The Background Count

At the bottom of a shaft four thousand three hundred and twelve meters deep there is a thing that decays. Every eighty-six point four seconds it gives out one count. A thousand counts make one day. Wages, prison terms, betrothals, and the ages of the dead are all written in counts. Three hundred and seventy thousand people live above it, and the whole of their reason for being there is that one count. On a morning in July the interval between one count and the next begins to lengthen. Each count runs seven ten-thousandths longer than the one before it. It is smooth, it can be plotted, and it is not a fault. The source has not stopped. It is going away along a curve. Four days later the Bureau of Metrology splices a reference source onto the line so that the counting can go on. The numbers join up. The place they came from does not. What follows is the record of the next two hundred and nineteen years. The forms that could not be filled in. The four days that were never made up, and the men who were let out late because of them. The ledgers annotated and then burned. The second generation, who found the new arrangement steadier than the old, and who were not wrong. There is no system, no cultivation, and no one here who gets stronger. One account in this book does not come out even. Three different kinds of language are used on it, and all three fail. Nothing is explained at the end. The interval, by the last page, is fifty-six days.