The observatory kept time for the country once, and the clock room still has the master clock, checked against a signal from space to the nanosecond and logged. Every night at ten to four it drops a second. Not drifts. Drops, all at once, and the log shows it a second behind for ten minutes, and at four it gains the second back. The camera in the clock room, which is time stamped from the clock, has a frame every night that is stamped with the missing second, and in that frame there is a man at the clock with his hand on the pendulum case.
I am the timekeeping officer at an observatory, which is a post that has existed since the building did and has meant less every decade, and the master clock is the reason it still exists.
The clock.
A pendulum clock in a sealed case in a room kept at one temperature, once the reference for the whole country, now checked every second against a satellite signal and logged, because an observatory that cannot say what time it is is not an observatory. The clock has not been wrong by more than a few thousandths in my time.
At ten to four it is wrong by a second.
The second.
It goes at ten to four. The log shows the clock in step with the satellite, and then one second behind, all at once, with no drift into it. It stays a second behind for ten minutes. At four it is back in step, all at once, as if the second had been put back where it came from.
The clock room camera stamps its frames from the master clock, because the master clock is the truth in that room. So the camera, every night, has a frame whose stamp is the lost second. A frame from a second that the clock says did not happen.
In the frame there is a man.
The frame.
The clock room, the case, the pendulum behind its glass. And a man beside it, in a dark suit of an old cut, with his hand on the case, flat, the way you put your hand on a thing to feel it working, and his head bent, listening. He is in one frame. The frame before is the empty room and the frame after is the empty room and in the missing second he is there, with his hand on the clock, and his face is turned to it and not to the camera, and he is old, and he is not in a hurry.
What has been checked.
The clock, by the people who know, who found it perfect. The satellite receiver, replaced. The second goes at ten to four.
The clock room, at ten to four, by me, inside it, beside the case. The room is silent except for the pendulum, and I stood with my hand on the case, where his is in the frame, and at ten to four the pendulum stopped. One beat. It was at the end of its swing and it hung there, and I felt the case under my hand go still, and the room went still, and beside my hand on the glass there was another hand, I did not see it, I felt the glass under my palm warm where it was, and then the pendulum swung, and the clock was a second behind.
I stayed till four. At four the pendulum did a thing it cannot do, which was beat twice in one second, and the log was in step, and the glass under my hand was cool.
Who.
The clock room had a keeper once. A man whose whole job was the clock, who lived in the building, who checked the pendulum every hour of every night against the stars, and the observatory's history has him, fifty years in the post, and a line that says he retired when the radio time signal came in and the clock no longer needed a man, and that he had asked to be allowed to keep checking it, without pay, and had been told it was not necessary, and had died within the year.
He checks it. Every night at ten to four, which the history says was his last check before bed. He puts his hand on the case. And the clock, which is kept right by a satellite now and does not need him, stops one beat to let him, because it is his clock, and it knows who kept it.
What is done about it.
The second is on the time log every night and the log goes to the national timekeeping people, who have written to ask why our master clock has a repeating one second step at ten to four, and I have written back that it is a known feature of the installation, which they have accepted, because nobody argues with an observatory about time.
What I do.
I keep time.
His check was logged. That was the whole of the job: you checked the clock against the stars and you wrote it in the book, the error, to the hundredth, and your initials, and the book was the country's time. The books are in the archive and the last one stops the week the radio signal came in, with his initials on the last line.
I have the book out. At ten to four I am in the clock room with it open on the desk, and when the pendulum stops its beat I write the check. The time, the error, which is one second, and the initials, his, from the last line, and then mine, as witness, because a check is witnessed. And at four, when the clock beats twice and is right, I write the correction, and sign that too.
The frame on the camera has changed. He is there, in the missing second, with his hand on the case. But his head is not bent to the clock now. It is turned, a little, towards the desk, towards the book, and the expression, as far as an old face in one frame of a camera can be said to have one, is that of a man who has found that somebody has kept up the book, and is checking it, because that is what he would do.