It was a winter afternoon with little light left in it. Dozens of clocks, large and small, ticked each in its own voice, and the sound of them together made the whole room beat like one great heart. In the middle of it an old man with white hair sat before the largest clock, tightening a small screw with shaking hands.
"The room is full of sound," I said.
"It's the sound of time." He answered without stopping his hands. "At sea it was the difference between living and dying. A ship that doesn't know where it is runs onto rocks, and hundreds of men die at once. North and south you could take from the stars. East and west no one could take. That was a riddle of death hundreds of years old. There was a night when a whole fleet climbed onto the rocks. They had reckoned their position wrong. Close to two thousand men went into the cold water in a single night. Not for want of stars. They simply did not know what hour it was."
He raised his head for the first time. "And the answer, of all things, was a clock. Look. The sun goes once around the sky each day. So if you know the hour in your home port, and the hour here where you stand at noon — when the sun is highest — the difference between the two tells you how far east or west you have come. One hour of difference is a handspan of the world. So only one thing was needed. A clock that would keep the hour of home, on a rolling ship, for months, without losing a hair's breadth."
"And everyone told you it was impossible."
"Every one of them. The learned men all said so. On a rolling ship an accurate clock cannot exist." He looked down at his shaking hands. "I was a carpenter. I never set foot in a school. And I made that clock. One that doesn't stop, however it rolls, in heat or in cold. I made it four times over. It took me forty years. The first was the size of a chest; the last was a pocket watch that sat in your palm."
But what lay at the end of the pride was bitterness. "...And that was the fight of my life as well. Those learned men would not have it, that a carpenter had solved it. I fought decades for what was owed me. Until my hair went white." He lifted his shaking hands to show me. "By the time the clock was finished, my hands were already like this. The man who measured time more exactly than anyone had been eaten by that same time sooner than anyone."
The clocks in the room ticked all at once. I asked:
"Does your clock measure a king's hour differently from a beggar's?"
He looked at me. Then, slowly, he shook his head.
"...It measures them the same. A clock has no favorites. For a king and for a beggar, for the learned men and for an unschooled man like me, it runs at the same speed." His voice dropped. "I think I made them my whole life without seeing it. That this exact hand I cut was pointing all along to the same one thing for everyone. We are all going toward the same end. At the same speed. Whether we are honored or not. Whether we are rich or poor." He looked around at the clocks. "These will go on ticking after I am earth, so long as someone winds them. But the hand that made them — once it stops, no one can wind it again. I made things that do not stop, and I am a man who will stop soon." He smiled faintly. "So the decades I spent fighting for that recognition may have been the most wasted time of all. We were going to the same end regardless. I'd have done better to sit and listen to this ticking. It's a sound you can only hear while you're alive."
I looked around the room. Dozens of clocks, each with a different face, all of them pointing to the one time that runs the same for everyone. Standing in that ticking, I found myself looking back at my own hurrying. I too had walked as if racing time, to find again the one who had vanished. And watching Harrison's shaking hands, a sense grew another hand's width clearer in me — that outside the time all those hands point to, there may be a place that time cannot eat. Perhaps the one I am looking for stands outside that time, and was also here, in this forgotten old man's ticking room.
As I went out the door, the old man was reaching for the clock again. Not to mend it. Only, it seemed, to feel the tremor of it — the ticking that was still left to him. The sound that filled the room followed me a long way down the street after the door had closed. The kindest and the most honest sound there is, and only the living can hear it.
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