Thief of Time - Terry Pratchett [7]
“How about invar?” said the lady, still apparently inspecting the museum of clocks.
Jeremy looked shocked. “The alloy? I didn’t think anyone outside the guild knew about that. And it is very expensive. Worth a lot more than its weight in gold.”
Lady LeJean straightened up.
“Money is no object,” she said. “Would invar allow you to reach total accuracy?”
“No. I already use it. It’s true that it is not affected by temperature, but there are always…barriers. Smaller and smaller interferences become bigger and bigger problems. It’s Xeno’s paradox.”
“Ah, yes. He was the Ephebian philosopher who said you couldn’t hit a running man with an arrow, wasn’t he?” said the lady.
“In theory, because—”
“But Xeno came up with four paradoxes, I believe,” said Lady LeJean. “They involved the idea that there is such a thing as the smallest possible unit of time. And it must exist, mustn’t it? Consider the present. It must have a length, because one end of it is connected to the past and the other is connected to the future, and if it didn’t have a length then the present couldn’t exist at all. There would be no time for it to be the present in.”
Jeremy was suddenly in love. He hadn’t felt like this since he’d taken the back off the nursery clock when he was fourteen months old.
“Then you’re talking about…the fabled ‘tick of the universe,’” he said. “And no gear cutter could possibly make gears that small…”
“It depends on what you would call a gear. Have you read this?”
Lady LeJean waved a hand at one of the trolls, who lumbered over and dropped an oblong package on Jeremy’s counter. He undid it. It contained a small book.
“Grim Fairy Tales?” he said.
“Read the story about the glass clock of Bad Schüschein,” said Lady LeJean.
“Children’s stories?” said Jeremy. “What can they tell me?”
“Who knows? We will call again tomorrow,” said Lady LeJean, “to hear about your plans. In the meantime, here is a little token of our good faith.”
The troll laid a large leather bag on the counter. It clinked with the heavy, rich clink of gold. Jeremy didn’t pay it a great deal of attention. He had quite a lot of gold. Even skilled clockmakers came to buy his clocks. Gold was useful because it gave him the time to work on more clocks. These earned him more gold. Gold was, more or less, something that occupied the space between clocks.
“I can also obtain invar for you, in large quantities,” she said. “That will be part of your payment, although I agree that even invar will not serve your purpose. Mr. Jeremy, both you and I know that your payment for making the first truly accurate clock will be the opportunity to make the first truly accurate clock, yes?”
He smiled, nervously. “It would be…wonderful, if it could be done,” he said. “Really, it would…be the end of clockmaking.”
“Yes,” said Lady LeJean. “No one would ever have to make a clock again.”
Tick
This desk is neat.
There is a pile of books on it, and a ruler.
There is also, at the moment, a clock made out of cardboard.
Miss Susan picked it up.
The other teachers in the school were known as Stephanie and Joan and so on, but to her class she was very strictly Miss Susan. “Strict,” in fact, was a word that seemed to cover everything about Miss Susan and, in the classroom, she insisted on the Miss in the same way that a king insists upon Your Majesty, and for pretty much the same reason.
Miss Susan wore black, which the headmistress disapproved of but could do nothing about because black was, well, a respectable color. She was young, but with an indefinable air of age about her. She wore her hair, which was blond-white with one black streak, in a tight bun; the headmistress disapproved of that, too—it suggested an Archaic Image Of Teaching, she said, with the assurance of someone who could pronounce a capital letter. But she didn’t ever dare disapprove of the way Miss Susan moved, because Miss Susan moved like a tiger.
It was always very hard to disapprove of Miss Susan in her presence, because if you