Damon Knight - Orbit 17

This is the paper: no date is in sight,

Nor numbers on pages, nor anything right.

“Is it possible that I, who have always been so far ahead of the times, have now fallen behind the peasants and the peckerwoods?” Melchisedech Duffy asked himself in a loud and truculent voice. His hand was badly burned and he was flustered generally. “Is it possible that this is really the Great Day dawning, and that I alone lack the grace to comprehend it? Oh well, two things at a time. I’ll just go around to that newspaper office, to complain, to cajole, perhaps to correct. But I suspect that the cupless coffee has burned me deeper than my hand.”

The morning paper had been as defective as the morning coffee, and in much the same way. It had no date on any of the pages, and the pages were not numbered. It must have been put together by drunken cajuns working through the night. All the headlines were gathered together on the first two pages (Mel-chisedech supposed they were the first two pages; they weren’t numbered either, and there were no headings at all on any of the stories or articles in the body of the paper).

The whole journal had an odd flavor, fishy or at least amphibian, as though an unmoored thought process were behind it all. The stories just weren’t as newspaper stories should be. They didn’t tell one anything. They made a person want to shout “What did you say?” at the newspaper. Melchisedech was himself a sometime journalist, and this all seemed like sloppy journalism to him. He twitched his whitish beard in annoyance. It had been the first beard of the late Pleistocene, and (the way things were going) it would likely be the last.

But he was uneasy as he went through the streets toward the newspaper building. It just seemed to him that there was something a little bit different about everything this morning. There was something different about the cars and the buses in the streets, a great but subtle difference; and Duffy could not find a name for it immediately.

He several times narrowly missed death on that three-block walk. One reason for the frightful danger that was abroad was the behavior of the frightful traffic signals. They will be considered in a few minutes: who has the nerve to consider them right now?

And there was something very wrong about the newspaper building itself. It was not exactly that there was any new thing added to it. It was more as if some main thing had been forgotten or removed from it. But Melchisedech Duffy boldly entered the somehow wrong newspaper building, and he entered his outraged protest as he usually did.

“Your paper this morning is weird beyond comprehension,” he said to an editorial assistant. Duffy knew the young man slightly, but he could not now remember his name. It was as though the young man’s name had been removed on purpose. In any case, the young man had not taken any notice of Melchisedech’s sputtering statement. Try again, then.

“Your paper this morning is the worst I have ever seen,” Duffy said in an elegant but tight way, and he banged the paper down in front of the young man.

“Why do you say that it is our paper?” the young man said. “Everything is everybody’s now. You will notice that the paper hasn’t any name on it anywhere. Neither do we, the building, I mean.”

“That’s so,” Duffy admitted. “It hasn’t and you haven’t. I wondered what main thing had been removed from this building. It is that big, gawky sign from your roof that is gone.”

“It’s the newest thing not to have a name for anything,” the young man said, “or for anybody. Names are enslaving. But why do you say that it’s this morning’s paper? Being undated, it cannot be identified positively as this morning’s paper. We believe that this is the Great Day Coming itself, and the Great Day is one that doesn’t need a name or a number. Why do you even say that it’s a morning paper? It may be an afternoon or an evening or a graveyard-shift paper.”

“Aw, jay-walking Judas Priest!” Duffy exploded. “Let me talk to the editor. You can’t run a paper like that.”

“We are all equally editors here now,” the young man said. “We are all equally everything, but we will not use that title or any title. We will do just what work we feel like doing, and the days when we are nothing-minded we will do nothing. We call this job enrichment.

“But I don’t believe there will be any paper printed here today. When everything in the world is new, then there can be no such thing as ‘news.’ We may put out a comic book instead. Reruns of old comics, probably. What do you think?”

“I feel like the rerun of an old comic myself,” Melchisedech said. “And you do put me out a bit. How did all these changes happen?”

“All these rectifications, rather. Oh, we noticed that there wasn’t anyone of any importance around the paper last night. So a couple of us persons of no importance put it into effect. That’s the way major things always happen. The paper really should have been brought out blank, but we’re not perfected in the new ways yet.”

“Couldn’t your paper even have said that your Great Day a-Coming had come? Any explanation is better than none at all.”

“It does say so on page—oh, I forgot that pages aren’t numbered anymore. It’s on one of the back pages. It’s a little filler at the bottom.”

“I see that there is no sanity here,” Melchisedech said. He left the newspaper building, unsatisfied. He noticed that the big, gawky sign hadn’t really been removed from the roof of the newspaper building. But it had been felled. It lay in broken pieces, and some of the pieces had fallen into the street. There was a steady sputtering and sparking where the electrical feeders to the big sign had been ruptured. Wires dangled and hissed above the street. “Someone will touch one of those and be killed,” Duffy said. Then he noticed that it had already happened. There was a scorched and charred child on the sidewalk, dead and unnoticed by the passersby. But you can’t make changes without breaking up old patterns of life.

Melchisedech Duffy, pawnbroker, art dealer, bookseller, part-time personage, stood undecided. He wasn’t sure that this was the Great Day, and he wasn’t sure that he liked it if it was.

These are the signals that harry one hence:

These are the beacons that don’t make sense.

Oh, oh, those life-endangering traffic signals once more! There had been a time, no longer ago than last night, when lights were red or green, or they were amber; when the signals said “Go” or they said “Stop”; when they flashed “Walk” or “Don’t walk”; when they indicated turns and such things.

But this morning those signals lit up in a hundred different colors or blends of colors; perhaps some of them were subjective, but they could not all be. And the signals flashed such words as “When you feel like it, go,” “People’s Intersection,” “To stop is to die, to stop growing is to die a little,” “Shout Liberty before crossing,” “If you’re not part of the confluence you’re part of the collision,” “Capricorns should not cross any streets today,” “Leos should not cross any streets ever.” These weren’t the traffic signals that Melchisedech was used to.

“How do you know when to cross the street?” he asked a young lady there. Mighty funny business. Duffy was usually the one to come up with an answer: why did he have to ask this strange young lady?

“It is the Emancipation,” the young lady said with some heat, “and old goatskin here wants to know when to cross the street!” “Don’t people cross streets after the Emancipation?” Duffy asked.

“Only emancipated people. Don’t you relate at all?” the lady asked crossly.