Philip Dick - Counter Clock World

"Vengeance," Ann said. "That always animates them. Back to the days of Malcolm X's assassination."

Again he nodded.

"Well, what do you personally say about this?" she demanded.

"I've given up," he said, simply.

"They'll be sore as hell at you for stopping me," Ann said. "If they were mad at you before--"

"I know." He had thought of that. While the Anarch was telling him. He had, in fact, been thinking about it ever since.

"Can you get away somewhere? You and Lotta?"

"Maybe Mars," he said.

Once more she squeezed his knee. "I appreciate your telling me. Good luck. Now get out; I'm getting terribly nervous--I want to take off while I still can."

He slid from the car and shut the door. Instantly Ann started up the engine; the car rose swiftly and headed in the direction of mid-afternoon cross-town traffic. Standing there, he watched it go until it had disappeared.

From the elevator entrance two silk-clad Offspring of Might appeared, gun in hand. "What happened?" one demanded. "Why didn't she and you come downstairs?"

I don't know, he started to say. But then, instead, he told them, "I warned her off."

One of the Offspring raised his pistol, started to point it in Sebastian's direction. "Later," the other said rapidly. "Maybe we can catch her; let's go." He raced toward their parked car, and, indecisively, the other forgot about Sebastian and sprinted after him. A moment later they, too, were airborne; he watched them streak off and then he walked to his own car. Inside he sat for a time doing nothing, not even thinking; his mind had become empty.

At last he picked up the car's phone and dialed his own number.

"Goodbye," Lotta said breathlessly, in answer; her eyes dilated when she recognized him. "Is it over?" she asked.

"I tipped her off," he said.

"_Why?_"

Sebastian said, "I'm in love with her. Evidently. What I did would seem to substantiate that."

"Are--the Offspring upset?"

"Yes," he said curtly.

"You really love her? That much?"

"The Anarch told me to do it," he said. "He appeared to me in a vision."

"That's silly." She had, as always, begun to cry; tears rolled unobstructed down her cheeks. "I don't believe you; nobody has visions any more."

"Are you crying because I love Ann Fisher?" he asked. "Or because the Uditi will be after us again?"

"I--don't know." She continued to cry. Helplessly.

Sebastian said, "I'm coming home. I don't mean I don't love you; I love you in a different way. I'm just hung up on her; I shouldn't be but evidently I am. In time I can get rid of it. It's like a neurosis; like obsessive thinking. It's an illness."

"You bastard," Lotta said, choking with grief.

"Okay," he said leadenly. "You're right. Anyhow, the Anarch told me that, told me how I really feel about her. _Can_ I come home? Or should I--"

"Come on home," Lotta said, wiping at her eyes with her knuckle. "We'll decide what to do. Hello." Wanly, she rang off.

He started the engine of his car and ascended into the sky.

When he arrived back at his conapt, Lotta met him on the roof. "I've been thinking," she said, as he emerged from the parked car, "and I realize I have no right to blame you; look what I did with Joe Tinbane." Hesitantly, she reached her arms Out toward him. He hugged her, tightly. "I think you're right when you regard it like an illness," she said, against his shoulder. "We both have to view it that way. And you will get over it. Just like I'm getting over Joe."

Together, they walked to the elevator.

"Since I talked to you," Lotta continued, "I phoned the U.N. people here in L.A. and talked to them about our emigrating to Mars. They said they'd mail us the forms and instructions today."

"Fine," he said.

"It'll be an exciting trip," Lotta said, "if we actually do it. Do you think we will?"

He said, candidly, "I don't know what else we can do."

Downstairs, in their apartment, they faced each other across the small expanse of their living room.

"I'm tired," Sebastian said; he massaged his aching eyes.

"At least now," his wife said, "we don't have to worry about Library agents. Isn't that so? They're probably grateful to you for saving her hide; wouldn't you imagine?"

"The Library won't do us any more harm," he agreed.

"Do you find me insipid?" Lotta asked.

"No," he said. "Not at all."

"That Fisher girl is so--dynamic. So aggressively active."

Sebastian said, "What we've got to do is hide until all our papers are in order and we're aboard a ship heading to Mars. Can you think of any place?" At the moment he could not. He wondered how much time they had. Possibly only minutes. The Offspring could return at each new tick of the clock.

"At the vitarium?" Lotta offered hopefully.

"No chance. They'll look here first, there second."

"A hotel room. Picked at random."

"Maybe," he said, chewing on it.

"Did the Anarch really appear to you in a vision?"

"It seemed so. Maybe--he said it himself--I inhaled too much of the LSD. And what spoke to me consisted of a part of my own mind." He would probably never know. Perhaps it didn't matter.

"I'd like that," Lotta said. "To have a religious vision. But I thought you had visions of people dead. Not living."

"Maybe they had already killed him," Sebastian said. He probably is dead by now, he conjectured. Well, that's that. _Sum tu_, he thought, quoting Ray Roberts. I am you, so when you died I died. And, while I still live, you, too live on. In me. In all of us.

21.

Thou calledst, and shoutedst and burstest my deafness. Thou flashedst, shinest and scatteredst my blindness... Thou did touch me, and I burned for Thy peace.

--St. Augustine

That evening, drably, he and Lotta watched the news on TV.

"All day," the announcer exclaimed, "a crowd of Uditi, the followers of His Mightiness Ray Roberts, has been growing in the vicinity of the People's Topical Library; a restless crowd, surging back and forth in a manner suggesting anger. Los Angeles police, who have kept an eye on the crowd without attempting to interfere with it, expressed fear shortly before five P.M. that an attack on the Library would be soon forthcoming. We talked to a number of persons in the crowd, asking them why they had assembled here and what they proposed to do."

The TV screen showed disjointed scenes of people in motion. Noisy people, mostly men, waving their arms, yelling.

"We talked to Mr. Leopold Haskins and asked him why he had come to parade in front of the Library, and he had this to say."

A burly Negro man, probably in his late thirties, appeared on the TV screen, looking sullen. "Well, I'm here," he said gruffly, "because they got the Anarch in there."

Holding out the portable microphone the TV news announcer said, "They have the Anarch Thomas Peak in the Library, sir?"

"Yeah, they got him in there," Leopold Haskins said. "We heard about ten this morning that not only do they got the Anarch in there but they plan to dispatch him."

"To murder him, sir?" the TV announcer inquired.

"That right; that what we hear."

"And what do you propose to do about it, assuming this to be true?"

"Well, we plan on goin' in there. That what we plan." Leopold Haskins glanced about self-consciously. "They told us that we going to get him out if at all possible, so that why I'm here; I'm here to keep the Library from doin' that terrible thing they plan on doin'."

"Will the police try to stop you, do you think?"

"Uh, no," Leopold Haskins said, taking a deep, shuddering breath. "The L.A. police, they hate the Library bad as we do."

"And why is that, sir?"

"The L.A. police know," Haskins said, "that it was the Library that kilt that policeman yesterday, that Officer Tinbane."