The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (9 page)

“I was a Protestant in
Paris, until it became impossible to be a Protestant in Paris,” Jehan said,
flatly. “My father was born in Geneva, which is a Protestant city, so that was
where I came — but everywhere I went in the city, people who heard my name
looked strangely at me, and I was afraid all over again. My grandmother had
spoken of a village named Évionnaz as a remote and peaceful place, so I decided
to go there, but when I arrived I found the same dark stares, so I continued on
my way. Friedrich Spurzheim is the first man I have met hereabouts who did not
look at me that way, and he made me welcome as a guest.”

“Are you a clockmaker?”
the captain asked.

“No,” Jehan said. “I’m a
printer. I made Bibles in Paris. My father was murdered, my press smashed and
my home burned.”

“Have you seen the Devil’s
clock?”

For the first time,
Jehan hesitated. Then he said: “There is only one clock in the chateau. It is
shaped to resemble a church. There is nothing devilish about it.”

“Lead us to it,” the
captain instructed.

Jehan exchanged a glance
with Friedrich; the little man risked a brief nod of consent. Jehan led the way
around the château, through the garden and in through the door on whose step
the basket of apples still lay. Then he led the captain and his men to the
Clock of Andernatt.

It was an hour after
noon; while the soldier was studying the clock, the hour struck and the words
CARPE DIEM appeared, as if by magic, in the space beneath the rose window.

“What does that say?”
demanded the captain of Nicholas Alther, his voice screeching horribly.

“I don’t know!” the colporteur replied.

“It says
Carpe Diem,”
Friedrich told them. “It’s Latin. It means
Seize the Day.
The other
mottoes . . . .”

But it did not matter
what the other mottoes were, any more than it mattered what
carpe diem
actually
signified. It would have made no difference had the motto been in French or
German rather than Latin, or whether it had been a quotation from the Sermon on
the Mount.

Much later, Jehan
guessed, the captain and all of his men would be willing to swear, and perhaps
also to believe, that the mysterious legend that had appeared as if by magic had
said HAIL TO THEE, LORD SATAN or DAMNATION TO ALL CALVINISTS or CURSED BE THE
NAME OF GENEVA, or anything else that their fearful brains might conjure up.
They would also be willing to swear, and perhaps also to believe, that when
they attacked the clock with half-pikes and maces, sulphurous fumes belched out
of its 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. It’s yours now; you’re heir to Master Zacharius, and
to me. You have the stature and the strength, as well as the delicate hands.
The secret is yours, to do with as you will. The world will change regardless,
so you might as well play your part.”

“Wherever we go, we’ll
go together, Friedrich,” Jehan told him. “Whatever we do, we’ll do together,
even if we’re damned to Hell or oblivion.”

And he was as good as
his word — but whether they were damned to Hell or oblivion we cannot tell, for
theirs is a different world than ours, unimprisoned by our history; all things
are possible there that were possible here, and many more.

AUTHOR’S NOTE.

Jules Verne is rather
vague about the exact time-period in which the events of “Master Zacharius”
take place and exactly what kind of escapement mechanism the Genevan clockmaker
is supposed to have invented. So far as history is concerned, though, small
spring-driven clocks and watches were reputedly invented by Peter Henlein
circa
1500; given that “Master Zacharius” takes place before Calvin’s reformation
of Geneva, that implies a date somewhere in the first two decades of the
sixteenth century. Verge escapements, consisting of crossbars with regulating
weights mounted on vertical spindles, had been in use in weight-driven clocks
for some time by then, so the escapement credited by Verne to Zacharius must
have been either a stackfreed (a kind of auxiliary spring) or a fusée — a
conical grooved pulley connected to a barrel round the mainspring.

The latter invention is
usually credited to Jacob the Czech
circa
1515; I have assumed that to
be the device Verne might have had in mind, but I have also credited Zacharius
with manufacturing a fusée in brass, although history has no record of that
being done before 1580. The discovery of the isochronicity of the pendulum is,
of course, credited by our records to Galileo in the early seventeenth century;
pendulum clocks first appeared in our world
circa
1650 and were first
equipped with recoil escapements ten years thereafter, some 87 years later than
the device credited to Friedrich Spurzheim in the story.

“Master Zacharius” was
one of the earliest stories Verne wrote, and embodies ideas that he
subsequently set firmly aside; this sequel is, I think, far more Vernian in the
best sense of the word.

Verne’s first novel,
Cinq Semaines en ballon,
was a huge success, not simply because
of the book itself, but because of several associated publicity stunts. One in
particular was by Verne’s friend Félix Tournachon (usually called Nadar) who
planned to emulate the adventure in the story and fly a balloon from Paris
across Europe to Africa. He never made it, getting only as far as Hanover, but
it captured the imagination of the French who blurred fiction and reality and
treated Verne’s work as a real story, which forms the basis for the following
tale. Over the years there have been many who have taken Verne’s tales as true,
because he was able to blend scientific achievement so faultlessly into a story
that it was wholly believable. Well, usually. We’ll come to
Hector Servadac
later. It was this success that established Verne’s reputation, and assured
the confidence of his publisher, Jules Hetzel, cementing a relationship that
would last for thirty years.

I arrived in Glasgow
from the west coast on the 8th of February, 1930, and made my way to the
British Dirigible Company depot on Sauchiehall Street, intending to catch the
noon flight for London.

It was a short walk from
the bus station, but I witnessed much poverty and degradation on the way.
Entire families made their homes on the pavement, and my progress was impeded
by the incessant importuning of child-beggars. I gave them what little change I
had in the pocket of my threadbare overcoat, and in doing so experienced a
curious, double-edged guilt. I felt guilty for being unable to give more and,
paradoxically, for being in the situation where I could give at all.

I arrived at the
dirigible depot, which was guarded by both black-shirted militia and a division
of the local constabulary, with seconds to spare. The last of the passengers
were crossing the swaying drawbridge on to the gondola, and I just had time to
buy an early edition of the
Herald.

The purser gave me a
resentful look as I proffered my ticket and hurried across the drawbridge to
the
Spirit of London.
I wondered whether it was my tardiness or the
state of my overcoat that had roused his ire.

The gondola was only
half-full and I found a window seat with ease. Ever since German planes had
downed the
Pride of Benares
last year, the public had shied away from
air travel.

A klaxon sounded.
Hawsers whipped away from capstans on the platform. With a sudden lurch we were
in the air, floating silently over the bomb-sites and the few remaining
tenements standing after the recent blitz.

Already I longed for the
solitude of my island retreat. The crass advertisements which decorated the
interior of the carriage sickened me with their creators’ assumptions that the
populace might be so easily tempted. Outside, the eye was offered no respite.
The ruin of the city gave way to the slag heaps of the country, with pathetic
stick-figures scratching for coal and whatever growing thing might be stewed in
the pot. Even the air of this benighted land sat heavily upon my chest.

I opened my notebook and
reread the first lines of the poem I was working on:
As I stood at the
blackened gate/ With warring worlds on either hand . . .

For the next hour I
reworked the line and then, tired, tried to absorb myself in the
Herald.
War
coverage predominated — the usual exaggerated claims of success, with little
actual analytical reportage of the politics behind the conflict. But what did I
expect, with the newspapers of Great Britain in the strangle-hold of the
capitalists?