At the moment she was not peering at her wrist. Her wrist was turned off. Arthur squatted down quietly beside her to see what she was looking at.
It was his watch. He had taken it off when he’d gone to shower under the local waterfall, and Random had found it and was trying to work it out.
`It’s just a watch,’ he said. `It’s to tell the time.’
`I know that,’ she said. `But you keep on fiddling with it, and it still doesn’t tell the right time. Or even anything like it.’
She brought up the display on her wrist panel, which auto- matically produced a readout of local time. Her wrist panel had quietly got on with the business of measuring the local gravity and orbital momentum, and had noticed where the sun was and tracked its movement in the sky, all within the first few minutes of Random’s arrival. It had then quickly picked up clues from its environment as to what the local unit conventions were and reset itself appropriately. It did this sort of thing continually, which was particularly valuable if you did a lot of travelling in time as well as space.
Random frowned at her father’s watch, which didn’t do any of this.
Arthur was very fond of it. It was a better one than he would ever have afforded himself. He had been given it on his twenty-second birthday by a rich and guilt-ridden godfather who had forgotten every single birthday he had had up till then, and also his name. It had the day, the date, the phases of the moon; it had `To Albert on his twenty-first birthday’ and the wrong date engraved on the battered and scratched surface of its back in letters that were still just about visible.
The watch had been through a considerahle amount of stuff in the last few years, most of which would fall well outside the warranty. He didn’t suppose, of course, that the warranty had especially mentioned that the watch was guaranteed to be accu- rate only within the very particular gravitational and magnetic fields of the Earth, and so long as the day was twenty-four hours long and the planet didn’t explode and so on. These were such basic assumptions that even the lawyers would have missed them.
Luckily his watch was a wind-up one, or at least, a self-winder. Nowhere else in the Galaxy would he have found batteries of pre- cisely the dimensions and power specifications that were perfectly standard on Earth.
`So what are all these numbers?’ asked Random.
Arthur took it from her.
`These numbers round the edge mark the hours. In the little window on the right it says THU, which means Thursday, and the number is 14, which means it’s the fourteenth day of the month of MAY which is what it says in this window over here.
`And this sort of crescent-shaped window at the top tells you about the phases of the moon. In other words it tells you how much of the moon is lit up at night by the sun, which depends on the relative positions of the Sun and the Moon and, well… the Earth.’
`The Earth,’ said Random.
`Yes.’
`And that’s where you came from, and where Mum came from.’
`Yes.’
Random took the watch back from him and looked at it again, clearly baffled by something. Then she held it up to her ear and listened in puzzlement.
`What’s that noise?’
`It’s ticking. That’s the mechanism that drives the watch. It’s called clockwork. It’s all kind of interlocking cogs and springs that work to turn the hands round at exactly the right speed to mark the hours and minutes and days and so on.’
Random carried on peering at it.
`There’s something puzzling you,’ said Arthur. `What is it?’
`Yes,’ said Random, at last. `Why’s it all in hardware?’
Arthur suggested they went for a walk. He felt there were things they should discuss, and for once Random seemed, if not precisely amenable and willing, then at least not growling.
From Random’s point of view this was also all very weird. It wasn’t that she wanted to be difficult, as such, it was just that she didn’t know how or what else to be.