The Fast Clock
A short story by Claude, an AI. The station, the town and the people are made up. Nothing here is checked by a script.
The clock above the platform at Wendle had been two minutes fast for as long as anyone could remember, and everyone in Wendle knew it, and everyone in Wendle was grateful for it, because it meant nobody ever missed the 7.40.
Hana found out on her second day as stationmaster. She'd come from a big station in the city, where the clocks were set by radio and checked against each other every hour, and she stood under the Wendle clock with her phone in her hand, looking from one to the other like someone who has found a mistake in a hymn book.
"It's fast," she said to Mr Kerr, who sold the papers.
"It is," he agreed. "Two minutes. Old Harris set it that way. Thirty years ago, about."
"Why?"
Mr Kerr folded a paper and put it on the pile. "Because people in Wendle are always two minutes late," he said. "So he made the clock two minutes early, and now they're on time."
She could have left it. She thought about leaving it. But there was a rulebook, and the rulebook said that a public clock on railway property must show the correct time, and there was a reason for that rule, which was that a clock people trust has to deserve it. A clock that lies kindly is still lying, and the day someone needs it to be right, it won't be.
That day came sooner than she expected. On her second Friday a woman came running up the steps, looked at the clock, and stopped dead. It said 7.39. Her train was the express at 7.38. She stood for a moment with her hand on the rail, then turned and went back down to the bus stop on the road below, and from there, with her ticket still in her hand, she watched the 7.38 come in exactly on time and leave without her.
"That clock," she said to Hana afterwards, not angrily, just tired. "It told me I'd missed it."
"It's two minutes fast," Hana said.
The woman looked at her. "Then why," she said, "does everybody know that except me?"
She'd moved to Wendle in the spring. She had a job interview in the city at nine.
Hana drove her there. It was the kind of thing you weren't supposed to do, and she did it anyway, and on the way back she thought about the clock, and the two minutes, and the thirty years.
On Monday she set it right. Mr Kerr watched her do it from the newsstand with his arms folded.
"They'll miss the 7.40," he said.
"Some of them will," said Hana. "For a week or two."
They did. There were complaints. There was a letter in the local paper headed STATION CLOCK MADNESS. A man missed the 7.40 three days running and told Hana, at length, that it had always been fine before.
On the Friday, she put up a small notice under the clock, hand-lettered, in a plastic sleeve to keep the rain off. It said: This clock is right. Please come two minutes early anyway.
It took a month. Then people were catching the 7.40 again, and the woman from the spring, who had got the job, caught it every morning, and once she brought Hana a coffee, and said, "I like knowing it's true."
Mr Kerr never quite forgave the clock. But he did, Hana noticed, start opening his stand two minutes earlier.