Geneslide

By Richard Quarry

You don't miss your genes till they turn prehistoric.

To save the world from nuclear holocaust, the Timekeeper must start evolution running backward. And man, is he pissed. So pissed, he's decided to backdate humans right out of existence.

As people morph in and and out of prehistoric animals, a ragtag band led by Galloping Ariadne and Philip the Assault Otter careens through time fighting off dinosaurs and time storms as they try to convince the Timekeeper, now convinced he's cruise director aboard the Titanic, to give humanity one last chance.

But the greatest threat of all comes from a right-wing cabal led by a megalomanic saber-tooth who plans to bypass humanity all together and set himself up as a god.

Specifically, Seth, God of Evil.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Quarry
• Release date: Mar 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201024604

Book preview

1

Brighter than a thousand suns.

Across the sky flash the lights of doom. Mushroom clouds spit out blast walls a thousand feet high.

Countdown to the end of life on Earth.

Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five—

Time hiccups.

Four, three—

Time chokes and gags.

Two, one—

And then it stops. Just like that.

And time starts to swallow its own tail.

2

Yeah, but Phil, you gotta pull really good grades if you wanna get to be a killer whale. Jim Solomon sat in his underwear on the lower bunk, eyes bleary, carrot hair tousled. What time is it, anyway?

Sundial was creeping toward eleven when I passed.

Philip Prendick straddled a wooden chair at the window end of a dorm room cluttered with Jim’s jeans, dirty t-shirts, comic books, and spare set of underwear. Philip’s possessions, except for the overflowing books, huddled away in the single closet. Only it’s taken you fifteen minutes to get as far out of bed as you are. And my grades aren’t that bad.

"Maybe not that bad, for a guy who cuts as many classes as you. But they’re not gonna lift you to the top of the food chain, either. What’s the ratio? Ten percent predators, ninety percent prey?"

Jim yawned and scratched his armpit. Wasn’t much doubt of his future: he had sloth written all over him. His red hair and beard had already started to thicken as if in preparation. Besides, who’s gonna write you a recommendation? The profs don’t like you. The ones who’ve ever seen you in class, anyway. You’re a pain in the ass.

Not that big a pain in the ass.

Jim rolled his eyes. Phil, ask anybody. You bring me back some coffee from the snack bar?

Philip reached to the desk behind him. A couple of volumes, not one of them having anything to do with his classes, toppled off the pile of books. He proffered a brown earthenware mug. How many cups does that make it you owe me? We up to two hundred yet?

Yeah, yeah. Hey, what’s this? What happened to the Styrofoam cups?

What do you think? They’re disintegrating back into the past. Or the future, depending how you look at it.

"Styrofoam?"

Yeah, Styrofoam. Like steel and electronics and every other man-made material. What, you thought Styrofoam grew on trees? And don’t lose that mug. I had to sign for it. They want it back.

Jim shook his head sadly. Man, that’s pitiful, when you can’t even get Styrofoam no more. He took a sip. It’s lukewarm.

It was hot the first time I told you to haul your ass out of bed.

"See, that’s what I mean about you being a pain in the ass. You got the attitude for a killer whale. Might not make a bad wolverine, either. Far as grades, though, forget it. I see you more like ... a mule. Yeah. Stubborn, bad-tempered, always going hee-haw at everyone."

You can’t devolve into a mule. It’s man-made, like Styrofoam.

No shit! Jim looked genuinely surprised. Man-made outta what?

"Have you ever been to a class? Out of a donkey and a horse."

Man, that’s just weird. Jim sipped his coffee and stared around at the close bare walls like he might find something to divert him. Most students’ rooms featured some sort of decoration: posters of rock stars or athletes, movies or video games, motorcycles or scantily clad women. But Jim Solomon seldom bestirred himself even so far as to stick a tack in the wall. And Philip Prendick possessed an itinerant soul, always looking ahead to his next interest, immune to keepsakes and mileposts.

Speaking of horses, though .... Philip ventured.

Oh man, you’re gonna try for horse now? That’s like, uh, poignant, man.

What’s so damn poignant about it?

The one single reason you would ever even think about horses is Laura Sue Womack.

And what’s wrong with Laura Sue Womack? Philip demanded.

Nothing’s wrong with Laura Sue Womack. Jim upended the mug and poured the last dregs into his mouth. "Question is, what’s wrong with Laura Sue Womack and you. And for starters, you can’t run for shit."

Actually, Philip said hopefully, "I was thinking we could maybe get a little something going before we devolved quite that far. I mean, if she just thought I was going to be a horse, it might melt some ice."

Take an awful lot of melting, you ask me. I mean, what’s your thing with Laura Sue anyway? Besides she’s got the best ass on campus.

Well .... How much more did you need?

I mean, said Jim, check it out. You always got your nose stuck in some book or other. And Laura Sue, all she cares about is jumping hurdles and kick-boxing and spiking volleyballs down people’s throats. Why not try Olivia Hartley? She’s more your type. And she digs you. He shrugged. Takes all kinds.

Hey, it’s just a joke, me being such a pain in the ass and all.

Ah, Phil?

And if it’s just a question of getting my grades up, hell, no problem. He stood and swung the chair aside. I’ll go see Professor Dorfman. Talk him into assigning me some special project or other. I’m a lot better at papers than tests.

What class is that, Professor Dorfman?

What class? Time Fluctuations 206. You’re in it.

No shit? Jim shook his head, grinning at the unexpected wonders of life. Hey, tell the prof Big Red says hello.

Yeah, I’m sure that will improve his mood.

Philip started from the room, then halted. Probably create a better impression if he tucked a few books under his arm. Some students still carried tablets or smartphones, but like all electronic and mechanical devices, their powers were devolving along with everything else. Now you see it, now you don’t.

He rummaged through the novels and histories covering his desk. Near the bottom he located a couple of textbooks. He couldn’t remember if they belonged to Professor Dorfman’s class or not.

Philip accepted, conditionally, some of the rationale for turning what remained of civilization into a giant network of campuses. Humanity had lost the natural instincts that evolution hard-wired into our forbearers. At least in the early stages of devolution, the brain appeared to remain more human than animal. It would be nice, when you ran into something most people had never heard of, to know if you were more likely to eat it or it eat you. Along with how to sidestep natural dangers, proper courtship behavior, and if you’d devolved into a predator but not so far as to jettison all moral qualms, how to tell a former human from some beast that had been born fair prey.

As to whether grades would really decide what form of animal you morphed into and how far back down the evolutionary chain you’d slide before landing in your appropriate niche, well, that’s what the teachers claimed. Without a whole lot of evidence, that Philip could see.

On the other hand, if you waited for empiricism to settle the question, it would be a little late to angle for extra credit.

Besides, where else was there? Lots of people opted out of the university system for ideological or religious reasons. Lots more simply sat in front of their on-and-off TV’s waiting for the end, foreshadowed by a lot of blank screens. But the increasingly irregular newscasts showed nothing but mounting desperation out there, as steel and alloy disintegrated and whole cities disintegrated along with them.

Anyway, at twenty-three Philip Prendick had spent pretty much his whole life in school. In a half-assed sort of way. He was good at it. He could almost always eke out a last-minute B-minus, even though he skipped at least three-quarters of his classes.

Thing was, he had a strong premonition that Laura Sue Womack might take an A-plus effort.

And nothing in his relatively sheltered life had taught him just what Philip Prendick’s A-plus looked like.

Philip strolled past the rows of three and four-story red brick buildings lining the Main Quad. The older structures’ stone had survived while devolution kept plucking the sinews out of more modern steel-frame constructions, collapsing them into piles of rubble. The whole campus bore the look of bombed-out WWII cities he’d seen in pictures; over here a structure perfectly untouched, while next to it stood nothing but one ragged wall climbing out of a mound of rubble.

Though the day was sunny and warm, lights glowed in many of the windows. With petroleum products evaporating back to the shale from which they’d been tapped, only solar and wind-generated power still functioned. Daily brownouts and blackouts promoted a catch-as-catch-can attitude toward electricity.

In the middle of the quad a large crowd had gathered. A speaker on a raised platform harangued them through a megaphone. As Philip drew closer he identified the speaker’s round face, rounder gut, and smugly strident voice as that of Dale Whipple, a loud-mouthed champion of misinformation in its most provocative forms.

If this so-called devolution isn’t stopped soon, the Whippler shouted, "we’ll all be animals. And that, my friends, is just what Big Brother wants. The socialist/multicultural cabal trying to take over this country knows they can’t herd real men and women around like collectivist cattle. So their progressive-social relativist pointy-head eugeneticists have gene-researched their way into a whole new plot to strip us not only of our God-given freedoms, but our God-given humanity on top of it. Am I saying devolution is no more than some left-wing big-government plot? You bet your bippy I am!"

About half the audience roared their support. A little less, in fact, because Philip could see that the raw-lunged enthusiasm of the rah-rah crowd belied their numbers. They stood concentrated in sections. These weren’t chance passers-by, either. Someone had roused out the jobless townies, bible-thumpers, and inevitable gangs of rowdies who believed that sufficient violence could solve any problem. Now they stood shoulder to shoulder with the university’s own collection of the frightened, paranoid, and those for whom devolution back to a lungfish would serve as an intellectual promotion.

All had gathered to seek the counsel of anyone who could reassure them that because of race, religion, privilege, or sheer nastiness, misfortune was the morally proper province of other people. And that true winners never stopped to think.

This could not bode well.

To quote Paul Revere, Whipple shouted, the blood of patriots must sprout from the seeds of tyranny.

The megaphone gave his voice an odd towel-wrapped effect, to match what passed for his thought process. Folks, I’m here to tell you that I’ve read the Constitution backwards, forwards, upside down and inside out, and there’s not one word in it says we have to stand by and salute while a bunch of Godless scientists turns us into beasts. No matter how many studies our own hard-earned tax dollars paid for. If you would honor the true spirit of our freedom-loving ancestors, then remember the words of another great patriot, George Washington. True liberty, he declared, comes not from a diploma, but from the barrel of a gun.

He sat down to shouted applause from the leather-lunged set, while most of the actual students cast alarmed looks at each other and started sidling away.

Whipple shared the stage with other favorite rousers of this particular rabble: Acacia Fretwell, Lorelei Rockham ... and who was that on the far end? Seth Ashplant? What was he doing here, got up in a plaid shirt, tooled leather boots, and a ten-gallon cowboy hat?

While Philip knew that ten gallons might not accommodate Seth’s massive ego and the even more massive ambition behind it, he was surprised to see him sharing the stage with the openly demented. The perennial third or fourth-place finisher for class president always tended to appeal to people’s baser impulses, but most often in coded language that maintained plausible deniability from its lynch-anyone-who-dares-say-different underpinnings.

Seth Ashplant’s sole genius was for sensing the very worst anyone might be capable of, while more conventional and idealistic types treasured the myth that with all its faults, humanity was steadily reaching toward greater heights. Something of a hard sell when humanity itself was circling the drain.

The fact that Seth had come out of the closet to park his butt in the midst of this unholy in-your-face and down-your-throat alliance meant some zeitgeist was trending toward hyperbole. Some panic-inspired orgasmic cataclysm was building toward escape velocity. Somebody was gonna get their head kicked in tonight.

Lorelei Rockham advanced on the podium, her classic toothy smile spread impossibly far across her face.

You know, she began, "the big-city central government power brokers would have us believe that devolution can’t be stopped. And that only by kowtowing to their flunkies in caps and gowns can we save ourselves from being reborn as a worm or a cockroach. Well what I say is, my America is right here, clapping for liberty with the two human hands our Creator gave us. And everyone else can go get stuffed. In fact if the progressives really want to know about their next incantation or whatever, I’m more than willing to get my shotgun down off the rack and give them a boost. You know? You know?"

The true believers went wild. For them, no solution could be considered serious if it didn’t involve killing something.

And I know all you freedom-loving true patriots are with me. That’s what democracy is all about. Standing up for what you believe in and a big boot up the keister for everyone else. Isn’t it? Well isn’t it? she repeated more loudly, as her supporters swooned with bloodlust.

Smiling even more broadly in apparent defiance of all physiognomic probability, Lorelei sallied further out on seas of incomprehensibility.

"God created me in His image, and He created you in His image, and there ain’t no professors with their cockroach panels can change us into a bug just ‘cause we may flunk all their theories of chaoti-cocism or whatever. What I say is, if evolution never happened in the first place, then it sure as heck-darn can’t happen backward now. Now do you get it? And I’m with Dale one thousand and, uh, a whole big bunch of percents when he says it’s time to water the tree of freedom with the blood of liberty, just like it declares in our sacred Constitution. Am I right? Well am I?"

Right as the dodo! shouted Philip. He couldn’t help himself.

It didn’t matter anyway, for the cheers of the anti-any-evolutionists, whether forward or back, drowned him out. A few of the remaining students looked at him laughing, and a few Lorelei-lovers — a bizarre but passionate crowd — gave him dirty looks, but apparently did not comprehend the remark well enough to beat him up over it.

And then he saw her face.

Well, the back of her head, actually. And a moment later, her ass. Laura Sue Womack. His beloved.

Well, beloved-to-be. Someday. Maybe. If he could just nudge his grades up a smidge. Just enough to be a horse.

Surprising he hadn’t noticed her earlier. Not like she was easy to miss. Not at six foot two, with that glowing, prismatic loam-rich brown mane — er, hair — falling in a glorious cascade almost to her—

By main force he stuffed his heart back into his chest cavity.

A short red flannel jacket set off her hair. She wore tan slacks. Not tight — Laura Sue never wore truly tight pants — but artfully draped to half-show, half-suggest the perfect crescents of—

Somebody stepped directly in front of him. A guy. Always some guy. Philip shuffled forward, reestablished his position with a liberal application of shoulder and elbow, and held it with a menacing look that sent the challenger away muttering.

Up on the platform, Acacia Fretwell now took front and center. Thin and nervous, she squinted out at the crowd and smirked.

Acacia always smirked. Phil had taken a class with her a couple of years before. At that time she’d been a cuticle-chewing, foot-tapping, sotto voice mocker of everyone she took to be slightly below her in the campus pecking order, and a fawning admirer of everyone a couple of steps above. She hadn’t believed in anything, that Philip could tell. But she always s had that air of searching for a weapon. Now she’d found one, and simply had to wave it around just to see who bled.

Even before she parted her thin, bloodless lips Philip felt a wave of foreboding. Dale Whipple and Lorelei Rockham had gotten the crowd, or that part of it imported here to drool and snarl, worked up to a self-righteous furor. But a true lynching, a pogrom, a Krystal Nacht, did not start from sheer ideology, no matter how incendiary. Always the rumor must be planted of some inciting sacrilege. Some baby had to get its blood drunk, some innocent virgin violated, some sacred symbol trampled underfoot.

And that was Acacia’s thing.

I hate to have to be the bearer of unpleasant news, she said, her smirk sharpening in pleasurable anticipation. "But I just learned of this, and I have to share it with you because already the authorities are moving to suppress the truth. A woman in Pittsburgh just gave birth to — I’m sorry to inflict this on you, but the truth must be told — to a beast."

The crowd gasped. Or that part of it that had been eating this crap up in the first place.

A beast! Acacia Fretwell cried again. And what kind of animal was it? My sources couldn’t tell for certain. It had small horns, but it wasn’t a goat. Cloven hooves, but it wasn’t a horse.

Which was too much for Laura Sue Womack, who shouted out, "Horses don’t have cloven hooves, you ignoramus!"

So Laura Sue was another Acacia-despiser. Interesting.

"And, shouted Acacia Fretwell, it had what at least one observer took to be a forked tail!"

The crowd, by now shedding most of its students in a big hurry, gave forth shocked gasps and howls of fury.

"This ... this abomination, born to a human woman! How many more signs does God have to send, before we realize the true price of sacrilege? This is what comes of forcing people to worship at the altar of devolution. This, this evil! This—"

This bullshit! Philip shouted. Normally he sought a more humorous riposte, but he couldn’t find anything funny in Acacia’s canard.

Maybe if it hadn’t been for Laura Sue’s outburst he would have had sense enough not to paint a big bull’s-eye on his chest. Maybe not. In any case he felt some denouement, some phase change, approaching, and it frightened him. Only not, unfortunately, quite enough to keep his big mouth shut about it.

"This horror!" Acacia finished. "And if we do nothing but stand by and wring our hands, the same thing will happen to you and your loved ones!"

Philip didn’t bother with more commentary. For one thing, the outraged roar of the crowd rendered any remark vain.

For another, retribution was fast approaching. In the ample-gutted form of Brock Thumper Blauer, buzz-cut bristling and clad in — could it be? — a brown shirt with a black armband. And trailing an entourage of bubbas similarly attired, along with a grinning and gap-toothed fringe of the great unwashed eager to see Philip get his comeuppance.

Hey, Thump, Philip greeted him, what’s with the armband? You in mourning? He needed to find one good line before he got stomped, and didn’t have a lot of time to get selective.

The Thumper waddled forward till their noses were six inches apart. He was a truly ugly individual. Fat gut and fat face, but one of those very strong sumo-wrestler kind of fat guys. His lower lip habitually protruded in a pugnacious manner, and he bore a perpetual hard stare like the whole world better scramble real fast to get off his pecs.

You’re a real pain in the ass, know that, Pendick? Kind of his pet name for Philip.

Up on the stage, Seth Ashplant stepped forward to issue the call to action.

Well there you have it, folks, he said in a tone of (relatively) calm reason. The truth at last. The truth the progressives and the intellectuals and the fake news have been trying to hide from you.

Phasing out from the speech — he already knew the ending —Philip made a quick calculation. He could surrender to the inevitable and throw the first punch. With a seventy or eighty pound edge and a head like something spit out by a car crusher, Brock would indeed thump him. But if it looked like a straight mano-a-mano fight, the others just might let it go down that way.

Or he could let Brock build up momentum bad-mouthing him, until the entourage took it as their patriotic duty to jump forward and put the boot in.

People didn’t ordinarily get their ribs stove in on campus, but clearly something was starting here, something cunningly planned and well calculated to get quickly out of hand. A full-blown lynch mob had been summoned and was now puffing out its cheeks. And Philip looked to have signed on as preliminary martyr.

This is the great challenge of our times, Ashplant was saying. The great responsibility. The greatest responsibility in the history of the world. To be man, or animal. It is up to you and me, my friends, to decide. No one in the Establishment, has been listening to one word the common people have to say. It is time we make ourselves heard. Time right now, before time runs out.

Thumper, huh? Philip temporized. Does that mean you’re going to devolve into the world’s biggest, ugliest rabbit?

For yourselves, Seth bid the crowd. "For your children. For America — the real America. Our America. And most of all, for all those dear little babies yet destined to be born. Think of them, my friends. No one loves babies more than me. No one. Now take a moment to think of a pure, innocent little baby, with its cute little white hands reaching out to you. Really, get that picture fixed in your mind. Now stick that abomination Acacia just told you about in its place. If that isn’t enough to make you stand up and be counted … well, then maybe you better start laying in a supply of bird food, or dog food, or fish food, or whatever other kind of animal you and your children are going to end up as. Because if you’re a woman, you aren’t going to be a woman much longer. And there’s no way in hell anyone could ever call you a man."

After prolonged thought or whatever passed for it in his prematurely devolved brain, Brock Blauer finally came up with a witticism. Grabbing the lapel of Philip’s pea coat, he looked down at the grass. Shit. Is there any concrete around somewhere? Cause I’m about to go bowling. With Pendick’s face.

Let him go, Brock.

An intoxicatingly feminine voice distracted Philip from this monster intent on his disfigurement.

What’s it to you, Laura Sue? the Thumper responded, his lower lip thrusting even further out till it looked like a pie plate.

He’s my date. And I don’t want him scuffed up.

Philip swiveled his head around. Laura Sue Womack rolled gently from heel to heel, her hips and shoulders shifting rhythmically.

"What, Pendick? Your date? Hey, you want a real man ‘stead of this shitbird, I might be persuaded to—"

Stuff it, dickhead. Her head shivered, impossibly quick, shaking out her long mane — what the hell — of hair.

Brock wasn’t used to being contradicted. He shoved Philip staggering aside. Hey, no bitch talks that way to—

He really should have been paying more attention. For while his mind ground ponderous gears trying to formulate a list of threats, Laura Sue shivered once more, and a keening, stuttering whine broke from somewhere behind her nostrils, and she, well, gamboled, in a half circle.

Then she sort of lilted forward, and her foot lashed out into Brock’s overhanging gut.

The proto-fascist blew out a great puff of breath, and hung bent over with his eyes trying to hug each other for comfort. Then he fell to his knees, clutching his stomach.

Laura Sue loomed over him, and Brock cowered away.

Next time you talk to me that way, I’ll kick your spine out. She tugged Philip along by his sleeve. Come on, date.

Gratefully he followed along, looking behind to see if anyone wanted to take up Thumper’s cause. No worry. All stared stupefied from their fallen fuehrer to Laura Sue’s receding netherside.

Seth Ashplant gunned it into high gear. "You have at last heard the truth. Not the lies the media and the professors and the professional politicians are trying to foist off on you. The real, genuine truth. Right here, today. The question, the one single question that amounts to a hill of beans in this world, is what the hell are you going to do about it?"

The serried ranks before him (serried? what exactly did that mean, serried?), the legion of the unwashed and unreasoning, broke out in cries of Death to this and Kill the that. Philip realized that here, as throughout history, the prospect of industrial-strength bloodletting struck the true believers as cleansing.

Laura Sue pulled Philip across the grass to the far end of the quad. Her stride displayed a smoothly rolling rhythm, firm-footed yet with a marked suggestion of springiness. Several times he had to trot to keep up, because though she was no more than an inch or two (well, maybe two and a half) taller than him, her legs were far more than proportionately longer.

Once well clear of the mob, she released his pea coat and swung around on him. Do you always start things you can’t finish?

Well, I guess if you put it like—

You really are a pain in the ass, aren’t you? Just like everyone always says.

Ah .... If he couldn’t find a truly funny line with Brock, he couldn’t even stammer out an apology to Laura Sue.

Not that she was all that gorgeous. From the front. A little long-faced, in fact, with her lips slightly pursed to cover overly healthy teeth. Incredible skin. Made glass look rough, cream look muddy, and cheesecake luscious as spinach. Wide hazel eyes, intense yet holding back mysteries; limpid, fathomless pools of ....

I mean, he assayed, forced to acknowledge he found her the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen whatever the point-by-point aesthetic truth of it, I’m, ah, well, the thing is—

"You can always try just keeping your mouth shut."

He tried.

There, that’s not so hard, is it?

But it was.

Laura — instinct told him to leave off the Sue — I’m sorry. I never meant to drag you into anything. I—

Would have gotten your ass kicked, she completed. And serve you right. Don’t you have any sense at all?

Ah, apparently not. Look, it’s not enough just to thank you. I was going to get tromped. And it was my own fault.

I just said that.

Yes, you did. He took a deep breath to brace himself.

Laura, these people have always used outright lies, but now they’re moving toward outright violence on top of it. And when some fool like me laughs out loud without reckoning the consequences, well, it takes a very brave person to step forward and defend him. I know you did it more for the sake of decency and civilization than for me. So okay, I owe decency and civilization one. And I hope that when the time comes to make good on that debt — and it may not be a long time coming — I will remember your courage and do the right thing.

Laura Sue’s eyelids fluttered, blurring like stagecoach wheels in a western.

Well, she declared. Aren’t you just full of yourself? And now I suppose you’d like to ask me out.

You did say I was your date.

So I lied. I can live with that. But you’re here now. So what are you going to tell me? How time’s running out and we have to share all the humanity we have left? How language may be lost to us soon and we need to explore other means of communication? How other boys just want me for my ass but you want me for my soul? How you’re so sad and lonely and no one understands you?

She stood contemplating him with a challenging expression, arms crossed firmly across her chest. As if by themselves her feet did an ambling sort of half-hop to the side.

Well? she demanded, sliding back into place.

Actually, my problem is that people do understand me.

Unexpectedly, she laughed. Like water trilling over stones. Coming to a halt, she sighed thoughtfully, then pointed a finger toward his nose.

Okay. You called me Laura instead of Laura Sue, and that shows at least a little perception. Your name is Philip, which is very sound. And though I’m afraid you may be more dumb than brave, you did at least speak out when no one else did. So. Since the date situation around here is really pretty pathetic, you may go out with me tonight. Just don’t let your hopes run away with you.

Her shoulders rolled, and a low-pitched rumbling coughing noise sounded from deep within her chest. Meet me at the snack bar. Seven-thirty.

I’ll be honored.

You better be, buster. And bring money. I may be a cheap drunk, but I make up for it on popcorn. See you later.

And she started to walk away. She’d only taken three or four steps when her legs went from a stride to a bounce, then from a bounce to a ta-rummp, ta-rummp, and then she was racing away at a full gallop, her mane blowing out behind.

Well, well, well.

His heart beat faster than when Brock Blauer had threatened to polish the concrete with his face.

He needed that extra credit bad.

3

If Professor Dorfman ever said his prayers, he didn’t appear to regard Philip as the answer to them.

Where’s Seth Ashplant? the professor demanded, jumping up from his chair to shuffle through the jumble of dismembered clockwork covering his desk, then falling back after disorganizing the wrack still further. He said he’d come. Where’s Seth?

Chanting ‘burn, baby, burn’ by now, I should think, Philip replied. What do you want with him anyway? Herr Professor.

I need to give him — to talk to him.

The prof, a thin, iron-haired man with Groucho Marx eyebrows and a constant peering expression, didn’t look good. Not like he’d want to hear how Big Red said hello. His breath came in gasps, and his head kept pointing this way and that disjointedly.

Seth was supposed to be meet me here, he whined.

He’s having too much fun playing with fire. Ah, actually, Professor Dorfman, I came to see if we couldn’t arrange some kind of extra-credit assignment. See, I’m trying to get my grades up and—

Professor Dorfman clasped his hands across the bridge of his nose and moaned. Where’s Seth? I haven’t much time. Oh, this is terrible.

I’m sorry to hear that, Professor. Truly sorry. Only the thing is, see, I’d like a chance to improve my grades—

The Professor bounced to his feet and pranced sideways a few steps in a manner slightly reminiscent of Laura Sue Womack, only indescribably less graceful.

"Your grades? Screw your lousy grades! I didn’t even know your face until two weeks ago. If only I’d appreciated my good fortune!"

Well yeah, I can see where you’re coming from, but—

You’re a pain in the ass! And as if to emphasize the point, he bent over and held his haunches. Moaning. Oh, I’ve left it too late! Too late! Where’s Seth? He said— Oh, it’s happening. It’s happening!

And before Philip’s incredulous eyes he began to bounce around the office, wherever he could find some room. Which afforded him only a limited scope. A prof’s room was messy by tradition, but where most settled for stacks of ungraded papers and teetering piles of books, Professor Dorfman had crammed his office full of clocks. Or pieces of them.

Mechanical, every last one, not a digital timepiece in sight. And all in various stages of dismantlement, jumbled together on folding tables and shelves denuded of books or stacked in precarious piles on the floor.

Elaborate ivory or china-mounted gilt-scrolled clocks