Automated Alice

Through the Clock's Workings

Alice was beginning to feel very drowsy from having nothing to do. How strange it was that doing absolutely nothing at all could make one feel so tired. She slumped down even deeper into her armchair. Alice was visiting her Great Aunt Ermintrude's house in Didsbury, Manchester; a frightful city in the North of England which was full of rain and smoke and noise and big factories making Heaven-knows-what. "I wonder how you do make Heaven-knows-what?" thought Alice to herself. "Perhaps they get the recipe from somebody who's only recently died?"

The thought of that made Alice shiver so much that she clutched at her doll ever so tightly! Her Great Aunt was a very strict old lady and she had given Alice this doll as a present with the words, "Alice, the doll looks just like you when you're in a tantrum." Alice thought that the doll looked nothing like her at all, despite the fact that her Great Aunt had sewn it an exact (if rather smaller) replica of Alice's favourite pinafore; the splendidly warm and red one she was currently wearing. Alice called the doll Celia, not really knowing the reason for her choice. Alice would often do things without knowing why, and this made her Great Aunt very angry indeed: "Alice, my dear," she would pronounce, "can't you make sense for once?"

Alice now hugged the Celia Doll even closer to her chest, where she wrapped it in the folds of her pinafore: this was all because of the lightning that was flashing madly outside the window, and the November rain that was falling onto the glass, sounding very much like the pattering of a thousand horses' hooves. Her Great Aunt's house was directly opposite a large, sprawling cemetery, which Alice thought a horrible place to live.

But the very worst thing about Manchester was the fact that it was -- oh dear! -- always raining. "Oh Celia!" Alice sighed to her doll, "if only Great Uncle Mortimer was here to play with us!" Great Uncle Mortimer was a funny little man who would always have a treat tucked away for Alice; he would amuse her with jokes and magical tricks and the magnificently long words that he would teach her. Great Uncle Mortimer was, according to her Great Aunt, "big in the city", whatever that could mean. "Well," said Alice to the doll, "he may well be big in the city, but when he gets back to his home he's really rather small. Perhaps he's got two sizes, one for each occasion. How splendid that must be!" Great Uncle Mortimer would spend every night smoking on his pipe whilst adding up huge rows of numbers, and wolfing down a great plateful of the radishes that he grew for himself in the vegetable garden. Alice had never seen so many numbers before (or so many radishes). She was not awfully good at mathematics (or radish eating), and the numbers one to ten seemed quite adequate to her. After all, she only had ten fingers. Why should anybody need more than ten fingers? (Or, for that matter, more than one radish?)

These idle thoughts only made Alice realize how dreadfully bored she was. Great Aunt Ermintrude had three daughters of her own (triplets in fact) but they were all much older than Alice (and Alice always had trouble telling them apart), so they weren't much fun at all! There was nothing to do in Manchester. The only sounds she could hear were the pitter-pattering of the rain against the window and the tick-tocking, tick-tocking of the grandfather clock in the corner of the room. The housemaid had dusted the clock this very morning and the door of it was still open. Alice could see the brass pendulum swinging back and forth, back and forth. It made her feel quite, quite sleepy, but at the same time quite, quite restless. It was at this very moment that she noticed a solitary white ant marching across the breakfast table towards a sticky dollop of Ecklethorpe's Radish Jam; the maid had neglected to remove this in her cleaning. Alice had tried a spoonful of the radish jam (it was Uncle Mortimer's favourite preserve) on a piece of toast that very morning but had found the taste of it too sickly sour. The ant was now running over the jigsaw puzzle that Alice had spent the whole morning trying to complete, only to find (frustratingly) that fully twelve pieces were missing from the segmented picture of London Zoo. "Oh, Mister Ant," Alice said aloud (although how she could possibly tell it was a Mister from that distance is quite beyond understanding), "how is it that you've got so much to do, whilst I, a very grown-up young girl, have got so very little to do?"

The white ant, of course, did not bother to make an answer.

Instead it was Whippoorwill who spoke to Alice. "Who is it that smiles at ten to two," he squawked, "and frowns at twenty past seven, every single day?" Whippoorwill was a green-and-yellow-plumed parrot with a bright orange beak who lived in a brass cage. He was a very talkative parrot and this pleased Alice -- at least she had somebody to converse with. The trouble was, Whippoorwill could only speak in riddles.

"I don't know," answered Alice, grateful for the diversion. "Who does smile at ten to two, and frowns at twenty past seven, every single day?"

"I'll tell you the answer if you open my cage."

"You know I daren't do that, Whippoorwill. Great Aunt would be very angry."

"Then you'll never know," squoked the parrot. (Squoking is how a parrot talks, exactly halfway between speaking and squawking.)

"Oh well," Alice thought, "I suppose it won't do very much harm to open the cage door just a little way." And even before the thought had finished itself, Alice had pulled herself and Celia Doll out of the armchair and made her way over to where Whippoorwill's cage stood on an alabaster stand. "Now you really won't try to escape, will you?" said Alice to the parrot, but the parrot had no answer to give her: he clung to his perch and turned a quizzical eye towards the young girl. Seeing that quizzical eye, Alice could do nothing more than to release the tiny brass catch, and let the cage door swing open.

Oh dear! Whippoorwill immediately flew out of his cage; his bright feathers made a fan of colours and his screechy voice seemed to fill the room. "Whatever shall I do now?" cried Alice, aloud. "My Great Aunt shall have to have words with me!" The parrot flew all around the room and Alice tried her best to catch hold of his tail feathers, but all to no avail. Finally he flew directly into the grandfather clock's open casing. Alice quickly ran to the clock; she slammed the door shut, trapping the poor parrot inside. The door had a window in it and Alice could see Whippoorwill making a fearful commotion trying to escape. "Now let that be a lesson to you, Whippoorwill," said Alice. She looked up at the clock's face and saw that it was almost ten to two in the afternoon. At precisely two o'clock each day her Great Aunt would come calling for Alice to take her afternoon writing lesson; Alice could not possibly be late for that engagement. (She had not at all bothered to complete yesterday's assignment on the correct use of the ellipsis in formal essays: the truth be known, Alice didn't even know what an ellipsis was, except that it was made out of three little dots, just like this one is...) Despite the young girl's predicament, the two hands of the clock seemed to put a smile on its moon-like face: it was then that Alice found the answer to Whippoorwill's latest riddle, but when she looked through the glass window into the casing all she could see was the blur of the parrot's wings as he flew upwards into the clock's workings.

Whippoorwill vanished!

Alice looked here and there for the parrot, but finding only a single green-and-yellow feather floating down, she decided that she must go into the clock's insides herself. Alice therefore opened up the door and climbed inside. It really was a very tight squeeze inside the clock, especially when the pendulum swung towards her. "That pendulum wants to cut my head off," thought Alice, and then she looked up into the workings to discover where the parrot had got to. "Whippoorwill?" she cried, "where on the earth are you?" But there was no trace of the parrot at all! Alice climbed aboard the pendulum as it swung past her, and then started to climb up it, which is quite a difficult task when you have a porcelain doll called Celia in your hands. But very soon she had reached the top of the pendulum and now her head was pushing against the very workings of the clock, and the tick-locking, tick-tocking seemed very loud indeed! And that naughty Whippoorwill was still nowhere to be seen.

Just then Alice heard her Great Aunt's stentorian voice calling over the clock's tickings: "Alice! Come quickly, girl!" the voice boomed. "It's time for your lesson, dear. I do hope you've done your assignment correctly!"

"Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!" cried Alice. "Whatever shall I do? Great Aunt is early for my lesson! I really must find Whippoorwill. He must be around here somewhere!" And so Alice climbed up the pendulum even further until, with a sudden ellipsis...

Alice vanished.

Now I don't know if you have ever vanished, but if you have, you will know it can be quite a fearsome experience. The strangest thing was this: Alice knew that she had vanished, but, even so, she could still see herself! Imagine that, you know that you've vanished, but you can still see yourself! So then, how is it that you know that you've vanished?

But Alice was far too busy to pay much attention to these thoughts; she was presently rushing down -- at an ever-increasing pace! -- a long tunnel of numbers. The numbers flashed by her eyes like shooting stars in the night, and each number seemed to be larger than the last one. They started out from one-thousand-eight-hundred-and-sixty (which was the number of the present year) and rapidly increased until Alice could no longer see where the count was taking her. Why, to count this far, one would need a million fingers! Ahead of her she could see Whippoorwill flying through the cascade of numbers, until what looked like a very large, and a very angry one-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-eight clamped his numbersome jaws around the ever-so-naughty bird. Alice plummeted forwards (if you can plummet forwards, that is) until she felt herself being eaten up by that very same number.

Down, down, down. Through an endless tubing Alice fell. "Whatever shall we do, Celia?" she said to the doll she still clutched in her fingers, and she wasn't all that surprised when the doll answered, "We must keep on falling, Alice, until we reach the number's stomach."

"I didn't even know that numbers had stomachs," thought Alice, "Great Uncle Mortimer will be most astounded when I tell him this news." When suddenly, thump! thump! thump! down Alice came upon a heap of earth, and the fall was over.

Alice was not a bit hurt: the earth was quite soft, and she jumped up in a moment. She looked around only to find herself standing in a long corridor under the ground. The walls and the floor and the ceiling of the tunnel were made of dirt, and it curved away in both directions until Alice felt quite funny trying to decide which way to go. "Oh Whippoorwill," she cried, "wherever have you flown to?" And then she heard three men approaching around the corridor's bend. She knew it was three men because she could hear six footsteps making a dreadful noise. But what should come around the corner but a rather large white ant! He was quite the same size as Alice and he had on a tartan waistcoat and a pair of velvet trousers. (Although I suppose you can't really have a pair of six-legged trousers: you can have a sextet of trousers -- but that sounds too much like a very strange musical composition.) Dangling between the ant's antennae was an open newspaper which completely obscured his face, and from behind which he could be heard muttering to himself:

"Tut, tut, tut! How dare they? Why, that's disgusting! Tut, tut, tut!" The newspaper was called News of the Mound and if Alice had managed a look at the newspaper's date she would have received a nasty shock, but all her attention was focused on the headline, which read: TERMITES FOUND ON THE MOON! Alice was so puzzled by this news, and the ant was so engrossed in his reading, that they both banged into each other!

"Who in the earth are you?" the ant grumbled, folding up his paper and looking rather surprised to find Alice standing there.

"I'm Alice," replied Alice, politely.

"You're a lis?" the ant said. "What in the earth is a lis?"

"I'm not a lis. My name is Alice." Alice spelt her name: "A-L-I-C-E."

"You're a lice!" the ant cried. "We don't want no lice in this mound!"

"I'm not a lice, I'm Alice! I'm a girl."

"Are you now? Then I suppose this might very well be yours?" Upon which utterance the ant produced a tiny piece of crooked wood from his waistcoat pocket. "I found it lying in the tunnel, just a few moments ago."

"Why, yes it does belong to me," cried Alice. "It's a missing piece from my jigsaw!"

"Well take it then, and in future may I ask you to refrain from cluttering up the tunnels with your litter."

"I'm very sorry," replied Alice, taking the jigsaw piece from the ant's grasp. It showed the picture of a single white ant crawling up the stem of a flower. "I shall place this in London Zoo, just as soon as I get back home." And she slipped the jigsaw piece into her pinafore pocket.

"But it's only a picture," sniffed the ant, "not a living creature."

"That's quite all right," Alice replied, "because he's going to live inside a picture of London Zoo. Is that today's newspaper?"

"I sincerely hope it's today's paper! I've just paid three grubs for it."

"But it says that termites have been found on the Moon?"

"So?"

"But nobody's been to the Moon!"

"What are you going on about?" the ant demanded. "The humans have been travelling to the Moon for years now! For years, I tell you! What, exactly, are you doing in this mound?"

"I'm looking for my parrot."

"A parrot, you say? This wouldn't be a green-and-yellow parrot, with a big orange beak, who just can't stop asking riddles?"

"Yes, that's Whippoorwill! Where did he go?"

"The parrot, he went that-a-way," said the ant, pointing back down the corridor with one of his antennae.

"Oh thank you, Mister Ant. You've been ever so helpful."

"How dare you, young miss!" exclaimed the ant, raising himself onto his back legs and blocking her path. "You have made not one, but two factual errors: firstly, I am not an ant. I am a termite."

"Oh I am sorry," said Alice. "But surely there's not that much difference between ants and termites?"

"Stupid child! Just because we've both got six legs and two sections, and just because we both live in highly organized societies comprising winged males, wingless females and winged queens, you presume ants and termites to be all but identical. You couldn't be more wrong, dear girl. Why, there's a thousand differences between us!"

"Please tell me one," asked Alice.

"Tell you one what?"

"A difference between a termite and an ant."

"Well, now... let me think... I'm sure there was something... it's in here somewhere..." The termite was tapping his head with one of his antennae as he pondered. "Of course! We termites are vegetarians, while the horrible ants are carnivores. In fact..." and here the termite looked around rather nervously as he whispered to Alice, "ants like to eat termites for breakfast. On toast! I suspect that the ants are jealous because they haven't been found on the Moon. Quite a mound of difference, I think you'll agree?"

Alice did agree, but she wasn't sure why. "What is your name, Mister Termite?" she asked.

But this latest (very polite) question only made the termite even angrier: his antennae fairly bristled with indignation. "And that", he trumpeted, "brings me to your second mistake, for, if you had been paying attention to my previous statement, you would have recognized that I am completely wingless and therefore, logically, I am a female termite."

"Very well," said Alice, getting just a little exasperated herself now, "what is your name, Mrs Termite?"

"Mrs? Mrs? Do I look like a Mrs? Only the Queen is a Mrs! I told you already that the Queen has wings. What is the matter with you?"

"Oh!" cried Alice, "Miss Termite, you're just too... too... too logical for me!"

"Logical? Of course I'm logical. I'm a computermite."

"Whatever's a computermite?"

"Exactly what it sounds like, silly. I'm a termite that computes. I work out the answers to questions. Now, what is your question?"

"Very well," began Alice, trying her best to keep her anger in check, "what is your name, Miss Computermite?"

"Name?" squeaked the termite. "Names, names, names! What would I know about names? I'm a termite, for digging's sake! Termites don't have names! Whatever next? You'll be asking if we've got bicycles in a minute!"

Just then, Alice heard a trundling noise coming from behind her, and when she turned to look, what should appear around the corner but a male termite, on a bicycle!

It was quite an ordinary bicycle except that it had two sets of pedals (rather like a tandem) which the male termite pedalled at furiously with his middle and his hind legs, whilst clinging to the handlebars with his forelegs. (This is one of the few cases when two plus two plus fore equals six.) Alice knew it was a male termite because of the wings on his back, and she felt rather proud to have worked out this piece of logic, although why he wasn't flying through the tunnel rather than bicycling through it was quite another question. However, the male termite never gave her a chance to ask this question because he was obviously in a terrible hurry; he simply pedalled past Alice and the female termite at a terrific speed, shouting at them as he did so, "Come on, you two, hop to it! The Queen of the Mound has received a question from Captain Ramshackle and we must answer it immediately. Chop chop!" And with that he disappeared around the curve in the tunnel.

Alice was quite taken aback by this whirlwind appearance. "Who on earth is Captain Ramshackle?" she asked of Miss Computermite, but the female termite was already hurrying along the tunnel after the bicycle. "Come on then," the termite shouted back at her, "there's no time for questions, we've got a question to answer!" Alice thought that sentence completely illogical. "Oh dear, Celia," she said to her doll, "we shall never be home in time for our writing lesson now." And it wasn't until after she'd finished the sentence that Alice realized she no longer had Celia in her hands. "Oh bother!" she said to herself. "Not only have I lost Whippoorwill, I've also lost Celia. And not only that, I've also lost myself! Great Aunt Ermintrude is going to be very, very angry."

And with that Alice started to run along the corridor after Miss Computermite.