Legacy AKA A Tale of Two Clocks by James H. Schmitz

"Hard to believe," Trigger observed, "that a sort of leech-looking thing could distinguish between people."

"This one can.  Do you get any sensations while holding it?"

"Sensations?"  She considered.  "Nothing particular.  It's just like I said the other time--little Repulsive is rather nice to feel."

"For you," he said.  "I didn't tell you everything."

"You rarely do," Trigger remarked.

James H. Schmitz came to mind when we read his OK piece "We Don't Want Any Trouble" for the last installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.   In late June, at D. J. Ernst Books in Selinsgrove, PA, I picked up at a bargain price a 1979 Ace paperback copy of Schmitz's 1962 novel A Tale of Two Clocks that bears the new title Legacy and a mediocre sex and violence cover (the foreshortening and perspective on the pistol are distractingly wrong) that suggested the book is one of Schmitz's famous female-cop-of-the-future works.  isfdb tells us that A Tale of Two Clocks is the first book in the Hub series; we've already read the third Hub book, The Demon Breed, and three Schmitz stories about alien monsters that take place in the Hub setting, "Lion Loose," "Goblin Night" and "Grandpa."  (The collection Agent of Vega, which is all about girl space cops, apparently is not set in the same universe as the Hub.)  I spent the last week or so slowly grinding through this 346-page typo-ridden Ace edition and I am afraid I have to tell you I did not enjoy it very much.     

The typeface of this edition might be large (33 lines per page) but A Tale of Two Clocks feels quite long.  The story moves slowly, and in disjointed fashion, with most of the events that make up the plot presented not directly to the reader but in expository dialogue after the fact--as in a mystery novel, the goals of many of the characters consist of figuring out who did what and why in the past.  Quite a few chapters feel circular, like they don't advance the plot.  For example, in the first half of the novel our heroine, 24-year-old Trigger Argee of the interstellar Federation's  FBI/CIA, wants to abandon the position she has been assigned on the University planet and return to planet Manon, where her boyfriend is, so she uses her spy skills to go AWOL.  She gets captured by her superiors but not punished.  She goes AWOL again and gets recaptured again.  Again she is not punished, and then her superiors just assign her to Manon, so she ends up going where she wants to go anyway.  We don't really know why she was sent to the Uni planet, nor back to Manon, nor why she really wanted to return to Manon, until quite a bit later in the book.

For multiple reasons, the novel lacks tension and urgency.  As the AWOL chapters described above suggest, for the named characters in A Tale of Two Clocks risks seem slight and the stakes feel low; people misbehave or make mistakes but don't get punished, they lose fights and break laws but suffer no physical injury or serious legal ramifications.  Not only are the novel's characters exempt from risk, they are exempt from responsibility--again and again people are hypnotized or mind-controlled and thus not responsible for their own actions; almost every prominent character in the book is not in control of his or her body and/or mind at at least one point, and this happens to several of them multiple times.   

A Tale of Two Clocks reminded me of the juvenile mysteries I read as a kid, like The Hardy Boys and The Three Investigators, in that it has a light-hearted vibe and our putative protagonist Trigger Argee runs little risk and is a minor player in things, not the motor or brain that drives the plot.  Trigger is treated by everyone like an adorable mischievous child, always praised, always forgiven, no matter what she does--even though she serially disobeys orders and even knocks her superiors unconscious and steals from them they keep on loving her, even praising her for her ingenuity.  Even though this novel is about spies and criminals and naval battles and human civilization at risk of erupting into total human vs human war or enslavement or extermination by aliens, Schmitz does very little to instill fear or suspense in the reader; most of the alien monsters look grotesque but prove to be admirable or harmless; the alien at the center of the plot, which Trigger compares to a leech, is soothing to the touch of our heroine, and when Trigger guns down one monster in a fight she feels bad about it.  Schmitz's purpose in this novel isn't to produce thrills and chills, to generate tension by suggesting the protagonist might suffer and then relieving that tension in a catharsis by portraying the heroine triumphing thanks to her abilities or personality; I think he hopes readers will enjoy seeing a bunch of admirable and likable people act all chummy and have little comic interludes.  As we often see in crime and espionage fiction, many of the bad guys are likable and switch sides to join up with the good guys, and many of the good guys are former bad guys or do things not dissimilar to what bad guys do, but do it to protect society.  

Another of the value propositions of A Tale of Two Clocks is its depiction of a high tech future with lots of gadgets and with different social mores than our own--most of these mores revolve around gender roles and sex.  Trigger and her comrades interact quite often with what we might call internet terminals, and there is plenty of other futuristic gear, like clothes that distort light waves to change your body silhouette in order to augment your disguise.  Schmitz actually describes people's clothes and hair quite a lot; this is perhaps a facet of the feminist aspect of Schmitz's work, which helped endear Schmitz to Mercedes Lackey, who reports in the intro to a Baen edition of Agent of Vega that Schmitz was the first science fiction author she ever read.  Schmitz here in A Tale of Two Clocks portrays a society of sexual equality in which half the spies, half the scientists, and half the criminals are women, and he goes the extra mile, trying to get into women's heads, though whether feminists would be thrilled by the fact that Trigger spends a lot of time thinking about her clothes and her hair is up for debate.

Another aspect of the novel that might engender ambiguous reactions from feminists are all the hints at fetishistic sexuality; women in the novel are bound in various high tech and low tech ways, and there are multiple scenes of women being ogled by men.  The cover of the first hardcover edition hints at this aspect of the novel, depicting Trigger in what amounts to a bikini, perhaps a reference to the outfit she dons in Chapter 13. 

Long, boring and confusing, with hordes of uninteresting characters, as I read and took notes on A Tale of Two Clocks AKA Legacy I kept wavering between an expectation that in this blog post I would judge it merely acceptable and a sad realization that I had to condemn it as poor.  The final two chapters are actually good hard science fiction, with a good action climax and a satisfying denouement which helped soothe the frustration of the previous 320 pages, so I guess our final verdict is that A Tale of Two Clocks is tolerable.  The plot outline, the alien monsters, the high tech equipment and even the social world which are the basic building blocks of Schmitz's novel are good, but the tone and the structure of the book are weak and the characters bland so that there is no passion or narrative drive, nothing to stir up the reader's emotions.  I didn't care what happened next, and it was easy to put the book aside, with the result that I was reading only two or three chapters a day.  

Oh, the plot.  In brief, A Tale of Two Clocks is the story of how young Trigger, the high-IQ marksman and famous government security agent, is manipulated by criminals and her employers as various revisionist governments and greedy entities compete with each other and the status quo powers of the Federation for possession of the recently discovered plasmoids, the biomechanical creatures that apparently served as the industrial base of the aliens who ruled the galaxy thousands and thousands of years ago.  The plasmoids, who are very reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft's shoggoths, in this novel play the McGuffin role that the One Ring plays in Tolkien or a nuclear weapon formula might play in an extravagant spy story--bad guys from all over the galaxy want the plasmoids and the wiser people among the good guys wish the plasmoids could be kept out of the hands of any humans as they represent a technology that has the potential to cause a terrible war between humans or a monster army that could take over the galaxy.  The novel's events include lots of espionage/detective business--people in disguise, a long list of suspects to sift through, people getting interrogated--plus plenty of monsters and lots of psychology jazz.  At the end we finally get space naval battles and people in space suits on a dangerous mission in vacuum.  And a twist ending in which we learn the astonishing identity of the aliens who used to rule the galaxy and their enduring influence.

If you want more plot details, and examples to back up all my many complaints (and limited praise), read on below.   

**********

Our heroine is Trigger Argee, already at age 24 a famous agent of the security services of the human Federation of over a thousand planets.  She has been summoned to the "University World of the Hub" on a mission about which she has been told little.  Chapter 1 gives us a little exposition, plus scenes demonstrating that Trigger is a badass and popular with everybody, for example friends with the butch head of the university's women's athletics department and the uni's comic relief principal, an absent-minded fat guy who is a bad driver.  Ha ha.

Schmitz doesn't limit our experience of his story to scenes with Trigger; in Chapter 2 we observe the athletics director, a security agent herself, on a phone call with a senior security officer, talking about how Trigger has a high IQ and is difficult to manage.  And get more exposition.  On planet Manon, where Trigger was previously working, were discovered some of the "plasmoids" of the "Old Galactics," artificial life created by the lost race that ruled the galaxy before the rise of humanity.  These blobs of various sizes apparently served the ancient ones as machines--kind of like H. P. Lovecraft's shoggoths--but today, thousands of years later, while alive, they are dormant.  Specimens are being studied all over the Federation, including here on the University planet, but many extra-Federation governments and institutions that would like plasmids have been forbidden by the Federation from access to any, and so criminals and agents of unknown identity, we learn in Chapter 3, have been trying to seize plasmoids.  People have also been trying to kidnap Trigger, though her masters haven't apprised Trigger of this fact.

Chapter 3 also introduces a love triangle.  Via an interstellar phone call, Trigger learns that her boyfriend back on Manon is being pursued by a sexy nineteen-year-old, the daughter of a shipping magnate.  Schmitz does a sort of gender switcheroo on us and has Trigger worried that this girl's wealth, not her youth and beauty, might tempt her boyfriend--I feel like in real life men tend to worry women will be tempted by money while women worry men will be tempted by youth, physical beauty and sexual availability.  Schmitz doesn't do much of anything with this love triangle and in Chapters 18 and 20 we learn Trigger didn't really want to go back to Manon because of jealousy but because she had been hypnotized into wanting to go back to Manon; concern over her boyfriend was just an excuse her hypnotized brain grabbed on to. 

Chapter 4 describes in some detail Trigger's effort to get off the University planet and to Manon without her bosses knowing it, Schmitz giving us all the espionage/crime fiction slosh: Trigger buying tickets under an assumed name, exploiting her local contacts, changing her clothes, etc.  But her security masters capture her before she can get off world and bring her before a security big wig for some exposition on the plasmoids and current operations in Chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8.  (Most of the plot of this novel is described to us at a remove, in the conversations of the characters or while the characters are watching a screen or something like that.)  Somebody has stolen one of the plasmoids, perhaps the most important one, one that is like the manager of the others, able to direct them and even generate replacements for failed lesser plasmoids.  Trigger is also informed that people have been trying to kidnap her, but her superiors are not sure why; could the fact that she may be attuned to plasmoids--we see one before more active in her presence--be the reason?  

In Chapter 9, in an effort to evade any future kidnapping attempts, Trigger and the women's athletic director, whom Trigger now knows is also a government agent, are in disguise on a hunting preserve while another woman impersonates Trigger back at the university.  In Chapter 10, knocks out her short-haired friend and we get more spy business with disguises and false names; Trigger this time makes it aboard a liner to Manon.  In Chapter 11 Schmitz describes what a trip on a space liner is like; the fact that hyperspace travel induces hallucinations and that part of the liner's entertainment system consists of illusions add a surreal note to the proceedings--is that little yellow devil Trigger sees a hologram, an hallucination, or an alien?  

At the liner's first stop, a Federation Security agent, Quillan, boards and Trigger finds herself again under the control of her government employers.  Quillan offers exposition in Chapter 12 and A Tale of Two Clocks takes on some of the character of a murder mystery.  Some nameless crewmen have been killed by a monster, but it is not clear if the monster is still aboard and it is totally unknown who employed the monster or who it was really sent to kill.  I have to admit that as I write this I have actually forgotten the monster's owner and target--the answer doesn't really mean much in the greater scheme of things, perhaps.

Anyway, we get a roster of suspects, which essentially overlaps with the list of people suspected of masterminding the efforts to kidnap Trigger and capture plasmoids.  Of the multiple groups of people who have been restricted by the Federation from access to plasmoids and are trying to get plasmoids by underhanded means, the most important to Schmitz's novel are the people of aristocratic planet Tranest, ruled by a woman named Lyad, which is easy to remember because it is an anagram of "lady."  Lyad is in league with the obese shipping magnate whose daughter is after Trigger's boyfriend.  Second in importance are the totalitarians of planet Devagas.  Lyad, the shipping magnate, and the top Devagas scientist, Balmordan, are on the liner and headed to Manon.

Quillan and some other Federation agents present incognito on the liner move in the high social circles of Lyad and the shipper and Trigger gets invited along with the other Feds to a dinner party with the big three criminals.  Chapter 13 is primarily concerned with a revealing party dress which Quillan gives Trigger to wear to the shindig, while in Chapter 14 we learn via a flashback about the party at which the Federation agents and the various suspects all try to get info out of each other.  Why Schmitz structures the chapter as Trigger looking back on the party rather than just describing the party start to finish, I don't know, as it short circuits suspense and tension.

Chapter 15 covers Trigger and her superiors watching on a TV screen as the murderous monster is killed by a trap--again we readers view the action of the plot through a mediating individual or institution instead of being right there, which saps that action of immediacy and excitement.  Then Trigger's bosses drug her so she won't make any more trouble during the voyage to Manon--one of the reasons A Tale of Two Clocks lacks excitement is that Trigger, whom we keep being told is a high-IQ badass, doesn't drive the plot with her decisions or desires, but is herself propelled by the decisions and goals of a multitude of characters so numerous and boring it is hard to keep track of them all.        

Chapter 16, halfway through the book, we are finally on Manon with Trigger and that big cast of boring characters, a bunch of spooks who do unscrupulous things in service to the government and a bunch of rich people who do unscrupulous things to get more rich and who are suspects in the series of crimes that has been accumulating in the novel's many expository dialogue passages.  Trigger has a long talk with one of her superiors about what other characters are up to; she is also given custody of the little plasmoid that seemed to like her.  She is provided a special handbag in which she can carry "Repulsive;" the handbag is a door into hyperspace--should trouble arise, Trigger can say the magic words and teleport Repulsive into hyperspace to hide; when the danger has passed, another set of words can bring him back into the bag.  In Chapter 17 she and we learn something what has been only hinted at before, that while she was working on Manon some unknown forces knocked her out and hypnotized her, implanting valuable information deep in her brain.  The Federation's elite psych apparatus rendered her unconscious seven times so they could hypnotically probe her brain, looking for the info.  Trigger of course remembers none of these criminal or government hypno sessions, and I myself have forgotten who committed the initial crime against Trigger and what the info was.  I do remember that the security people sent Trigger to the University planet so she would be closer to a top government shrink, however.       

In Chapter 18, Trigger's masters maneuver her into discovering what they already know--her boyfriend is one of the people stealing plasmoids.  They don't just tell her straight out because they want her to resent her boyfriend, not them.  Boyfriend has been gaining weight and not practicing his hand-to-hand combat skills in Trigger's absence so Trigger is able to outfight him when he attacks her rather than surrender the valuable little monsters he has collected.  Reflecting the low stakes that characterize the interactions of named characters in this book, the boyfriend isn't imprisoned or anything for stealing the creatures, just given the opportunity to resign from the spy service.  (He later marries the magnate's daughter and becomes very rich.)  Reflecting one of the shortcomings of this book, we readers don't care that Trigger has broken up with her boyfriend after he tried to kill her because Schmitz never put any effort into building up a relationship between these two people; Schmitz doesn't bother building up a relationship between Trigger and Repulsive, either, even though that relationship, in the final chapters, is the key to the survival of the human race.

Chapter 19 provides exposition on a subplot involving a guy who faked his death months ago, and the start of a hypnotic psychoanalysis session Trigger undergoes--we learn all about Trigger's youth.  Chapter 20 continues the psychoanalysis session, including dream analysis (one of the Trigger's dreams features the images of two clocks--at the very end of the book we learn this is a clue from Repulsive that was incomprehensible to both Trigger and myself) and hints at why Trigger has been acting the way she has.  This whole book is about Trigger being manipulated by others, and Chapter 20 ends with her being kidnapped by the Tranest faction of plasmoid thieves and hauled into the magnate's ship where waits Lyda.

In Chapter 21, Lyda tries to get Trigger to join her criminal gang; Trigger refuses and escapes, but gets captured by Lyda's people again in Chapter 22 even though she manages to kill Lyda's guard monster.  Trigger is bound (one of the numerous guarded erotic elements in the book) and has her brain read (many people in this novel have stuff read from their brains, written in their brains, and erased from their brains) and then the Federation Security people rescue her.  This chapter also offers the scene that inspired the cover of the Belmont edition of A Tale of Two Clocks and of the Spanish edition of the novel, Plasmoides--Quillan and Trigger make her way into the shipping magnate's office, where he keeps the members of his harem suspended in crystal pillars, asleep and on display, when they are not working.   

In Chapter 23, we learn through expository dialogue how the Transet peeps kidnapped Trigger from under the noses of the Federation Security department (some Security people got hypnotized by the criminals, others got replaced by imposters) and some boring details of the various criminals' long term conspiracies to seize plasmoids.  Everyone on the roster of suspects is guilty of something or other, but some were working in concert, others individually, sometimes at odds with each other.  This is all pretty confusing and not interesting enough to remember.  

In Chapter 24, the Security people and Lyad, whose punishment will be losing her position as queen of Tranest* but is otherwise treated almost like one of the ship's crew (at the end of the novel she joins the Federation security service) go to some planet where more plasmoids have been found.  There, in Chapter 25, Trigger's relationship with one of the male Security people begins to blossom in "meet cute" style.  A monster appears while Trigger is bathing nude, we get a section break, and then Trigger and her new boyfriend talk about how the sight of the monster led her to run into his arms.  Why does Schmitz do this thing where he has the characters talk to each other about an action scene after the fact instead of presenting us with the action scene?  Maybe in this case because the monster turned out to be harmless--this monster encounter was not an action scene at all, but a joke scene.  Trigger in this chapter is also told about a space naval battle taking place between the Federation government and the Devagas. 

*The shipping magnate loses some of his business empire but like Lyad isn't imprisoned or anything.  Lots of no-name characters get killed in the course of the many crimes in this novel but somehow nobody is brought to justice for those untimely deaths.

     

Trigger gets periodic reports about the naval engagements in Chapter 26.  She also takes Lyad offscreen to interrogate her, then tells other Security personnel about the interrogation; I guess as a joke and for titillation purposes it sounds like Trigger bent the lady over a stump and swatted her on the ass with sticks.  What Trigger learned from Lyad sends the cast out into deep space, to a region where warp storms make hyperspace travel hazardous.  Their destination is a space station built by the Devagas and watched over by a Tranest warship.  On the way there, into Chapter 27, the security people hear all about what Lyad learned about plasmoids from reading the brain of Balmordan after he was found dead; much of what Balmordan learned about plasmoids he knew from reading the brain of another dead scientist the Devagas found in the wreck of a spaceship.  When they arrive at the station's vicinity they find both the Tranest ship and the Devagas station have been taken over by a renegade plasmoid of great intelligence and psychic power, the one that was stolen some months ago.

The Federation ship Trigger is aboard outfights the zombie Tranest ship, but the station is too tough a nut for this frigate-sized vessel to crack.  (Let me take a second here to complain that the edition of Legacy I read does not italicize ship names, annoying in a book already chock full of goofy character and place names.)  Luckily, Repulsive can out psyker the renegade plasmoid.  In Chapter 28, the best chapter in A Tale of Two Clocks by a long distance, Trigger gets in a space suit and invades the station--as in the first Star Wars movie, the station's guns can't track a target as small as a person.  The station is writhing with plasmoids like a dead body writhing with maggots, the absolute most compelling thing in this entire book, but when Trigger gets close enough to the renegade monster plasmoid, Repulsive silences the whole lot of them, saving the galaxy.  

In the final chapter, set months later when most of the characters are relaxing at the country estate of one of the scientists, we learn that Repulsive is able to go in and out of Trigger's body to commune with her.  Also, Repulsive is not really a plasmoid but one very few surviving of the Old Galactics--his people were almost wiped out in a genocidal war with extra-galactic aliens.  Reminding us of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness again, Repulsive suggests the extra-galactic menace may return someday to threaten the galaxy.  Repulsive is going to secretly control the brains of top Federation scientists and politicians so they hunt down and destroy any additional dangerous plasmoids as well as bring back to Repulsive a female member of his own species to be his girlfriend.