At twenty to five on Tuesday the fifteenth of June, 1920, the basement of the Fenwick Laboratory smelled of hot shellac and Professor Hartley's pipe, and the galvanometer needle had started to climb.
"Read it out," said Hartley.
"Four point two," said John. "Four point four."
"Lovely." Hartley was on his knees by the coil housing with a screwdriver in his teeth, which made lovely come out as luvvy. He took the screwdriver out. "Keep reading. If we're done by seven I can get home for Melba."
"For what?"
"Dame Nellie Melba. On the wireless from Chelmsford, ten past seven. Singing into the air." He waved the screwdriver at the ceiling.
"Four point nine," said John.
The resonance stabiliser took up most of the bench. Two copper coils the size of bicycle wheels, wound by John over three wet weeks in March. A quartz plate in a clamp between them. A mercury interrupter ticking in its jar. Sixty Leclanché cells in racks under the bench, each labelled in John's small square hand. And on top of the chart roll, to stop it curling, Hartley's astrolabe: a brass disc as wide as a saucer, green in the folds, with a pierced star map over a plate of engraved lines. Hartley had bought it off the Charing Cross Road for nine shillings because nobody else wanted it.
The needle went past five.
"Five point three," said John. "Professor. That's past the line."
"It's meant to go past the line. That's the experiment."
"It's past the line you drew yesterday."
Hartley looked up. Sixty-one, bald on top, white tufts over his ears, small bright eyes behind steel spectacles. He looked at John the way he always did when John was being careful: fondly, with no intention of listening.
"John," he said. "You've been in a war. Nothing in this room is going to blow up."
The quartz plate began to sing.
It was a thin sound, very high, like a wet finger round the rim of a glass. The mercury interrupter stopped ticking and started to hum. The hairs on John's arms stood up under his shirtsleeves. He could smell something new under the shellac and the pipe: the clean, sharp smell he remembered from the wireless dugouts at Messines, just before a valve went.
That's ozone.
"Five point eight," he said. "Six. Professor, I'm opening the..."
He reached for the knife switch, and the room went white.
* * *
It wasn't like the shell at Wytschaete, which had been a shove and a roar and then the ground. This was quiet. This was the room falling away from him in every direction at once.
He saw the basement.
Not the one he was standing in. The same walls, the same low arched ceiling with the pipes along it, but painted white, and lit by long tubes that gave a flat, bluish light like nothing he'd ever seen. The bench was gone. A grey cabinet stood in its place, with little lines of green light moving on a dark glass window. On a table by the door, a paper cup with a lid, and red lipstick on the lid. On the wall, a calendar with a photograph of a mountain. MARCH 2045.
A woman's voice said, somewhere behind him, quite clearly, "Oh, come on."
Then the basement was gone and he was standing on nothing, high up, over a city.
A city by a sea of a blue he'd only seen in paintings. Towers of glass, taller than St Paul's, with straight roads between them full of something fast and bright. On the nearest tower hung a woman's face three storeys high, and beside it a line of writing he couldn't read: birds, eyes, wavy lines, the kind of thing you saw on mummy cases in the British Museum. Under it, in ordinary numerals: 2002.
Then nothing at all.
* * *
"John. John. Can you hear me? Open your eyes, there's a good chap."
He opened his eyes.
The ceiling. The pipes. The ordinary yellow light of the electric bulbs, one of them swinging gently on its flex. Hartley's face, upside down, very close, very white.
"There you are," said Hartley. His voice was shaking. "There you are. Don't move. You've had a nasty shock. The whole bank blew. I've pulled the switch."
John sat up anyway.
Blue smoke curled under the arches. The coils were black. The quartz had cracked straight across in its clamp.
And all of it was doubled.
Over everything lay a faint second picture, like a photograph printed twice on one plate. Hartley knelt in front of him, and just to the left, very faint, Hartley was standing up. Further left, fainter still, Hartley was at the door.
"What time is it?" said John.
Hartley looked at his watch. "Ten to five. You were out four or five minutes." He frowned. "Why?"
"What's the date?"
"The fifteenth. Of June. Nineteen-twenty." Hartley's frown deepened. "John, you're frightening me."
John looked at the ghosts. The faint Hartley by the door was turning his head. A second later, the real Hartley turned his head the same way, towards a sound on the stairs that hadn't happened yet. Then it happened: a door slamming, two floors up.
He's going to look at the door. He's looking at the door.
"Professor," said John. "I think something's happened to me."
* * *
He showed him with a pencil.
It was the first thing that came to hand. A stub of HB from the bench, with John's teeth marks on the end. He held it out at arm's length over the stone floor and let go, and as it left his fingers he pushed, in a direction he didn't have a name for. Not with his hand. With something behind his eyes.
The pencil stopped.
Not quite. It was falling. He could see it falling, a hair's breadth at a time, turning very slowly end over end, the light sliding along its yellow paint. The blue smoke under the arches had stopped curling and hung in the air like cotton wool. The swinging bulb had paused at the top of its swing. Hartley's mouth was open on a word, and the word was taking a very long time.
John counted. One. His own heart, slow and heavy in his ears. Two. Cold in his fingertips, as though he'd put his hands in snow. Three. Something warm on his upper lip. Four.
It snapped back. The pencil hit the floor and bounced. The bulb swung. The smoke curled. Hartley finished his word, which was "...wrong?"
And John's nose was bleeding onto his shirt.
He put the back of his hand to it and looked at the blood. His fingers had gone white to the second knuckle, like a man's after a night on sentry in January. And he was hungry the way he'd been hungry in the line in 1917, when the ration party didn't come up for two days.
"There are sandwiches," he said. "In your bag. Aren't there?"
Hartley fetched his bag without a word. Egg and cress, from his housekeeper. John ate both standing up, in about a minute.
"The pencil," said Hartley, at last.
"Yes."
"It stopped."
"It slowed down. Or I did. I don't know which." John wiped his mouth. "Four seconds. I counted. It costs something. Heat, I think. And whatever's in sandwiches."
"Do it again."
"I don't think I should."
"Do it again, John."
He did it again, with the stopwatch in Hartley's hand. Four seconds by John's count. A fifth of a second by the watch. His nose bled again, and his teeth started chattering.
Hartley looked at the stopwatch for a very long time.
"Twenty to one," he said. "Good God, John. Do you understand what this is?"
"No."
"Neither do I. Isn't it marvellous?" He was already at his desk with his fountain pen. "We'll write it up tomorrow. And I'll wire Pyle."
John's stomach turned over, slowly.
Major Pyle sat on the laboratory's funding board for the War Office. A pleasant man in a good grey suit who came twice a year and asked whether any of it could find submarines. The War Office paid for the coils, the cells, and most of John.
"Professor," he said. "Don't."
"Don't what?"
"Don't wire Pyle."
Hartley turned round with the pen in his hand. "Why ever not? He'll want to know. He'll have to know. If a man can do what you just did..."
"If a man can do what I just did," said John, "they'll want him in a uniform by Friday. I was a wireless sapper for two years, Professor. They didn't want wireless for Melba. They wanted it for ranging the guns. I'm not doing that again. Not with this."
Hartley had been kind to John for three years. Lent him books, fed him on Sundays, never asked about the war. He had also never in his life been near anything this big.
"John," he said gently. "This is bigger than Rutherford. We can't sit on it because you had a bad war." He capped his pen. "I'll wire him in the morning. You'll see. He'll be sensible."
He reached for his hat.
* * *
Afterwards he told himself he hadn't decided. He had. It just took less time than deciding usually did.
He pushed, and the room slowed, and Hartley's hand stopped halfway to his hat.
And this time John looked at him the way he'd looked at the pencil, and saw more than he'd meant to.
He saw the last few minutes of Hartley's life laid out like a strip of cinema film. The pencil hanging. The sandwiches. Good God, John. The pen, the word Pyle. Frames, joined, and he could feel the joins.
He found the place where the pencil started. He found the place where the hat began. He took hold of the strip between them, the way you'd take a strip of film out of a projector, and pulled.
It came away. It came away much too easily. And something came with it.
A woman laughing. A wooden pier, grey boards with the sea showing green between them, and wind, and a straw hat with a blue ribbon going end over end along the boards, and a woman in a white dress running after it and laughing so hard she had to stop and hold the rail. Edmund! Edmund, get it! Brighton. The summer of 1909. Two years before she died.
Clara. Her name was Clara.
He'd never met her. He could remember her laughing as clearly as his own mother's voice.
The world came back.
Hartley stood by the hat stand with his hand out, blinking. A thin line of blood ran from his left nostril down over his lip. He touched it, surprised, and looked at his fingers.
"Good Lord," he said. "I'm bleeding."
"It's the shock," said John. His voice sounded far away. "The overload. We both took a knock."
"Did we?" Hartley looked round at the black coils and the cracked quartz as if seeing them for the first time. "Good Lord. What a mess. Lucky, very lucky." He held a handkerchief to his nose. "We'll clear up tomorrow." He took his hat off the stand, and put it on, and paused at the door. Something crossed his face. A small puzzled look, like a man who has come into a room for something and can't remember what.
"Funny," he said. "I was thinking about Brighton just now. Haven't thought about Brighton in years." He shook his head. "Well. Melba. Goodnight, John."
"Goodnight, Professor."
The door shut. His feet went up the stairs.
John stood alone in the smoke with a dead woman laughing in his head.
* * *
The notebook was on the desk where Hartley had left it, open.
Every reading was there in Hartley's spidery hand, down to a blot where the pen had jerked when the room went white. The coil specifications. The quartz cut. The cells, bank by bank. Everything a careful man would need to build it again and run it past the line.
John picked it up and held it over the Bunsen burner by the sink. He turned the gas tap. He struck a match.
He stood there with the match burning down towards his fingers and the notebook over the flame, and he couldn't do it.
Three years of Hartley's work. Nine months of his own. The most important numbers ever written down, and you didn't burn numbers.
Somebody will find it.
The match burned his fingers. He shook it out. He put the notebook back in the drawer of the desk, under the blotter, where Hartley kept it, and shut the drawer.
Somebody will find it, and run it past the line.
He turned the gas off.
* * *
He took his wallet out of his jacket, and from behind the photograph of his mother he took a letter he had carried for four years. One sheet, folded small, soft as cloth at the creases. Pencil, in his brother's careless capitals. 30th June 1916. Dear Johnny. Big show tomorrow, can't say more. Don't tell Mum but I'm not a bit scared, the guns have been at them a week and there can't be a German left alive...
Tom had gone over the top at seven-thirty the next morning, by La Boisselle. They'd never found him.
John held the letter flat between his palms and shut his eyes. If the room could fall away to 2045, it could fall away to 1916. He had the date, the place, a thing Tom had touched. He pushed, harder than before, towards a trench in France on the last night of June.
He hit a wall.
There was no other word for it. It was like running full tilt into a pane of glass in the dark. Something in his head went crack, and he was on his knees on the stone floor with blood running out of his nose in a stream, onto the letter, onto his hands, and his ears ringing, and the room swinging round him.
He knelt there for a long time.
When he could, he folded the letter, blood and all, and put it back behind his mother's photograph. Then he reached up for the edge of the bench to pull himself to his feet, and his hand closed on the first thing it found, which was cold and round and brass.
The astrolabe.
He looked at it. Under his bloody thumb, round the rim, very small, the engraver's letters that he'd seen a hundred times and never read.
FACTA FLORENTIAE MDIII.
Made in Florence. 1503.
The brass was warm. It was getting warmer. And the floor of the basement, very gently, the way a boat leaves a quay, began to go.