One doesn’t--that’s the answer. One merely has the clock. I’d rather be a fool than a machine. EDDY I never definitely elected to be either. IAN One can be both without electing either. ELOISE I want to hear the ticking of a clock! EDDY It’s a nice thing to hear. The ticking of a clock means the minds of many men. As long as the mind of man has to--fix up the facts of nature in order to create ideal time I feel it’s a little more substantial to have the minds of many men. ALICE As I’ve told you before, Eloise, you can’t do better than accept the things that have been all worked out for you. IAN You hear them, Eloise? You see where this defense of clocks is leading? ELOISE Ian, I’m terribly worried--and a little hurt--about the sun. [_As one beginning a dirge._] The sun has failed me. The North star is false. IAN [_Going to her._] I am here, dearest. ELOISE Sometimes you seem so much like space. I am running by the sun--that wobbly sun [_Looking at it_] and everyone else is running by Philadelphia. I want a little clock to tick to me! IAN You will grow, dearest. ELOISE There’s no use growing. The things you grow to are wrong. [_Pressing her hands to her head._] I need a tick in time! IAN [_Striding savagely from her._] Very well, then; dig up the clocks. EDDY Now you’re? talking! [_ELOISE springs up._ IAN Dig up the clocks! And we spend our lives nineteen minutes and twenty seconds apart! [_ELOISE is arrested, appalled. Dreadful pause._ ELOISE You mean we’d never get together? IAN Time would lie between us. I refuse to be re-caught into a clock world. It was you, Eloise, who proposed we give up the clocks and live in this first-hand relation to truth. ELOISE I didn’t know I was proposing a first-hand relation with that snake! IAN It’s not a snake! It’s a little piece of the long winding road to truth. It’s the discarding of error, the adjustment of fact. And I did it myself. And it puts me _on_ that road. Oh, I know [_To EDDY and ALICE_] how you can laugh if you yourself feel no need to _feel_ truth. And you, Eloise, if you don’t want to feel time--return to your mean little clock. What is a clock? A clock is the soulless-- [_The alarm clock enters a protest. Smothered sound of the alarm going off underground. ELOISE screams._ ELOISE The alarm clock! It’s going off! ALICE Buried alive! ELOISE Oh, no--oh, no! How terrible! Ian, how terrible! [_She runs to him. Alarm clock, being intermittent, goes off again._ IAN Eloise, if you listen to the voice of that clock--! EDDY How bravely it tries to function in its grave! ALICE The death struggle--the last gasp! [_With another scream ELOISE snatches spade, begins to dig; alarm clock gives another little gasp; spade is too slow for her: in her desperation goes to it with her hands. Gets it and, as she holds it aloft, the alarm clock rings its triumph._ ELOISE