Hartley’s hand was on the brim of the hat.
The pipe was still warm in the ashtray on the desk, and the burned coils ticked as they cooled.
Upstairs, the porter was whistling as he swept the corridor.
It was eight minutes to five.
Later, John told himself he hadn’t really decided to do it.
But he had.
It just took less time than deciding usually took.
He pushed.
The room slowed down, and Hartley’s hand stopped in mid-air, halfway to his hat.
This time John looked at Hartley the way he had looked at the pencil, and he saw more than he meant to see.
He could see the last few minutes of Hartley’s memory, laid out in front of him like a strip of cinema film: the hanging pencil, the sandwiches, Hartley saying Good God, John, the fountain pen, the name Pyle.
Each moment was a separate frame, and John could feel where the frames were joined together.
He found the frame where the pencil test began.
He found the frame where Hartley reached for his hat.
He took hold of the strip of memory between those two points, the way you would take a piece of film out of a projector, and pulled it out.
It came away.
It came away far too easily.
And it pulled another memory out with it, one that wasn’t part of today.
John saw it as clearly as if he were there.
A woman was laughing.
He stood on a wooden pier with grey boards and green sea showing through the gaps between them.
The wind was blowing.
A straw hat with a blue ribbon was tumbling along the boards, and a woman in a white dress was running after it, laughing so hard she had to stop and hold the rail.
She shouted, Edmund!
Edmund, get it!
It was Brighton, in the summer of 1909, two years before she died.
Her name was Clara.
She had been Hartley’s wife.
John had never met her.
Now he could remember her laugh as clearly as his own mother’s voice.
He had taken the memory out of Hartley’s head, and it was in his own head now.
Time came back to normal speed.
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 in surprise and looked at his fingers.
“Good Lord,” he said.
“I’m bleeding.”
“It’s the shock,” said John.
His own voice sounded far away to him.
“From the overload.
We both took a knock.”
“Did we?” Hartley looked round at the burned coils and the cracked quartz as if he were seeing them for the first time.
He no longer remembered the pencil, the stopwatch, or Pyle.
“Good Lord.
What a mess.
We were lucky, very lucky.” He held a handkerchief to his nose.
“We’ll clear it up tomorrow.” He took his hat off the stand and put it on.
At the door he stopped.
A small, puzzled look crossed his face, like a man who has walked into a room to fetch something and can’t remember what.
“Funny,” he said.
“I was thinking about Brighton just now.
I haven’t thought about Brighton in years.” He shook his head.
“Well.
Melba.
Goodnight, John.”
“Goodnight, Professor.”
The door shut.
John heard Hartley’s footsteps go up the stairs.
He stood alone in the smoky basement, with the laugh of a dead woman in his head.
* * *
For a while he did nothing at all.
He sat down on Hartley’s stool because his legs had decided he would, and he listened to the building empty.
The porter, Mr Daley, finished the corridor and came halfway down the basement stairs with his keys.
“Still at it, Mr Ashford?”
“Half an hour, Mr Daley.
There was a short in the battery bank.
I want to make sure nothing’s smouldering.”
Daley sniffed the air.
He was an old man with one lung, who had been gassed at Loos, and he knew burnt rubber when he smelled it.
“Don’t you go setting fire to the War Office’s property,” he said.
“I’ll lock the street door.
Let yourself out the back.”
“I will.”
His keys jingled away up the stairs.
John noticed, after Daley had gone, that he had been ready to do it again.
Without deciding anything, he had looked at the old man and felt for the edge of the last minute in his head, in case Daley asked the wrong question.
It had been as easy as reaching for a pencil.
That’s twice in ten minutes I’ve thought about it.
He put his cold hands under his armpits.
Don’t make it a habit.
He made himself do what he would have done with any new instrument.
He took his own pocketbook out of his jacket, a cheap one from Smith’s with squared paper, and wrote down what he knew, in the order he knew it.
15 June 1920.
Overload at approx.
4.40 pm.
Flash.
Unconscious approx.
4 to 5 min.
1.
Seeing ahead.
Faint second image of people, roughly 1 second in advance.
Sometimes further, fainter.
Present all the time since waking.
Cannot switch it off.
2.
Slowing.
Call it the Hold.
A push, behind the eyes.
Room slows to about 1/20.
My mind runs at full speed.
My body does NOT.
I can think a great deal in it but move very little.
Max 4 counts.
Costs: cold fingers, nosebleed, hunger.
Cumulative?
3.
Taking memory.
Recent minutes come out like a strip of film.
Easy.
Too easy.
Something older came with it, and it stayed with me.
Subject bleeds from the nose.
He looked at number three for a long time.
Then he added: Clara Hartley.
Brighton, 1909.
I have it now.
He does not.
He tested number two once more against the wall clock, to be sure.
He watched the second hand while he pushed.
It crawled one mark in the time it took him to count four.
Then his teeth began to chatter so hard he bit his tongue, and he stopped, and wrote: Confirmed.
Do not do it more than three times in an hour.
That was when he saw Hartley’s notebook.
It lay open on the desk, where Hartley had left it.
Every reading from the experiment was written there in Hartley’s thin, spidery handwriting, right down to an ink blot where the pen had jerked at the moment of the flash.
It had the coil measurements, the way the quartz was cut, and the batteries, bank by bank.
It was everything a careful man would need to build the machine again and push it past the line.
John picked the notebook up and held it over the Bunsen burner by the sink.
He turned on the gas tap.
He struck a match.
He stood there with the match burning down towards his fingers and the notebook above the flame, and he couldn’t do it.
The notebook held three years of Hartley’s work and nine months of his own.
These were the most important numbers anyone had 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 desk drawer, under the blotter, where Hartley always kept it, and shut the drawer.
Somebody will find it, and run the machine past the line.
He turned off the gas.
* * *
He should have gone home then.
His lodgings were in Camden Town, two rooms over a cobbler’s on Pratt Street, twenty minutes on the Northern line.
He thought about the train, the crowd, the people around him each with a faint second self a second ahead, and he stayed where he was.
Instead he thought about the calendar on the white wall.
MARCH 2045.
For a few seconds the flash had thrown him a hundred and twenty-five years forward, into this same room.
Then further, to a city with a woman’s face on a tower and the year 2002 under it.
He had not travelled there.
He was quite sure of that.
His body had been on the floor the whole time, with Hartley shouting at him.
But something in him had gone there and come back, the way a wireless signal goes out from an aerial and the echo comes back off a hill.
If something in me can go forward, it can go back.
He knew exactly where he would go.
He had known since the moment he saw the calendar, and he had been not thinking about it ever since.
Tom had been two years younger than him and six inches taller.
He was the one who climbed the drainpipe at school, who joined up in 1915 by lying about his age, who wrote home that the food was champion.
On their last leave together, in the spring of 1916, they had sat on the wall of Regent’s Canal with a bag of chips, and Tom had said, “If one of us gets it, Johnny, it’ll be you.
You’re the one who thinks.” He had laughed when he said it.
John had come home from France in 1919.
Tom had not come home at all.
John took his wallet out of his jacket.
Behind the photograph of his mother was a letter he had carried for four years.
It was a single sheet, folded small, and the creases had gone as soft as cloth.
It was written in pencil, in his brother Tom’s careless capital letters.
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…
The next morning, at half past seven, Tom had climbed out of his trench near La Boisselle and gone over the top into the Battle of the Somme.
His body was never found.
John held the letter flat between his palms and shut his eyes.
He thought: if the room could fall away to 2045, then it could fall away to 1916.
He knew the date and the place, and he was holding something Tom had touched.
He pushed, harder than before, trying to reach a trench in France on the last night of June 1916, the night before Tom died.
He hit a wall.
There was no other word for it.
It felt like running full speed into a pane of glass in the dark.
Something in his head went crack.
Then he was on his knees on the stone floor.
Blood was streaming from his nose onto the letter and onto his hands, his ears were ringing, and the room was spinning round him.
Whatever this power was, it would not take him back to Tom.
He knelt there for a long time.
When he was able to, he folded the letter, blood and all, and put it back behind his mother’s photograph.
Then he reached up to grab the edge of the bench and pull himself to his feet.
His hand closed on the first thing it touched.
It was cold, round, and made of brass.
It was Hartley’s astrolabe.
He looked at it.
Under his bloody thumb, very small around the rim, were letters the engraver had cut into the brass.
John had seen them a hundred times and never read them.
FACTA FLORENTIAE MDIII.
It was Latin: Made in Florence, 1503.
The brass was warm in his hand, and getting warmer.
And slowly, gently, the way a boat pulls away from a quay, the basement floor began to slide away beneath him.