Five Minutes Behind the Pigeons

I noticed the clock because it disagreed with my pocket watch. The clock on the tower said eleven twenty-seven. Mine said eleven thirty-two. I stood in the square comparing them until a woman carrying a ladder asked whether I intended to arbitrate.

“I was considering it.”

“The clock has the larger audience.”

She was Priya, one of three volunteers responsible for the tower clock and, that morning, the only one willing to climb the stairs. The ladder was for a noticeboard, not the clock. I carried it inside anyway, which is how I found myself invited up.

The staircase had been designed for people with narrower shoulders and fewer opinions about handrails. Priya went first. I followed with a canvas tool bag that knocked every third step, then every second when I tried to correct it. Somewhere above us a pigeon objected to the rhythm.

At the clock room, Tom was waiting with a thermos and the expression of a man who had already heard several theories. He was the caretaker. His own theory was that the clock had become tired.

“Five minutes slow since Sunday,” he said. “It was two minutes slow on Friday. That's a trend.”

“Or three observations,” Priya said.

I liked her immediately.

The mechanism occupied a wooden frame behind the public faces. Gears turned with patient authority. The escapement released one tooth at a time, and the pendulum marked out its repeated journey below. Nothing in the room appeared tired. I put the tool bag down where Priya pointed and kept my hands in my pockets.

“Warm week,” I said. “A longer pendulum runs more slowly.”

Priya looked at me. “Does it?”

It was not a request for a lecture. I gave her one sentence anyway. The period of a simple pendulum depends chiefly on its length and gravity; when a metal rod warms and expands, the effective length can increase, so the clock loses time. Clockmakers had spent centuries taking that small inconvenience personally.

Tom poured tea into three plastic cups. “Can we offend it back into accuracy?”

Priya showed us a photograph pinned beside the maintenance log. It was a gridiron pendulum: alternating rods of different metals arranged so their thermal expansion opposed one another. John Harrison, a carpenter and self-taught clockmaker, had used steel and brass in temperature-compensating pendulums while pursuing much more accurate timekeeping. This tower had nothing so elegant. It had a plain rod, a regulating nut and a handwritten table of seasonal corrections.

I bent to inspect the nut.

“If you touch that,” Priya said, “I shall tell everyone the pigeons adjusted it.”

I straightened.

She checked the maintenance log, compared the pendulum's beat with a small electronic timer and watched long enough to make impatience visible in my shoulders. The beat was almost exactly where last month's entry said it should be.

“If the clock were losing five minutes every few days,” she said, “the error would keep growing. Tom, what did the inside dial say when you opened up?”

Tom looked at a small reference dial mounted on the frame. It showed eleven forty-one, as did Priya's watch.

The public face still showed eleven thirty-six.

I had been explaining the pendulum when the pendulum was keeping time. This is a common hazard of possessing an interesting answer.

Priya followed the drive shaft towards the east face. A coupling had slipped just enough to leave its minute hand behind while the movement continued correctly. The other three faces agreed with the mechanism. From the square I had chosen the one clock face that supported my theory.

“A useful sample,” Priya said.

“It was very persuasive.”

“It was one.”

We could not see the east hand from the clock room, so Tom went down to the square with his telephone. Priya isolated the face drive and made a careful adjustment while I relayed Tom's reports on speaker.

“Two minutes fast,” he said.

Priya moved the coupling.

“Now seven minutes slow.”

“That seems ambitious,” I said.

She gave me the spanner.

“Hold this.”

I held it. My responsibilities were developing.

Below, Tom enlisted a woman at the bus stop to stand at the far end of the square, where the hand was easier to see. Her name was Maribel. We could hear her through his telephone correcting both his angle and his arithmetic.

“Minute hand on the seven,” Tom said.

“That's thirty-five,” Maribel called.

“I know.”

“You said thirty-seven.”

“Corran,” Priya said, “which witness do you prefer?”

“The one willing to contradict us.”

Maribel became our official observer.

On the third adjustment, the east face agreed with the mechanism. Priya tightened the coupling and marked its position with a fine line of wax chalk so any further movement would be obvious. She recorded what had happened, including the fact that the regulating nut had not been altered. I contributed the spanner by returning it to the wrong pocket of the bag.

At noon, the striking train began to lift. Tom shouted a warning through the telephone half a second before the bell sounded above us.

The first blow entered through my boots. By the twelfth, my ribs had accepted that they were part of a civic instrument. Priya leaned against the frame, laughing at my expression.

“You were standing under a bell,” she said.

“I had noticed the clock.”

“A useful sample.”

When we came down, Maribel was still at the bus stop. Her bus had arrived and gone while she was correcting Tom. She did not appear troubled; the next was due in fifteen minutes. Tom bought her a coffee from the kiosk. Priya bought one for herself and, after a glance at my pendant, asked whether I had anywhere urgent to be.

I looked at the tower. All four faces now agreed, though agreement did not make any of them the day itself. Pigeons occupied the ledge beneath the east dial, indifferent to the repair and several centuries of argument about accuracy.

“Not for at least thirteen minutes,” I said.

Priya checked her watch.

“Fourteen.”

“I was allowing for the stairs.”

We drank coffee in the square until Maribel's bus came. The tower kept excellent time. The pigeons left early.