It was twenty to five on the afternoon of Tuesday, 15 June 1920.
In the basement of the Fenwick Laboratory in London, two men were running an experiment.
The room smelled of hot shellac and of Professor Hartley’s pipe.
On the bench, the needle of the galvanometer, the dial that measured the current, had started to climb.
“Read it out,” said Hartley.
“Four point two,” said John.
“Four point four.”
“Lovely.” Hartley was kneeling on the floor beside the coil housing with a screwdriver held in his teeth, so lovely came out as luvvy.
He took the screwdriver out.
“Keep reading.
If we’re finished by seven, I can get home in time for Melba.”
“For what?”
“Dame Nellie Melba.
She’s singing on the wireless from Chelmsford at ten past seven.
Singing into the air.” He waved the screwdriver at the ceiling.
“Four point nine,” said John.
The machine was called the resonance stabiliser, and it took up most of the bench.
It had two copper coils, each the size of a bicycle wheel, which John had wound by hand over three wet weeks in March.
Between the coils, a flat plate of quartz sat in a clamp.
Beside them, a mercury interrupter ticked in a glass jar.
Under the bench stood racks of sixty Leclanché batteries, each labelled in John’s small, square handwriting.
On top of the paper chart roll, to stop it curling, lay Hartley’s astrolabe.
It was a brass disc as wide as a saucer, gone green in the grooves, with a star map cut out of a top plate over a bottom plate of engraved lines.
Hartley had bought it in a shop on 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 on the dial yesterday.”
Hartley looked up.
He was sixty-one, bald on top, with white tufts of hair over his ears and small bright eyes behind steel spectacles.
He gave John the look he always gave him when John was being careful: fond, and 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 make a sound.
It was a thin, very high note, like a wet finger rubbed round the rim of a glass.
The mercury interrupter stopped ticking and began to hum.
The hairs on John’s arms stood up under his shirtsleeves.
Under the smell of shellac and pipe smoke there was a new smell, clean and sharp.
John knew it from the wireless dugouts at Messines during the war.
It was the smell just before a valve burned out.
That’s ozone.
“Five point eight,” he said.
“Six.
Professor, I’m opening the…”
He reached for the knife switch to cut the power.
It was a hinged copper blade with a wooden handle, pressed down into a metal clip; pulling it up would break the circuit.
Before his hand got there, a white flash filled the whole room.
* * *
John had been hit by a shell once, at Wytschaete.
That had been a hard shove, a roar, and then the ground.
This was different.
It was silent.
It felt as if the room were falling away from him in every direction at once.
Then he saw the basement again.
But it was not the basement he was standing in.
It had the same walls and the same low, arched ceiling with the pipes running along it, but now the walls were painted white.
Long glass tubes on the ceiling gave off a flat, bluish light, like no lamp he had ever seen.
The bench was gone.
In its place stood a grey metal cabinet with a dark glass window in the front, and small lines of green light moved across the glass.
On a table by the door stood a paper cup with a lid, and there was red lipstick on the lid.
On the wall hung a calendar with a photograph of a mountain.
It said MARCH 2045.
He was seeing the same room, a hundred and twenty-five years in the future.
Somewhere behind him, a woman’s voice said quite clearly, “Oh, come on.”
Then the basement vanished.
John was standing on nothing, high in the air, looking down at a city.
The city lay beside a sea of a blue he had only ever seen in paintings.
Glass towers rose out of it, taller than St Paul’s Cathedral.
Straight roads ran between them, full of fast, bright shapes.
On the side of the nearest tower hung a picture of a woman’s face, three storeys high.
Next to it was a line of writing he couldn’t read: little birds, eyes and wavy lines, like the writing on the mummy cases in the British Museum.
Under the writing, in ordinary numbers, it said 2002.
Then he saw nothing at all.
* * *
“John.
John.
Can you hear me?
Open your eyes, there’s a good chap.”
He opened his eyes.
He was lying on his back on the basement floor.
Above him were the ceiling and the pipes, and the ordinary yellow light of the electric bulbs.
One bulb was swinging gently on its cord.
Hartley was bent over him, his face upside down, very close and 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 battery bank blew.
I’ve pulled the switch.”
John sat up anyway.
Blue smoke curled under the arches of the ceiling.
The copper coils were burned black.
The quartz plate had cracked straight across in its clamp.
And John was seeing everything twice.
Over the real room lay a faint second picture, like a photograph accidentally printed twice on one plate.
The real Hartley knelt in front of him.
Just to the left, faint and see-through, a second Hartley was standing up.
Further left, fainter still, a third Hartley stood at the door.
They were not ghosts.
They were where Hartley was about to be.
“What time is it?” said John.
Hartley looked at his watch.
“Ten to five.
You were out for four or five minutes.” He frowned.
“Why?”
“What’s the date?”
“The fifteenth of June.
Nineteen-twenty.” Hartley frowned harder.
“John, you’re frightening me.”
John watched the faint Hartley by the door.
It turned its head.
One second later, the real Hartley turned his head the same way, towards the stairs, as if he had heard a noise.
But there had been no noise yet.
Then it came: a door slammed, two floors up.
He’s going to look at the door.
Now he’s looking at the door.
John was seeing a second into the future.
“Professor,” said John.
“I think something’s happened to me.”
* * *
He showed Hartley with a pencil.
It was the first thing he could reach: a stub of HB pencil 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.
As it left his fingers, he pushed.
He didn’t push with his hand.
He pushed with something behind his eyes, in a direction he had no name for.
The pencil stopped.
Not completely.
It was still falling, but only a hair’s breadth at a time, turning very slowly end over end, with the light sliding along its yellow paint.
The blue smoke under the ceiling had stopped curling and hung in the air like cotton wool.
The swinging bulb had stopped at the top of its swing.
Hartley’s mouth was open in the middle of a word, and the word was taking a very long time to come out.
The whole room had slowed down.
John had not.
John counted.
One.
He could hear his own heart, slow and heavy in his ears.
Two.
His fingertips went cold, as if he had pushed his hands into snow.
Three.
He felt something warm on his upper lip.
Four.
Time snapped back to normal.
The pencil hit the floor and bounced.
The bulb swung.
The smoke curled.
Hartley finished his word, which was “…wrong?”
John’s nose was bleeding onto his shirt.
He wiped it with the back of his hand and looked at the blood.
His fingers had gone white up to the second knuckle, the way a sentry’s fingers went after a night on guard in January.
And he was hungry.
It was the hunger he remembered from the front line in 1917, when the ration party failed to come up for two days.
“There are sandwiches in your bag,” he said.
“Aren’t there?”
Hartley fetched his bag without a word.
Inside were two egg and cress sandwiches his housekeeper had made.
John ate both of them standing up, in about a minute.
“The pencil,” Hartley said at last.
“Yes.”
“It stopped.”
“It slowed down.
Or I sped up.
I don’t know which.” John wiped his mouth.
“Four seconds.
I counted.
And it costs something.
Body heat, I think.
And whatever food gives you.”
“Do it again.”
“I don’t think I should.”
“Do it again, John.”
He did it again, while Hartley held a stopwatch.
By John’s count it lasted four seconds.
By the stopwatch it lasted one fifth of a second.
His nose bled again, and his teeth started to chatter with cold.
Hartley stared at the stopwatch for a long time.
“Twenty to one,” he said.
Every second of John’s was a twentieth of a second for everyone else.
“Good God, John.
Do you understand what this is?”
“No.”
“Neither do I.
Isn’t it marvellous?” He was already sitting at his desk with his fountain pen.
“We’ll write it up tomorrow.
And I’ll send a telegram to Pyle.”
John felt his stomach turn over, slowly.
Major Pyle sat on the War Office board that funded the laboratory.
He was a pleasant man in a good grey suit who visited twice a year and asked whether any of their work could be used to find submarines.
The War Office paid for the coils, the batteries, and most of John’s wages.
“Professor,” John said.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t tell Pyle.”
Hartley turned round in his chair with the pen still 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, “the army will want him back in uniform by Friday.
I was a wireless sapper for two years, Professor.
They didn’t want wireless so people could listen to Melba.
They wanted it to aim the big guns.
I’m not doing that again.
Not with this.”
For three years Hartley had been kind to John.
He had lent him books, fed him on Sundays, and never asked about the war.
But he had also never in his life come near a discovery this big.
“John,” he said gently.
“This is bigger than Rutherford splitting the atom.
We can’t keep it quiet because you had a bad war.” He put the cap back on his pen.
“I’ll send the telegram in the morning.
You’ll see.
He’ll be sensible.”
He got up and reached for his hat on the hat stand.
John watched him do it, and for a moment he saw two Hartleys again.
The real one was lifting the hat.
The faint one, a second ahead, was already at the door with the hat on his head and the notebook under his arm.
Behind that one, so faint it was hardly there at all, John could see a third: Hartley at the counter of the post office on Gower Street in the morning, licking the end of a pencil over a telegram form.
He’s really going to do it.
John looked down at his own hands.
The fingers were still white to the second knuckle.
His nose had stopped bleeding, but he could taste iron at the back of his throat.
Four seconds, he thought.
Four seconds was all he had, and every one of them cost him blood and heat.
Four seconds was enough to stop a man reaching for his hat.