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By Root 1400 0

the gas themselves, and we are choosing a delegate to speak up boldly for Unthank at the general assembly of council states soon to be held in Provan. The fact is that the council has treated Unthank badly. It is a long time since they introduced their decimal calendar based on the twenty-five-hour day. They promised us new clocks, so we rashly scrapped the old ones, and the new clocks failed to arrive. I was a young man then and I confess that, like most people, I didn’t care. Everyone likes to feel they have plenty of time; nobody likes seeing how fast it passes. But we can’t cope with a public emergency without clocks, so we have created a new department, our own department of chronometry. This department has commandeered a television channel—this television channel—and I will show you what it is going to transmit.”

Sludden walked over to a clock hanging on a wall, a pendulum clock with a case shaped like a small log cabin.

“Fucking miraculous,” said Macfee, opening another beer can. Helen said, “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”

“This is one of many clocks recently unearthed from museums, lumber-rooms and antique shops. It may not look very impressive, but it is the first to be restored to perfect working order. When the others have been repaired they will be installed in the head offices of our essential services, and each one of them will be synchronized with this.”

Sludden pointed to a weight shaped like a fir cone.

“Notice that the weight has been wound up and placed on a small shelf immediately under the case. At the end of this announcement, I will suspend it, and the clock will strike the hours of midnight: the time when an old day dies and a new day begins. The sound will be reinforced by a long blast upon police and factory sirens, who will repeat the noise at noon tomorrow. Employees of the chronometry department have also taken over ninety-two church towers with bells in them, and from now on they too will broadcast the message of this little clock.

“I know that quiet-minded people will find this a rude intrusion on their privacy; that intellectuals will say that a return to a solar timescale, when we don’t have sunlight, is putting clocks backward, not forward; and that manual workers, who time themselves by their pulses, will find the whole business irrelevant. Never mind. This clock allows me to make definite promises. By eight o’clock tomorrow every house, mohome, office and factory will have received an envelope of plastic wastebags. By ten o’clock the first free tubes of plastic cement will be available at your local post office. And at every hour I or some other corporation representative will appear on this channel to tell you how things are going. And now—”

Said Sludden taking the weight in his hand—

“I wish you all a very good night. Eternity, for Greater Unthank, is drawing to an end. Time is about to begin.”

He suspended the weight. The pendulum swung left with a tick, then right with a tock. The clock face grew till it nearly filled the windscreen. Both hands pointed straight upright to a small door above the dial, which flapped open. A fat wooden bird popped out and in shouting “Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuck—” Macfee turned a switch and the windscreen went transparent. The three of them sat in a row and stared through it at the darkened carpark. Sirens, hooters and distant clanging could be heard outside. Helen switched on a light.

“A maniac!” said Macfee. “The man’s a maniac.”

“Oh no,” said Lanark. “I’ve known him a long time, and he’s not a maniac. As a private person I don’t trust him, but he seems to have thoroughly grasped the political situation. And that speech sounded honest to me.”

“He’s a friend of yours?”

“No, a friend of my wife.”

Macfee leaned over and grabbed Lanark’s lapels and said, “What’s the score?”

“Jimmy!” cried Helen.

Lanark cried, “What’s wrong?”

“That’s what I’m asking you! You’ve a council passport, right? And you work for social stability, right? You know Sludden, right? So just tell me what you folk are trying to do!”

Lanark had been half dragged across Helen