I should take my tools, get my motors from McCarthy, open my shop, start my piddling business, go on despite the horrible line. Be working, creating in my own way right up to the end, living as best I can, as actively as possible, until the wall falls back into the moat for all of us, all mankind. That’s what the oracle is telling me. Fate will poleax us eventually anyhow, but I have my job in the meantime; I must use my mind, my hands.
The judgment was for me alone, for my work. But the line; it was for us all.
I’m too small, he thought, I can only read what’s written, glance up and then lower my head and plod along where I left off as if I hadn’t seen; the oracle doesn’t expect me to start running up and down the streets, squalling and yammering for public attention.
Can anyone alter it? he wondered. All of us combined… or one great figure… or someone strategically placed, who happens to be in the right spot. Chance. Accident. And our lives, our world, hanging on it.
Closing the book, he left the lounge and walked back to the main work area. When he caught sight of McCarthy, he waved him over to one side where they could resume talk.
“The more I think about it,” Frink said, “the more I like your idea.”
“Fine,” McCarthy said. “Now listen. Here’s what you do. You have to get money from Wyndam-Matson.” He winked, a slow, intense, frightened twitch of his eyelid. “I figured out how. I’m going to quit and go in with you. My designs, see. What’s wrong with that? I know they’re good.”
“Sure,” Frink said, a little dazed.
“I’ll see you after work tonight,” McCarthy said. “At my apartment. You come over around seven and have dinner with Jean and me—if you can stand the kids.”
“Okay,” Frink said.
McCarthy gave him a slap on the shoulder and went off.
I’ve gone a long way, Frink said to himself. In the last ten minutes. But he did not feel apprehensive; he felt, now, excitement.
It sure happened fast, he thought as he walked over to his bench and began collecting his tools. I guess that’s how those kinds of things happen. Opportunity, when it comes—
All my life I’ve waited for this. When the oracle says “something must be achieved” it means this. The time is truly great. What is the time, now? What is this moment? Six at the top in Hexagram Eleven changes everything to Twenty-six, Taming Power of the Great. Yin becomes yang; the line moves and a new Moment appears. And I was so off stride I didn’t even notice!
I’ll bet that’s why I got that terrible line; that’s the only way Hexagram Eleven can change to Hexagram Twenty-six, by that moving six at the top. So I shouldn’t get my ass in such an uproar.
But, despite his excitement and optimism, he could not get the line completely out of his mind.
However, he thought ironically, I’m making a damn good try; by seven tonight maybe I’ll have managed to forget it like it never happened.
He thought, I sure hope so. Because this get-together with Ed is big. He’s got some surefire idea; I can tell. And I don’t intend to find myself left out.
Right now I’m nothing, but if I can swing this, then maybe lean get Juliana back. I know what she wants—she deserves to be married to a man who matters, an important person in the community, not some meshuggener. Men used to be men, in the old days; before the war for instance. But all that’s gone now.