“And the clock is quite a kidder,” Barnaby said. “Don't worry. All specimens will be returned at the end of the demonstration. Please, Angstrom, let some of the others have a chance at the magic clock. Ah, we have rock hounds loaded down with rocks. Doctor Eimer, would you like to give the clock a question in one way or another?”
“Carrock,” came a happy voice from the next room, and the tinkling of glass.
“What is in that room?” Angstrom asked suspiciously. “Is it man or beast?”
“I don't ask that of your friends, August,” Barnaby said kindly. “Proceed, Doctor Eimer.” And Doctor Eimer put a small stone into the clock slot.
“Give me the age of sedimentation and also the age of metamorphism of that stone,” Doctor Ergodic Eimer asked the clock. “… and also the age of metamorphism,” the clock was finishing its typing the while Barnaby was finishing his examination of the rock which he had taken from the conveyor belt which was below the false bottom of a display case.
Barnaby Sheen knew rocks; he knew them nearly as well as Doctor Ergodic Eimer did. He put the rock back on the belt and began to finger a precious thing in his hand. He did all these things without seeming to do anything. The attention of everybody was fixed on the question-answering typewriting clock.
“Both very recent,” the clock typed. “Age of sedimentation is eighty thousand years. Age of metamorphism is twenty-five to thirty thousand years.”
“My own estimate is somewhat longer,” Eimer said conversationally to the clock, “a hundred thousand years and fifty thousand years, but there is no way of being sure. It is possible that you are correct, clock.”
“… possible that you are correct, clock,” the clock finished the typing.
Petrified wood and blue shale, varved mud just in the process of turning into slate, a handwritten letter, a photograph, a chipped-stone fist hatchet, crinoid fossils, seashells imbedded in limestone, all these went into the clock slot. And the clock typed out what were possibly good answers to their ages.
Barnaby Sheen seemed sometimes inattentive, sometimes very interested.
“What? What did it say?” he asked once, and pushed in to see. “Oh, that's wrong, impossible. There's a malfunction somewhere.”
“Why no, Sheen, that's right, or approximately right,” one of the nondescript persons said. “I suspect that it's exactly right.”
“Really?” Barnaby said. “I had no idea that Trilobites of that sort were so old.”
“The circuitry isn't connected with this stuff at all,” Cris Benedetti whispered to Harry O'Donovan.
“Oh, I knew that all the time,” said the spirit named Mary Mondo.
“No, of course it isn't connected,” Harry said. “But, as Barney once told us, it's easier to sell a big package than a small package. Barnaby may well have something good in a small package there; I'm not sure that he hasn't; and he can merchandise it in as big a box as he wants to.”
And then the clock began to slip. It was on the old bones that it began to slip, and it got worse and worse. There was a sliver of haunch bone from Plateosaurus, that largest of the Triassic dinosaurs. It was put into the clock with a request for a reading. And the clock promptly typed out “One million years old.”
“Great Osseous Insanity, the thing is wrong!” rang the voice of Professor Ergodic Eimer. “Sheen, it should be nearer to one hundred and eighty million years.”
“Carrock,” rang the voice in the next room. “Carrock, carrock, carrock.”
“The clock is right,” Barnaby Sheen insisted. “It's always right.”
There was a nostril bone of the Hemicyon. “Three hundred and fifty-five years,” the clock typed after it had made an appraisal.
“It's a million years if it's a day,” howled one of those nondescript persons from City Museum. “This is an insult to the intelligence.”
“Carrock, carrock,” came the voice from the next room. It had a touch of amusement and was accompanied by the rattle of glasses.
“Sheen,” Velikov Vonk muttered in a low voice. “To hell with the clock. I just want to see that creature.”
“Wait till the others leave then,” Barnaby said. “He wants to try his hand at serving only a small bunch of us first.”
A prize was coming up. It was quite a small bone but it would be the test. The Investigators were primed for this one. And the small bone smelled (though not to the nose) unmistakably of Almost Man.
“Now we will see,” said those scientists and skeptics. And one of them set the thing into the maw of the clock. There was a long pause then, longer than usual.
“Carrock,” came the voice from the next room, and it had a touch of recognition in it. Those fellows have always been fantastic in their sensing.
Barnaby Sheen had already examined the thing on the conveyor belt that was under a display case. He walked about the room while everybody waited for the clock. And Barnaby diddled his right-hand fingers in his left palm. So that was the way he did it! He held a miniature wireless remote control in his palm, and he diddled the letters for the clock to type. And it typed.
“Fifty-five years since the inanimation or death of the creature,” it typed, “and seventy-seven years since its birth.”
And all those great visitors howled like maniacs at that poor machine of a clock. But the “Carrock, carrock” in the next room had turned into a chortle.
“Any fool would know that it has to be over a million years old,” August Angstrom swore furiously. “Clock, do you even know what it is?”
“Sure,” the clock typed after it had recorded and filed the question. “It is the characteristic short canine tooth of the Australopithecus. I can't in conscience add even a month to the elapsed time since the death of the creature. Fifty-five years, almost exactly. I can even tell you where the tooth came from.”
“Where?” Angstrom blurted.
“… where?” the clock recorded and filed. Then it answered. “Oh, from Ethiopia, about seventy miles northwest of Magdala, on the Guna Slopes. The creatures still thrive there.”
“Monkey-faced malarky!” August swore. “The species has been extinct for over a million years.”
Barnaby Sheen was flexing his fingers as though they were cramped. He had been doing a lot of fingering on his small remote-control gadget. And then he fingered some more.
“… been extinct for over a million years,” the clock finished typing the statement. “Carrock,” came the friendly voice from the next room. Then the clock began to rattle with new typing:
“The species still lives and thrives. It is true that, about a million years ago, the species did pull in all its ill-conceived and badly established colonies, and thereafter it lived only in its small and straited homeland. It still lives there.”
That broke up the party and the investigation. There were cries of “Fake” and “sick joke.” There were remarks about the ancestry of both the clock and Barnaby Sheen. Then half a dozen men and two women stomped furiously out. Indignation lingered after them like fog in the room.
There remained only the four men who knew everything, and myself who did not, and Professor Velikov Vonk; and perhaps two others who were really permanent features of the room. We were all slightly shaken and mightily depressed by the intolerance and violence of the leaving.
From the next room came “Carrock,” inquiringly, almost wistfully.
“All right, fellow,” Barnaby Sheen called loudly. “We're ready when you're ready.”
It, he, came into the room then. He had on a neat white bartender's jacket. He had a pad and pencil in his hands. He was grinning, he was hairy, he was simian in some rakish way, he was manlike or at least boylike in a more subtle way, and he was eager to be of service.
“Name your drinks, folks,” Barnaby said. “Myself, I'll have an Old Fashioned.” And the creature wrote something down on the pad. “Salty Doll, please,” said the life-sized sawdust-filled doll on the sofa, the doll that was perhaps Loretta Sheen. And the creature wrote.
“Fraidy Lady,” said the spirit named Mary Mondo. And then, in her confiding voice she said, “He's done wonders with Loretta in just the two days he's been here. He has her talking in words now, about as well as he does, and she couldn't do it before for a long time.”
“Bloody Mary,” said Cris Benedetti.
“Green Giannopoulos,” said Doctor George Drakos, “and I hope you can make them better than Barney here can. It isn't his specialty.” The creature grinned. He was getting it all down.
“Grasshopper,” said Harry O'Donovan. The creature wrote, and there was a pause.
“Laff?” Barnaby Sheen asked.
“Oh, Cuba Libra,” I said.
“Manhattan,” said Velikov Vonk. The creature went back to his little barroom.
“Do you really have a magic clock, Sheen?” Velikov asked.
“Yes I do,” Barnaby said. “I have it in my head, almost worked out. And this little play-act that I put on gave me some good ideas. It doesn't hurt to unveil a thing a year or two before it comes along. It will work. You'll see. I'll build it any year now.”
“Well, he is an Australopithecus, isn't he?” I asked finally. “The bartender, I mean.”
They all looked at me with pity. “Of course he is,” several of them finally said.
The Austro brought in the drinks. He had them all right, and they were perfect. And after a while he brought in more.
A living Australopithecus! Well, was he an animal, or was he a man? But I already knew the answer; he was neither yet. He was a boy. And which would he be? Oh, it wasn't certain, but the odds were better on him turning out to be a man than were the odds on most sapiens boys.
Time went by. How much time?
“The clock on the wall isn't working,” Barnaby said. “Does anybody have the right time?”
“The right time? It's sunrise, of course,” the spirit girl Mary Mondo said. “The demiurge with the sunshine brains has arrived and that makes it sunrise.”
Austro grinned. In him were the prophecies fulfilled. It wasn't sunrise literally though; it was about midnight. But nobody had the right time.
“Your magic clock, Barney?” Drakos asked. “Can't it give us the time?”
“Sure, correct within two or three days.”
It didn't matter. It was good time, pleasant time. The drinks were fine, and Austro stood willing and ready to serve.
The World As Will And Wallpaper
A template, a stencil, a plan.
Corniest, orniest damsel and man,
Orderly, emptily passion and pity,
All-the-World, All-the-World, All-the-World City.
—13th Street Ballad
There is an old dictionary-encyclopedia that defines a City as “…a concentration of persons that is not economically self-contained.” The dictionary-encyclopedia being an old one, however (and there is no other kind), is mistaken. The World City is economically self-contained.
It was William Morris who read this definition in the old book. William was a bookie, or readie, and he had read parts of several books. But now he had a thought: If all the books are old, then things may no longer be as the books indicate. I will go out and see what things are like today in the City. I will traverse as much of the City as my life allows me. I may even come to the Wood Beyond the World that my name-game ancestor described.
William went to the Permit Office of the City. Since there was only one City, there might be only one Permit Office, though it was not large.
“I want a permit to traverse as much of the City as my life allows me,” William told the permit man. “I even want a permit to go to the Wood Beyond the World. Is that possible?”
The permit man did a little skittish dance around William, “like a one-eyed gander around a rattlesnake.” The metaphor was an old and honored one, one of the fifty-four common metaphors. They both understood it: it didn't have to be voiced. William was the first customer the permit man had had in many days, though, so the visit startled him.
“Since everything is permitted, you will need no permit,” the permit man said. “Go, man, go.”
“Why are you here then?” William asked him. “If there are no permits, why is there a Permit Office?”
“This is my niche and my notch,” the permit man said. “Do away with me and my office and you begin to do away with the City itself. It is the custom to take a companion when you traverse the City.”
Outside, William found a companion named Kandy Kalosh and they began to traverse the City that was the World. They began (it was no more than coincidence) at a marker set in stone that bore the words “Beginning of Stencil 35,352.” The City tipped and tilted a bit, and they were on their way. Now this is what the City was like:
It was named Will of the World City, for it had been constructed by a great and worldwide surge of creative will. Afterward, something had happened to that surge, but it did not matter; the City was already created then.
The City was varied, it was joyful, it was free and it covered the entire world. The mountains and heights had all been removed, and the City, with its various strips of earth and sweet water and salt water, floated on the ocean on its interlocking floaters. As to money values, everything was free; and everything was free as to personal movement and personal choice. It was not really crowded except in the places where the people wanted it crowded, for people do love to congregate. It was sufficient as to foodstuff and shelter and entertainment. These things have always been free, really; it was their packaging and traffic that cost, and now the packaging and traffic were virtually eliminated.
“Work is joy” flashed the subliminal signs. Of course it is. It is a joy to stop and turn into an area and work for an hour, even an hour and a half, at some occupation never or seldom attempted before. William and Kandy entered an area where persons made cloth out of clamshells, softening them in one solution, then drawing them out to filaments on a machine, then forming (not weaving) them into cloth on still another machine. The cloth was not needed for clothing or for curtains, though sometimes it was used for one or the other. It was for ornamentation. Temperature did not require cloth (the temperature was everywhere equitable) and modesty did not require it, but there was something that still required a little cloth as ornament.
William and Kandy worked for nearly an hour with other happy people on the project. It is true that their own production was all stamped “Rejected” when they were finished, but that did not mean that it went all the way back to the clamshells, only back to the filament stage.
“Honest labor is never lost,” William said as solemnly as a one-horned owl with the pip.
“I knew you were a readie, but I didn't know you were a talkie,” Kandy said. People didn't talk much then. Happy people have no need to talk. And of course honest labor is never lost, and small bits of it are pleasurable.
This portion of the City (perhaps all portions of the City) floated on an old ocean itself. It had, therefore, a slight heave to it all the time. “The City is a tidy place” was an old and honored saying. It referred to the fact that the City moved a little with the tides. It was a sort of joke.
The two young persons came ten blocks; they came a dozen. For much of this traverse the City had been familiar to William but not to Kandy. They had been going west, and William had always been a westing lad. Kandy, however, had always wandered east from her homes, and she was the farthest west that she had ever been when she met William.
They came to the 14th Street Water Ballet and watched the swimmers. These swimmers were very good, and great numbers of curiously shaped fish frolicked with them in the green salt-fresh pools. Anyone who wished to could, of course, swim in the Water Ballet, but most of the swimmers seemed to be regulars. They were part of the landscape, of the waterscape.
William and Kandy stopped to eat at an algae-and-plankton quick-lunch place on 5th Street. Indeed, Kandy worked there for half an hour, pressing the plankton and adding squirts of special protein as the people orde
red it. Kandy had worked in quick-lunch places before.
The two of them stopped at the Will of the World Exhibit Hall on 6th Street. They wrote their names with a stylus in wax when they went in, or rather William wrote the names of both of them for Kandy could not write. And because he bore the mystic name of William, he received a card ut of the slot with a genuine Will of the World verse on it:
This City of the World is wills
Of Willful folk, and nothing daunts it.
With daring hearts we hewed the hills
To make the World as Willy wants it.
Really, had it taken such great will and heart to build the City of the World? It must have or there would not have been a Will of the World Exhibit Hall to commend it. There were some folks, however, who said that the building of the World City had been an automatic response.
Kandy, being illiterate (as the slot knew), received a picture card.
They stopped at the Cliff-Dweller Complex on 7th Street. This part of the City was new to William as well as to Kandy.
The cliffs and caves were fabricated and not natural cliff dwellings, but they looked very much as old cliff dwellings must have looked. There were little ladders going up from one level to the next. There were people sitting on the little terraces with the small-windowed apartments behind them. Due to the circular arrangement of the cliff dwellings, very many of the people were always visible to one another. The central courtyard was like an amphitheater. Young people played stickball and Indian ball in this area. They made music on drums and whistles. There were artificial rattlesnakes in coils, artificial rib-skinny dogs, artificial coyotes, artificial women in the act of grinding corn with hand querns. And also, in little shelters or pavilions, there were real people grinding simulacrum corn on apparatus.
Kandy Kalosh went into one of the pavilions and ground corn for fifteen minutes. She had a healthy love for work. William Morris made corndogs out of simulacrum corn and seaweeds. It was pleasant there. Sometimes the people sang simulacrum Indian songs. There were patterned blankets, brightly colored, and woven out of bindweed. There were buffoons in masks and buffoon suits who enacted in-jokes and in-situations that were understood by the cliff-dwelling people only, but they could be enjoyed by everyone.
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 151