Time and the Clock Mice, Etcetera

by Peter Dickinson

  I don’t. About Mrs. Curry, of course, I don’t. Look, there’s that Mr. O’Dowd she’s got her eye on coming out of the post office. She’ll stop and chat with him, I’ll be bound … Told you so. She always does, doesn’t she?

  It doesn’t follow, does it? Because Mrs. Curry always stops and chats with Mr. O’Dowd if she gets the chance, it doesn’t prove she will this time. I didn’t actually know.

  What’s so different about the egg? How do I know it isn’t just coincidence that everything anyone’s dropped so far has fallen towards the centre of the earth, but it won’t happen this time?

  Well, of course I know. It’s as certain as anything can be. But it still isn’t absolutely dead certain.

  I think we need two different words, Know and Qnow.

  Know is for ordinary knowing, the sort we all get along with. Qnow is for absolutely dead certain knowledge, which you can never have.

  So, OK, science is knowing. The trouble is, scientists keep trying to turn it into qnowing. Just one little bit more knowledge, they think, and we’ll have qnowledge.

  And that makes anything they do all right. They think.

  Lilith’s Michael was a pleasant young man, almost good enough for a girl like her, enjoyed country walks, collected old milking stools for a hobby, played the accordion for a folk-group Tuesdays, called me “Sir” which I pretend not to bother with but which makes me think I’m still some use in the world.

  I tried to open the door with the wrong keys and let him find the right one and do it for me, and then I went muttering and snuffling up ahead of him so he could get a good look at my feet because I was wearing one slipper and one boot.

  The going-chamber was a right mess. I’d dropped crusts and apple-cores around and the mice had nibbled and messed with them, and left their own droppings the way ordinary mice do, and bits of stuff they might have been dragging up for nests and so on.

  I offered Michael coffee from my Thermos and it turned out a mixture of tea and cocoa, tepid, and I mumbled about how I must have forgotten to empty the old tea out before I put the coffee in, which somehow I’d gone and made of cocoa, and he laughed and said it was a new experience, at least, and how about catching some mice as it looked as if there were plenty around.

  He’d brought three cunning little traps which wouldn’t hurt the mice, and he baited them with bits of apple and we swept up the other leavings so the mice wouldn’t have anything else to go for, and we left it like that.

  He came again next morning. All three traps had mice in them—Terry Hickory, Tracy Dickory and Sebastian Dock. He picked up the one with Sebastian and looked at him.

  “Looks like your average House Mouse,” he said. “I can’t see any difference.”

  He was right there. They looked a lot dumber than ordinary mice, even. If there’d been Oscars for acting thick, those three would have won them.

  “Well, thank you, sir,” he said. “Why don’t you come along to the lab next week and you can see how they’re making out.”

  A week. Months, in mouse time. Months in prison. I couldn’t tell him that so I got my diary out and we fixed a day and I wrote it down in the wrong month and let him put me right. I watched from above while he buzzed out of the square in one of those little open cars men like him drive.

  I was afraid.

  I’d no more business in Branton beyond waiting to see whether the Council would find a way of not paying me, so I drove over to visit Cousin Minnie.

  “So you’ve got your clock going?” she said.

  “Heard it all on the telly, did you?” I said.

  “I knew before that,” she said. “Soon as the big bell struck noon, I knew.”

  “Ah, come off it,” I said. “It’s forty-five miles if it’s an inch.”

  “I didn’t say I heard him,” she said. “I felt my bells move to his sounding.”

  I shrugged. Everyone to their own nonsense. Live and let live.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she said. “You’re not right with yourself, are you?”

  “I’m afraid,” I said, and I told her what had happened, from the beginning. I was still ashamed of myself to the soles of my shoes, but I didn’t leave anything out. She didn’t say anything till I got to the bit about being stuck in the tower while Old Joe was striking.

  “Won’t do you much harm,” she said. “He might even have banged some sense into you. That’s a marvelous great bell you’ve got there. No wonder your mice are brighter than most.”

  “You could be right,” I said, and told her my idea about the bell making the mice deaf and so forcing them telepathic.

  “That’s just like you,” she said. “Some ways you’re blinder than I am. If you’d any feel for the nature of things you’d understand about the resonances of the universe embodying themselves in a bell like that, and changing things round about as they pulse back where they came.”

  “You’re talking like Cousin Angel,” I said.

  “Don’t you go despising Cousin Angel,” snapped Minnie. “I know she can’t toast a crumpet or boil an egg so that anyone would want to eat them, but you’ll be glad of her before the week’s over.”

  I laughed at her, and we had our usual row about the nature of things, and that cheered us both up. I finished telling her about Michael while I was eating a few baps for tea, and went home to be with my cats.

  Michael worked at Yatterby University, I forgot to say. I meant to get early to the lab and then apologize for being late, but I was late anyway, having got caught up in a student protest about having to live in sewerpipes instead of houses because the money had run out.

  The receptionist pretended not to notice I was still wearing my pajamas under my jacket, so maybe Michael had told her what to expect, or maybe they get a lot of crazy old professors doddling about so I wasn’t anything out of the normal.

  Michael came and signed me through the security system. It was like getting into some kind of world-domination power-plant, with steel grilles, electronic tags, guards, armored doors with codes to punch before they’d open, the lot.

  “It’s the animal liberation people,” Michael explained. “They keep trying to break in and set the experimental animals free. People don’t seem to understand that we treat our animals as well as possible here, because it’s worth our while. You can’t work with sick animals. And if you let them loose outside they’d be dead in a week. Look at those rats, for instance …”

  I hadn’t even recognized the things in the cage as rats. They were horrible. They hadn’t a hair on them.

  “What’s happened to them?” I said. “Have they been shaved?”

  “That would be some job,” he said. “I’ve trouble enough with my own chin. No, they’re a special inbred strain with defective genes in the part of the chromosome that codes for hair. Dr. Pollard is studying the defect.”

  The bald rats looked perfectly happy, I’ve got to admit. Their eyes were bright, their noses twitched, they scampered or dozed. They were still horrible.

  Michael took me on to the section where he worked. He showed me a black-and-white rat in a cage. There were three buttons for it to poke with its nose. If it got them in the right order a bell rang and a scrap of food came out of a tube, but if it tried the same order twice it got an electric shock. Michael was studying how long it took for it to learn the rules for finding the new right order each time. He said some rats got it in three days but some never made it because they had nervous breakdowns first. There was a machine by the cage to count the tries so he didn’t have to stand and watch it happening.

  I told him I thought it was a very interesting experiment. I didn’t tell him I meant it was interesting about people, not about rats.

  There were other cages of rats and mice, some doing experiments, some just loafing around. Michael was gentle with them when he picked them up, stroking the bac
ks of their heads and murmuring to them. They weren’t at all afraid of him.

  The Clock Mice were over in a cupboard by themselves. Michael said he had to keep them separate from the others because they’d come in from the wild and they’d be carrying infections which the lab mice didn’t have any resistance to. I looked at them eagerly. They seemed all right, though they pretended not to recognize me.

  “What do you make of them?” I said. “Bright, aren’t they?”

  He looked at me with that special sort of patience which clever young men keep for old fools. I knew we were winning.

  “Well,” he said. “Judge for yourself. We’ll try them on the see-saw.”

  He pulled out from under the table a flat wooden box without a lid. In the middle was a sort of see-saw, mouse-size, but with one end of the plank longer than the other. A bit of wire with a hook on the end was arranged so that the hook was directly over the short end of the see-saw. Michael stuck a piece of apple on the hook and lifted Tracy and Terry out of their cages and put them in the box.

  “See how it works?” he said. “A mouse can reach the apple from the top of the see-saw, but only if the other mouse stays at the bottom and keeps it weighed down. So it depends on them learning to co-operate. I thought it would be a good test to see if there’s anything like telepathy going on. I may as well tell you that a pair of my lab rats will usually get the hang of it in two or three minutes. So let’s see. This isn’t their first try by any means.”

  Terry started off by trying to climb out, but the box had a rim to stop this and he kept falling off. The third time he fell on Tracy, who’d been sitting scratching herself, but now looked up and peered at the ceiling, as if she thought it might go on raining mice. Then she pretended to notice the apple for the first time. She gave a squeak of excitement and shot up the see-saw, which of course tilted under her weight and sent her tumbling down the other side. Immediately she circled round and tried again, and again, and again, like a clockwork toy. At first Terry went on trying to climb out, but then he too noticed the apple and joined in, timing his dash for the see-saw so that he collided with Tracy at the bottom. They had a classic mouse spat, struggling for who should be first. Terry won, but Tracy came close behind him so that they both went tumbling and swearing down the other side.

  They kept that up for a bit, but then they let themselves become separated out so that by the time one of them reached the bottom of the seesaw it was already tilting out of reach and they had to wait for it to fall back. Then Terry half caught up with Tracy, so that he reached the bottom just before the see-saw tilted and his weight kept it in place until she’d almost reached the apple.

  All at once she seemed to realize he was following her up. She turned and swore at him, and he backed off down to the bottom of the see-saw. Gingerly she edged up the slope again.

  “Look,” I whispered. “They’ve got it!”

  But just as Tracy was squatting up to reach for the apple Terry yawned and let go of the see-saw, and Tracy thumped down.

  Michael laughed. I managed to keep a straight face, just.

  “That’s about par for the course,” he said. “They do sometimes fluke it but they just don’t learn. It’s the same with the mazes and all the other tests. In fact, on average they perform markedly worse than lab-bred mice.”

  I shook my head and tried to look downcast. Good little Tracy, I thought. Well done, Terry and Sebastian. We’ll soon have you out of here and home in your nests and it will all be over and no harm done, except for Michael deciding I’m a silly old fool, which I am, but not in the way he thinks.

  “But there is something curious about them,” he said.

  “Uh?” I said. That wasn’t so good.

  “I noticed it a couple of days back,” he said. “I put them in separate cages so that the males didn’t fight. Mostly they’re just like other mice, nosing around and eating and sleeping. But sometimes they lie still, with their eyes open, and when they do that they all do it at the same time. It’s more curious because they can’t see each other.”

  Oh, Lor, I thought, that’s torn it. They’ve been talking to each other, and he’s noticed. Bright of him. He’d go far, spotting something like that.

  “Then I remembered you’d said something to Lilith about them being what you called telepathic,” he said. “I don’t believe in that sort of thing, as usually presented, but it looked as if some sort of communication might be taking place.”

  “You wouldn’t hear them,” I said. “Their voices are out of our range.”

  “I rigged mikes and checked on that,” he said. “In fact, they vocalize much less than normal mice …”

  “It’s because they’re wild,” I managed to say. “They don’t want to give themselves away to cats and things.”

  “Possibly,” he said. “Still, it’s a puzzle. There must be an explanation like that. I’ll know a bit more when I’ve taken a look at their brains.”

  “A look at their brains?” I said.

  He looked up from putting the mice back into their cages.

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “A. Look. At. Their. Brains?”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s absolutely painless. I put them down with an injection, and …”

  “You can’t do that,” I said.

  “I do it all the time,” he said. “It’s the normal procedure. They’re just mice.”

  “They aren’t just mice!” I said.

  That’s wrong. I can’t have said it. I must have yelled or bellowed or screamed it, the way he was looking at me. I felt as if my hair was standing on end. Beyond his elbow I saw Terry and Tracy and Sebastian looking at me too, bright-eyed, themselves, not acting dumb. That pulled me together a bit. I realized I was on the edge of telling Michael the truth, and if I did that nothing would stop him in his lust for Qnowledge, and he’d tell the world. He was almost there now. There was a sharp look in his eyes, as though he’d guessed I wasn’t as batty as I’d been making out, and I was keeping something from him.

  “What do you mean, not just mice?” he said.

  I remembered just in time what Cousin Minnie had told me about Cousin Angel coming to the rescue. If she could worship cats, then I could worship mice.

  I fell to my knees. I knocked my forehead on the ground in front of the three cages.

  “Forgive him, oh, forgive him his blasphemy!” I cried. “Listen young man! What you see before you may look to you like common mice, but I tell you that they are emanations of the Mouse-God of the ancient Egyptians, the great God Pteek! If you hurt one whisker of their heads the most dreadful curses will fall on you for the rest of your life. There will be thunderstorms at all your picnics and computer errors in your tax accounts and cows will stampede across your rosebeds and Lilith will have hiccups at romantic moments and your car will make strange untraceable grinding noises and there will be woodworm in your milking-stools and your accordion will leak and wherever you go on holiday your luggage will fetch up in Vancouver and your video won’t record anything except Neighbors and your children won’t think about anything but money …”

  I was gibbering by now. I’d run out of curses but I kept right on gibbering. Michael took me by the hands and pulled me to my feet.

  “Look,” he said gently. “It’s not a big deal. Why don’t you just tell me you don’t want them put down because they’re your pet mice?”

  I managed to say it without snarling. They weren’t mine. They weren’t pets. They were Terry, Tracy and Sebastian.

  “They’re my pet mice. Please let me have them back.”

  “Yes, of course, sir. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”

  He found a box for me and we put the mice in it and I took them home.

  FIFTH ESSAY ON CLOCKS

  Clocks aren’t time.

  It’s an easy mistake to make, because
clocks measure time—measure one sort of time, I mean. We listen to the steady way tock follows tick and tick follows tock and we watch the cogs turning, each tooth meshing where it must and nowhere else, this causing that and that causing t’other, cause and effect plain to see if you know what you’re looking for …

  But time’s not really like that. Time’s strange.

  I sent Lilith and Michael a wedding-present, a little clock I made specially for them. It’s in a glass case so that you can see all the works, and how they mesh and function—and then all of a sudden you say to yourself, “That’s nonsense. That can’t work. That wheel’s going the wrong way.” And it is. But the clock tells the time OK.

  It’s a trick, of course. I made it like that on purpose. I’m not going to tell Michael how it works, and I’m not going to tell him why I gave it to him, either. I just want him to understand that there’ll always be things he can’t know.

  Time’s one of those things. We’ll never understand it. Our minds are born into it. We live by it, one breath following another. We can never get outside to see what it is. I’ve read somewhere that there’s no good reason why time flows in the direction it does—it could just as well go the other way, what we’d call backwards. What does that mean? Don’t ask me. I know pretty well everything there is to know about clocks, but I don’t understand time.

  I’m getting to the end of mine, now. Maybe in that last moment, as I slip out of it, I’ll be allowed to look back over it from outside and say to myself, “Oh, of course! Now I see!”

  Meanwhile we’ve all got to get along with time, best we can. It’s where we’re at. Maybe that’s why we like stories, because they show us time happening—they’re a sort of practice at time. We’re outside their time.