THE GALACTIC CLOCK

THE GALACTIC CLOCK
by Vonda N. McIntyre

Originally published in Generation: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction ed. David Gerrold, Stephen Goldin in 1972

ELROY FINCHWOOD drove down the main street of the university district and hit every one of the synchronized stoplights on the red. When he was younger, he used to joke about it. If anyone was in the car with him (which happened seldom) he would say, “Watch that light up there; stoplights lie in wait for me. Watch! It’ll go red just before I get there.” And sure enough, it would. Just before he got there. Lately, he had stopped joking about it.

Elroy used to drive a stickshift car. He liked stickshifts, especially four-on-the-floor stickshifts. They made him feel younger, once he passed forty. But finally he gave up the single luxury of an English-made sportscar and bought a piece of Detroit iron with an automatic transmission, all because of the stoplights. They always began to change at exactly the right time, when the car was in exactly the wrong gear, to catch him as he was going just barely too fast to downshift without grinding the gears, barely too slowly to accelerate without straining the engine. He could have afforded the normal upkeep on his Coventry feline, but replacing the engine, the transmission, and the hydraulic clutch every year or so was too much for his bank account.

If it had only been the stoplights, it might not have bothered him. Everyone has their own little air pockets in the jetstream of life. For some people it’s stoplights, for some it’s hotel clerks, for many it’s the telephone company. But for Elroy Finchwood, it was everything. It had been everything since before he could remember.

In kindergarten, the bus driver hated him. He ignored his stop every chance he got. Elroy was scolded by his teacher for dawdling and missing the bus on the way to school, and by his mother for not paying attention and missing his stop on the way home. That started Elroy out on the wrong foot in school, especially when the bus driver added a new improved twist to hating him, and began splashing him with mud whenever there was a puddle near Elroy that he could drive through. Elroy’s teacher began writing notes home to Elroy’s mother about how messy he was. When Elroy’s mother saw Elroy’s clothes, she agreed that he was messy, but since she knew he had never been deliberately messy before, she decided it was the effect of public education on her son. That began a twelve-year border war between Elroy’s mother and Elroy’s teachers. Elroy was the border.

The bus driver retired the year after Elroy graduated.

Elroy wasn’t deliberately clumsy, either. He always got “excellent” scores on the agility tests all the gym classes had to take. And he always made the President’s National Physical Fitness Team. But he could never serve the tennis ball, or hit the golf ball, or pitch the baseball, or pass the football. He was always in the wrong place during the wrong play. By the time he got to junior high school they had quit picking him for the team. Any team.

He wasn’t naturally stupid. But tests made him deathly nervous. He would study all the previous week and late the night before the test. Still, when the time came, his palms would be sweaty and the pencil would shake in his hand. He answered the questions as best he could. Often he would seem to remember the correct answer to a question earlier in the exam, so he would go back and change it. He always changed it from a right answer to a wrong answer. Every time he did it, he was certain that this time he was writing down a right answer. He was always wrong. Sometimes he would solve a problem with actual glee, so certain was he that he was correct. Later, usually a few minutes after the examination hour, the real solution would come to him in a flash, and he would know that, once again, he had been wrong. 

After a while it began to depress him.

Some people are natural-born marks. They walk around their lives with everything they own held out on a silver platter, offered up as a sacrifice to cleverer men. If Elroy Finchwood had been a mark, he wouldn’t have been so depressed, because the marks of the world never know who they are. Elroy was generous, and even possibly a little naïve, but he was too honest to be swindled. Swindling requires an element of dishonesty in the person being swindled.

And Elroy wasn’t ignorant of his situation. He knew there was something wrong with him.

He just never could quite figure out what it was.

When he graduated from high school, he desperately hoped that his luck would change. He should have known better. He was given an obvious omen when he applied to an out-of-state college and was informed by return mail that their application date was December 15, while his forms had arrived December 16. Thank you for the ten-dollar application fee; it would help cover the cost of turning down the inconsiderate people who applied late.

His adviser swore up, down, and sideways that the year before the out-of-state college’s deadline had been in the middle of May.

Elroy went to State U.

He entered with high hopes that plummeted almost immediately. Because his application had come so late, his registration date was one of the last available. The adviser who was supposed to help him fill out his tentative schedule was tired, irritable, bored, and angry at the administration for refusing his request for a paid leave of absence to study the Ik tribe of southwest Africa before they became either completely civilized or completely extinct. Naturally, he took it out on Elroy.

“Elroy Finchwood, huh?” he grumbled as Elroy entered his office.

“Yes, sir,” young Elroy said, hesitantly handing him his schedule computer card.

The adviser took one look at it. “All these classes are filled. You’ll have to pick some others.”

“But,” Elroy said.

“Look, Elroy,” the adviser said, “I haven’t got time to argue with you. If you haven’t got the sense to get in here early enough to get the classes you want, that’s your own stupid fault.” He picked up a crumpled piece of computer paper and handed it over. “These are the classes that were open as of lunchtime today. You’d better choose at least thirty credits’ worth; then you might get twelve of them.”

“But,” Elroy started to say, remembering that all freshmen were supposed to carry a full load of sixteen credits, fifteen academic and one physical education, with the exception of freshmen with athletic scholarships, for whom the proportion was reversed.

“Come on, kid,” the adviser said impatiently.

Elroy picked a handful of classes, almost at random, because they all looked dull. The adviser stamped his signature on the still-blank card and sent Elroy out.

Elroy sat on the edge of the sidewalk, filling out the multitudinous spaces for name, student-body number, social-security number, age, sex, class, college, major, parents/guardian, address of parents/guardian (please include zip code), telephone number(s) of parents/guardian, alternate person to call in case of emergency (be sure to include zip code), telephone number of alternate person to call in case of emergency, permanent mailing address (postal regulations require zip code), local mailing address (omitting zip code is grounds for dismissal from university), local telephone number, hair color (natural and current), eye color (with and without contact lenses), height, weight, dental history, home town, city of birth, state of birth, country of birth (aliens are required to register with the adviser for foreign students, minority students, and financially embarrassed students), hospital of birth, date of birth, and sex at birth.

There was a special section headed “Race (this information will be kept completely confidential and is used only for university records, federal-aid programs, integrating housing, and press releases):” □ Negro □ Mexican-American □ American Indian □ Japanese-American □ Chinese-American □ Puerto-Rican

Elroy’s family was so thoroughly WASP that it couldn’t even enjoy the horse-thief somewhere back there on the distaff side. He left the section blank.

Before he could finish, one of the campus policemen drove by in his school-colors-colored jeep and told him to get his feet out of the street.

Elroy took his schedule computer card over to the administration building. In the registration room were long desks all around the walls, at which sat little old ladies wearing flowered print dresses and stockings with seams. As he watched from the long line, they passed scraps of paper between themselves, like overage schoolgirls. Nearly an hour later his name was called, and he went in, his schedule card clutched in his hand. He gave it to his registration lady.

She looked at it. “Oh, dear,” she said, “most of these classes are closed.”

“But,” Elroy began.

“I’m sorry!” she said. “That’s just the way it is! All you teen-agers come in here and blame me because the classes you want aren’t open! Blame the fire department for their fire regulations! Blame the administration for not building bigger classrooms! Blame the professors for cutting off enrollment when the class is only ten or twenty over the limit! But don’t blame me!” She shook the card under his nose. “You young whippersnappers think you can come in here and have everything your own way! You come in here and riot and tear things apart and kill people and destroy important papers and even misprogram the computer!” Tears were running down her shrunken cheeks, she was standing up from her high stool, and her voice had risen to a shriek.

“But,” Elroy said, meaning to reassure her by saying that as far as he knew, State U hadn’t had a riot in years, and that he wouldn’t dream of misprogramming the computer.

“Aaaaaaa!” she screamed.

The other registration ladies clustered around her, saying, “Why, Florence, what’s the matter?” and “I knew this would happen someday,” and “She’s been very nervous lately,” and, to Elroy, “What did you do to her?”

Elroy stood there, flabbergasted, as they led the trembling little old lady away. He didn’t know what he had done to her. As far as he knew, he hadn’t done anything to her.

After another delay they finally let him register with a lady with steel-gimlet eyes who snarled at him, kept referring to “poor little Florence,” and gave him his four last-choice classes. He ended up with beginning English, beginning Spanish, minor English poets of dadaism, and roller skating I.

Then, before he could leave, he was ordered up to the dean’s office to explain why he had harassed poor Miss Florence. And as anyone knows who has ever been called to the dean’s office, that is an unpleasant scene that need not be repeated, here or anywhere else. For anyone who has not been called to the dean’s office but is curious: don’t be. The experience left young Elroy wondering if he might not have been better off sending for a by-mail course in interior decorating, hotel/motel management, or mine-sweeper conversion.

After six months at State U, something right finally seemed to be happening to Elroy. He fell in love. With a girl. He had never been in love before, with a girl or otherwise. Her name was Elsie, and she was beautiful.

Well, she wasn’t actually beautiful, but Elroy thought she was beautiful. Besides, she gave him kissing and fondling lessons.

You see, Elroy was (of course) a virgin.

It was inevitable that they would end up in his or her room, eventually. It turned out to be his room, because his roommate went away for the weekend at just the right time.

Now, in enlightened State U, members of the opposite sex were permitted in students’ rooms until ten P.M. A good deal of leeway was allowed, or, as it were, infractions were overlooked. No one, in fact, had ever been turned in for overextending the time limit for a couple of hours, or days, or whatever.

Unfortunately, Elroy had had an argument with the adviser in his dormitory. Well, it hadn’t actually been an argument, it was more of a one-sided lover’s quarrel. Singular “lover.” Elroy’s adviser had contracted a fixation on Elroy’s body, which wasn’t really all that great, but as they say, love is blind. Elroy, naïve as he was, was blind too, to the point of the proposition. The adviser had minced off angrily, or maybe not so much angrily as feeling betrayed. Both he and Elroy were in minor English poets of dadaism II, for which Elroy had shown a surprising flair, and the adviser had no ability whatsoever. Elroy had offered to study with the adviser, in total innocence, but the adviser had come to the obvious (obvious to him) conclusion.

Now, 10:10 P.M., Friday, April 13, he had come back to Elroy’s room to give him another chance. Elroy, not expecting his roommate back until Sunday evening, and never getting any other company, had neglected to lock the door. The adviser knocked once and came in.

After his rejection, finding Elroy’s room occupied by a girl was a lot to take. He might have been able to do it, except that the girl was in bed with Elroy. That was just too much to accept. The adviser turned bright green with envy.

Elroy turned over and saw him standing in the doorway, and he turned bright red.

“Uh,” he said, “we’re just friends.”

Somehow, it didn’t sound too convincing.

He would have gotten away with it if it had been ten to ten instead of ten after ten. There was no official black-and-white rule against students’ sleeping together, because of the adult version of “My parents wouldn’t do anything like that.” Since the time rule would obviously prevent the children from being together during the extremely dangerous middle of the night, no more explicit rule was needed. Besides, the board of regents got tongue-tied every time it tried to talk over the situation.

But the time rule was in black-and-white, and it was theoretically hard-and-fast. It was in actuality hard-and-fast, when it was enforced. The adviser chose to enforce it. 

Elroy was politely requested to remove his belongings and his person from the dormitory, forthwith. He spent the rest of his college years in a musty boarding house room (phone number 696-3825) half an hour’s walk off-campus. The worst of it all was that Elsie dropped him like a rock.

She was the first girl who had ever been able to turn on Elroy’s adviser.

Elroy had problems with his classes, too. He had always been bad at languages, but there was a graduation requirement of two years, minimum, of a foreign language, and there was no way out. He chose Spanish because someone had told him once that it was the closest thing to English. It took him three tries to pass the first quarter.

It took him five years to get his B.A., partly because of that silly Spanish course and partly because he couldn’t find a major he was sure he liked for two years, and then had to catch up. It seemed for a while that his indecision would work well for him, because by the time he decided what to major in (minor English poets), he had completely taken care of all his distribution requirements: twenty credits in natural sciences, twenty credits in social sciences, twenty credits in humanities (outside his major field, of course), not to mention the math requirement, the physical-education requirement, the English proficiency requirement, and that ever-present foreign-language requirement.

The quarter after he had finished his last required credit, the campus radicals finally succeeded in having all distribution and proficiency requirements dropped.

After getting his B.A., Elroy had to wait a year before he could begin graduate school, because somehow his name had been put at the bottom of the list, and enrollment in the graduate school closed after the name above his had been accepted.

Why did he go to graduate school? Why didn’t he get out when he had the opportunity?

There’s nothing more worthless than a minor-English-poets major without an LL. D., except perhaps a minor-English-poets major without an M.A. Elroy, having chosen this path, had to go the whole route, or start all over again.

When he was about thirty he received his doctoral degree, and was hired by State U as a beginning professor. (The campus radicals had also done away with assistant, associate, and full professorial categories, not to mention tenure. It didn’t help much. You still got fired if you didn’t publish. They didn’t call it firing, of course, but a request to resign is pretty much the same thing.)

He wanted to go to Oxford, but his ordinary luck prevailed, and the position went to someone else, a Dr. H. M. Bateaux. What Elroy didn’t know, fortunately for his sanity, was that “H. M.” stood for “Hermione Marie,” and that she was picked over him because the adviser at Oxford had contracted a fixation on Hermione Marie’s body, which, unlike Elroy’s, was very shapely.

So Elroy took up his position at State U, telling bored freshmen about minor English poets of all periods. He wasn’t a bad teacher. He just wasn’t very good. The same kind of things that had plagued his college years inflicted themselves on his professional career.

For example, on his first day he went to the room where his class was scheduled to meet. When the bell rang, he looked around and discovered that he was surrounded by fifty-three women, ranging in age from twenty-eight to sixty-four. It didn’t look like the class of assorted freshmen his computer list showed.

“Uh,” Elroy said. “Is this minor English poets of the Romantic period?”

As a unit, the class giggled. When they had finished the first giggle at his question, and the second giggle at his bright-red face, one of them managed to get out, “No, this is librarianship 530.”

Unlike most quarters, which began on a Monday, this quarter began on a Tuesday. Elroy’s class, being a three-credit course, met on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Librarianship 530, being a two-credit course, met (in the same room) on Tuesday and Thursday.

Still blushing, Elroy made his exit. On the way out he ran into the diminutive librarianship professor, scattering her books, teaching materials, and computer lists all over the hall in the process.

He hoped that once he settled down into the routine of life as a college professor his luck might go to sleep for a while. But, again, his hopes were dashed. Everything still went wrong, all the little, annoying, completely frustrating things. They were like a cloud of gnats that followed him everywhere.

He had a class in the morning, where the chalk would crumble or the lamp in the overhead projector would burn out or the microphone would squeal with feedback or the fluorescent lights would flicker headachingly on and off all period. At lunch he would play gin rummy with his alter ego from the French department (an LL.D. in minor French poets who had gotten interested in the subject through minor French poets of the Victorian era). As always, he would begin throwing away a run just before the card to fill it came up in his draw. He had a two-thirty class in the building next to the construction area where they used jackhammers once a day—from two-thirty to three-thirty. He would go home and hit every red light on the way. He would go for his walk, hitting all the “Don’t Walk” signs. He would grade papers, and his nonsmear ball-point pen would glop all over them. He would eat a chicken TV dinner, probably a new brand, because he could never find one that wasn’t still raw at twenty minutes at 350°, but burned at twenty-one minutes at 350°. He would watch television, with which these days not too much could go wrong, except that his next-door neighbor always used his power saw while Elroy’s taped educational-television lecture was running. Along about ten o’clock his telephone would begin ringing, because (as he discovered the first week he lived there) his telephone was only one digit off from that of the local house of ill repute. For a little while it was interesting, then the three-A.M. calls began to get tedious. When he tried to have his number changed, the telephone company gave him such a royal runaround that he gave up with them and called the police, feeling it his civic duty. The police told him huffily that there was no prostitution in their city. The night Elroy unplugged his phone at nine P.M., the dean (who had recently forgiven him for driving Miss Florence into the nuthouse) called to ask him to come to a faculty tea. When he couldn’t get him the first time, he tried again, misdialed, and was connected to a certain young lady. When she found out that not only did the dean not want to see her, but that he didn’t even want to talk to her, she told him to go and perform a couple of acts which were not only not natural but which were not even very comfortable, either. For that, the dean never did forgive Elroy. And what’s more, Elroy missed the faculty tea. After that, he left his phone plugged in.

It got to be too much for him. After one particularly bad day (he had gone to the office of his assistant, a very promising young graduate student in minor English novelists, and found him in an undeniably compromising position with a freshman woman), he went to the university hospital for an appointment with the harassed insurance-company doctor who had to see all the students, faculty, and staff covered by the university health insurance. The doctor shoved the dry wooden tongue depressor down his throat too far and nearly made him sick, missed the reflex nerve in Elroy’s knee and hit instead what appeared to be a secondary funny bone, gave Elroy a bottle of tranquilizers and an appointment with the staff psychiatrist, and disappeared into his back office to write a paper for the Journal of the American Medical Association on “The Discovery of a Previously Unknown Nerve Center in the Carpal Joint of the Human Male.”

For forty-five minutes the psychiatrist listened to Elroy’s hard-luck story. Then, with the same tone he would use when giving a panhandler a quarter, he said, “Mr. Finchwood, I think you should take a vacation. You are obviously overworked. You may—”

“But,” Elroy said, “if I take a vacation I’ll be letting myself in for all kinds of horrible things.”

“Now, Mr, Finchwood,” the psychiatrist said calmingly, “you haven’t been listening. You have obviously developed a fixation, and the only way to cure it is to confront it! Confront it and overcome it! You may—”

“But,” Elroy said.

“Mr. Finchwood! Trust me!” the psychiatrist said.

“All right,” Elroy said miserably.

“You may pay the receptionist,” the psychiatrist said. 

Elroy was three dollars short.

For a long time he debated whether or not to take the psychiatrist’s advice. It was possible that he did have a fixation on his luck. Maybe the thing to do was confront it. He made his decision, finally: he would take a vacation.

As a precaution, he made very definite plans: two days in New York, two in Boston, one in Atlantic City, three in Avalon, and a week in Miami Beach. He bought all his tickets well in advance, reconfirmed all his reservations, and figured out how much money he would need, then multiplied the figure by 2.5. Then he set off for New York.

Elroy had once had dealings with a fly-by-night travel agency which had taken his money and lived up to its name. After that, he decided to make his own reservations. The airline swore this was the first time since it was installed that their Auto-Reserve computer had ever made a mistake.

His luxury hotel was overbooked—but they had reserved a room for him, at their own expense, at another fine hotel. No extra charge. You’re welcome, sir. Elroy could never remember the real name of the hotel he ended up in; he always thought of it as La Cucaracha. It was the only time he ever got any use out of his two years of college Spanish,

On his first afternoon in New York, Elroy went to the Empire State Building. For the first time in twenty years (since the Blackout), the elevator stuck between floors. Elroy, of course, was in it at the time. By the time he got out it was long past dinnertime, and long past the time of the (very expensive) reservation he had made at a (very expensive) restaurant.

But everything hadn’t gone wrong. He still had his ticket to the hot new off-Broadway musical Bald. He waved for a taxi until a bus went by. After a roundabout ride, three transfers, two fare increases, and a proposition, he arrived at the theater.

There was a rent-a-fuzz at the door, inspecting tickets. There had been a recent rash of counterfeit show passes lately. Elroy’s was one of them. Sorry, Charlie.

“But,” Elroy said, meaning to tell him that he had paid a scalper a substantial amount so he could see this show, and that his name wasn’t Charlie.

“Get along, Buster,” the rent-a-fuzz said, making another mistake about Elroy’s name, though he’d just seen his driver’s license, his social-security card, three credit cards, and his faculty photo ID. “I could take you in as accessory after the fact, you know. You’re getting off damned lucky.”

Elroy still had his last prize: a ticket to the incredibly popular, long-running Rick Cravett Show. On the second and last day of his stay in New York, he went to the Rockefeller Building and took his seat in fourteenth row center. He was looking forward to seeing in person the witty, intelligent talk-show host whom he had admired for so many years. Elroy had always said that Cravett was the only host on the air who knew when to shut up and let his guests speak, yet never let them talk themselves into a hole without having a quick remark ready to relieve the pressure.

The announcer, out of sight and safe in the announcer’s box, announced that Mr. Cravett had caught the Saigon flu and, for the first time in fifteen years of hosting talk shows, was too ill to come on. Donny Kerson was going to host the show tonight.

Elroy hadn’t seen Donny Kerson in years. For that matter, neither had anyone else. It was nostalgic, watching him mug at the camera while the secretary-general of the U.N. was trying to speak her piece, but Elroy had come to see Rick Cravett, and he was terribly disappointed.

After the show, the announcer announced that there were a limited number of tickets to the next night’s program, at which Mr. Cravett would surely be, and that anyone very dissatisfied with tonight could get a ticket for tomorrow if they hurried. Elroy made some fast calculations and realized that if he stayed an extra day, the airline cancellation penalties and the lost hotel reservation fees would total more than he could really afford to lose. He sighed and left the theater.

Fog delayed his flight for twenty-four hours. 

Elroy gave up in disgust and went home.

He brooded about his vacation until the first day of the new quarter. Driving down the street toward home in his unfriendly piece of Detroit iron, hitting all the red lights, he wondered once again what was wrong with him. He knew lots of other people with personal private little hang-ups, but no one had them like he did. His “vacation” had really gotten to him.

He had a friend in the physics department; this morning he had asked him if there were any logical reason why he should be this way. “Sunspots,” Elroy said hesitantly, “or something.” As he had feared, his physics friend laughed and told him he should write science fiction. Elroy had never even read any science fiction, and he didn’t have any intention of starting now.

He had another friend, in the mathematics department, who (when asked this afternoon) swore that statistically Elroy’s life was impossible. Elroy assured him that everything he had told him was true. Elroy’s mathematical friend suggested only half-jokingly that he pay a visit to the psychiatry department of the medical school.

That suggestion didn’t help a bit.

He parked his car, managing to maneuver it around the excessively large telephone pole that edged on the driveway and plonked itself directly in front of his window. He put his briefcase in his rented room-with kitchenette and went out for his walk. He took out his frustration only by scuffing his shoes on the sidewalk, because by now he knew from experience that if he did anything more violent he would fall down and hurt himself.

At the first “Don’t Walk” sign, a flower child came up beside him. “Want some pot, mister?” she said.

“No, thanks,” he said to her, as he did approximately once a week, She didn’t seem to be able to remember any longer than that that he never bought anything from her.

“Acid? Speed? Snowflakes? S&D? Mustard?” 

“No, thanks. Not today.”

“You look under, mister, really under.”

“Yeah,” he agreed.

“You should take up astrology,” she said, shoving a piece of grubby paper into his hands. Then she disappeared into an alley or two.

Astrology. He started to lift a mental lip at the idea, but held back. His scientist friends had lifted their lips at his queries, and he had had about enough of lip-lifting. He squinted to make out the pale dittography of the handout. It showed a sample horoscope and the name and address of a well-known local astrologer who advertised in the campus newspaper. Again he almost laughed; then, perversely, he stuffed the paper in his pocket and turned back toward home.

In his room he stretched out on his reclining chair (it was supposed to have a vibrator, but that had burned out the first week, and the store said the warranty didn’t cover it) and looked at the handout again.

“Matters of Life, Love, and Happiness.”

Intricately drawn astrological figures dimly rimmed the page, staring out at him in a friendly fashion. He looked at the table at the bottom of the page and discovered he was a Virgo. It seemed appropriate.

Elroy had never heard of a public astrology meeting, which the handout announced, but then, he had never paid much attention to astrology, either. For a couple of hours he debated whether to go to it or not, knowing that no matter which alternative he chose, no matter what kind of sound logic was behind his reasoning, it would be the wrong choice. On the one hand, if he went, he could be letting himself in for ridicule at the hands of his colleagues. On the other, who would ever know? Certainly none of them would ever go to an “astrology meeting” themselves.

If there were the faintest chance that he might find out what, was the matter with him, it would be worth it. 

Elroy glanced out the window and saw that it was foggily dark. He wasn’t surprised. He could hardly imagine himself thinking this way in the daytime. The moon was coming up, behind the telephone pole, gleaming through the thin fog. Abruptly he put on his coat and looked for his keys and found them finally in the refrigerator and went outside and maneuvered his car around the telephone pole, this time scraping the already battered fender.

It was not too far to where the astrology meeting was to be held, since most of the second-generation flower children and their current crop of gurus inhabited the area around the university, as their parents had before them. It was late enough that the stoplights had switched over to being blinking red lights or blinking yellow lights; all those on the route he had to take were blinking red lights. He had almost gotten used to them before his vacation, but now they were doubly annoying. When he reached the block of old houses, he began to look for a parking space, but everyone was home now, and crazy-painted ancient cars lined the street on both sides. He drove around the block twice. There was one spot that he would have been able to get his old car in, but this new one was too long. Airflow-spoilers had been the rage the year before, when he bought it.

Finally, two blocks down, he found a whole row of parking spaces. He pulled in, and put a quarter in the slot before he remembered that it wasn’t necessary after eight o’clock.

It was quarter to twelve by the time he walked to the old stone house where the meeting had been set for eleven. He knocked softly on the gray weathered-wood door, afraid that by now it was over. The vibrations of his touch seemed to spread through the whole house. The door slowly opened. He peered into the blackness, expecting some latter-day incarnation of Lon Chaney to appear.

“Come in.”

He started at the voice, it seemed so to come from nowhere. It was a high voice, a small voice. A glow in the dark caught his eye, and he looked toward it.

“Won’t you come in?” asked the girl who held the glass doorknob with baby-soft hands. She was dressed only in a white nightgown, from under which her bare toes peeked. Her silk-fine hair made a golden halo around her head as it caught the moonlight. Her eyes were the blue and innocence of summer skies. She was probably not more than five years old.

“Uh,” Elroy said, “hasn’t your mother ever told you not to let strangers in the house?”

She ducked behind the door, then looked out at him. “Aren’t you here for the meeting?” she piped.

“Yes,” he said quickly, before she could close the door on his feet. “I thought I was at the wrong house, though.” She opened the door again, a little wider, and motioned for him to come in. “But be quiet,” she warned. “Mommy has already started, and she doesn’t like to be interrupted.”

She went down a dark hall, her bobbing curls the only illumination. Elroy followed, hesitant but determined. The little girl opened a door at the end of the corridor. Elroy sidled in quietly, but pale faces turned half-interestedly to watch him. Most of the heads were crowned by masses of curly wild hair, ringed by beads and strips of bright cloth and feathers, painted in colors that glowed in strange patterns in the black light cast from concealed bulbs at the juncture of walls and ceiling. Some of the painted eyes narrowed when he walked in; others were oblivious to his straightness. A pungent mixture of odors washed over him.

“Another curious visitor,” the woman sitting at the front of the room on a slightly raised platform said. “Welcome, friend.”

“Uh, sorry to interrupt,” Elroy said.

“I understand,” she said, and somehow Elroy got the feeling that she really did understand. He sat down in the back of the room and listened.

It seemed almost like one of the undergraduate classes he had taken, where he would sit for an hour wondering what in the devil the professor was talking about. Here, too, he sat and wondered what “sidereal” and “inclination” and “opposition” and “conjunction” meant, at least in relation to his life, love, and happiness. He knew about astrology only what he had learned from brief, amused glances at newspaper horoscope columns. The woman at the front spoke for only a few more minutes to her students, not giving Elroy enough time to gain any bearings on the subject.

“I will see you next week, children,” she said. The collected group of (to Elroy) peculiar people stood up and milled around and leaked out through the various doors. Elroy stood in the middle of the floor in the near-dark, disappointed, upset, and confused. He had lost the door he had come in through.

The woman at the front was still there, standing now, watching Elroy with curiosity. Her hair was combed, and neatly, simply pulled back from her face and clasped in a silver pin. Her eye makeup was subdued blue and soft black that did not glow in the UV. Her dress wasn’t outlandish, but a long gown of black velvet, with one massive silver pendant on her breast.

“I’d be gone by now,” Elroy blurted, “only I haven’t got any sense of direction, and I’ve lost the door …” 

“Are you interested in learning astrology?” she asked kindly.

“Uh, well, not exactly,” Elroy said. “I saw your advertisement … and, well, I didn’t really have any other alternative that I hadn’t already tried.”

“There are lines of pain and sadness in your face,” she said. “Your life has not been easy.”

“Well … yes,” Elroy said, with more force than he had intended. He had, he decided, come to the end of making jokes about the strange affliction of his fortune.

“What you want,” she told him, “is not a class in the casting of horoscopes, but advice that only astrology can give. Come along. I will do a preliminary reading for you.”

“I don’t want to put you to any trouble,” Elroy said. 

“This is what I do,” she said.

“It must be very interesting,” Elroy said.

“It is my life’s work,” she said.

“I see,” Elroy said.

“It is what I do for a living,” she said, stressing “a living” only very slightly.

“Oh, uh, yes,” Elroy said, beginning to blush. “Of course, I’ll want to pay you for your trouble …”

She led him across the room. Halfway to the door, Elroy stumbled. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “Clumsy.”

“Not at all,” she said, guiding him around the blue chalk marks on the floor. “But you must not attempt to walk through the pentagram.”

“Oh,” Elroy said.

Two walls of her office were lined with leather-bound books, one was covered with maps and charts and an occasional psychedelic poster, and the fourth was curtained with a drape of indigo velvet. She sat behind the huge black hand-rubbed desk and waved him to a soft chair before it. “Now,” she said, “tell me the date and time of your birth.”

Elroy did, as close as he could, and she wrote it down at the top of a long sheet of paper and filled the rest of the page with calculations that she read off a six-inch slide rule. Elroy craned his neck to see, as she wrote down the final “equals” sign with a flourish. After it, she wrote: 4.

“Oh, dear,” she said.

“Maybe I’d just better go home …” 

“Things go wrong for you often,” she told him. “Big things and little things, and constantly. Annoying things and painful things. You have almost reached the limits of your endurance.”

“How did you know?” he asked wonderingly.

“The story is in the stars,” she said.

“No one else has ever believed the things that happen to me before, even when I tell them,” he protested.

She stood up and pulled the curtain away from the wide window. The fog had disappeared, and the moon was framed by velvet and backed by starry sky. “Somewhere out there,” she said dramatically, “out in the far reaches of the universe, is a galactic clock. We foolish humans probably would never recognize it as a clock, if we could see it or even ever find it, but its aura permeates this entire continuum, and it controls the destiny of every living creature.”

Elroy began to wonder if he would be able to find his way out of the old house if he bolted for the door right now.

“Every one of us is born at a certain time of the galactic clock,” she continued. “The lucky ones, the successful ones, the people for whom everything seems to go right, are the ones who are born at noon—at what corresponds to noon—of the clock: hour, minute, and second exactly at their heights. Normal, ordinary people are born at other times. On downswings or upswings or slightly off times, and they see the result in small pieces of their lives that do not go well.”

“And I,” Elroy said miserably, “was born at six-thirty-thirty.”

She laughed. “Ah, no, now! Your life is not as bad as all that. You are much rarer than the downswing people. You … you were born at a time that might match seven hours, thirteen minutes, eleven and an irrational fraction of seconds. You live in a direction half a pace away from the rest of the world. Downswings compete with upswings. In your time there are primes, endless strings of decimals, all the numbers that have held mystery throughout human history. Mystery … and terror.” Her voice had become dark and moody, but suddenly she smiled at him. “That is just an analogy, of course. There are no numbers on the galactic clock.”

“Numbers or not,” Elroy said, “is there anything I can do?”

“Ah, but you have already done it. You have come to me.”

“What can you do?” Elroy asked, wanting desperately to believe that, even after forty-five years, his life could be changed in one evening.

“I have already begun,” she assured him. “After this moment, there will be no more of those little annoyances or failures or disturbances, if you come to me and take my advice.”

“Really?” Elroy breathed.

“Really.” She laughed. “Really and truly!”

She sat down at her desk and drew out a sheet of crisp paper, on which to write him a short list of directions to follow.

He realized that she was helping him, that things had begun to go properly already, when he remembered before she was finished that there would be a fee, and got out his wallet and took out twenty, no, he decided, thirty dollars, and even had in his inside pocket a clean envelope in which to put the money discreetly. He never carried envelopes. He put it on the desk, and knew that she knew that it was there and that it was enough. A warm feeling glowed over him. He smiled.

She handed him the folded list. “These directions, if you follow them, will help you to live with the destiny the clock has given you, instead of against it. The next seven days will go well for you, Mr. Finchwood, until you can return next week, when I will have explored your situation more fully.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Not at all, Mr. Finchwood. Good night.” “Good night.”

He found the way to the door without a wrong turn. He scanned the list she had given him; there was nothing on it he was supposed to do tonight, and all the directions looked quite simple-nothing like frogs’ eyes or bats’ tails or any blackly magical things like that. Though he was standing on her doorstep in the middle of the night and a patrol car passed, the policemen did not stop and challenge him. He walked the two and a half blocks to his parking space, and every “Don’t Walk” sign said “Walk.” He did, and the sidewalks felt like foam-cushioned air. There was a huge dog on a porch that he passed, but it only lifted its head and peered toward him, and went back to sleep. He laughed aloud. Tomorrow he would win at gin rummy, and all the lights would be green, and the house of ill repute would move to another address and telephone number. Elroy Finchwood felt marvelous.

He reached his parking space and even patted the airflow-spoiler fondly, for he wouldn’t have to put up with it much longer. In the morning he would take it down and trade it in for his beloved English-made sports model.

Suddenly he stopped smiling. He felt in his pockets with a terrible premonition, then peered into the window of his car. In the dim illumination of a street lamp, Elroy Finchwood sat down on the curb and began to cry. Instinctively he knew that no one would ever be able to help him; he was too far gone for that. No psychiatrist, or mathematician, or physicist, or even astrologer. He was an irrational number on the galactic clock, and its hands would never point his way.

He had locked himself out of his car.

Copyright © Vonda N. McIntyre 1972