At first Gasher looked furious . . . and then only abashed. He sank into a nearby chair and
closed his mouth.
Tick-Tock, meanwhile, was examining the Seiko’s expansion band with an expression of
awe. He pulled it wide, let it snap back, pulled it wide again, let it snap back again. He
dropped a lock of his hair into the open links, then laughed when they closed on it. At last
he slipped the watch over his hand and pushed it halfway up his forearm. Jake thought this
souvenir of New York looked very strange there, but said nothing.
“Wonderful!” Tick-Tock exclaimed. “Where did you get it, cully?”
“It was a birthday present from my father and mother,” Jake said. Gasher leaned forward at this, perhaps wanting to mention the idea of ransom again. If so, the intent look on the
Tick-Tock Man’s face changed his mind and he sat back without saying anything.
“Was it?” Tick-Tock marvelled, raising his eyebrows. He had discov- ered the small button which lit the face of the watch and kept pushing it, watching the light go off and on. Then
he looked back at Jake, and his eyes were narrowed to bright green slits again. “Tell me
something, cully—does this run on a dipolar or unipolar circuit?”
“Neither one,” Jake said, not knowing that his failure to say he did not know what either of these terms meant was buying him a great deal of future trouble. “It runs on a
nickel-cadmium battery. At least I’m pretty sure it does. I’ve never had to replace it, and I
lost the instruction folder a long time ago.”
The Tick-Tock Man looked at him for a long time without speaking, and Jake realized
with dismay that the blonde man was trying to decide if Jake had been making fun of him.
If he decided Jake had been making fun, Jake had an idea that the abuse he had suffered on
the way here would seem like tickling compared to what the Tick-Tock Man might do. He
suddenly wanted to divert Tick-Tock’s train of thought—wanted that more than anything in the world. He said the first thing he thought might turn the trick.
“He was your grandfather, wasn’t he?”
The Tick-Tock Man raised his brows interrogatively. His hands returned to Jake’s
shoulders, and although his grip was not tight, Jake could feel the phenomenal strength
there. If Tick-Tock chose to tighten his grip and pull sharply forward, he would snap Jake’s
collarbones like pencils. If he shoved, he would probably break his back.
“Who was my grandfather, cully?”
Jake’s eyes once more took in the Tick-Tock Man’s massive, nobly shaped head and broad
shoulders. He remembered what Susannah had said: Look at the size of him, Roland—they
must have had to grease him to get him into the cockpit!
“The man in the airplane. David Quick.”
The Tick-Tock Man’s eyes widened in surprise and amazement. Then he threw back his
head and roared out a gust of laughter that echoed off the domed ceiling high above. The
others smiled nervously. None, however, dared to laugh right out loud . . . not after what
had happened to the woman with the dark hair.
“Whoever you are and wherever you come from, boy, you’re the triggest cove old
Tick-Tock’s run into for many a year. Quick was my great-grandfather, not my grandfather,
but you’re close enough—wouldn’t you say so, Gasher, my dear?”
“Ay,” Gasher said. “He’s trig, right enough, I could’ve toldjer that. But wery pert, all the same.”
“Yes,” the Tick-Tock Man said thoughtfully. His hands tightened on the boy’s shoulders and drew Jake closer to that smiling, handsome, lunatic face. “I can see he’s pert. It’s in his eyes. But we’ll take care of that, won’t we, Gasher?”
It’s not Gasher he’s talking to, Jake thought. It’s me. He thinks he’s hypnotizing me . . . and
maybe he is.
“Ay,” Gasher breathed.
Jake felt he was drowning in those wide green eyes. Although the Tick-Tock Man’s grip
was still not really tight, he couldn’t get enough breath into his lungs. He summoned all of
his own force in an effort to break the blonde man’s hold over him, and again spoke the first
words which came to mind:
“So fell Lord Perth, and the countryside did shake with that thunder.”
It acted upon Tick-Tock like a hard open-handed blow to the face. He recoiled, green eyes narrowing, his grip on Jake’s shoulders tightening painfully. “What do you say? Where did
you hear that?”
“A little bird told me,” Jake replied with calculated insolence, and the next instant he was flying across the room.
If he had struck the curved wall headfirst, he would have been knocked cold or killed. As it
happened, he struck on one hip, rebounded, and landed in a heap on the iron grillework. He
shook his head groggily, looked around, and found himself face to face with the woman
who was not taking a siesta. He uttered a shocked cry and crawled away on his hands and
knees. Hoots kicked him in the chest, flipping him onto his back. Jake lay there gasping,
looking up at the knot of rainbow colors where the neon tubes came together. A moment
later, Tick-Tock’s face filled his field of vision. The man’s lips were pressed together in a
hard, straight line, his cheeks flared with color, and there was fear in his eyes. The
coffin-shaped glass ornament he wore around his neck dangled directly in front of Jake’s
eyes, swinging gently back and forth on its silver chain, as if imitating the pendulum of the
tiny grandfather clock inside.
“Gasher’s right,” he said. He gathered a handful of Jake’s shirt into one fist and pulled him up. “You’re pert. But you don’t want to be pert with me, cully. You don’t ever want to be
pert with me. Have you heard of people with short fuses? Well, I have no fuse at all, and
there’s a thousand could testify to it if I hadn’t stilled their tongues for good. If you ever
speak to me of Lord Perth again . . . ever, ever, ever . . . I’ll tear off the top of your skull and eat your brains. I’ll have none of that bad-luck story in the Cradle of the Grays. Do you
understand me?”
He shook Jake back and forth like a rag, and the boy burst into tears.
“Do you?”
“Y-Y-Yes!”
“Good.” He set Jake upon his feet, where he swayed woozily back and forth, wiping at his streaming eyes and leaving smudges of dirt on his cheeks so dark they looked like mascara.
“Now, my little cull, we’re going to have a question and answer session here. I’ll ask the
questions and you’ll give the answers. Do you understand?”
Jake didn’t reply. He was looking at a panel of the ventilator grille which circled the
chamber.
The Tick-Tock Man grabbed his nose between two of his fingers and squeezed it viciously.
“Do you understand me?”
“Yes!” Jake cried. His eyes, now watering with pain as well as terror, returned to
Tick-Tock’s face. He wanted to look back at the ventilator grille, wanted desperately to
verify that what he had seen there was not simply a trick of his frightened, overloaded mind, but he didn’t dare. He was afraid someone else—Tick-Tock himself, most likely—would
follow his gaze and see what he had seen.
“Good.” Tick-Tock pulled Jake back over to the chair by his nose, sat down, and cocked his leg over the arm again. “Let’s have a nice little chin, then. We’ll begin with your name, shall we? Just what might that be, cully?”
“Jake Chambers.” With his nose pinched shut, his voice sounded nasal and foggy.
“And are you a Not-See, Jake Chambers?”
For a moment Jake wondered if this was a peculiar way of asking him if he was blind . . .
but of course they could all see he wasn’t. “I don’t understand what—”
Tick-Tock shook him back and forth by the nose. “Not-See! Not-See! You just want to
stop playing with me, boy!”
“I don’t understand—” Jake began, and then he looked at the old machine-gun hanging
from the chair and thought once more of the crashed Focke-Wulf. The pieces fell together
in his mind. “No—I’m not a Nazi. I’m an American. All that ended long before I was born!”
The Tick-Tock Man released his hold on Jake’s nose, which immedi- ately began to gush
blood. “You could have told me that in the first place and saved yourself all sorts of pain, Jake Chambers . . . but at least now you understand how we do things around here, don’t
you?”
Jake nodded.
“Ay. Well enough! We’ll start with the simple questions.”
Jake’s eyes drifted back to the ventilator grille. What he had seen before was still there; it
hadn’t been just his imagination. Two gold-ringed eyes floated in the dark behind the