure his vision completely, and he could see that the hair was snowy white. He looked up in agony.
“I’m old!”
The Clock ticked.
“I’m old . . .”
He looked down at his body. It was the body of an old, old man.
He slowly stood and then staggered to one of the supporting columns. He embraced the column, resting his cheek against the golden surface. His hand stroked the smooth metal of the column’s surface, almost as if he were caressing a woman. He giggled.
“Look at me,” he muttered to the Clock. “Look what you’ve done to me!”
The Fast Wheel hummed; the cogs turned.
“You’ve taken my life! I was young when I came here a year ago! Young! What have you done?”
His voice had become high and quavering and was swallowed in the sounds of the Clock.
“Oh God!” he said, and slumped against the column. He stayed there a long time, thinking. He was going to have his revenge. The Clock would run down, with no one to wind it. It would die, without him.
The Clock ticked, and he pushed his shoulders from the column, standing erect. He began to walk round the Great Chamber, putting out his hand here, stroking a wheel there. He blew kisses to the Fast Wheel and ran his flat hand gently over the surface of the Great Wheel. Wheedling, coquettish, he minced extravagantly through the Great Chamber, quietly talking to the Clock.
“Why?” he said. “Why? I’ve given you my life; what have you given in return? You have taken eighty years from me—what have you done with them? Are they stored vilely away in a cupboard? If I searched long enough, could I find them, stacked on a shelf? Could I put out my hands and slip them on, like clothes? Eh? Why did you steal them?”
His muttering suddenly became ominous in tone.
“I’ll fix you; I won’t even give you the pleasure of running quietly down, as you would have done with me. Oh no, my friend, you shall die violently; I’ll show you no quarter.’
He moved across to the trolley. He painfully lifted off the largest of the hammers and dragged it to the floor. A wheel of moderate size, about four feet across, was quite near to him. With all his strength he swung the hammer in a low arc and relaxed only as it smashed into the wheel. The giant hammer broke off one of the cogs completely, and bent part of the wheel at an impossible angle. He dropped the hammer, and, filled with emotion, crammed his fists against his opened mouth.
The Clock ticked.
He found that he was weeping; why, he didn’t understand.
The cog turned slowly, the damaged section moving ne
arer to its inevitable interaction with another wheel. He screwed up his eyes, and felt the warm tears running freely down his face.
“I’ve killed you,” he said. He stood, thin, bleached and naked, paralysed and sobbing. Something would happen soon.
The damaged section interacted.
The wrecked cog spun suddenly and rapidly before its teeth engaged again. A shower of sparks flew out, burning his flesh. He started, both at the pain and at the sheer noise of that dreadful contact. At the threshold of his hearing, far below the other sounds of the Clock, he could hear the buckling of metal, the scraping of part on part. The other wheel buckled and spun in its turn. A spring burst from somewhere behind the wheel and scattered metal splinters all over the Chamber. Strange smells were in the air; the death-smells of the Clock.
A trail of damage was running across the mechanism of the Clock like an earthquake fissure running across land. It could not be seen, and outwardly practically everything was normal, but his ears could hear the changes in what had been familiar sounds. The grinding and destruction spreading like a canker could be heard clearly enough.
The Clock ticked, and even the tick sounded slightly weaker.
Louder and louder came the sounds of invisible destruction. He stood, still weeping, shaking as if with fever. The changed sounds of the Clock plunged him into a new and unfamiliar world.
A different sound made him look up. Above him the Fast Wheel was running eccentrically. It was wavering from side to side in its supports, oil spurting from its reservoirs. As it spun, it whined, jarringly.
Abruptly it broke free of its supports and, still whining, it dropped to the floor. It screamed as it hit the floor and was covered by the roaring flame of its friction. And then it was gone, only the hint of a bright streak in the air indicating its trajectory. It smashed into the far wall scattering dust from the bones as the wooden wall dissolved into splintering wreckage.
An uluation came from the Small Chamber. Inside, the mass of wheels screamed as they were tortured by the new disorder spreading through their myriad ranks. The Clock shook in its ague, shivering itself to death. Suddenly through the open door of the Small Chamber came the wheels, thousands of them. The Great Chamber was full of smooth silver wheels, some broken and flying through the air, others rolling lazily.
The Clock ticked, gratingly, and then screamed again. The Escapement Mechanism jammed rigid, but the Pendulum wanted to continue its swing. It did, bending its great four-foot-diameter column in a grotesque shape.
Dust was everywhere, flying metal whistled about his ears. As the sound became unbelievable the destruction became complete.
His last sight was of light streaming brightly in as the whole Clock collapsed in a mass of falling wood and metal cogs.
3
And it was everybody else’s last sight, too. They may, for a brief period, have seen their world freezing itself in grotesque lack of activity. They may have seen water, solidifying in its fall to complete immobility; they may have seen birds flying through air that was like treacle, finally coming to rest above the ground; they may even have seen their own faces beginning to register terror, but never completing the expression . . .
But after that, there was no time to see anything.
THE GREATEST TELEVISION SHOW ON EARTH
J.G. Ballard
The discovery in the year 2001 of an effective system of time travel had a number of important repercussions, nowhere greater than in the field of television. The last quarter of the twentieth century had seen the spectacular growth of television across every continent on the globe, and the programmes transmitted by the huge American, European and Afro-Asian networks each claimed audiences of a billion viewers. Yet despite their enormous financial resources the television companies were faced with a chronic shortage of news and entertainment. Vietnam, the first TV War, had given viewers all the excitement of live transmissions from the battlefield, but wars in general, not to mention newsworthy activity of any kind, had died out as the world’s population devoted itself almost exclusively to watching television.
At this point the discovery of time travel made its fortunate appearance.
As soon as the first spate of patent suits had been settled (one Japanese entrepreneur almost succeeded in copyrighting history; time was then declared ‘open’ territory) it became clear that the greatest obstacle to time travel was not the laws of the physical universe but the vast sums of money needed to build and power the installations. These safaris into the past cost approximately a million dollars a minute. After a few brief journeys to verify the Crucifixion, the signing of Magna Carta and Columbus’s discovery of the Americas, the government-financed Einstein Memorial Time Centre at Princeton was forced to suspend operations.
Plainly, only one other group could finance further explorations into the past—the world’s television corporations. Their eager assurances that there would be no undue sensationalism convinced government leaders that the educational benefits of these travelogues through time outweighed any possible lapses in taste.
The television companies, for their part, saw in the past an inexhaustible supply of first-class news and entertainment—all of it, moreover, free. Immediately they set to work, investing billions of dollars, rupees, roubles and yen in duplicating the great chronotron at the Princeton Time Centre. Task-forces of physicists and mathematicians were enrolled as assistant producers. Camera crews were sent to key sites—London, Washington and Peking—and shortly afterwards the first pilot programmes were transmitted to an eager world.
These blurry scenes, like faded newsreels, of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the funeral of Mao Tse-tung triumphantly demonstrated the feasibility of Time Vision. After this solemn unveiling—a gesture in the direction of the government watchdog committees—the television companies began seriously to plan their schedules. The winter programmes for the year 2002 offered viewers the assassination of President Kennedy (‘live’, as the North American company tactlessly put it), the D-Day landings and the Battle of Stalingrad. Asian viewers were given Pearl Harbor and the fall of Corregidor.
This emphasis on death and destruction set the pace for what followed. The success of the programmes was beyond the planners’ wildest dreams. These fleeting glimpses of smoke-crossed battlegrounds, with their burntout tanks and landing craft, had whetted an enormous appetite. More and more camera crews were readied, and an army of military historians deployed to establish the exact time at which Bastogne was relieved, the victory flags hoisted above Mount Suribachi and the Reichstag.
Within a year a dozen programmes each week brought to three billion viewers the highlights of World War II and the subsequent decades, all transmitted as they actually occurred. Night after night, somewhere around the world, John F. Kennedy was shot dead in Dealey Plaza, atom bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in the ruins of his Berlin bunker.
After this success the television companies moved back to the 1914-18 War, ready to reap an even richer harvest of audience ratings from the killing grounds of Passchendaele and Verdun. To their surprise, however, the glimpses of this mud-and shell-filled universe were a dismal failure compared with the great technological battles of World War II being transmitted live at the same time on rival channels from the carrier decks of the Philippine Sea and the thousand-bomber raids over Essen and Dusseldorf.
One sequence alone from World War I quickened the viewers’ jaded palates—a cavalry charge by Uhlans of the German Imperial Army. Riding over the barbed wire on their splendid mounts, white plumes flying above the mud, these lance-wielding horsemen brought to a billion war-weary TV screens the magic of pageantry and costume. At a moment when it might have faltered, Time Vision was saved by the epaulette and the cuirass.
Immediately, camera crews began to travel back into the nineteenth century. World Wars I and II faded from the screen. Within a few months viewers saw the coronatio
n of Queen Victoria, the assassination of Lincoln and the siege of the Alamo.
As a climax to this season of instant history, the great Time Vision Corporations of Europe and North America collaborated on their most spectacular broadcast to date—a live coverage of the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Waterloo.
While making their preparations the two companies made a discovery that was to have far-reaching consequences for the whole history of Time Vision. During their visits to the battle (insulated from the shot and fury by the invisible walls of their time capsules) the producers found that there were fewer combatants actually present than described by the historians of the day. Whatever the immense political consequences of the defeat of Napoleonic France, the battle itself was a disappointing affair, a few thousand march-wearied troops engaged in sporadic rifle and artillery duels.
An emergency conference of programme chiefs discussed this failure of Waterloo to live up to its reputation. Senior producers revisited the battlefield, leaving their capsules to wander in disguise among the exhausted soldiery. The prospect of the lowest audience ratings in the history of Time Vision seemed hourly more imminent.
At this crisis-point some nameless assistant producer came up with a remarkable idea. Rather than sit back helplessly behind their cameras, the Time Vision companies should step in themselves, he suggested, lending their vast expertise and resources to heightening the drama of the battle. More extras—that is, mercenaries recruited from the nearby farming communities—could be thrown into the fray, supplies of powder and shot, distributed to the empty guns, and the entire choreography of the battle re-vamped by the military consultants in the editorial departments. ‘History,’ he concluded, ‘is just a first draft screenplay.’