Free The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures by Mike Ashley, Eric Brown (ed)

mysterious bowels, and that the screams of the damned could be heard,
echoing all the way from the inferno. They would probably remember, too, that
the château itself had been buried underground, extending its corridors deep
into the rock like shafts of some strange mine, connected to the very centre of
the spherical Earth.
    When they had finished
smashing the clock the soldiers smashed everything else Friedrich Spurzheim had
owned, and cast everything combustible — including his printed Bible — into the
flames of his fire. They killed his milking-goat, and as many of the others as
they could catch. They ripped up all the vegetables in his garden and stripped
the remaining apples from his trees. Then they smashed the shutters that
remained on some few of the chateau’s windows, and the doors that remained in
some few of its rooms. But they did not kill the dwarf, nor did they kill Jehan
Thun. They worked out all their ire and fear on inanimate objects, and
contented themselves with issuing dire warnings as to what would happen if
Friedrich Spurzheim
    or Jehan Thun were ever
seen again within twenty leagues of Geneva.
    Afterwards, when the
captain and his men were preoccupied with the items they had kept as plunder —
which included, of course, the silver disc that had served as a pendulum bob —
Nicholas Alther took Jehan aside again, and offered him something wrapped in
silk. Jehan did not need to unwrap it to guess that it was the colporteur’s
watch.
    “Your grandfather made
it,” the colporteur said. “You should have it, since you do not have one of
your own. It keeps good time.”
    “Thank you,” Jehan said,
“but it isn’t necessary. You owe me no debt.”
    “I didn’t betray you,”
Nicholas Alther insisted. “I didn’t want this to happen.”
    “I know that,” Jehan
assured him, although there was no way that he could.
    “I won’t repeat the
tale,” the colporteur went on, in the same bitter tone. “If this becomes the
stuff of legend, it shall not be my doing. There will come a day when all this
is forgotten — when time will pass unmolested, measured out with patience by
machines that no man will have cause to fear.”
    “I know that, too,”
Jehan assured him, although there was no way that he could.
    When the soldiers had
gone, Jehan went back to the clock’s tomb. Friedrich was waiting for him there.
    “One day,” Jehan said, “you
will build another. In another city, far from here, we shall start again, you
and I. You will build another clock, and I shall be your apprentice. We shall
spread the secret throughout the world — all the world. If they will not
entertain us in Europe, we’ll go to the New World, and if they are madly
fearful of the devil there, we’ll go to the undiscovered islands of the
Pacific. The world is a spinning sphere, and time is everywhere. Wherever men
go, clocks are the key to the measurement of longitude, and hence to accurate
navigation. What a greeting we’ll have in the far-flung islands of the ocean
vast!”
    The little man had been
picking through the wreckage for some time, and his clumsy hands had been busy
with such work as they could do. He had detached half a dozen of the plaques
from the wheel that was no longer sealed in its housing. Now he laid them out,
and separated them into two groups of three. TIME OVERTAKES ALL THINGS, TEMPUS
FUGIT and TIME NEVER WAITS he kept for himself; THERE IS TIME ENOUGH FOR
EVERYTHING, THERE IS A TIME FOR EVERY PURPOSE and FUTURE TIME IS ALL THERE IS
he offered to Jehan. “I’d give you the pendulum itself,” Friedrich said, “but
they stole it for the metal, and the escapement too. It doesn’t matter. You
know how it works. You can build another.”
    “So can you,” Jehan
pointed out.
    “I could,” Friedrich
agreed, “if I could find another home, another workplace. The world is vast,
but there’s no such place in any city I know, and wherever there are men there’s
fear of the extraordinary.