The first indication I had of the extraordinary affair of the unfinished minute was a smell of singed wool upon a summer morning when no fire had been lit in our sitting-room. Holmes was at the window, where he held a man's waistcoat against the light and examined its lining through a lens. The garment belonged to neither of us. It was of a sober brown cloth, well cut and much worn at the pockets, with a curious circular patch above the left breast that had been burned as neatly as though a heated coin had been pressed there.
Our visitor sat very erect in the chair by the hearth. She was a young woman with a sun-reddened face and a grey travelling coat, and she held her gloves so tightly that the kid had split at one seam. I had entered in time to hear her give her name as Miss Eliza Fenwick and to observe that she had not touched the tea Mrs Hudson had placed beside her.
“You are quite sure,” said Holmes, “that this was the waistcoat your father wore at breakfast?”
“I mended that pocket yesterday evening. You can see the thread is a different colour. He complained of it, but he put it on.”
“And at what hour did you last see him?”
“At twenty minutes past nine. I heard the clock strike the quarter while we were speaking, and I was angry with him for making me late. I remember looking at my watch when I left.”
Holmes laid down the waistcoat. “You were angry?”
“He had promised to come with me to the station. My aunt was arriving, and I had two trunks to fetch for her. He had been shut in the workshop for three days. He said he could not spare half an hour, and I said that he could not spare it because he had already given every hour he possessed to a machine.” She stopped and looked at her gloves. “I should not have said it.”
“It may nevertheless have been true,” said Holmes. “What happened after you left?”
“The laboratory assistant found the waistcoat on the floor at a quarter to ten. The workshop door was locked from the inside. There had been no cry, no fire, nothing except a little smoke. My father was gone.”
“Windows?”
“Bolted. There is a skylight, but it is painted shut. The police think he has gone away deliberately and left this to make us anxious. There is money missing.”
“Was it his money?”
“No. Mr Pell says it was entrusted to him for the work.”
“Who is Mr Pell?”
“The man who pays for the laboratory.” For the first time her voice hardened. “He has taken all the papers. He says they are his property, and he has sent the men home until he can decide whether to sell the machinery.”
Holmes returned the waistcoat to her. “I should like to see the workshop before Mr Pell has made that decision. Watson, if your morning is free, I think our visitor may need a doctor as well as a detective.”
“I have not said anyone is ill,” she objected.
“No. But a man who leaves his waistcoat behind in a locked room, with a burn over the heart, may have left in some distress.”
We travelled east by train and then took a cab through streets where the river showed itself in narrow, bright strips between warehouses. The Fenwick laboratory occupied the upper floor of a former sailmaker's building. Below it was a packing establishment, and the smell of rope and damp timber came up the stair. Miss Fenwick told us that her father had once taught mathematics, but that his experiments had consumed first his savings and then the patience of those friends who might have lent him more. Pell had appeared eighteen months earlier with capital and a willingness to ask few questions about the theoretical principles involved.
“He asked enough questions about money,” she said. “He wanted to know what could be sent without a ship, and how quickly. Father said he was nowhere near sending anything so large as a parcel. Mr Pell said a diamond would do.”
“And what did your father say to that?” I asked.
“That a diamond was very small and a man's greed was not. But he took the money.”
There were chalk marks on the upper landing and a constable beside the door. Inside, a tall man in a black coat stood at a bench turning over a sheaf of papers. He had a narrow, thoughtful face and the air of a person who had spent his life waiting for other men to stop talking so that he could conclude a bargain. Miss Fenwick introduced him as Mr Pell. He gave Holmes a glance of recognition which did not become a welcome.
“If you have come to discover where Professor Fenwick has hidden himself,” he said, “you are welcome to the room. I have asked the police to take a full inventory. I mean to lose nothing more.”
Holmes looked at the papers in his hand. “Has the inventory begun with those?”
“They concern my business.”
“Your business may be the quickest route to the professor.”
Pell smiled. “The quickest route would be to look for the six hundred pounds he withdrew from my account under the authority I gave him. I have spoken to the bank. He drew it yesterday.”
Miss Fenwick flushed. “He told you why. He was paying the wages for the next three months.”
“Indeed. And did he pay them?”
“No. They were due today.”
“I have found neither the money nor a receipt.” Pell folded the papers. “The men may be as disappointed as I am.”
The constable, who had forced the door that morning, had been instructed to allow the professor's daughter access, and Pell could not prevent us from examining the room. It had two windows overlooking a narrow yard, a skylight above the principal bench and a single door opening on to the landing. At one end was a brass-framed apparatus resembling a large birdcage without bars. Two circular coils faced each other across a space a little wider than a man's shoulders. Beneath them sat a bank of batteries, a clockwork governor and a flat plate of black glass. A heavy copper lead ran through the floor to an engine below.
“Do not touch it,” said Pell sharply.
“I had no such intention,” said Holmes. He stooped beside the black plate. Its surface was dusted with a fine grey powder, except for an oval impression where something had rested. Beside the apparatus was a chair, overturned, and upon the bench a notebook lay open to a page of figures. A drop of ink had fallen across the last line. It was divided by a clean white gap no wider than a hair.
Holmes called me to it. “The ink has not merely dried unevenly, Watson. See where the two halves of the drop no longer correspond. The lower portion is displaced to the right.”
“Someone has moved the page while it was wet.”
“Then the paper would show the movement as well. It does not.” He raised his lens. “The gap crosses the ruled line too. An interesting little absence.”
On the wall above the bench hung a clock, stopped at twenty-seven minutes to ten. Its glass was intact, but the hands had a peculiar appearance: the minute hand was straight for most of its length and then bent abruptly at a point just beyond the centre. Holmes set his finger beside it, without touching the glass, and traced an imaginary line from the clock to the apparatus.
“What stopped it?” I asked.
“The pendulum has been removed,” said Miss Fenwick. “The police took it out. It was still swinging when they came.”
“Without moving the hands?”
“They thought it had been set going after it stopped.”
A bell sounded from somewhere below, one clear note followed by a faint rattle. The constable glanced towards the door. Forty-three seconds later we heard the same note, and the same rattle after it.
“That bell is cracked,” said Holmes. “It repeats itself most faithfully.”
“It is the packing-room bell,” said Miss Fenwick. “They ring it when a cart arrives.”
The note came a third time, at precisely the same interval. Holmes took out his watch. On the fourth occasion he walked to the window. “There is no cart in the yard.”
Pell came to his side. “There is a jammed contact in the electrical wiring. It has sounded all morning. I have sent for a man to attend to it.”
The interval continued while Holmes examined the bolts, the sill and the door. A fine line of blackening ran across the inside of the latch. The bolt was drawn, but the wood around its socket had splintered where the constable had forced the door that morning. Holmes inspected the splinters, then the floor beneath the bench, where a small brass screw lay in a drift of plaster. He picked it up with his handkerchief.
“Has anything been removed from the apparatus?” he asked.
Pell hesitated. “The papers.”
“I mean a physical part. A screw has fallen from a threaded hole in this brass collar. It is clean on one side and greasy on the other, as though it has been taken out recently with oily fingers.”
“The assistant may have removed it.”
“Then we must ask him.”
The assistant, Mr Gedge, was in the packing room, where he sat on an upturned crate with a bundle of tools at his feet. He was a stout man with a grey moustache and the patient expression of one accustomed to explaining the same simple thing to men who considered themselves very clever. He rose when Miss Fenwick entered and immediately asked whether there was news.
“Only questions,” she said. “I am sorry.”
“I had rather have questions than Mr Pell's answer.”
Gedge told us that he had arrived shortly before half past nine and had gone first to the engine room. The professor had been upstairs, for a light showed beneath the workshop door. A few minutes later Gedge had heard the packing-room bell. It was unusual at that hour, so he had looked into the yard, found it empty and gone up to ask the professor whether he had rung. The door was locked. He had knocked and received no answer. When he returned downstairs the bell sounded again. After the third ring he fetched the landlord. The constable returned with them and forced the door.
“I saw the smoke first,” he said. “Then the coat and waistcoat. I thought he must have caught fire and thrown them off. But there was no shirt, no trousers, and no sign of him.”
“Did you touch the apparatus?” Holmes asked.
“Only to turn the batteries off. The switch was down.”
“Do you know what the machine does?”
“I know what it was meant to do. The professor said a thing might be held back from one moment and let into the next. He put a moth in a jar once and made the jar disappear. It came back after the clock had ticked twelve times. The moth was still alive.”
“Did you see it disappear?”
“I saw the jar on the plate. I looked away when the light came, and when I looked again the jar was gone. Afterwards it was there. That is what I saw.”
Holmes nodded. “An admirable distinction. Did you remove a screw from the brass collar?”
“No, sir. That collar carries a catch. If the catch is loose, the shutters will not close when the governor stops.”
“What shutters?”
Gedge took us back upstairs. On the inward face of each coil was a thin metal disc, now folded behind the frame. A spring should have pulled the two discs together over the black plate when the mechanism ran down. One end of the spring hung free. The catch which held it was missing.
“I put that in myself on Monday,” Gedge said. “It cannot have fallen out without the screw being taken off.”
Pell had followed us. “The professor was forever altering his machinery.”
“Then he may have altered it yesterday,” said Holmes. “Miss Fenwick, did your father write to anyone about the experiment?”
“He wrote to me. He always left notes in the kitchen if he was working late.” She drew an envelope from her bag. “I brought this because I thought you might wish to see his hand. It was on the table this morning.”
The note was brief. It told her that he expected an important result and asked her not to enter the workshop until he called. Below was a postscript: Tell Gedge the second bell is not a fault.
“Did you tell him?”
“I forgot. After our quarrel I went straight to the station.”
Gedge stared at the page. “He knew it would ring.”
Holmes turned to Pell. “How long have you known that the machine could send an object forward?”
“I know nothing of the sort. I was told it might one day transmit goods.”
“You have removed a safety catch from a machine you profess not to understand. The screw is on the floor, but the catch is not. I suggest it is in your pocket.”
Pell's face went pale, then red. “You have no authority to search me.”
“None whatever. Constable, will you be good enough to remain at the door?”
Pell stepped back from the bench. “You cannot detain me on a guess.”
“I do not propose to. But if the professor has not gone away, every minute may matter to him. I ask you to give us the catch.”
For a moment I thought Pell would strike him. Instead he took a small brass piece from his waistcoat and dropped it on the bench. “I found it loose. I thought he had removed it to prevent my using the machine. I took it because I had paid for it.”
“Before or after his disappearance?”
“After.”
“Why conceal it?”
“Because I knew you would make a story of it.”
Holmes held the catch up to the light. There was fresh oil at one end and a smear of grey powder at the other. “Gedge, can you replace this without turning on the current?”
“Yes, but I should like to know what we are replacing it for.”
“So should I,” said Holmes. “First let us discover whether the bell is truly repeating the same sound.”
He sent Gedge down to stand by the bell with a pencil and paper and to make a mark each time it rang. Watson, he told me, should stand by the stair with his watch. Holmes himself took a position at the window overlooking the yard. Pell remained in the room, watched by the constable. For ten minutes we heard the clear note and the rattle after it, at intervals of forty-three seconds by my watch. Then Holmes called for the bell to be struck deliberately between the repetitions.
Gedge's blow was louder and had a different, flat tail. Forty-three seconds after the preceding note the original sound returned, unchanged. Gedge struck again; his second blow did not return at all.
When we gathered upstairs Holmes pointed to the black plate. “I think the professor intended to conduct an experiment at twenty-seven minutes to ten. The effect did not remain confined to the plate. It extended in a thin, irregular layer across the bench and the clock, and perhaps down the copper lead as far as the bell. Where that layer passed through the wet ink, one part of the drop moved and the other did not. Where it crossed the clock, the hand was displaced and the train broken. The bell's contact was caught in the same disturbance. It is producing the note made at the instant of the experiment, over and over.”
“You mean the bell has gone mad,” said Pell.
“I mean that something has happened for which our ordinary descriptions are inadequate. The note gives us a measure: forty-three seconds outside, and within the disturbed region an instant returning to its beginning. The professor's jar did not travel through space. It was absent for twelve ticks and returned to the same position. This time he may have placed himself within the field.”
“His clothes were outside it,” said Miss Fenwick. “How could he leave them?”
“A question I cannot yet answer. Nor do I know whether the disturbance ends of itself. But his note shows he anticipated at least a second bell. I should like to see the calculations you took, Mr Pell.”
Pell's hand went to his coat. “Those calculations are mine.”
“If your claim is correct, you may have them back. If it is not, your investment has trapped a man and may presently injure a great many others. The lead runs through a working building. The repeated bell tells us that the disturbance has reached beyond the plate.”
Pell brought out the papers. He did not surrender them, but he spread them on the bench and watched as Holmes read. Miss Fenwick moved to his other side. The sheets held columns of figures, rough diagrams and a series of observations in the professor's close, slanting hand. One showed a circle within the coils, with a dotted boundary extending past them to the clock. Another bore the words release must precede return. Underneath, twice underlined, was a warning that the field would widen if allowed to recur without the shutters.
“How wide?” I asked.
Holmes shook his head. “There is no figure here. Perhaps he did not know.”
Gedge had gone white. “There are twenty men downstairs.”
“Get them out,” said Holmes. “Tell the landlord to clear the adjoining building as well. Do not explain the theory. Say there is danger from the batteries.”
Gedge hurried away. We heard his voice below, first answered with laughter and then, as he grew more urgent, with the scrape of chairs. Pell gathered the papers, but Holmes placed a hand upon them.
“Leave them.”
“They will burn if the batteries catch.”
“Then carry them to the landing and return. You know more than you have told us.”
Pell took the sheets out. He did not return. The constable followed him down the stairs at Holmes's instruction. From the window I saw them cross the yard, Pell walking swiftly and the constable trying to keep pace while calling to the men to move back from the building.
Miss Fenwick had been studying the professor's note. “He wrote the second bell was not a fault. He expected it more than once. But why forty-three seconds?”
Holmes looked towards the clockwork governor. The dial beside it was marked in divisions from one to sixty. Its pointer stood at forty-three. “Because he set it so. Gedge, when he returns, may be able to tell us how the governor is coupled to the field. Meanwhile I propose a small experiment.”
He took a pencil from his pocket and placed it across the edge of the plate, half inside the brass frame and half outside. With a piece of chalk he drew a line beneath its point. Then he moved back and waited for the bell. The note sounded. The pencil did not move. He repeated the test at several points, working closer to the centre. At the fifth position the outer half of the pencil jumped a fraction of an inch, leaving the inner half where it had been. Between them was a clean break.
Miss Fenwick gasped. Holmes held the two pieces together. The exposed wood had been scorched at the break, leaving a small circular mark about the graphite. He compared it with the burn on the waistcoat.
“At the boundary, the field parts loose matter that is not held across both sides. The pencil and the professor’s unfastened clothes were free to split away; a shaft held in bearings on either side can remain whole. The professor stood partly inside it. God grant that the rest of him was far enough in.”
The quiet with which he said this impressed me more than an exclamation would have done. Miss Fenwick clutched the back of the chair. I moved towards her, but she raised a hand.
“Can you bring him back?”
“I hope so. The shutters must close during the instant before the next recurrence. Whether that will release what is inside, or destroy it, I do not know.”
Gedge returned alone. The men had cleared the lower floor and the landlord was warning the neighbours. He had also seen Pell go into the yard with the papers and hand them to a cab driver.
“Can you stop the governor?” Holmes asked him.
“The switch should do it. It is already off.”
“The governor is within the field, then, and the switch is not. Can the shutters be closed by hand?”
“Not from outside. The springs pull them, but the governor holds them open until it runs down.”
Holmes showed him the line on the pencil. “If you replace the catch, will the springs close when the governor reaches zero?”
“They should.”
“Can you alter the setting without putting your hand across that line?”
Gedge crouched and studied the machine. “There is a shaft beneath the plate, held in bearings on both sides of the field. If I take off the cover, I can turn it with a spanner.”
“And the catch?”
“I can fit that from the side. But the shaft will be turning against me. It may take a great deal of force.”
“Then you shall have help.” Holmes looked at me. “Watson, I must ask you to leave with Miss Fenwick. There is no medical service you can provide until the machine stops.”
“I shall remain,” I said.
He gave me the briefest smile. “I expected that answer. But Miss Fenwick should not stay.”
“I know the calculations,” she said. “I copied them for him. If you change the setting while the coils are charged, the current has to go somewhere. He wrote it here.” She opened the notebook that had lain on the bench since we entered and pointed to its wiring diagram. “There is a discharge wire to the water pipe. It must be connected first.”
Gedge looked beneath the bench. “The wire is loose.”
Pell had taken the papers and loosened the safety devices, but he had not carried away his fear. The wire lay coiled behind a battery, its end newly cut. Gedge joined it to the pipe with a clamp from his toolbox. Holmes tested the connection by tugging it. Then he opened the workshop door, shut the notebook left on the bench and laid it beyond the threshold, weighing it down with a brick from the landing.
“We have perhaps made sufficient provision for the future,” he observed. “Let us attend to the present.”
Gedge fixed the catch in place and loosened the cover below the plate. The shaft was a dull steel rod no thicker than my finger, its end squared to take a spanner. He fitted the tool and pulled. It moved a little, then snapped back as the bell sounded.
“The setting has returned,” he said. “Every time.”
“How far did you turn it?”
“Four divisions, perhaps five.”
“Then we must turn it forty-three within one interval.”
Gedge set the spanner again. Holmes took its end beside him. The cover and its ratchet lay outside the disturbed boundary, although the shaft passed through it; otherwise, as Holmes later remarked, the expedient could have held no more firmly than their hands. At the bell they pulled together. The handle moved with a slow and dreadful resistance. I watched the dial: thirty-eight, thirty-four, thirty. The bell sounded and the pointer sprang back to forty-three, wrenching the spanner from their hands. It struck the leg of the bench hard enough to dent the wood.
“Again,” said Holmes.
They tried a second time, and a third. Each time they made progress, and each time the bell undid it. Sweat ran down Gedge's face. A thin blue light had begun to flicker between the coils, though the batteries were switched off.
“We cannot move it fast enough,” he said.
Miss Fenwick had been looking at the cover. “The ratchet. Father used it to set the governor. If you put it on the shaft, it will hold what you gain.”
Gedge picked up the cover. On its inside was a small toothed wheel and a spring pawl. “That only engages when the cover is screwed down.”
“Then screw it down with the spanner in place,” she said.
“There is no room.”
“Cut the side away.”
He stared at her and then took a hacksaw from his bag. The metal was thin. Holmes held the cover against the bench while Gedge worked, the blade rasping through brass. It seemed an intolerable noise in that room, where all our attention had narrowed to the interval between one bell and the next. When the cut was made, Gedge filed the edge with three hurried strokes and fixed the cover over the shaft. The spanner projected through the opening.
This time, when they pulled and the bell sounded, the handle jolted but did not spring back. The pointer held at thirty-one. They waited for the next note and pulled again. At eighteen the coils brightened and the air above the plate appeared to ripple, like the view across a hot road. I thought for an instant that I saw a man's hand inside it, but when I looked directly the shape was gone.
The bell sounded. At six, Gedge cried out. A spark had leapt from the cover to his wrist. Holmes seized the spanner alone, but the resistance had increased. I took hold beside him. The handle burned through the cloth of my sleeve. Together we pulled it past five, four, three, two and one. On the next pull, the bell sounded and the handle struck against its stop.
For one silent instant nothing happened. Then the shutters clashed together with a report like a pistol. The blue light vanished. A shock ran through the floor, followed by the smell of hot copper. Something heavy struck the black plate and rolled to the boards.
Professor Fenwick lay on his side in his shirt and trousers. There was a red line across his throat and another on the back of each hand, but he was breathing. I knelt at once, loosened his collar and felt his pulse. It was rapid and irregular. His eyes opened as Miss Fenwick dropped beside him.
“Don't touch the switch,” he said.
“No one will,” she answered. “Father, can you hear me?”
He looked at her with an expression of surprise so complete that she began to laugh and cry at once. “You are late for the station,” he said.
“My aunt can carry her own trunks.”
He attempted to sit up and fell back. Gedge brought water, and between us we carried him to the landing, away from the batteries. It was several minutes before he could give a connected account. He remembered the machine starting, an immense pressure upon his chest and a flash of light. To him, no time had passed between stepping onto the plate and seeing his daughter on the floor beside him.
The missing money proved less mysterious than the missing man. Professor Fenwick, recovering enough to take offence at the suggestion that he had stolen wages, asked Gedge to fetch his coat from the packing room. In its inner pocket was a folded bank envelope containing the six hundred pounds. He had put it there intending to give it to Gedge before beginning the experiment. The force at the field's boundary had torn coat and waistcoat away from him, but the pocket and its contents had fallen outside with the cloth.
Pell was found that afternoon with the professor's papers in his possession and a piece of cut discharge wire in his cab. He admitted taking the safety catch before the experiment, hoping the professor would believe it lost and postpone the trial until he could secure sole possession of the results. He had cut the wire after finding the room empty, fearing that the professor might return and contradict his account. What precisely he intended thereafter was a matter for the police. His attempt to sell the apparatus was prevented by a simpler circumstance: Gedge, with the professor's agreement, took a hammer to the coils before any buyer could arrive.
I confess that I was troubled by that destruction. The possibility of passing an object through time, however briefly, seemed to me one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science. Holmes listened while I said so, and then asked whether I had noticed the men waiting in the yard.
“They had come back for their wages,” I said.
“And for their tools. One had left his dinner inside. Another had a coat belonging to his dead brother hanging on a peg. None of them knew whether the building would still be there when they were allowed to enter. The professor's discovery was a great one, Watson. He had not yet learnt how to keep it from taking other people's minutes as well as his own.”
A week later Miss Fenwick called at Baker Street with a parcel wrapped in brown paper. It contained the professor's clock, repaired by a local craftsman. The bent minute hand had been replaced, but the original was enclosed in an envelope, at her father's insistence. She told us that he had begun to write an account of the experiment, although he had promised not to build another apparatus until he understood what had happened to the first. Gedge had accepted his wages and a partnership in the work, on the condition that he be allowed to veto any experiment conducted before breakfast.
“And your aunt?” I asked.
“She is staying with us. She has told Father that if he wishes to disappear again, he must first put up the shelf in her room.”
When she had gone, Holmes set the clock upon the mantelpiece and wound it. We listened to its steady ticking for a little while. Then he took the old minute hand from its envelope and laid it across his palm. Its end pointed in a direction no clockmaker had intended, but the hand itself was unbroken.
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