The Complete Short Stories

Conrad shrugged. Blue and yellow clocks, he noticed, outnumbered all others; obviously the major governmental agencies had operated from the plaza area. ‘Highly organized but better than the sort of life we lead,’ he replied finally, more interested in the sights around him. ‘I’d rather have the telephone for one hour a day than not at all. Scarcities are always rationed, aren’t they?’

‘But this was a way of life in which everything was scarce. Don’t you think there’s a point beyond which human dignity is surrendered?’

Conrad snorted. ‘There seems to be plenty of dignity here. Look at these buildings, they’ll stand for a thousand years. Try comparing them with my father. Anyway, think of the beauty of the system, engineered as precisely as a watch.’

‘That’s all it was,’ Stacey commanded dourly. ‘The old metaphor of the cog in the wheel was never more true than here. The full sum of your existence was printed for you in the newspaper columns, mailed to you once a month from the Ministry of Time.’

Conrad was looking off in some other direction and Stacey pressed on in a slightly louder voice. ‘Eventually, of course, revolt came. It’s interesting that in any industrial society there is usually one social revolution each century, and that successive revolutions receive their impetus from progressively higher social levels. In the eighteenth century it was the urban proletariat, in the nineteenth the artisan classes, in this revolt the white collar office worker, living in his tiny so-called modern fiat, supporting through credit pyramids an economic system that denied him all freedom of will or personality, chained him to a thousand clocks…’ He broke off. ‘What’s the matter?’

Conrad was staring down one of the side streets. He hesitated, then asked in a casual voice: ‘How were these clocks driven? Electrically?’

‘Most of them. A few mechanically. Why?’

‘I just wondered… how they kept them all going.’ He dawdled at Stacey’s heels, checking the time from his wristwatch and glancing to his left. There were twenty or thirty clocks hanging from the buildings along the side street, indistinguishable from those he had seen all afternoon.

Except for the fact that one of them was working!

It was mounted in the centre of a black glass portico over an entranceway fifty yards down the right-hand side, about eighteen inches in diameter, with a faded blue face. Unlike the others its hands registered 3.15, the correct time. Conrad had nearly mentioned this apparent coincidence to Stacey when he had suddenly seen the minute hand move on an interval. Without doubt someone had restarted the clock; even if it had been running off an inexhaustible battery, after thirty-seven years it could never have displayed such accuracy.

He hung behind Stacey, who was saying: ‘Every revolution has its symbol of oppression.

The clock was almost out of view. Conrad was about to bend down and tie his shoelace when he saw the minute hand jerk downwards, tilt slightly from the horizontal.

He followed Stacey towards the car, no longer bothering to listen to him. Ten yards from it he turned and broke away, ran swiftly across the roadway towards the nearest building.

‘Newman!’ he heard Stacey shout. ‘Come back!’ He reached the pavement, ran between the great concrete pillars carrying the building. He paused for a moment behind an elevator shaft, saw Stacey climbing hurriedly into the car. The engine coughed and roared out, and Conrad sprinted on below the building into a rear alley that led back to the side-street. Behind him he heard the car accelerating, a door slam as it picked up speed.

When he entered the side-street the car came swinging off the plaza thirty yards behind him. Stacey swerved off the roadway, bumped up on to the pavement and gunned the car towards Conrad, throwing on the brakes in savage lurches, blasting the horn in an attempt to frighten him. Conrad sidestepped out of its way, almost falling over the bonnet, hurled himself up a narrow stairway leading to the first floor and raced up the steps to a short landing that ended in tall glass doors. Through them he could see a wide balcony that ringed the building. A fireescape crisscrossed upwards to the roof, giving way on the fifth floor to a cafeteria that spanned the street to the office building opposite.

Below he heard Stacey’s feet running across the pavement. The glass doors were locked. He pulled a fire-extinguisher from its bracket, tossed the heavy cylinder against the centre of the plate. The glass slipped and crashed to the tiled floor in a sudden cascade, splashing down the steps. Conrad stepped through on to the balcony, began to climb the stairway. He had reached the third floor when he saw Stacey below, craning upwards. Hand over hand, Conrad pulled himself up the next two flights, swung over a bolted metal turnstile into the open court of the cafeteria. Tables and chairs lay about on their sides, mixed up with the splintered remains of desks thrown down from the upper floors.